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The Zen of Reticulum

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Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#41

Post by alnwlsn »

wtallis wrote: post #33
alnwlsn wrote: post #21

Philosophize all you want; if the first instruction in your manual is 'pip install' I don't consider you to be anywhere near as offline / off-grid as you claim to be. All the Lora mesh projects do this. For all the off-grid advertising they do, there doesn't seem to be a lot of thought put into bootstrapping or maintaining the network once the internet is gone. (yes, you and I could probably figure it out, but some u…

"The internet no longer exists" is a particularly extreme subset of off-grid scenarios. For the more plausible off-grid scenarios—the ones that have actually happened —the unavailability of the internet has been varying degrees of localized and temporary. In that context, being able to bootstrap the entire network without any reliance on internet infrastructure is more of a convenience than a hard requirement. In par…

The whole project is a convenience. If I were in a situation where I actually had to rely on Meshtastic for comms, I'd be pretty nervous. It doesn't really work that well. Luckily, I've only enjoyed Meshtastic recreationally. Where this comes from is from me trying to learn about and set up some nodes on vacation in an area with very limited internet. I followed the tutorials, thought I had what I needed, but I was wrong. Woops, documentation is online. Within the community, I've seen "that same thing happened to me" more than once.

As with many hobbies, this is a "just because I can, I will" type of thing.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#42

Post by AndrewKemendo »

perching_aix wrote: post #22
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author discovered Conways law and got frustrated Too bad nobody wrote a book called “the mythical man month” to dispel the majority of fantasies that engineers have about the way the world works

Not sure I follow the allegory, could you substantiate? I'm not sure specifically e.g. why being an engineer would put someone at an outsized disadvantage against the already hopeless notion of "understanding how the world works [in its totality?]". One would think being smart and educated would put them ahead of the pack, even if they overestimate how smart and educated they are compared to others, or fall victim to…

Sure

If creative people don’t think at a systems level or a political intersectional level when doing design then they will completely ignore or miss the fact that engineering is a subset of a political or otherwise organizational goal

The key problem with most engineers is that they don’t believe that they live inside a political system

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#43

Post by muvlon »

DataDaoDe wrote: post #14

> The internet we rely on today is a chain of single points of failure. Cut the undersea cable, and a continent goes dark. Shut down the power grid, and the cloud evaporates. Deprioritize the "wrong" traffic, and the flow of information is strangled. The deep brokenness of the current internet, specifically what has become the "cloud" is something I've been thinking about a lot over the past few years. (now I'm worki…

But the part about the undersea cable is simply wrong! Major undersea cables have been disrupted several times and never has a "continent gone dark".

I think this betrays a severe misunderstanding of what the internet is. It is the most resilient computer network by a long shot, far more so than any of these toy meshes. For starters, none of them even manage to make any intercontinental connections except when themselves using the internet as their substrate.

Now of course, if you put all your stuff in a single organization's "cloud", you don't get to benefit from all that resilience. That sort of fragile architecture is rightly criticized but this falls flat as a criticism of the internet itself.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#44

Post by Night_Thastus »

DataDaoDe wrote: post #14

> The internet we rely on today is a chain of single points of failure. Cut the undersea cable, and a continent goes dark. Shut down the power grid, and the cloud evaporates. Deprioritize the "wrong" traffic, and the flow of information is strangled. The deep brokenness of the current internet, specifically what has become the "cloud" is something I've been thinking about a lot over the past few years. (now I'm worki…

People naturally want to maximize the value they extract from any system.

If you hand individuals or groups the internet, they will naturally use it for spam, advertisement, scams, information harvesting, propaganda, etc - because those are what gain them the most.

The 'enshittification' if the internet was inevitable the moment it came into existence, and is the result of the decision of its users just as much as any one central authority.

If you let people communicate with each other on a large scale at high speeds, that's what you get.

The only way to avoid the problem is to make a system that has some combination of the following:

* No one uses

* Is slow

* Is cumbersome to use

* Has significant barriers to entry

* Is feature-poor

In a such a system, there's little incentive to have the same bad behaviors.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#46

Post by snickerer »

I love that Mark Qvist publishes his strong opinion, view of the world, and goals.

It quite smells like the hacker spirit of the 80s, mixed with a little spiritualism and anarchism. Very refreshing after so many other people are just disillusioned, worn out, angry, or frightened.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#47

Post by reticolon »

drob518 wrote: post #8

I’ve looked at a few of the LoRa-based mesh network systems over the last couple months. They all seem to have a philosophical document of some sort, like this one, sometimes buried as part of the user docs, but none of them have clear protocol specification docs. When I look at their node maps, the node counts are absurdly small (like 20 nodes in a city of 1 million people). I suspect each of them has major scaling…

Reticulum has no bandwidth management. If your node or the whole local area is flooded with traffic from the rest of the network there is nothing you can do.

"Reticulum does not include source addresses on any packets" and with that you cannot throttle passing-through traffic based on source. Any hope of scaling is gone.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#48

Post by appplication »

alnwlsn wrote: post #36
drob518 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so I understand, what sort of bootstrap process are you looking for? Even a pre-built binary is going to require a download? If you build from source (e.g., C), you’re going to need to download the source code and a compiler. I’m not much a Python guy myself, but installing via pip doesn’t seem particularly bad. But I’m probably missing your point.

My goal is to be able to do all steps of the typical Meshtastic youtube tutorial without access to the internet. I like to liken it to my other hobby of retrocomputing. In the old days, your whole OS and all the applications ran from a few floppies and a couple of books for documentation. If you need to duplicate the environment, just make copies of your disks. And of course you need an original set to start with. Bu…

If you’re pip installing you can just toss your venv on a floppy/cd/flash whatever if you’re so inclined. I’m not sure I understand the concern. The need for internet is a sliding scale with your own resourcefulness.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#49

Post by immibis »

rednafi wrote: post #13
orbifold wrote: post #6

At some point we will be so tired of distinguishing between AI generated content and human content that we will stop using the Internet and it will be left to bots.

Dead internet theory [1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

Personally I'm waiting for the "everyone is 12 internet theory" to get a Wikipedia page. (Of course I am - I'm 12)

non-wikipedia garbage site reference: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/viral-everyone-12-now-theory-19314...

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#50

Post by alexjplant »

> The mental maps we carry are dominated by a single, misleading image: The Cloud.

> To break free of the center, you must also let go of the concept of the "Address".

When I was still dealing primarily with on-prem networks in regulated environments (or cloud networks stubbornly architected in a fashion similar to on-prem ones) I worked with a lot of people that could not and would not ever understand this. It's not just a cloud thing. Some people just cling to using IP addresses for everything all the time. They don't understand why trying to access the JIRA server via IP wouldn't work because they didn't understand SNI let alone a Host Header. Dynamic record registration and default suffix settings are nothing more than a section of settings to be cruised over during clicked-in configuration. Zones can and should be split without regard for architecture or usage. Et cetera.

My theory is that because these people didn't understand Layer 7 stuff like HTTP or DNS they just fall back to what they can look at in a console (Cisco ASA, AWS, or otherwise). IPv6 will simplify a lot of the NAT stuff but it won't cure these people of using network addresses as a crutch. Not really sure what the systemic solution is - I was like this once but was fortunate enough to be task with migrating a set of BIND servers to the cloud and so learned DNS by the seat of my pants. Maybe certification exams should emphasize this aspect of networking more.

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