4 ms·

Those are certainly more pragmatic than ideological concerns, which is the point GP was making.

by saghm 4y ago

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
And I agree. I just think monetization is the larger factor.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Reliable servers ain't free, at least that's what I think one of the larger issues is.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    No centralization, no server.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      "This, and other things CEOs say while smoking crack." Computer code still runs on CPUs and not the aether. If its accepting connections from other computers it is the server in the client/server model. If it's on your desktop, it just typically means it doesn't have ECC memory and a battery backup dropping the reliability even further. Decentralized architectures have all kinds of fun and complicated failure modes, and especially for consumer use, high speed and low latency typically are not their strong points.
      - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
        How much does Tim Berners Lee pay for hosting the world wide web?
      - jtode 4y ago
        High speed and low latency are overvalued at the moment, because they are so important to the functioning of the capitalist internet. Usenet, IRC, email - discussion, conversation, mail - all worked fine for decades on the old, low speed internet. What exactly are we getting in exchange for all this high-availability nonsense anyways?
        pixl97 4y ago
        Usenet was pretty low latency at the time. But that time is long past. This is the problem you have where you look at the past and said "All these things worked great then", but the moment your users use something with higher bandwidth and lower latency they are leaving your site. If everything is slow that is the expectation, if you're slow, you're losing. So yea, we're the old men yelling at clouds, and the kids have gone on to a ADHD fueled media filled flashing light fest and they don't plan on coming back.
        cykros 4y ago
        Usenet also enjoyed ISP's typically being willing to host them as part of providing basic Internet service at the time. Good luck asking Comcast and company to host the latest iteration of social media this decade.
        jtode 4y ago
        I think that the desirable long term outcome involves the vast majority of people embracing the idea that we should pay up front for information services, rather than accepting "free" things from capitalists. TANSTAAFL. The good part is that operating a usenet server with no alt.binaries.* content is extremely low demand; it was designed to run on the 70s internet, so...
        jtode 4y ago
        If I'm not mistaken, though, irc still works pretty well, and still provides what it always has, and could still function as the live chat aspect of a small community's technology stack. Moreover, in the event that the high-availability internet goes away, it will probably still work on a 90s-tech internet. If your packets are just conversational text, you really don't need a massive warp-speed pipe to make it work. Likewise Usenet - yes, we abused it to get our alt.binaries (read: boobies), but that was strictly desperation. It still works fine on the fast internet, but again, will continue to work on a 90s internet, in the event that we lose the fast one. Fast itself is really what's warping our perceptions of what is normal and acceptable. When was the last time you watched an old Connery Bond movie? My grandpa took me to see every Bond movie that existed at the time back in the 80s, the downtown cineplex threw a festival. I remember enjoying all of them at the time, nothing wrong with em. I threw on Dr No a couple months ago and I swear, I could not get past about 30 minutes, the pacing was hellishly slow, to the point that wanted to climb into the screen and lob a bomb at his car myself out of sheer boredom. Had a similar experience trying to watch Three Days of the Condor. Interestingly, I decided to rewatch the Lone Wolf and Cub movies after watching the Mandalorian, and they were just as fun as I remember. Some slow scenes, but good pacing with a decent body count:frame ratio. I don't think we're so much yelling at clouds as wishing the clouds would slow down long enough for us to yell at em. I have my doubts that the pace can be maintained indefinitely, and they are not trying to bring it under control at all. What I expect next is a painful correction in which the laws of nature will come into play in a big way. Whee!
      - sliken 4y ago
        Not sure I get the problem. Yes an expensive server in expensive data center has more CPU, Ram, disk I/O, and bandwidth than a normal desktop, laptop, or phone. But say you track 1000 peers, find 50 online, and send a 280 character tweet to ten of them. Sure it's going to take seconds for that tweet to get to whatever fraction of millions of people that are interested. Sure your client should ask the 40 peers if they saw the message to make sure it went out. The beautiful thing is that even on a smart phone paying 10x the bandwidth of a tweet is still effectively zero. If the goal was a commodities trading platform, sure distributed wouldn't make sense. But receiving tweets of interest send in the last few minutes seems rather insensitive to a peers bandwidth, latency, CPU, or ram.

