> the general rule of optimizing for bad reception died.

Yep, and people will look at you like you have two heads when you suggest that perhaps we should take this into account, because it adds both cost and complexity.

But I am sick to the gills of using software - be that on my laptop or my phone - that craps out constantly when I'm on the train, or in one of the many mobile reception black spots in the areas where I live and work, or because my rural broadband has decided to temporarily give up, because the software wasn't built with unreliable connections in mind.

It's not that bleeding difficult to build an app that stores state locally and can sync with a remote service when connectivity is restored, but companies don't want to make the effort because it's perceived to be a niche issue that only affects a small number of people a small proportion of the time and therefore not worth the extra effort and complexity.

Whereas I'd argue that it affects a decent proportion of people on at least a semi-regular basis so is probably worth the investment.

I work on a local-first app for fun and someone told me I was simply creating problems for myself and I could just be using a server. But I'm in the same boat as you. I regularly don't have good internet and I'm always surprised when people act like an internet connection is a safe assumption. Even every day I go up and down an elevator where I have no internet, I travel regularly, I go to concerts and music festivals, and so on.

I don't even travel that much, and still have trouble. Tethering at the local library or coffee shops is hit or miss, everything slows down during storms, etc.

Yeah British trains are often absolutely awful for this, I started putting music on my phone locally to deal with the abysmal coverage.

Not true because of cost or access? If you consider starlink high speed, it truly is available everywhere.

Privacy is a niche concern sadly.

I'm not sure if the handful of people in space stations are a big enough market to drive such changes.

There are no longer options to buy. Everything is a subscription

I think people have seen enough of this 'free' business model to know the things being sold for free are in fact, not.

But again, that's conflating web connected or even web required with mainframe compute and it's just not the same.

PC was never 'no web'. No one actually 'counted every screw in their garage' as the PC killer app. It was always the web.

But gmail is also a relatively complicated app, much of which runs locally on the client device.

Well, app code is streamed, content is streamed. The app code is run locally. Content is pulled periodically.

The mail server is the mail server even for Outlook.

Outlook gives you a way to look through email offline. Gmail apps and even Gmail in Chrome have an offline mode that let you look through email.

It's not easy to call it fully offline, nor a dumb terminal.

On phones, most of the compute is used to render media files and games, and make pretty animated UIs.

The text content of a weather app is trivial compared to the UI.

Same with many web pages.

Desktop apps use local compute, but that's more a limitation of latency and network bandwidth than any fundamental need to keep things local.

Security and privacy also matter to some people. But not to most.

IPads are incredibly advanced. Though I guess you mean they don't use anything that requires more sophistication from the user (or something like that)?

The Ipad is not a thin client, is it?

I think it has more to do with the 'common wisdom' dictating that this is the way to do it, as 'we've always done it like this'.

Which might even be true, since cloud based software might offer conveniences that local substitutes don't.

However this is not an inherent property of cloud software, its just some effort needs to go into a local alternative.

That's why I mentioned Home Assistant - a couple years ago, smart home stuff was all the rage, and not only was it expensive, the backend ran in the cloud, and you usually paid a subscription for it.

Nowadays, you can buy a local Home Assistant hub (or make one using a Pi) and have all your stuff only connect to a local server.

The same is true for routers, NAS, media sharing and streaming to TV etc. You do need to get technical a bit, but you don't need to do anything you couldn't figure out by following a 20 minute Youtube video.

> Once up on a time social media was called Usenet and worked offline in a dedicated client with a standard protocol.

There was also FidoNet with offline message readers.

> called Usenet and worked offline

People must have been pretty smart back then. They had to know to hang up the phone to check for new messages.

The small mind could have an advantage if it is closer or more trustworthy to users.

It only has to be good enough to do what we want. In the extreme, maybe inference becomes cheap enough that we ask “why do I have to wake up the laptop’s antenna?”

