Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel

I have never heard of, seen or even got wind of a "QAnon" member, group, theory, website or whatever they say it is outside of mainstream news. According to them it's some huge group of evil people but I can't tell myself that they're a real thing. If anyone has any real world, personal experience I would love to hear it.

The Internet Was Designed With a Narrow Waist - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/02/diagrams.html

The Internet has huge utility because TCP/IP is a narrow waist. It has architectural connections to Ethernet/wireless/... on one end, and HTTP/BitTorrent/... on the other.

For the most functionality, you want fewer code components, and more interoperability. You want O(M + N) pieces of code to give O(M * N) functionality.

The narrow waist architecture does that -- it gives O(M * N) connections to O(M + N) amounts of code.

You don't want to write O(M * N) code, though many people and systems are stuck there!

This generally works the best when the connections are data-oriented and protocol-oriented, not oriented around source code.

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A Sketch of the Biggest Idea in Software Architecture - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/03/backlog-arch.html

I mention Metcalfe's law, which is related but distinct. Metcalfe's law is about O(N^2) network node connections ("dynamically"), while the (usually) O(M * N) narrow waist is about system architecture ("statically").

They both produce network effects! If the Internet already exists, then the easiest design to implement is to attach your new network to it (e.g. a network in space), not create a new, incompatible network.

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Incidentally, this seems like what's wrong with the Kubernetes ecosystem -- it has an combinatorial explosion of code due to lack of protocols and interoperability.

It's not data-oriented, like Unix is.

(An important point is that lots of people complain about Unix-style unstructured byte streams because it's suboptimal LOCALLY, while missing the global interoperability / scale / system economy issues -- they get stuck writing O(M * N) code to avoid parsing and serializing )

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Newer article from last year - Oils Is Exterior-First (Code, Text, and Structured Data) - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/06/ysh-design.html

Software modularity within a process is much different than modularity between processes -- it's a bit more like networking.

You need an exterior narrow waist. To pick an example, a consequence of that is that encodings like UTF-16 don't make sense in any channels where you don't have metadata, and there are a lot of those

e.g. the URL comes BEFORE the Content-Type header in HTTP!

Complete success is something like 50% overall, but in general in many of those cases that "aren't solved" they know who did it, they also know they can't prove it.