Those are certainly more pragmatic than ideological concerns, which is the point GP was making.

by saghm 4y ago

Those are certainly more pragmatic than ideological concerns, which is the point GP was making.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

And I agree. I just think monetization is the larger factor.

pixl97 4y ago
Reliable servers ain't free, at least that's what I think one of the larger issues is.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  No centralization, no server.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    "This, and other things CEOs say while smoking crack." Computer code still runs on CPUs and not the aether. If its accepting connections from other computers it is the server in the client/server model. If it's on your desktop, it just typically means it doesn't have ECC memory and a battery backup dropping the reliability even further. Decentralized architectures have all kinds of fun and complicated failure modes, and especially for consumer use, high speed and low latency typically are not their strong points.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
      How much does Tim Berners Lee pay for hosting the world wide web?
    - jtode 4y ago
      High speed and low latency are overvalued at the moment, because they are so important to the functioning of the capitalist internet. Usenet, IRC, email - discussion, conversation, mail - all worked fine for decades on the old, low speed internet. What exactly are we getting in exchange for all this high-availability nonsense anyways?
      - pixl97 4y ago
        Usenet was pretty low latency at the time. But that time is long past. This is the problem you have where you look at the past and said "All these things worked great then", but the moment your users use something with higher bandwidth and lower latency they are leaving your site. If everything is slow that is the expectation, if you're slow, you're losing. So yea, we're the old men yelling at clouds, and the kids have gone on to a ADHD fueled media filled flashing light fest and they don't plan on coming back.
        cykros 4y ago
        Usenet also enjoyed ISP's typically being willing to host them as part of providing basic Internet service at the time. Good luck asking Comcast and company to host the latest iteration of social media this decade.
        jtode 4y ago
        I think that the desirable long term outcome involves the vast majority of people embracing the idea that we should pay up front for information services, rather than accepting "free" things from capitalists. TANSTAAFL. The good part is that operating a usenet server with no alt.binaries.* content is extremely low demand; it was designed to run on the 70s internet, so...
        jtode 4y ago
        If I'm not mistaken, though, irc still works pretty well, and still provides what it always has, and could still function as the live chat aspect of a small community's technology stack. Moreover, in the event that the high-availability internet goes away, it will probably still work on a 90s-tech internet. If your packets are just conversational text, you really don't need a massive warp-speed pipe to make it work. Likewise Usenet - yes, we abused it to get our alt.binaries (read: boobies), but that was strictly desperation. It still works fine on the fast internet, but again, will continue to work on a 90s internet, in the event that we lose the fast one. Fast itself is really what's warping our perceptions of what is normal and acceptable. When was the last time you watched an old Connery Bond movie? My grandpa took me to see every Bond movie that existed at the time back in the 80s, the downtown cineplex threw a festival. I remember enjoying all of them at the time, nothing wrong with em. I threw on Dr No a couple months ago and I swear, I could not get past about 30 minutes, the pacing was hellishly slow, to the point that wanted to climb into the screen and lob a bomb at his car myself out of sheer boredom. Had a similar experience trying to watch Three Days of the Condor. Interestingly, I decided to rewatch the Lone Wolf and Cub movies after watching the Mandalorian, and they were just as fun as I remember. Some slow scenes, but good pacing with a decent body count:frame ratio. I don't think we're so much yelling at clouds as wishing the clouds would slow down long enough for us to yell at em. I have my doubts that the pace can be maintained indefinitely, and they are not trying to bring it under control at all. What I expect next is a painful correction in which the laws of nature will come into play in a big way. Whee!
    - sliken 4y ago
      Not sure I get the problem. Yes an expensive server in expensive data center has more CPU, Ram, disk I/O, and bandwidth than a normal desktop, laptop, or phone. But say you track 1000 peers, find 50 online, and send a 280 character tweet to ten of them. Sure it's going to take seconds for that tweet to get to whatever fraction of millions of people that are interested. Sure your client should ask the 40 peers if they saw the message to make sure it went out. The beautiful thing is that even on a smart phone paying 10x the bandwidth of a tweet is still effectively zero. If the goal was a commodities trading platform, sure distributed wouldn't make sense. But receiving tweets of interest send in the last few minutes seems rather insensitive to a peers bandwidth, latency, CPU, or ram.