I tune out at this "what Steve Jobs would have done" talk. A thing needs to stand on its own without borrowing Steve Jobs (or Jeff Dean as I saw someone do the other day).
Pretty much, we don't know what Steve would have done and even if we did, there is no guarantee that it was a good idea. When he had hits, it was brilliant but there were many stinkers as well.
I suspect if Steve was doing a new internet it would be a walled garden like the App store, so a worse internet that favors him. As Woz said, Jobs just wanted to have a business and be rich, didn't really matter what the business was. Any illusion of a greater good was always a calculated bet in getting more users.
Job's did some great things for the industry, I also call him the architect of the locked down digital jails we are inhabiting. But we shouldn't put him up as some perfect beacon of the industry.
For something so complex like a PC or desktop experience, having a bunch of oppositional goals (like ad pop ups) do not serve the user well enough. Often times a committee releases a product, but there is no real consensus or accessibility in mind.
That sounds like a false dichotomy. You want opinionated software? Great, so do I. Design the software, own your decisions yourself, and explain your thinking without shortcuts.
Also, steve jobs made utterly stupid decisions in a lot of areas. If you're trying to revolutionize something, try not to use someone who was clearly flawed in many aspects. Otherwise it sounds like you're just building a facade.
Yes, and Seward also made a Folly. I suppose he missed out on some things, but his success rate at predicting features that are now standard was higher than most in that era.
Yeah, reading his biography was interesting. He had the problem of tech not quite being where he wanted it to be over and over. But eventually things really hit.
It's all of the above, integrated with a maximum latency for each tier level. Not a new protocol, but adopting the best of the best, like QUIC over UDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Client_support
Apple is a vertically integrated company, so the idea is that a mobile carrier/ISP could help ensure the middle trunk from server to client arrive in a timely fashion. Often that involves good QoS and limiting streaming to 720p. But there are a lot of other things that can be done to limit slow page loading. For example, I tried loading Reuters on a slow data connection, and it took much longer than BBC. https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
I still don't get it. I came here to make much the same comment as you are replying to.
Unless you mean that your parallel internet is just the regular internet but with the protocols you personally like? So its more of a web thing where you promote sites that aren't bloated?
> so the idea is that a mobile carrier/ISP could help ensure the middle trunk from server to client arrive in a timely fashion.
I don't know that demanding someone like Hurricane Electric to use QoS is going to have a desirable outcome. Is this more a government thing? Forcing T1s to use QoS? My gut tells me that ignoring QoS markers saves them an appreciable amount of CPU, and also lets them act more neutrally.
How do I as a carrier service your "Thinnernet". How "Parallel" is the infrastructure? Do I have to buy capacity or can we peer? Do I have to maintain a separate routing table? Do you use BGP or something else? Are you planning to buy L2 international capacity to "Replace" T1's? What do you do if a carrier starts sending everything as EF? Is there a PoC node or network operating anywhere?
I just don't see anything in here except for broad references to undersea cables and UX.
Core idea from this: we do need something that discourages web page bloat. The last try at this was Google AMP, which didn't go over well with either site operators or users. Any better ideas?
To be honest, one thing I've been interested in is a totally markdown-only web. You leave everything the same, you just use a Markweb browser as the only thing and it only accesses text/markdown. Then I build Yet Another Protocol Bridge for my blog and no one visits it ever again. That sounds like fun.
The trouble is, people keep extending Markdown to add HTML features. There's even Javascript embedded in Markdown.[1]
You'd just create churn, not a fix.
Haha that’s what I was joking about. I already have a Gemini bridge at gemini://g.wiki.roshangeorge.dev and I’ve had maybe two days in its history with any visitors. Funny.
> There is a funny email that had been released after before Jobs's passing where a user complained of a spotty signal, and his advice was basically to not hold the phone in that direction (or with his hand over the top part where the antenna was positioned).
Is this a reference to “antennagate”[0], when Jobs dismissed an affected user telling them to “just avoid holding it that way”[1]?
> because 3G technology at the time wasn't robust, and one shouldn't have expected him to have all the solutions that were out of his control
If so, this is an incredibly bad take. Lots of other phones had implemented good 3G connectivity at the time, including Apple's own prior iPhone. Apple made a mistake here, and the takeaway should be that corporate hubris is real and companies aren't your friends, not some cockamamie prattle about how we should accept bad products because technology is hard, boo hoo.
> had Jobs lived to 70 or 80
Jobs' own death is another fine demonstration of his arrogance. Very ironic to refer to it in this paragraph.
The coordination and discipline required to build it is quite simply not there (or here, or anywhere). We will sooner have multi-gigabit space internet or 7G.
