@argv_minus_one @fivetonsflax @futurebird That one I'm surprisingly less familiar with why it's asymmetric, despite growing up with it in Australia

I'd defer to telco nerds on that ;-;

@argv_minus_one @fivetonsflax @futurebird *Puts hand up*

Hi, I have worked in the ISP space before.

Cable's asymmetry wasn't an intentional choice. But a design vestige of its history. Originally these systems were designed as a one-to-many (and one way) network. Radio waves were blasted down the wire and into the back of TV sets

The lacking upload speed is because the networks were never *designed* with the idea of broadcasts coming back up the pipe. DOCSIS was grafted on to cable TV networks as an afterthought and required major cleanup of the design of the networks to accommodate them

@futurebird I've said for a while that the internet as we know it (or a lot of us from "the 90's/early 2000's internet" knew it) has been rotting for a very long time

Capitalism connected the overwhelming bulk of the planet to the internet and then ran headfirst into a problem: Nobody had any *money*

Those endless deluges of boner pills and pop up ads for "free money" were a capitalism "pioneer species". Eeking out fractions of pennies at a time. The name of the game was how much sludge you could fling and how many inboxes you could flood with it.

Then, after the turn of the century, they realized that malware could make money. Just turn peoples computers into email relays or DDoS vectors. Weigh the machine down with spyware and adware served up through garbage apps and P2P software (looking at you, KaZaA)

Meanwhile the capitalists looked at services like Geocities and thought "how can we inject ourselves in the middle and extract rent for this?" and we ended up with the "social media era" of "web 2.0". We moved off the free hosting of ISP's and into "the cloud" and started normalizing shovelling ads everywhere on MySpace/Twitter/Facebook.

Then the capitalists realized that they were leaving pennies (or fractions of pennies) on the table by not siphoning every single persons *data*. Surveillance capitalism became the name of the game to sell to advertisers.

Now we're at the final, nauseating junction with the AI slop machine. They've spent 20 years picking away at every shred of flesh, so it's a mad dash to scoop up the bones and dump them all into a giant pot and boil down the marrow and hope that the slop that oozes out of that brew is palatable to force feed to the populus

Important