It's frankly pathetic that the so-called "biggest innovators" and people who "get the internet" feel the need to be constrained in an already crowded city.
Face to face communication is important, but there are tools to help with day to day communication
The Linux world knows much better how to deal with this then your average "Web 2.0" company
While I a mostly agree with you, but you're ignoring network effects. People being forced to use it for work, or whatever, because they won't interoperate with other clients.
You mean that it's not reasonable to expect users to do all their work on an air-gapped system, and wait in line for the one internet-enabled terminal in the office? ;)
My biggest problems with trying to work in a variety of public places (coffee shops, libraries, universities, Panera, lobbies of various buildings, whatever) are:
- Lack of large display. I can't really do anything serious on a laptop anymore. I know I used to before large displays are affordable, but it just feels indispensable now - for development work, at least.
- LATENCY! Public wifi hotspots suffer from lack of QoS policing or fair queueing, and there are always going to be a few annoying people with virus-laden Windows laptops around to help slow things down. I work on large telecom systems that pretty much require me to do my development remotely via SSH and/or SSHFS and/or NFS over VPN; there is no local development alternative for me. I can't cram my stuff onto a laptop. So, if I have to deal with substantial lag (consistent or spikes) over an SSH session my productivity just circles the drain.
Big tech probably loses millions of customers from developing countries because of their bloated frontend engineering. Not everyone has an M3 with gigabit fiber.
My favorite setup when working remotely with slow internet is the following :
- Build tasks & large data operations run on my home server via SSH
- Markdown notes, Notion being unusable
- 100% CLI apps, which are usually the lightest and most efficient
I think that's because setting up and maintaining the small neighborhood networks is work. People mostly don't care for that, they just want to have that group going with a bunch of people / play that game / etc. The "geeky" aspect of things is just a hindrance to their goals. 30 years ago, they had to do that if they wanted to participate. Mostly, they chose to not participate at all. Today, they can outsource those things, so they gladly do so.
I also have those memories and am a bit nostalgic of the internet of olde, and maybe even somewhat annoyed with some aspects of what it has become, but I can't help but notice a certain discrepancy even in myself.
While I absolutely love tinkering with my computers, and, for lack of interested neighbours, doing the small network all by myself in my apartment, I really don't have the same relationship with my phone, which I consider just like an appliance: allow me to call people, play some music, show me a map, and leave me alone.
The "No (regular) internet" thing is tough - the global public Internet is kinda the only game in town. But otherwise, there are so many cheap laptops that can run Linux. We're in a golden age.
It is lame to you, but not lame to many people. You might enjoy your coffee shop wifi but I prefer a super fast fiber connection that allows me to download a 3GB file in less than two minutes because I need that speed to accomplish my work. $200 laptop? You just need $45 to get a RaspberryPi.
We work for a company because we think the company can compensate us fairly and those at Mozilla are usually very happy with what they can do (open source projects most of the time). That's interesting. You like your freenlancer, go-everywhere-style, good, but not me.
Idealized city apartment? Half of the people working for Mozilla are remote and the other half spend half of their week at home as well. That's how we work and we make good product.
I like getting a comfortable chair, some snacks and food on a daily and weekly basis. It's like telling people they should all become a freelancer or become their own boss - why work for anybody?
This article should be read by everyone working in open space offices across the world expecting to get decent speed and reliability out of Wi-Fi with more than a dozen people in a single room.
An open space office (or any office) for a company that depends on the Internet for any of its work without Gigabit Ethernet cables sticking out of every workstation is pretty damn foolish.
So now there’s significant complexity to getting on the network. Seems like a poor choice for a co-working space. And, as I say, plenty of large companies with competent IT departments don’t seem to think that’s necessarily.
And how about when you’re having a meeting with outside people who need to get onto a network?
People could just not connect some devices to the wider world. Make them offline, or support airgapped usage patterns, or support a 1:1 connection only with a management interface (like a KVM), or support fully online use but with as simple a protocol as you can to reduce surface area.
And at the prosumer / pro level people don't even want to think at all.
Complex, fragile connection are just a chore for the average person. It means failure on the job, delay, stress.
Unless they invest in more marketing so people get the message and stronger builds (alas for instance DELL thunderbolt docking station are not solid yet)
While I think it could have been said better, we all need to quit feeling the need to have everything so perfectly connected all the time and feeling frustration when our tech gets in the way.
If everyone and every object in the world is connected to the network continuously with high bandwidth, why would they need to visit a building in the middle of a city in order to work with others?
That's a post-office world, and one which will come before our concept of work as the necessary foundation of an existence is eliminated (though on a long enough time frame, that's probably coming too).
To howls of outrage, I have suggested to several companies that we simply disconnect from the public Internet. People programmed before cut-and-paste-from-SO was a thing after all. Obviously the web servers in the DC need to be accessible but the desktops in the office, or the critical bits of infra like DB, file servers and so on, nope.
Anyone who wants to surf can easily do so on their personal smartphone with no risk to corporate systems. No one has ever been able to put together a coherent rebuttal to my proposal, yet still the PCs remain connected and still people click things they shouldn't...
As someone who has actually traveled through "cheaper" parts of the world, I couldn't imagine working without a local environment. Cheaper parts of the world often imply worse internet connections, spotty wifi, and so on. Requiring a stable internet connection for everything would have been a productivity killer.
What strikes me the most here and there in this interesting blog is how the OP found immediate solutions to some of his problems just looking outside his door, instead of the internet. Why do not go with the full local route then, next time? Less adventorous than moving threads globally but hopefully more rewarding economically (time vs hassle vs ROI)?
It's frankly pathetic that the so-called "biggest innovators" and people who "get the internet" feel the need to be constrained in an already crowded city.
Face to face communication is important, but there are tools to help with day to day communication
The Linux world knows much better how to deal with this then your average "Web 2.0" company
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