"Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler.
Wrong? Yep.
At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.
Gives me pause. Most of my screwups have had limited publicity: Forgetting my lines in my 4th grade play. Misidentifying a Gilbert and Sullivan song while suddenly drafted to fill in as announcer on a classical radio station. Wasting a week hunting for planets interior to Mercury’s orbit using an infrared system with a noise level so high that it couldn’t possibly detect ‘em. Heck – trying to dry my sneakers in a microwave oven (a quarter century later, there’s still a smudge on the kitchen ceiling)
And, as I’ve laughed at others’ foibles, I think back to some of my own cringeworthy contributions.
Now, whenever I think I know what’s happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff…
Warm cheers to all,
-Cliff Stoll on a rainy Friday afternoon in Oakland"
A lot of his words fell flat as incorrect prognostications in the 2000s and 2010s, but now that we're in the 2020s, I feel the heart and soul of what he was getting at rings true.
The bright-eyed luster faded, revealing the deeper truths.
> Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.
Bingo.
> Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading.
More true with each and every passing day.
> Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question
Google is starting to feel like that, especially when looking for more than simple facts.
> Won't the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.
Computers won't make people interested in municipal issues. At the national level, it's closer to team sports with all the betting and emotional rivalry.
> Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We're told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you've got computer-aided education?
Schools continue to slide. Phones and tablets grant access to vast educational resources, but most kids don't use them in this way.
> And you can't tote that laptop to the beach.
Gotta find fault in this one, though. I've once or twice been goaded into being oncall during vacation. That's my own stupid fault, though.
>> Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—.... None answers my question
>Google is starting to feel like that, especially when looking for more than simple facts.
Honestly, if it weren't for Wikipedia, the web would be almost useless for getting basic facts quickly.
yup, and the Japanese internet is said to be much, much worse in this regards. Being able to find everything and anything but the fact you’ve been looking for is kind of a running gag over there, at least i was told.
I've never heard that, though I can't say I've lived here long enough to be any kind of authority on the matter. There is a Japanese version of Wikipedia though, and my girlfriend frequently looks things up on it just like I do with the English version.
take it with a grain of salt then, i haven’t lived in Japan for longer than a few weeks. I live in a german city with a large Japanese diaspora, so that’s where I got my, possibly wonky, intel
Went to the beach a while back and saw a family out on towels with kids. For the hour I was there, it was the two parents out frolicking in the waves as the 10? and 14?yr old spent the entire time on their phones, although they occasionally apparently commiserated with each other by showing a picture/video (of their parents doing something embarrassing?).
Really, it wasn't that shocking. It's not like everyone loves going to the beach. Nobody was upset, just bored. But, it seemed the exact opposite of the age dynamic I expected. It could have just as easily been reversed, but I would have stil lbeen just a little sad.
At the time (1995) this came out, people were worried about "piracy" on newgroups and murder for hire through pseudonymous accounts. Instead we got DMCA takedown fraud and SWATting.
I thought he was best known for having a massive amount of Klein bottles in the crawl space of his house, and using a little robot car to manage that inventory.
Almost entirely bunk until you get to the last line.
>A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.
Common Internet discourse is often pure emotion to the point where the author doesn't even agree with it in person. With all the beauty that being connected has given us, we're about to see what the consequence of all of this is.
He missed Wikipedia and Amazon. Strangely he did not foresee that business pressure would have made payments feasible soon. The company I was working for was working with financial institutions on that only a couple of years later.
A pretty great mix of sharply prescient and horribly wrong.
Maybe a few straw men mixed in too, because I don't think there were many serious claims that computers would replace teachers. Computers and software were seen as supplementary.
There was a lot of excitement among tech enthusiasts in the mid-90s about virtual/cyber everything. I remember hearing regularly that soon we wouldn’t need local mediocre teachers because everyone could be taught virtually in cyberspace by the best teachers on the planet. It’s not hard to find tech demos from the era that are reminiscent of current-day VR/mixed-reality work. But by the time the internet became fast and universal enough, what had survived the dot-com crash had little of that flavor left.
My perspective is of someone in the educational software business at the time. The idea of replacing teachers wasn’t really a thing there.
We saw teachers as the co-primary users of the software. The other users were the kids, of course. So there was a lot of consideration, e.g., to how teachers would use the software, what they needed it to do, etc. Actually, the product leads were typically former teachers.
It wasn’t just us either. It wasn’t a thing at the conferences I went to either. I think it would have come across as a silly/unserious idea.
You could really only entertain it if you had no idea what teachers actually do.
What's interesting about this is not that parts it got wrong, but the parts it got right.
The cacophony problem is still with us. With engagement-oriented social media, it's worse since extreme voices tend to get amplified where they might previously have been drowned out by all the noise.
Search engines were great for a while, and often remain quite good; I can instantly get the date for the battle of Trafalger, and I trust that the answer DuckDuckGo provided by way of Wikipedia is correct. Few people would put up a web page to lie about that. LLMs, however eagerly lie about simple, uncontroversial facts. I asked a local copy of the Mistral 7b LLM for the date of the battle of Trafalger and got three different answers, all wrong. Both interacting directly with LLMs and search engines finding LLM-generated content are likely to further reduce our ability to quickly and reliably find facts online.
