> Many, if not most, of us already own a hand-sized computer with a persistent network connection that we take pretty much everywhere and which lives in our pockets or bags. The top of the line Android and Apple personal computing devices [...] run at upwards of 2 Ghz, have around 4GB of RAM, and on-board storage ranging between 64 and 512 GB.
Who is "many of us" really? If this is supposed to be a promising new avenue for decentralising the internet it seems a little premature... I feel like there are too many wide eyed rich people with $1k phones living in a bubble sometimes - the vast majority of the world cannot afford the expensive toys you take for granted.
> honestly, does anyone use their “phone” primarily as a voice communication device anymore?
Most of the world... (The internet does exist outside san francisco, but hey you can decentralise _your_ internet I guess)
I recently got a Nokia 6 as a secondary phone for running/ the gym.
It was 180 Euros, comes with a 1.4Ghz ocatcore, 3GB ram, 32GB storage (+ option for 128 GB SSD) and a decent GPU. This is a cheap phone that can run beautiful 3D games surprisingly well.
(I honestly don't know why I would need anything more powerful, only the somewhat weak camera is a drawback)
Most applications are not high res video editing, they are note taking, todo/task management, document editing, small group chats, ...
A lot of those could be implemented via local compute and federation perfectly well, with the help of some cloud storage and online instances for easy sharing/coordination/discovery. Especially if implemented in memory and CPU efficient (and therefore battery preserving) languages like Rust/C++.
We would just need to change our approach to application design and implementation.
But I appreciate the feedback. I think you're right that I'm being a bit optimistic here, but the whole vision is a work in progress.
I'm also not sure that current smartphones are actually what you would want to use for such a vision. They're convenient because lots of people have them, but they're not purpose-built for the kind of work that I'm discussing here.
Yes, SF was just a euphemism for "rich people city", oh great now you made me say it!
> I'm also not sure that current smartphones are actually what you would want to use for such a vision. They're convenient because lots of people have them, but they're not purpose-built for the kind of work that I'm discussing here.
Smartphone technology has already created lots of nice side-effects like the super cheap single board computer craze... I honestly think this is currently the closest device that is of a practical cost and performance for almost "everyone" as a personal server.
But the main issue with all these decentralised ideas is not really if your personal server is fast enough, but whether it has enough pipe (this is still a problem even in a mesh network). Dare something be slightly popular (especially video), your personal pipe will never be large enough, this is where centralisation rules unless P2P serving technology is pushed more (there are already some nice working examples out there for video and even entire static sites).
Right next to each other, in the same paragraph... are you really arguing it is not implied that high specs are intended to be relevant to the authors argument? If so what is the purpose of this sentence?
If you design for today’s $1K phones, you have an outside shot at maybe, maybe having your system sort of ready by the time a few billion people have the phones that cost $1K today.
In other words, the fact that not everyone has this tech yet is an even better reason to start building now.
Who is "many of us" really? If this is supposed to be a promising new avenue for decentralising the internet it seems a little premature... I feel like there are too many wide eyed rich people with $1k phones living in a bubble sometimes - the vast majority of the world cannot afford the expensive toys you take for granted.
> honestly, does anyone use their “phone” primarily as a voice communication device anymore?
Most of the world... (The internet does exist outside san francisco, but hey you can decentralise _your_ internet I guess)