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Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

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Re: Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

#131

Post by mikepurvis »

aerzen wrote: post #130
mikepurvis wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining and providing a deb is pretty easy too; the real killer for a nix flake I think it's how dirt simple it is to provide infinite testing builds for different branches.

Well, for .deb there is the dependency problem. Even if your deb is just a release of a project, you can only use versions of dependencies that are in debian repository. Or include it all in your .deb, which becomes hard to maintain. By "infinite branches" you probably mean that a nix derivation / flake is a recipe that can build any version of the project?

Yeah, Nix flakes can be a static URL path, but they inherit your VCS refs directly, so

    nix run github:tailscale/tailcat
Gets you the default branch. Tailcat doesn't yet have any tags, but if you want a build of the main tailscale repo at a particular tag, it's just:

    nix build github:tailscale/tailscale/v1.102.3
But because this can be any ref, you can specify an arbitrary branch or tag, so like if you're trying to get a colleague to check out your work it's as easy as:

    nix run github:tailscale/tailcat/my-fancy-branch
And obviously a flake can reference other flakes with the same flexibility, so your home manager config or your company's private app flakes can transparently pull the not-yet-merged version of a change you're proposing upstream without having to make special internal "patched" releases with tortured 1.2.3~actually.1.4.6 type version numbers like in Debian. And of course that same flake reference policy applies all the way down, so you also don't need to worry about the private apt repo as a big piece of shared state that's going rev forward and break your older code branches or Dockerfiles, since each branch of your app flake has its own flake.nix and accompanying lockfile controlling which deps it is pinned to.

It really is an awfully nice system, and shockingly modern in its sensibilities considering how old the Nix fundamentals are.

Re: Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

#132

Post by frollogaston »

JavierFlores09 wrote: post #109
freakynit wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://pumpkinmc.org/

none of the rust-based minecraft server have enough functionality implemented to use them for survival, maybe for some minigames but that's about it. Pumpkin has gotten far out of the many[1] but there's still lots to be done. 1: https://dayssincelastrustmcserver.com/

Whoa, Coral is memory-safe!

Re: Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

#133

Post by frollogaston »

jasonmp85 wrote: post #81
tucnak wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this downvoted? Bedrock is literally dog shit clone for iPad kids. This is not even controversial, it's just fact.

You're defending a video game written in Java.

Minecraft RAM Edition

Re: Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

#134

Post by mikepurvis »

swozey wrote: post #34
mikepurvis wrote: post #28

I enjoy that they supply a nix install/environment, similar to the main tailscale/tailscale repo. Is nix widespread or the standard dev environment at tailscale, or is it like a 10% option and most people just use Docker or whatever?

When I was writing rust stuff a few years ago it seemed like nix was the hip cool thing all the up and coming rustaceans (mostly unemployed students trying to land faang jobs) were using. If you're not familiar with the rust community it's very different from other programming communities I've been in (python/go/ruby/etc). Almost felt like you'd be kicked out of their lunch table if you weren't using it, but I've onl…

I suspect some of this goes the other way too, that the people who see the value in Nix and/or are willing to tolerate its idiosyncrasies in exchange for what is on offer there are are a lot of the same kinds of folks likely to take an interest in rust, ocaml, elixir/gleam, etc.

Re: Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

#135

Post by sfllaw »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #124

Peers might not want to use third party rendezvous servers or relay servers It appears that Tailscale attempts to persuade peers not to run own "DERP" servers (cf. encouraging peers to run own servers) "In general, you should not need to or want to run this code. The overwhelming majority of Tailscale users (both individuals and companies) do not." "Running your own DERP services requires exeprtise [sic] in multi-lay…

> Unclear why the company markets peer-to-peer networking but wants traffic going to their own third party servers

At Tailscale, we do not _want_ traffic through our servers. What we do want is for Tailscale to Just Work without your needing to set up any infrastructure. That’s why we run the DERP relay network as a fallback of last resort, for when a direct connection is not possible. And the tailscaled client tries very hard to make that direct connection.

If and only if you need to run your own infrastructure, then we provide peer relays which are significantly less onerous than running a DERP server: https://tailscale.com/docs/features/peer-relay

This note exists in the README because people would assume that hosting a DERP server was a hard requirement for using Tailscale. Or they would assume that an production Tailscale network would eventually operate a DERP server. People who run their own DERP servers usually have data sovereignty or strict metadata requirements.

