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0 pointsTuring_Machine2y ago0 comments

The Internet has made a good portion of the sum total of human knowledge available to anyone with a cheap cell phone plan. Yes, most of them are using it to play games and look at funny cat pictures, but some are not, or at least not exclusively. I'm not being snobbish here -- I like funny cat pictures myself, but that's not how I spend most of my online time.

That's far from "marginal" or a "gizmo", IMO, and I don't think we've even begun to see the final outcome.

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tivert2y ago

> That's far from "marginal" or a "gizmo", IMO, and I don't think we've even begun to see the final outcome.

Come on. The internet is really a gizmo that in no way is a substitute for basic needs (like housing, healthcare, or security) when evaluating someone's quality of life.

That's pretty easy to show: if you were given a choice between:

1. being homeless but having access to "a good portion of the sum total of human knowledge" through "cheap cell phone plan."

2. having a home, but no internet access.

Which would you choose? Wikipedia won't keep the rain off your head.

IMHO, software engineers are often very poor judges of the true value of the tech-gizmos they spend so much time with.

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