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>> but it’s undeniable that once you federate your protocol, it becomes very difficult to make changes. He opens by talking about how everything keeps changing

>> but it’s undeniable that once you federate your protocol, it becomes very difficult to make changes. He opens by talking about how everything keeps changing, the denigrates the stuff "stuck in the 1990s" then complains that you cant change a federated protocol. Not sure what he's in favor of.

api 5y ago
He is arguing that decentralized systems are incapable of keeping up with the times due to inability to herd the cats. As evidence I would submit that it's 2022 and we are still using IPv4. A centrally managed Internet could have upgraded to IPv6 in one day. Send out update. Everything updates. Done. There is a genuine and IMHO very significant problem here. If this problem can be solved it will require a different approach from the ones already tried. Pretending the problem doesn't exist doesn't help.
- Plasmoid 5y ago
  I like your optimism but even in centrally managed systems people won't upgrade. I've been harassing other employees to move away from our old Prometheus instance to our new one and it's been a real uphill battle. The only work is (1) copy over the alerts they want to keep to the new storage location. By copy, I mean literally copy. (2) Change the datasource pointer in grafana to the new prometheus location
  - Godel_unicode 5y ago
    Counterpoint, basically everyone who runs them runs up-to-date Chrome and iOS. This is more an argument that some centralized systems are poorly (or perhaps weakly?) managed. Could you not copy their alerts and use DNS aliases and/or load-balancing to migrate them?
    - Plasmoid 5y ago
      We're trying to slowly reduce the amount of technical debt we've built up. It's not a naive copy and paste for us, since it's possible they've done silly things, but for teams they will understand what the alerts are for. That said, I've had teams forget they had alerts at all or outright deny they owned alerts on their service.
- gnufx 5y ago
  Someone who wasn't on JANET in the '90s, for instance?
- freeopinion 5y ago
  I don't understand your point. In some alternate reality, there could be some IPv4 internet that was centrally managed and contained like 3 routers and 20 total nodes? Yeah? What does that have to do with anything? The internet became the internet expressly because it wasn't centrally controlled. If it were centrally controlled from the beginning it would never have outgrown IPv4. See also IPX.
jerry1979 5y ago
Moxie also talks about this dynamic in his critique of NFTs. The logic kinda goes like this: (Step One) People create Federated Services to establish fault tolerant internet infrastructure which more-or-less works. (Step Two) People then build agile Centralized Services which give users exactly what they want. (Step 3) People then attempt to build new, robust Federated Services in an attempt to copy the good features of the Centralized Services. The argument says that the last step of copying the Centralized Services is a fool's errand, and it makes more sense to build better Centralized Services through (Step 2 + SGX) specialized hardware. Time and again Moxie has decided to build the better Centralized Services by leveraging Intel's SGX enclaves (the specialized hardware). Both Signal and MobileCoin rely entirely on these SGX enclaves. Since I don't trust the enclaves, my hope is for Step 3. edit that said, I do use signal everyday and I think mobilecoin is neat.

api 5y ago

He is arguing that decentralized systems are incapable of keeping up with the times due to inability to herd the cats. As evidence I would submit that it's 2022 and we are still using IPv4. A centrally managed Internet could have upgraded to IPv6 in one day. Send out update. Everything updates. Done. There is a genuine and IMHO very significant problem here. If this problem can be solved it will require a different approach from the ones already tried. Pretending the problem doesn't exist doesn't help.

Plasmoid 5y ago
I like your optimism but even in centrally managed systems people won't upgrade. I've been harassing other employees to move away from our old Prometheus instance to our new one and it's been a real uphill battle. The only work is (1) copy over the alerts they want to keep to the new storage location. By copy, I mean literally copy. (2) Change the datasource pointer in grafana to the new prometheus location
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  Counterpoint, basically everyone who runs them runs up-to-date Chrome and iOS. This is more an argument that some centralized systems are poorly (or perhaps weakly?) managed. Could you not copy their alerts and use DNS aliases and/or load-balancing to migrate them?
  - Plasmoid 5y ago
    We're trying to slowly reduce the amount of technical debt we've built up. It's not a naive copy and paste for us, since it's possible they've done silly things, but for teams they will understand what the alerts are for. That said, I've had teams forget they had alerts at all or outright deny they owned alerts on their service.
gnufx 5y ago
Someone who wasn't on JANET in the '90s, for instance?
freeopinion 5y ago
I don't understand your point. In some alternate reality, there could be some IPv4 internet that was centrally managed and contained like 3 routers and 20 total nodes? Yeah? What does that have to do with anything? The internet became the internet expressly because it wasn't centrally controlled. If it were centrally controlled from the beginning it would never have outgrown IPv4. See also IPX.

jerry1979 5y ago

Moxie also talks about this dynamic in his critique of NFTs. The logic kinda goes like this: (Step One) People create Federated Services to establish fault tolerant internet infrastructure which more-or-less works. (Step Two) People then build agile Centralized Services which give users exactly what they want. (Step 3) People then attempt to build new, robust Federated Services in an attempt to copy the good features of the Centralized Services. The argument says that the last step of copying the Centralized Services is a fool's errand, and it makes more sense to build better Centralized Services through (Step 2 + SGX) specialized hardware. Time and again Moxie has decided to build the better Centralized Services by leveraging Intel's SGX enclaves (the specialized hardware). Both Signal and MobileCoin rely entirely on these SGX enclaves. Since I don't trust the enclaves, my hope is for Step 3. edit that said, I do use signal everyday and I think mobilecoin is neat.