4 ms·

sometimes people remark at how extensive ancient civilations became with such simple technology, yet here we are. billions of people being served by things like

sometimes people remark at how extensive ancient civilations became with such simple technology, yet here we are. billions of people being served by things like BGP and SS7. as i get older, i become more and more concerned with humanity's lack of fault tolerance. brett weinstein clued me into this as an evolutionary phenomena. if a gene activates a short-term solution and long-term problem, that gene is likely to be favored. how do we transcend this problem that seems to be inherent with existing? a first-principal problem?

selecsosi 6y ago
I think potentially the concern/idea of optimization, for nature, is at a different scale and goal than what humans are capable of observing to be linear, predictable, "right" or "good". On a similar scale I think a "scientific" observer of nature might say one shouldn't worry about local maximums because there is always some input stimuli to disrupt seemingly stable long term maxima, and that measurable dynamism of categorical evolution comes through dipping to local mins, and finding a new path to the new temp max because the topology of the surface changed. Humanity challenge I think is in recognizing that almost all successful solutions to long term problems is built from small functional systems that scaled up rather than top down predictive and prescribed methodologies (mostly accidents until recent history). We can stand in nature and appreciate the diverse and varied approaches nature has taken to solving the particular localized problem (soil, land topology, etc...) but we don't evaluate the suffering and time frame it might of taken to find that particular solution. The plants that were either prematurely stunted or culled are just as much part of the ecosystem and fertilizer that holds the visible flora. While appreciable suffering can and should be addressed and planned for, localized short term solutions are the things that take hold and spread until the collapse under their own lack of structural stability. Luckily nature is always at the ready to continue the experiment. Trail blazing is not about clearing the path, but finding it, the shortest path for nature is almost always the most preferred, you could say many of the foundations of physics[0] are rooted in it [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_principle
CloudNetworking 6y ago
If anything, these kind of issues we see popping up here and there are proof of the high availability of the Internet and specifically how protocols such as BGP helped on making it what it is today. It is not that we have built the Internet despite BGP. We have built it thanks to BGP. If we didn't have BGP we would have to invent it :)
- alexchamberlain 6y ago
  Isn’t the point that BGP is great in the same way as the Model T was great? No one is saying it wasn’t needed or - to a certain extent - doesn’t do the job, but given recent (and not so recent) improvements to technology and security standards, maybe we need a BGP 2.0?
  - PietjePukster 6y ago
    BGP 2.0, like self driving cars, are five years away. For the last 20 years..
    - p_l 6y ago
      Good that we're running BGP 4, right? ;)
    - Aperocky 6y ago
      This makes total sense because humans are inherently lazy. Hurd would be out in production in 199x if not for Linux. But it's still being worked on in 2020.
      - phone8675309 6y ago
        > humans are inherently lazy > Hurd would be out in production in 199x if not for Linux. I think Hurd is not a good example of this. Hurd being sidelined seems to me to be a result of bikeshedding (which microkernel to use) and realizing that Linux (as a kernel) had more effort being poured into it because it had more mindshare. > But it's still being worked on in 2020. At more or less a leisurely pace as a passion project more than the end goal being production, precisely because the social goal that it was trying to achieve has been mostly achieved by the Linux kernel.
ATsch 6y ago
This outage really doesn't really appear to have anything to do with BGP? As in, it would have happened even if you replaced it with some super shiny modern distributed protocol. Your comment is also strange because especially in networking, BGP is far from the oldest thing we are using. There is this tendency in startup bros to assume BGP must be bad because it's old but in general BGP still holds up as a great protocol and is still something people regularly deploy into shiny new systems internally (e.g. bgp evpn vxlan) with no hesitation or regret, which is what L3 was doing here. The only real fundamental problem with BGP is that the assumption that "the internet" is such an internal system no longer holds. Solving that is primarily a social and economic problem in the same way other internet wide protocol upgrades are, just with the added difficulty of convincing a bean counter you need a few 100k for new routers.
cm2187 6y ago
...and smtp!
jonathanliu 6y ago
> brett weinstein clued me into this as an evolutionary phenomena. if a gene activates a short-term solution and long-term problem, that gene is likely to be favored. It's tough because of path dependence. If you don't survive the short term problem, the long term doesn't matter.
tenebrisalietum 6y ago
Short-term solutions per X is bad for an individual X, but great for many X's spread over the world, if X has the the ability replicate and grow over time.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
being cut off from certain parts of the internet for about 5 or 6 hours is "being served" ? your definition of civilizational collapse differs a bit from mine. i'm not altogether certain which one is more useful.

