81–90 of 322 posts
Symmetric connections for everyone, everywhere by default (assymetric only when it's not feasible, i.e. mobile devices). This I always thought would open door for more peer-to-peer or onion or some superdecentralized architectures.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to be talking about WWW and not the Internet. The Internet itself was designed to be decentralized, in fact that was a major motivator (distributed command & control in the case of a major war cutting off large chunks of the C&C groups from each other or eliminating them entirely). Now, it could've been done in a better fashion, more deliberately, or more broadly, but there are at least two notable early pro…
While yes, "the internet" and "www" are different systems, the latter built on top of the former, in practice "the internet" and "www" are one in the same. When we're talking - culturally - about problems with the internet, we mean the problems with "www".
The most basic problems seem to be: 1. Everything being 'free' by default drives us to ad-supported centralized services. Economics aren't a separable concern. 2. Too few IP addresses. (At least one of the pioneers, I forget which, said he pushed for longer addresses but was overruled. So the technical constraints probably did not force this.) I'm not sure how to fix #1, but here's an approach from the 90s: https://c…
Quite frankly, if they didn't allocate full /24 to single entities (including localhost...), we might still have enough addresses left.
Basically: servers focus on serving their data, and then it's up to the user to figure out which "renderer" they want to use to display it. Ofc defaults would be provided.
But, say, you wanted to view tweets in a table form: no problem.
Or maybe, you want to have a really wacky "whip the llamas ass" UI for podcasts: go for it.
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The big benefit of this is that it would allow for artistry in websites, rather than the boring old blue, black, white, grey material design.
Find a way to better decentralize it, so that it doesn't rely on single hosts(and later sites) as the source of truth for any particular function. The original idea was that protocols would allow any one to participate by simply making their own webpage. But dynamic IP addresses, the DNS system, and even just HTML design were out of reach for most people so that got lost and monsterous websites under centralized cont…
Have you heard of Holochain?
"Holochain is an open source framework for building fully distributed, peer-to-peer applications.
Holochain is BitTorrent + Git + Cryptographic Signatures + Peer Validation + Gossip (data propagation).
Holochain apps are versatile, resilient, scalable, and thousands of times more efficient than blockchain (no token or mining required). The purpose of Holochain is to enable humans to interact with each other by mutual-consent to a shared set of rules, without relying on any authority to dictate or unilaterally change those rules. Peer-to-peer interaction means you own and control your data, with no intermediary (e.g., Google, Facebook, Uber) collecting, selling, or losing it."
2-D syntax everywhere. It's a 2-dimensional binary. Suddenly the intermediate layers between binary and the higher level langs we work with day in and day out have the same form. For example, 2d langs for HTML, CSS, JSON, others: https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/ A 2D lang that replaces Markdown: http://scroll.pub/ You can have 2D langs for TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, et cetera. A grid is all you need. I figured the ma…
I don't follow. Can you elaborate? What is 2-D syntax?
2D languages have none of those. They imagine all programs as laid out on a grid. Think of a spreadsheet. For trees, you use indentation. There is not a single computer language in all the world that cannot have it's semantics represented with just that 2D syntax. This realization has long fascinated me. It knocks me off my feet, the same way I feel about binary notation.
Here is a talk I gave in 2017 about 1D vs higher D languages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldVtDlbOUMA
Here is a video that makes the connection between programming languages and spreadsheets clearer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l2QWH-iV3k
You leave it the hell alone!
You leave it the hell alone -- because if you don't, upon returning to 2021, you'll discover that in addition to your wanted change -- there will be all kinds of unwanted "butterfly effects" in the world, resulting from that change, and not limited to the Internet, either!
Like, propagating in and through actual reality -- not just constrained to a computer screen or virtual world!
Unwanted/unforseen/unexpected (but mostly unwanted!) "butterfly effects" (imagine just how scary these could be if you were unprepared for them -- the scariest Stephen King novel wouldn't do them justice!) resulting from Chaos Theory (which programmers know to be actual fact -- make a small change early on in a program -- get vastly differing results later on, as the program moves through TIME...)
So if it one day happens that you magically appear (through time travel, or other plot element) at DARPA in the 1960's -- then you take a quick look, like Clark Griswold in "National Lampoon's Vacation", when he takes a brief look at the Grand Canyon (all of a few seconds!), and you appreciate all that DARPA and all of the other earlier Internet researchers did -- and you leave all of it the hell alone!
Yup, sorry, nothing to see here, nothing to change here, no changes for me! Just passing by, not going to touch a single thing!
You also appreciate the fact that while today's reality is a mess in many ways (and it is!) -- it could also (with Time Travel/Butterfly Effects/Chaos Theory) -- have been a much, much bigger mess(!) -- with Butterfly Effect horrors beyond your wildest understandings!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butterfly_Effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
Disclaimer: The above was written for thought-provoking and possibly (depending on the reader's viewpoint!) comedy purposes only! (Though it also works if read from a serious viewpoint...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't follow. Can you elaborate? What is 2-D syntax?
1D syntax assumes a linear pass from beginning to end across the bytes of a program to build the AST. You have concepts like brackets and parens and quotation marks and colons. 2D languages have none of those. They imagine all programs as laid out on a grid. Think of a spreadsheet. For trees, you use indentation. There is not a single computer language in all the world that cannot have it's semantics represented with…