I don't want to send sensitive information to a data center, I don't want it to leave my machine/network/what have you. Local models can help in that department.

You could say the same about all self-hosted software, teams with billions of dollars to produce and host SaaS will always have an advantage over smaller, local operations.

The advantage it might have won't be in the form of "more power", it would be in the form of "not burdened by sponsored content / training or censorship of any kind, and focused on the use-cases most relevant to the individual end user."

We're already very, very close to "smart enough for most stuff". We just need that to also be "tuned for our specific wants and needs".

Abundant resources could enable bad designs. I could in particular see a lot of commercial drive for huge models that can solve a bazillion different use cases, but aren't efficient for any of them.

There might be also local/global bias strategies. A tiny local model trained on your specific code/document base may be better aligned to match your specific needs than a galaxy scale model. If it only knows about one "User" class, the one in your codebase, it might be less prone to borrowing irrelevant ideas from fifty other systems.

The only difference is latency.

Universes like ours where the datacentre mind is completely untrustworthy.

Yes, but your computer relies on dozens (hundreds?) of servers at any given time.

There are often activities that do require compute though. My last phone upgrade was so Pokemon Go would work again, my friend upgrades for the latest 4k video or similar.

Consumers care about battery life.

> By that logic none of us should be paying monthly subscriptions for anything because obviously someone would disrupt that pricing model and take business away from all the tech companies who are charging it?

Non sequitur.

If a market is being ripped off by subscription, there is opportunity in selling the asset. Vice versa: if the asset sellers are ripping off the market, there is opportunity to turn it into a subscription. Business models tend to oscillate between these two for a variety of reasons. Nothing there suggets one mode is infinitely yielding.

> If Apple does finally come up with a fully on-device AI model that is actually useful, what makes you think they won't gate it behind a $20/mo subscription like they do for everything else?

If they can, someone else can, too. They can make plenty of money selling it straight.

Because they need to displace open AI users, or open AI will steer their trajectory towards Apple at some point.

What on-device app does Apple charge a subscription for?

It's a lot more complicated than that. They need to be able to take the island very quickly with a decapitation strike, while also keeping TSMC from being sabotaged or destroyed, then they need to be able to weather a long western economic embargo until they can "break the siege" with demand for what they control along with minor good faith concessions.

It's very risky play, and if it doesn't work it leaves China in a much worse place than before, so ideally you don't make the play unless you're already facing some big downside, sort of as a "hail Mary" move. At this point I'm sure they're assuming Trump is glad handing them while preparing for military action, they might even view invasion of Taiwan as defensive if they think military action could be imminent anyhow.

And notably, those phones and tablets are intentionally hobbled by the device owners (Apple, Google) who do everything they can to ensure they can't be treated like personal computing devices. Short of regulatory intervention, I don't see this trend changing anytime soon. We're going full on in the direction of more locked down now that Google is tightening the screws on Android.

Ok, so Brave Browser exists - if you download, you will see 0 ads on the internet, I've never really seen ads on the internet - even in the before brave times.

Fr tho, no ads - I'm not making money off them, I've got no invite code for you, I'm a human - I just don't get it. I've probably told 500 people about Brave, I don't know any that ever tried it.

I don't ever know what to say. You're not wrong, as long as you never try to do something else.

I agree man, it's depressing.

> I'm not sure we can look forward to self-hosted models ever being mainstream.

If you are using an Apple product chances are you are already using self-hosted models for things like writing tools and don't even know it.

The "enshittification" hasn't happened yet. They'll add ads and other gross stuff to the free or cheap tiers. Some will continue to use it, but there will be an opportunity for self-hosted models to emerge.

> Like 50% of internet users are already interacting with one of these daily. You usually only change your habit when something is substantially better.

No, you usually only change your habit when the tools you are already using are changed without consulting you, and the statistics are then used to lie.

You make a fair point, I'm just hoping this will happen, but not confident either to be frank.