Not much "Zen" when it barely works under i386 (Atom n270 CPU), 1GB of RAM and a simple 80x25 terminal. Sadly, even my usual one (100x32/36) isn't good enough to please retrowannabe hipsters.
The Zen of Reticulum
51–60 of 74 posts
Re: The Zen of Reticulum
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Reticulum and Nomadnet should have been ported to Go long ago; you can bundle all the dependencies
under a zip/tgz file just in case, and provide static binaries for everyone. NNCP, Yggdrasil... every portable project uses sane choices. With Python you need Pip, pinned releases and a beefy machine.
Re: The Zen of Reticulum
#53I’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.
I believe the recommendation would be to use https://reticulum.network/manual/using.html#using-blackhole-... in such scenarios.
Re: The Zen of Reticulum
#54> 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 an…
We'd probably agree on this: people respond to incentives created by system design. One example that comes to mind is how London's Congestion Charge and how it has changed traffic behavior over the years depending on how the rules change.
There is nothing inherent about fast, large-scale, or user-friendly communication that forces spam, scams, or propaganda. Its just that those outcomes emerge when things like engagement, attention, or "reach" are rewarded without being aligned to quality, truth, or mutual cooperation.
This is a well-studied problem in economics, but also behavioral science and psychology: change the incentive and feedback structure, and behavior reliably changes.
Based on the studies I've read in and around this topic, I think harmful dynamics are not inevitable properties of communication, but really contingent on how each system rewards actions taken by participants. The solution is not slowness or barriers, but better incentive alignment and feedback loops.
Re: The Zen of Reticulum
#55Mentioning HAM-based internet is cool too eg. HamWAN
Oh I guess that falls under packet radio I see
Re: The Zen of Reticulum
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 w…
What you don't think we can put up a shadow internet running at 250kbps?
That said, I picked up a couple of prebuilt lora solar nodes and a couple of mobile nodes (seed solar jobies and seeed mobile jobies) and stuck the solar ones into my upper story windows just over new years, one is set up as a meshtastic repeater the other as a meshcore repeater.
I'm pretty amazed at the distances I hear from, I'm getting stuff this morning over meshcore all the way from vancouver bc into my office in seattle (pugetnet.org).
To get it all dialed in having a discord full of old HAM guys that know RF pretty well certainly doesn't hurt.
It's certainly hobbiest grade at best. It seems like it could be very interesting for installs in small communities and larger estates for backhaul for remote iot applications. Obviously you aren't going to push video over that bandwidth but for weather stations and the like seems cool.
Reticulum becomes more interesting when you are talking about some of the more robust radio technologies. Building a mesh LAN out of old wifi gear is interesting in concept.
Re: The Zen of Reticulum
#57I’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…
Seattle is showing >400 nodes for meshcore: https://meshcore.co.uk/map.html
Re: The Zen of Reticulum
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I think that's an important consideration, especially with telecommunications technologies, but the author seems to have been pretty mindful of that angle from the get go, i.e. they seem to have been frustrated with the state of affairs from the beginning.
Or do you mean that to you it all reads as yet another case of someone thinking their technology is what's going to right the ship that is society's current trajectory, then bailed when that didn't come to be? Cause while I can certainly see that being the case, I'd say such a cycle is as much desperation as it it naivety. I think this is even reflected in it being a PHY-agnostic thing, meaning as far as an effort into anything goes, it's a fairly enduring one.
Re: The Zen of Reticulum
#59Too bad the Zen of Reticulum is against freedom. Specifically freedom 0: the freedom to use the software for any purpose. Its restrictions preventing it "from being used in systems designed to harm humans" prevents it from being used in e.g. militia groups in oppressed countries who may wish to use it to harm humans in self-defense.
The exact text is "The Software shall not be used in any kind of system which includes amongst its functions the ability to purposefully do harm to human beings."
This is an example of the HN "Jump to Conclusions Mat" where there is an instant jump to extremely high level politics and philosophy and skipping over the more practical mundane problems.
A more practical issue is the author has zero interest in being sued if my LoRA connected emergency stop button for my CNC milling machine crashes and the machine then hurts someone (possibly myself).
Or my "emergency alert" transponder fails when I'm in the wilderness and someone (maybe me) dies instead of being rescued.
The wildest part of the story which isn't being covered is this is an example of one guy doing all the work to produce something more capable than the entire meshtastic project in about a year. A real life example of 10x or 100x engineers. How can meshtastic accomplish so little if one guy accomplished so much? Historically it was not THAT bad where having more than one person work on a network protocol never killed progress for decnet or banyan vines or SNA or any other old time protocol, but maybe its a mesh network thing that having more than one cook in the kitchen eliminates all progress.
Unfortunately, being a pretty much 1 person project he doesn't have the legal skills to realize the license as written is awful and needs rewriting to achieve his goals, assuming his goals are even a good idea...
I've set this up and used it on my LAN at home. Its a LOT more than just LoRA or just meshtastic and its pretty cool and works well. The app on my phone works well. Being abandonware I'm shutting it down "when I get around to it". The ratio of Meshcore to Meshtastic users/traffic is around 20:1 in my area so I'll be setting up Meshcore to fit in. Mesh LoRA is very local just like cell phone service; I'm well aware there are parts of the world operating at an opposite ratio of popularity where you "have to" use meshtastic to fit in. That is not where I live so I must use meshcore.
Meshtastic isn't used here, so I can't mesh so cross that off. Reticulum works perfectly and is abandonware so cross that off. Meshcore has its ... interesting pay money to unlock features scheme, I can't decide if I like or dislike that, I'd like to cross that off but its the only remaining protocol. I could write my own and GPLv2 it but if a superior system (reticulum) can't get buy in, my better licensed system would also be unused. I think I am stuck having to use Meshcore, I about 95% like that and 5% dislike that.
I do find it amusing that I used ham radio AX.25 packet radio in the late 80s, early 90s, some times this century, I know all about digipeating problems and hidden transmitter problems and all the stuff the "kids" refuse to do a literature search for and seem surprised when it bites them. Really this mesh stuff is just ham packet radio from 1981 except the total cost of a station is like $15 vs back in the day it was oh at least $1000. I had a node running linux AX25 back in the 90s and I'm sure I had a couple thousand bucks in equipment by the time I was done, mostly repurposed later on. I still have several hardware TNCs in some closet or shelf somewhere...
Re: The Zen of Reticulum
#60Philosophize 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…
Ha! I believe every RNode can be used to bootstrap a Reticulum network, as that tiny ESP32 hosts the RNode firmware, the full network software stack and documentation! The RNode has the capability to become a Wifi access point, if you connect you get this at 10.0.0.1.: https://unsigned.io/rnode_bootstrap_console/ Shit's insanely well thought out! I encourage everyone to dive in a bit. It's pure tech porn. (If you can…
This is excellent and should be featured more prominently!