That would be high bandwidth and high latency, which might be the opposite of what's being proposed in the article. (It's difficult to be certain what's being proposed in the article. I'm fairly sure the article is about internet, beyond that point all is guesswork.)
I wrote a number of articles that try to address the many stacks of the application, transport, and OS layers. The best platform I can think of are the mid 2000's Symbian S60 phones, which were Real Time Operating Systems and used J2ME:
https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/how-about-new-java-ba...
There are new Java'based platforms that could build upon that, but chips today have so much processing power that they might think it's easier to develop a higher level language with more dependencies. But that leads to more maintenance if some package gets lost or broken.
Once Android and iOS became the leading smartphone makers, code efficiency wasn't super important, because they hardware makers could add 10-20X the RAM. The competition between Symbian and iOS was a brief decade, but it actually made efficient code development interesting and beneficial for battery life. Since RAM got cheaper, even though it's expensive at the high end (HBM3e), it's a lot easier to develop with 4GB of phone memory than 4MB on the Nokia 7650 (2002). Those are quite extremes, but most symbian phones had a lot of features with as little as 32MB of RAM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7650
I've sort of been thinking about this as well. Personally, I'd like to re-capture the era of personal blogs and niche knowledge discovery of the earlier web I experienced - crossed with something easy to host/publish and not requiring a browser.
I don't really have any coherent picture but I would like to see these ideas I think:
- Anti-commercial/anti-tracking: maybe requiring some sort of open-source license for all published content that makes it harder to commercially exploit the information, ideally this would be by and for the community, especially in light of recent aggressive LLM-training crawling. I would also like to exclude advertisement and tracking.
- Browser-less: The idea would be to do away with the complexity of the modern web (as people say, browsers are basically operating systems), back to more of its hyper-text roots. Simple documents, mostly textual information. I could imagine a mix of basic markdown and some pre-wired complex/interactive views like "forum" or "blog" and so on (differences in how data is loaded, presented, ...) - the idea would be to implement the "app" part in the browser-replacement and not in the web-page itself if that makes sense. This would lead to more uniformity but that might be a good thing. I'm not even sure if/how images would fit in or videos.
- Peer-to-peer?: Hosting should be as simple as hitting a "publish" button on an article. I like the idea of decentralization, so maybe there could be some sort of peer-to-peer federation where users could "host" content that they've read, liked or general content that's part of a certain (sub-) community. This might require some ranking like HN or a similar mechanism to (unfortunately) censor certain content if the community would not believe it to match their values - so not ultimate freedom. P2P would be more about decentralization, and maybe anti-tracking than pure censorship-resistance.
A session might look like opening the "non-browser" app - it would be fast and require very little memory. Then you'd select or type a community/site and you view of all the content with filters and sorts, depending on the community/site's "template" (again, this is not JS/HTML - basically a native form rendered directly if you will). When you feel like it, you click the "create" button, a text-area + preview pops up and you write your post or article in markdown. When happy, you "publish" and it gets slowly disseminated through all the P2P nodes of your community. This could encompass communities like HN or reddit even if the voting mechanics are worked out, personal blogs, ... but would probably exclude e-commerce stores or video sites because the engine would be potentially too simplistic - and that's fine by me.
Modern smartphones could implement more Data Saver features, but websites could opt-in by using less data. For example, https://marcusb.org/hacks/tinyblog.html
I've been thinking more lately about how to get "Basic Web" - just like normal HTML and maybe a little bit of CSS (No Service Workers, Background Sync, DRM, etc.) and make it work over a LORA/Meshtastic rig somehow.
Personally, I think Reticulum is the parallel Internet. It could even replace the Internet Protocol, and whatever the IP protocol connects is in my view the Internet.
I suspect if Steve was doing a new internet it would be a walled garden like the App store, so a worse internet that favors him. As Woz said, Jobs just wanted to have a business and be rich, didn't really matter what the business was. Any illusion of a greater good was always a calculated bet in getting more users.
Job's did some great things for the industry, I also call him the architect of the locked down digital jails we are inhabiting. But we shouldn't put him up as some perfect beacon of the industry.
For something so complex like a PC or desktop experience, having a bunch of oppositional goals (like ad pop ups) do not serve the user well enough. Often times a committee releases a product, but there is no real consensus or accessibility in mind.
> So what is Thinnernet? Imagine a fiber optic bundle of undersea cables- maybe a hundred or so 10Gbps cables comprising....
and the question goes unanswered. is it a protocol? physical layer? guideline? no idea.
Unless you mean that your parallel internet is just the regular internet but with the protocols you personally like? So its more of a web thing where you promote sites that aren't bloated?