selecsosi 6y ago

I think potentially the concern/idea of optimization, for nature, is at a different scale and goal than what humans are capable of observing to be linear, predictable, "right" or "good". On a similar scale I think a "scientific" observer of nature might say one shouldn't worry about local maximums because there is always some input stimuli to disrupt seemingly stable long term maxima, and that measurable dynamism of categorical evolution comes through dipping to local mins, and finding a new path to the new temp max because the topology of the surface changed. Humanity challenge I think is in recognizing that almost all successful solutions to long term problems is built from small functional systems that scaled up rather than top down predictive and prescribed methodologies (mostly accidents until recent history). We can stand in nature and appreciate the diverse and varied approaches nature has taken to solving the particular localized problem (soil, land topology, etc...) but we don't evaluate the suffering and time frame it might of taken to find that particular solution. The plants that were either prematurely stunted or culled are just as much part of the ecosystem and fertilizer that holds the visible flora. While appreciable suffering can and should be addressed and planned for, localized short term solutions are the things that take hold and spread until the collapse under their own lack of structural stability. Luckily nature is always at the ready to continue the experiment. Trail blazing is not about clearing the path, but finding it, the shortest path for nature is almost always the most preferred, you could say many of the foundations of physics[0] are rooted in it [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_principle

CloudNetworking 6y ago

If anything, these kind of issues we see popping up here and there are proof of the high availability of the Internet and specifically how protocols such as BGP helped on making it what it is today. It is not that we have built the Internet despite BGP. We have built it thanks to BGP. If we didn't have BGP we would have to invent it :)

alexchamberlain 6y ago
Isn’t the point that BGP is great in the same way as the Model T was great? No one is saying it wasn’t needed or - to a certain extent - doesn’t do the job, but given recent (and not so recent) improvements to technology and security standards, maybe we need a BGP 2.0?
- PietjePukster 6y ago
  BGP 2.0, like self driving cars, are five years away. For the last 20 years..
  - p_l 6y ago
    Good that we're running BGP 4, right? ;)
  - Aperocky 6y ago
    This makes total sense because humans are inherently lazy. Hurd would be out in production in 199x if not for Linux. But it's still being worked on in 2020.
    - phone8675309 6y ago
      > humans are inherently lazy > Hurd would be out in production in 199x if not for Linux. I think Hurd is not a good example of this. Hurd being sidelined seems to me to be a result of bikeshedding (which microkernel to use) and realizing that Linux (as a kernel) had more effort being poured into it because it had more mindshare. > But it's still being worked on in 2020. At more or less a leisurely pace as a passion project more than the end goal being production, precisely because the social goal that it was trying to achieve has been mostly achieved by the Linux kernel.

ATsch 6y ago

This outage really doesn't really appear to have anything to do with BGP? As in, it would have happened even if you replaced it with some super shiny modern distributed protocol. Your comment is also strange because especially in networking, BGP is far from the oldest thing we are using. There is this tendency in startup bros to assume BGP must be bad because it's old but in general BGP still holds up as a great protocol and is still something people regularly deploy into shiny new systems internally (e.g. bgp evpn vxlan) with no hesitation or regret, which is what L3 was doing here. The only real fundamental problem with BGP is that the assumption that "the internet" is such an internal system no longer holds. Solving that is primarily a social and economic problem in the same way other internet wide protocol upgrades are, just with the added difficulty of convincing a bean counter you need a few 100k for new routers.

cm2187 6y ago

...and smtp!

jonathanliu 6y ago

> brett weinstein clued me into this as an evolutionary phenomena. if a gene activates a short-term solution and long-term problem, that gene is likely to be favored. It's tough because of path dependence. If you don't survive the short term problem, the long term doesn't matter.

tenebrisalietum 6y ago

Short-term solutions per X is bad for an individual X, but great for many X's spread over the world, if X has the the ability replicate and grow over time.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

being cut off from certain parts of the internet for about 5 or 6 hours is "being served" ? your definition of civilizational collapse differs a bit from mine. i'm not altogether certain which one is more useful.