Re: Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

#136

Post by treszkai »

gchamonlive wrote: post #112
JavierFlores09 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

none of the rust-based minecraft server have enough functionality implemented to use them for survival, maybe for some minigames but that's about it. Pumpkin has gotten far out of the many[1] but there's still lots to be done. 1: https://dayssincelastrustmcserver.com/

These game servers are really the perfect use case for agents. Would anyone really care that much about code quality if the server works fast and reliably?

The number of implementations and the lack of success suggest that it is a genuinely hard problem for humans, and "agents" are not going to magically make it simpler. Unlikely that humans abandoned their projects (or failed to band together) solely because of their desire for code quality.

Re: Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

#137

Post by gchamonlive »

treszkai wrote: post #136
gchamonlive wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These game servers are really the perfect use case for agents. Would anyone really care that much about code quality if the server works fast and reliably?

The number of implementations and the lack of success suggest that it is a genuinely hard problem for humans, and "agents" are not going to magically make it simpler. Unlikely that humans abandoned their projects (or failed to band together) solely because of their desire for code quality.

Software is genuinely hard for humans, and agents have made it simpler, not magically, but they cut complexity like butter.

Re: Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

#138

Post by TaLiTr »

frollogaston wrote: post #129
petterroea wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its proprietary, but trivially decompileable. Sure, maybe if the game was released today they would try obfuscating better, but the thing is that modding culture had already basically torn the game apart by the time Microsoft came around. I don't think they had a choice but to accept the status quo. There are mods to disable unwanted Microsoft-pushed features like chat signing, for example. Microsoft doesn't want thi…

Ok I had to look this up because last time I did MC modding was when I was in high school... It used to be obfuscated. Someone used to manually map those to human-readable names (didn't know this back then and thought the names were somehow hidden in the bytecode). But recently MS has started deliberately shipping unobfuscated builds. So I'm getting the feeling they actually want JE to be moddable. Which makes sense…

For anyone confused about timelines, they started releasing un-obfuscated builds in 2025. In 2019 they started releasing Obfuscation mappings. Before that it was all Minecraft wizards with excellent tooling.

Re: Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

#139

Post by mintflow »

being built a iroh based distributed notes app for myself use

and see tailcat come out, trying to replace iroh with this to do some experiment because i really love how tailscale works and invest much time to the stack

True appriciated of open source this, combine the tailscale open source client core with this, i think it can unlock more stuffs

Re: Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

#140

Post by petterroea »

frollogaston wrote: post #129
petterroea wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its proprietary, but trivially decompileable. Sure, maybe if the game was released today they would try obfuscating better, but the thing is that modding culture had already basically torn the game apart by the time Microsoft came around. I don't think they had a choice but to accept the status quo. There are mods to disable unwanted Microsoft-pushed features like chat signing, for example. Microsoft doesn't want thi…

Ok I had to look this up because last time I did MC modding was when I was in high school... It used to be obfuscated. Someone used to manually map those to human-readable names (didn't know this back then and thought the names were somehow hidden in the bytecode). But recently MS has started deliberately shipping unobfuscated builds. So I'm getting the feeling they actually want JE to be moddable. Which makes sense…

Sorry for the long wait, I wasn't ignoring you, just busy.

Yes, symbols were obfuscated, but Java software with obfuscated symbols is trivial to reverse, at least compared to its native counterparts. My understanding is that the biggest change when releasing symbols was that the MCP team no longer had to manually update symbols for every update. Java also has great reflection features that make it a lot easier to make mods - you don't need to patch binaries like you do with native code.

I think you are right in that Bedrock and JE players are different segments. I think the main goal of Bedrock is to target the casual market, maybe not by intention but by the fact that the community itself is mostly stuck on JE. I still think the long term wish is to get everyone over and kill Java, as Java inherently is less suited for the microtransaction model I am sure they want.

Then again with the rise of LLM-based RE, I guess the largest hurdle for modding bedrock is somewhat lower now, as you can automate a lot of the skill-heavy but not difficult work required.

> But also just realized, if this changed, rather than locking down JE, they'd probably just kill it and maaybe release Bedrock for Mac/Linux to keep those players. Possibly not.

I think this is a good instinct.

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