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The Zen of Reticulum

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Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#21

Post by alnwlsn »

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 user who actually needs this might not be able to). I'm not really complaining about this, but it is a little ironic.

Reticulum is actually ahead of the curve by having a ready to use PDF manual you can download. For my part, I've been trying to put together an all-inclusive Raspberry Pi image or a live USB for Meshtastic, but it's not quite there yet (it's no more than a hobby for me, but I'm not making big off-grid promises either).

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#22

Post by perching_aix »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #17
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…

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 the consequences of that - an accusation engineers commonly recieve on social media, with similarly high suggestiveness, and similarly little substantiation.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#23

Post by ronsor »

subscribed wrote: post #11
MarsIronPI wrote: post #7

Too 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.

I'm sure such militias wouldn't worry about the ToS. However there's a chance apartheid and authoritarian countries would not use it exactly because of this.

> However there's a chance apartheid and authoritarian countries would not use it exactly because of this.

I don't think they will care.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#24

Post by drob518 »

AyyEye wrote: post #19
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 is absolutely not flood routed and is not "LoRa-based" lmao. Typical hn comment. Planetary-scale networks is mentioned as a design goal on the first page of the docs https://reticulum.network/ which are hidden at the very top of the git repo.

Okay, maybe Reticulum isn’t strictly LoRa-based, but others are (e.g. Meshtastic), and while Reticulum works over lots of physical layers, the README specifically states “An open-source LoRa-based interface called RNode has been designed specifically for use with Reticulum.”

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#25

Post by subscribed »

animuchan wrote: post #16
catoAppreciator wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Willing to kill. >Not willing to violate the license of a software package.

Thank you very much! I also feel that the impact of software licensing on violent groups behavior might be low. It is, however, interesting on principle, since it only allows the use by criminals (implicitly), and not by law enforcement. By then making the tool very impractical to use, we can punish bad actors still. (I think there was a honeypot operation to this effect, something with feds making up a "secure encry…

Did you really say that only criminals are permitted to use Reticulum?

So presumably, by the extension of your argument, average person using Reticulum is either ("implicitly") a criminal or breaking the licence / ToS.

Where do you see it?

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#26

Post by the__alchemist »

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…

> but none of them have clear protocol specification docs

This is a big turn off for me. I have seen it for a number of protocols beyond mesh ones. ESP-Hosted does this too. So does ELRS. Maybe I'm too used to reading data sheets etc, but if your protocol requires a specific implementation, I am put off by the friction: I must integrate your software, in the language you used, and will likely hit compatibility problems as a result.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#27

Post by subscribed »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #9
MarsIronPI wrote: post #7

Too 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.

It's such a strange and unfortunate addition to the project. Also, what's the point of assuming every entity is potentially hostile? Can't you just put in the license "you're not allowed to be malicious or hostile on this network"?

Just read the manifest.

GP used intentionally hostile and weird interpretation of "if you intend to subdue, enslave or kill, don't use it", aimed at dictatorships, organisations like Palantir, etc.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#28

Post by AyyEye »

wredcoll wrote: post #20
AyyEye wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reticulum is absolutely not flood routed and is not "LoRa-based" lmao. Typical hn comment. Planetary-scale networks is mentioned as a design goal on the first page of the docs https://reticulum.network/ which are hidden at the very top of the git repo.

Design goals are great. How do they actually achieve it?

Not with flood routing.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#29

Post by drob518 »

wredcoll wrote: post #20
AyyEye wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reticulum is absolutely not flood routed and is not "LoRa-based" lmao. Typical hn comment. Planetary-scale networks is mentioned as a design goal on the first page of the docs https://reticulum.network/ which are hidden at the very top of the git repo.

Design goals are great. How do they actually achieve it?

Exactly. Okay, that’s a great claim. How? Also, “planetary scale” is meaningless. With the right node count (low), topology, and radios, just about any mesh network can achieve “planetary scale.” But that doesn’t mean it’ll support 10 thousand users, never mind millions. There are underlying technical reasons that the Internet works the way it does.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#30

Post by drob518 »

the__alchemist wrote: post #26
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…

> but none of them have clear protocol specification docs This is a big turn off for me. I have seen it for a number of protocols beyond mesh ones. ESP-Hosted does this too. So does ELRS. Maybe I'm too used to reading data sheets etc, but if your protocol requires a specific implementation, I am put off by the friction: I must integrate your software, in the language you used, and will likely hit compatibility proble…

Exactly. And are you going to break it one day just because and force every node to run the new version of firmware to stay active. I like implementers who show some transparency and some self-reflection about the limits of the protocol. And to be clear, in looking through the other docs in the Reticulum repo, it looks like there are more protocol details there, so maybe Reticulum has that transparency.
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