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It's hard to tell whether you're being serious.... A single tweet is so incredibly bloated and inefficient for transmission through space, that it would not ha

It's hard to tell whether you're being serious.... A single tweet is so incredibly bloated and inefficient for transmission through space, that it would not have any chance of arriving uncorrupted on the other side. "If you open that tweet in a browser, you'll see the page is 900 KB big. That's almost 100 KB more than the full text of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s funny and enigmatic novel about the Devil visiting Moscow with his retinue (complete with a giant cat!) during the Great Purge of 1937, intercut with an odd vision of the life of Pontius Pilate, Jesus Christ, and the devoted but unreliable apostle Matthew. For a single tweet." (https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

scrumbledober 5y ago
right but the content of the tweet is much smaller than the javascript bundle that twitter.com sends users...
motoboi 5y ago
Yeah, but nothing stops you from serving twitter.com from a CDN on Mars for Mars users, right? They'll even have netflix, if you think about it. Not youtube thought.
- munk-a 5y ago
  Unfortunately they'll only have access to the old style disk Netflix and those envelopes will come with a hell of a postage cost on them. /s More seriously, I don't know why you assume Netflix would be accessible or a priority for settling on Mars - or that Youtube wouldn't be.
  - memetomancer 5y ago
    because Netflix data is measure in GB / week, while Youtube is measure in TB / second.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      I assume that the primary conveyance of data would just be a hard drive (or other storage method) actually sent to mars with the mission. Just like the bundle of wikipedia you could order on a CD, curate stuff of particularly high quality and send it with the crew. For live transmission I think signal issues will cause everything to need to be pre-buffered basically to completion so streaming is not a realistic thing to consider. For instance, twitch is probably just flat out unless we have some pretty insane developments in general data transmission reliability (probably including FTL data transmission which, who knows, might some day be possible through entanglement).
  - motoboi 5y ago
    Netflix is served from a Netflix openconnect appliance inside your ISP datacenter, not from the cloud. They just send one to Mars and it’s good to go.
teawrecks 5y ago
It's hard to tell whether you're being serious. This site is criticizing the response size of an http request to view one tweet, not the size of the actual tweet. In the context of interplanetary communication, sending the tweet from a server on mars to a server on earth would be a tiny packet containing a payload no bigger than the char limit, and some metadata. Browsing the website on earth would fetch from the servers on earth, and might still be 100KB, but no one cares about optimizing that bandwidth usage. Idk if this is that much different from the original telegram at this point though. Sending tiny messages using limited bandwidth between two places. Eventually we'll widen that bandwidth sufficiently, it's just latency that probably won't ever surpass the speed of light. Also the problem of timestamping tweets when relativity is involved.
rory 5y ago
Cool dunk on the GP but it seems obvious that they didn't mean literally send the tweet to Mars as an HTML page with full Javascript bundle.
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  The problem with a centralized service like Twitter is that there is absolutely no guarantee that you will be able to access it through any particular means. For example, my only means of accessing Twitter are either through the bloated Web UI, which is unusable on most of my devices, or through Nitter, which is read-only and sometimes doesn't work due to Twitter's API limitations.
- munk-a 5y ago
  I don't know if that seems obvious. They were talking about twitter the social media platform... I can't think of a single thing twitter has got going for it outside of the size of the message, and the size of the message isn't a huge advantage considering often times users use image macros rather than text (which completely destroys the space efficiency) and you could easily just have, say, size limited facebook posts or something similar. Honestly, I stand by my estimation that interplanetary communication will probably primarily be done over email.
  - rory 5y ago
    I'm not defending the central point-- I agree with you that the primary means of interplanetary communication will be email. It's just helpful to discussion if we don't assume others are expressing the stupidest possible iteration of the ideas they describe.
smotched 5y ago
hes talking about just the text. Why on earth would anyone send that whole bundle back and forth. It would live on mars and you just update new tweets(texts).
kradeelav 5y ago
I might be remembering wrong but I think early on (pre 2015?) twitter had the capability to send tweets via SMS texts. I wouldn't know the size comparison, but if they re-added that feature, it feels like an easy way to cut the bloat.

scrumbledober 5y ago

right but the content of the tweet is much smaller than the javascript bundle that twitter.com sends users...

motoboi 5y ago

Yeah, but nothing stops you from serving twitter.com from a CDN on Mars for Mars users, right? They'll even have netflix, if you think about it. Not youtube thought.

munk-a 5y ago
Unfortunately they'll only have access to the old style disk Netflix and those envelopes will come with a hell of a postage cost on them. /s More seriously, I don't know why you assume Netflix would be accessible or a priority for settling on Mars - or that Youtube wouldn't be.
- memetomancer 5y ago
  because Netflix data is measure in GB / week, while Youtube is measure in TB / second.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    I assume that the primary conveyance of data would just be a hard drive (or other storage method) actually sent to mars with the mission. Just like the bundle of wikipedia you could order on a CD, curate stuff of particularly high quality and send it with the crew. For live transmission I think signal issues will cause everything to need to be pre-buffered basically to completion so streaming is not a realistic thing to consider. For instance, twitch is probably just flat out unless we have some pretty insane developments in general data transmission reliability (probably including FTL data transmission which, who knows, might some day be possible through entanglement).
- motoboi 5y ago
  Netflix is served from a Netflix openconnect appliance inside your ISP datacenter, not from the cloud. They just send one to Mars and it’s good to go.

teawrecks 5y ago

It's hard to tell whether you're being serious. This site is criticizing the response size of an http request to view one tweet, not the size of the actual tweet. In the context of interplanetary communication, sending the tweet from a server on mars to a server on earth would be a tiny packet containing a payload no bigger than the char limit, and some metadata. Browsing the website on earth would fetch from the servers on earth, and might still be 100KB, but no one cares about optimizing that bandwidth usage. Idk if this is that much different from the original telegram at this point though. Sending tiny messages using limited bandwidth between two places. Eventually we'll widen that bandwidth sufficiently, it's just latency that probably won't ever surpass the speed of light. Also the problem of timestamping tweets when relativity is involved.

rory 5y ago

Cool dunk on the GP but it seems obvious that they didn't mean literally send the tweet to Mars as an HTML page with full Javascript bundle.

forgotmypw17 5y ago
The problem with a centralized service like Twitter is that there is absolutely no guarantee that you will be able to access it through any particular means. For example, my only means of accessing Twitter are either through the bloated Web UI, which is unusable on most of my devices, or through Nitter, which is read-only and sometimes doesn't work due to Twitter's API limitations.
munk-a 5y ago
I don't know if that seems obvious. They were talking about twitter the social media platform... I can't think of a single thing twitter has got going for it outside of the size of the message, and the size of the message isn't a huge advantage considering often times users use image macros rather than text (which completely destroys the space efficiency) and you could easily just have, say, size limited facebook posts or something similar. Honestly, I stand by my estimation that interplanetary communication will probably primarily be done over email.
- rory 5y ago
  I'm not defending the central point-- I agree with you that the primary means of interplanetary communication will be email. It's just helpful to discussion if we don't assume others are expressing the stupidest possible iteration of the ideas they describe.

smotched 5y ago

hes talking about just the text. Why on earth would anyone send that whole bundle back and forth. It would live on mars and you just update new tweets(texts).

kradeelav 5y ago

I might be remembering wrong but I think early on (pre 2015?) twitter had the capability to send tweets via SMS texts. I wouldn't know the size comparison, but if they re-added that feature, it feels like an easy way to cut the bloat.