I'm so grateful both to have grown up during the birth of the web, and to have read Stoll's books as a kid. I was introduced to his work through The Cuckoo's Egg, which had me absolutely riveted. And then read "Silicon Snake Oil". Regardless of which aspects of Stoll's predictions came true, I really appreciate his perspective. So many of the things he said in Snake Oil stick with me to this day. Like, despite all this technology around us, the importance of a good chocolate chip cookie recipe and the company of friends. Also learned a lot about writing from him. Like using short sentences.
Right about a lot, massively wrong about 'cyberbusiness' and 'virtual communities', which we today call 'business' and 'communities'.
Perhaps the key thing missed was that attitudes would change? He may have been right for 1995 attitudes, but secure financial transactions online did happen and attitudes changed to accept them; meeting friends for coffee is still nice, but attitudes changed to accept a lot more casual chat, video calls, (web)forum interaction, etc.
The key thing he missed is not the change in attitudes, but the evolution in technology. He was assuming e-commerce must mean ordering cds in the mail, and reading e-books on low resolution CRTs. Predictions about the future tend to overestimate change in the short term but underestimate it in the long term.
It's the problem. There is not a more important problem on the web.
All that crying about google results deteriorating? It's them trying to filter out exponentially more noise being generated every time unit. LLMs made it so much worse.
You want people to stop caring about something? Flood the web with plausible and crackpot arguments about it from both sides and watch people walk away from the topic in resignation. It used to cost something to pay a legion of trolls, now it takes a couple racks of GPUs and a manageable electricity bill, especially if you're a state actor.
Noise kills utility of any information channel, twitter, HN, google, the web, you name it, it suffers. He probably couldn't have predicted LLM jammers, but I worry the internet's information capacity is about to peak.
Sure, but that’s huge. And probably the reason some (or at least me) are becoming so disillusioned with the web. It’s why I find it hard to believe/trust what I read from news to health advice to product reviews. The noise numbs us to the point where it all starts to feel worthless. This may be one reason ChatGPT et al feel so novel. They get rid of the noise. Of course, they are all built on the back of that noise.
> This may be one reason ChatGPT et al feel so novel. They get rid of the noise.
I think I disagree. LLMs are much better at increasing the noise than they are at getting rid of it. Worse: they are really good at making it look like they get rid of the noise.
To me, LLMs have the potential to break the Web. Instead of search engines crawling the Web and allowing people to search its content, we may have to go back to trusting people: "I read this blog because I know who writes it". The day we can prove that LLMs were used to add tens of thousands of mistakes in Wikipedia (with a political agenda), will we still be able to trust Wikipedia the way we do today?
LLMs have the potential to systematically and automatically destroy the Web.
Wikipedia policy will hopefully prevent LLM generated garbage from corrupting it because some random web site is not a "reliable source" to add "facts" to articles. Today's Wikipedia is also remarkably effective at enforcing its policies. Most of its incorrect information scandals and notable long term vandal incidents happened in the 00s when it was still new.
That's the positive side of its policies. The negative side is that it often reflects the biases of its "reliable" sources meaning it often gets the same things wrong that the mainstream media and academia get wrong.
I was being specific when I chose an LLM product like ChatGPT, not LLMs generically. I do so because it is a product like ChatGPT that boils away the noise to the end user, for better or worse. That is, to grossly simplify my point, it provides a single answer / response, instead of a long list of potential garbage for which I must dig, ponder, assess etc.
Yes most of what is on the web is not trustworthy so a Google search will not show trustable sources.
Thus I look at known trustworthy sources e.g. traditional media where their biases are known. Or places like here which get some known reputation.
Reviews long established places like Consumer Reports and Which . Reviews on sites I assume most are false - but I look at negative ones and see if there are some common problems that seem reasonable.
I assume all influencers are liars or at least advertorials.
One good rule is looking how the site/author gets paid for doing what they do. If not obvious assume that it is getting clicks.
Except pre-web you didn't have to do that, at least not to the same extent. You don't think you're affected by the noise, but the reality is you've adjusted your behavior to compensate for it. The noise changed your whole outlook.
The brand was bought by a low quality clickbait farm long ago, ironically they'll never again publish anything substantive like this. I am surprised they got the archives and not just the brand name.
Wow, that didn't age well :) Like not one but dozens of predictions, all demolished and blown to pieces.
But would the technology have remained at 1995 level, he'd been right. Crappy displays, terrible transfer bandwidth, no search engine ... few would take their "Internet Newspaper" to the beach if it weren't for smartphones.
I saved the comment. Quoting:
"Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler.
Wrong? Yep.
At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.
Gives me pause. Most of my screwups have had limited publicity: Forgetting my lines in my 4th grade play. Misidentifying a Gilbert and Sullivan song while suddenly drafted to fill in as announcer on a classical radio station. Wasting a week hunting for planets interior to Mercury’s orbit using an infrared system with a noise level so high that it couldn’t possibly detect ‘em. Heck – trying to dry my sneakers in a microwave oven (a quarter century later, there’s still a smudge on the kitchen ceiling)
And, as I’ve laughed at others’ foibles, I think back to some of my own cringeworthy contributions.
Now, whenever I think I know what’s happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff…
Warm cheers to all,
-Cliff Stoll on a rainy Friday afternoon in Oakland"