> so the idea is that a mobile carrier/ISP could help ensure the middle trunk from server to client arrive in a timely fashion.
I don't know that demanding someone like Hurricane Electric to use QoS is going to have a desirable outcome. Is this more a government thing? Forcing T1s to use QoS? My gut tells me that ignoring QoS markers saves them an appreciable amount of CPU, and also lets them act more neutrally.
How do I as a carrier service your "Thinnernet". How "Parallel" is the infrastructure? Do I have to buy capacity or can we peer? Do I have to maintain a separate routing table? Do you use BGP or something else? Are you planning to buy L2 international capacity to "Replace" T1's? What do you do if a carrier starts sending everything as EF? Is there a PoC node or network operating anywhere?
I just don't see anything in here except for broad references to undersea cables and UX.
[1] https://www.markdownlang.com/advanced/javascript.html
its a cool idea, but lacks content. Discoverability is kinda bad as well. All fixable problems. I think it could take off given some good content.
Is this a reference to “antennagate”[0], when Jobs dismissed an affected user telling them to “just avoid holding it that way”[1]?
> because 3G technology at the time wasn't robust, and one shouldn't have expected him to have all the solutions that were out of his control
If so, this is an incredibly bad take. Lots of other phones had implemented good 3G connectivity at the time, including Apple's own prior iPhone. Apple made a mistake here, and the takeaway should be that corporate hubris is real and companies aren't your friends, not some cockamamie prattle about how we should accept bad products because technology is hard, boo hoo.
> had Jobs lived to 70 or 80
Jobs' own death is another fine demonstration of his arrogance. Very ironic to refer to it in this paragraph.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4#Antenna
1: https://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/24/steve-jobs-describes-ip...
There are new Java'based platforms that could build upon that, but chips today have so much processing power that they might think it's easier to develop a higher level language with more dependencies. But that leads to more maintenance if some package gets lost or broken.
As for the internet speeds themselves, It is similar to net neutrality but a voluntary guideline by the website developers: https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-sierpinski-triang...
I also explore QUIC, but it's already implemented and not everything needs it, except higher bandwidth: https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/5-things-to-lighten-d...
Once Android and iOS became the leading smartphone makers, code efficiency wasn't super important, because they hardware makers could add 10-20X the RAM. The competition between Symbian and iOS was a brief decade, but it actually made efficient code development interesting and beneficial for battery life. Since RAM got cheaper, even though it's expensive at the high end (HBM3e), it's a lot easier to develop with 4GB of phone memory than 4MB on the Nokia 7650 (2002). Those are quite extremes, but most symbian phones had a lot of features with as little as 32MB of RAM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7650
I don't really have any coherent picture but I would like to see these ideas I think:
- Anti-commercial/anti-tracking: maybe requiring some sort of open-source license for all published content that makes it harder to commercially exploit the information, ideally this would be by and for the community, especially in light of recent aggressive LLM-training crawling. I would also like to exclude advertisement and tracking.
- Browser-less: The idea would be to do away with the complexity of the modern web (as people say, browsers are basically operating systems), back to more of its hyper-text roots. Simple documents, mostly textual information. I could imagine a mix of basic markdown and some pre-wired complex/interactive views like "forum" or "blog" and so on (differences in how data is loaded, presented, ...) - the idea would be to implement the "app" part in the browser-replacement and not in the web-page itself if that makes sense. This would lead to more uniformity but that might be a good thing. I'm not even sure if/how images would fit in or videos.
- Peer-to-peer?: Hosting should be as simple as hitting a "publish" button on an article. I like the idea of decentralization, so maybe there could be some sort of peer-to-peer federation where users could "host" content that they've read, liked or general content that's part of a certain (sub-) community. This might require some ranking like HN or a similar mechanism to (unfortunately) censor certain content if the community would not believe it to match their values - so not ultimate freedom. P2P would be more about decentralization, and maybe anti-tracking than pure censorship-resistance.
A session might look like opening the "non-browser" app - it would be fast and require very little memory. Then you'd select or type a community/site and you view of all the content with filters and sorts, depending on the community/site's "template" (again, this is not JS/HTML - basically a native form rendered directly if you will). When you feel like it, you click the "create" button, a text-area + preview pops up and you write your post or article in markdown. When happy, you "publish" and it gets slowly disseminated through all the P2P nodes of your community. This could encompass communities like HN or reddit even if the voting mechanics are worked out, personal blogs, ... but would probably exclude e-commerce stores or video sites because the engine would be potentially too simplistic - and that's fine by me.
Modern smartphones could implement more Data Saver features, but websites could opt-in by using less data. For example, https://marcusb.org/hacks/tinyblog.html