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Comment by forgetfreeman | Hacker News Reader

Let's review these accomplishments shall we? Implemented a global digital panopticon, check. Bricked news media as a credible source of information, check. Eliminated affordable housing as a concept in major metro areas around the globe, check. Centralized merchandising to the point that one dude can afford to buy Wyoming while hundreds of millions of would-be shop keepers and artisans are forced to participate in the online equivalent of a protection racket just to maintain solvency, check. Implemented and normalized methods for atomizing society, check. And now we're on the cusp of unrecoverably eliminating the trust metric for all content online permanently thanks to late breaking improvements in AI. All of that is certainly innovative, but where are the improvements?

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Availability, ease of acquiring and applying knowledge. Also logistics and availability of products is amazing, we take a lot for granted. I can get almost anything in any midsize town with a few trips during business hours. Almost anything else can be delivered in a few days.

We have definitely hit some snags like the collapse of Google search results, drm, and several other major human hostile monetization strategies but the reality is that we can do a lot more a lot faster as an individual or with your own team than you could in very recent history.

Uh, nope. In its infancy the internet was absolutely revolutionary in making information available, the entirety of the last 30 years of "innovation" in this arena have undermined this basic premise to the point that it has inverted, which is to say the internet is now more effective at producing and disseminating misinformation than anything factual.

As for touting international logistics as innovative, I guess we're ignoring the last couple thousand years of sea trading? The only innovations in this space are new shipbuilding techniques and the dismantling of international trade tarif regimes, neither of which involves the kinds of technology touted here.

As to claimed productivity gains, you can do more of what, exactly?

The problem is, you’re confusing the gold rush with the gold. The last thirty years have just been the monetisation phase. Most of the revolutionary tech that produced those benefits you describe were created by universities and government funded agencies, often with a pure research focus.

It is really bizarre but for reliable (traditional) recipes I nowadays go back to my paper recipe books, because online everyone has their own take to the extent that you have to start averaging recipes and still don't know for sure if it's right.

(Yes, there are many variations to traditional recipes and there often is not one official recipe, but I see that as something else from the many different recipes found online for the same thing)

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