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The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

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Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#41

Post by yifanl »

IGI-111 wrote: post #22
akanet wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a greatly simplified and probably unproductive view of both ecologies and monocultures. Certainly nature as a whole is an ecology, but you are vague in defining what a monoculture even is, or how both even apply to human culture. To wit, there are massive redwood forests that occur in nature that are just one cloned genome. These are reproductively successful on timespans many times a human life. Is Amazon it…

I think it's fair to be reminded here that centralized computing has existed in the past, and that the IBM was unsinkable.

The glib rebuttal would be that the internet was once distributed, and it was unimaginable that the content would become as centralized as it has today.

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#43

Post by notabee »

akanet wrote: post #24
zeth___ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>To wit, there are massive redwood forests that occur in nature that are just one cloned genome. These are reproductively successful on timespans many times a human life. That there is a massive monoculture in an area that was an extreme desert until as little as 5000 years ago makes my point that a monoculture is more efficient in the short term. A human life is a terrible stick to measure geological time, one might…

I think your central claim is sort of refuted by history, and I think there's two parts to it. 1. How relevant "natural" ecology is to understanding longevity of modern culture: unclear, probably not very. 2. Monocultures by nature are less robust, even in the context of human society: well, you need only examine how quickly distributed hunter gatherers were exterminated by less distributed agrarian societies, who we…

Industrial society is itself rapidly approaching overshoot of the habitability of this planet. Without being able to fully, artificially generate everything from food to atmosphere without it being subsidized by natural resources that are not renewable at the rate at which we're exhausting them, industrial civilization will collapse in all its complexity. To take a natural ecological example: just because a predator figures out a very efficient way to eat all of the available prey does not protect it from when the food is exhausted. Just because an invasive herbivore is better at stripping the landscape bare of vegetation does not protect it from the consequences of its success. Just because agricultural and industrial civilizations supplanted the hunter gatherers does not mean that they are sustainable long term. If society manages to completely replace its habitat and resource inputs with technological prowess, then it will survive. We are not even close to that point yet given our current dependencies. We depend on a finite amount of energy, sunlight stored in an efficient chemical form millions of years ago, and predictable weather in order to grow crops in the ground outdoors. Oceans with a limited regenerative capacity needed to feed the world that are being overexploited. Soil phosphate and other minerals that we already must add back artificially, also using non-renewable inputs. We are not separate or dominant over natural ecology until we are no longer dependent on it for survival, and until that point we're like college students living on loans and our parents' money and calling ourselves wealthy and independent.

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#45

Post by ksk »

csomar wrote: post #42

No P2P storage networks have succeeded? What about torrents? It is a huge market.

Because torrents are not a storage network. Even ignoring the read-only aspect of it, there is no way to ensure that someone will download your torrent.

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#47

Post by jasode »

csomar wrote: post #42

No P2P storage networks have succeeded? What about torrents? It is a huge market.

>No P2P storage networks have succeeded? What about torrents?

You have to look at the specific context his essay is about.

Torrents are popular for data that many participants desire such as "StarWars_1080p.mp4" and "LadyGaga_album.mp3".

Torrents do not work for a 500GB encrypted backup of "JohnDoe_personal_vacation_photos_20180621.zip". There's no financial incentive for others to download and store it so the number of seeeds/peers will be 0.

His essay is not about a p2p version of Netflix or Spotify (e.g. bittorrent or Napster). He's talking about a p2p version of "cloud storage" such as BackBlaze/AmazonS3/DropBox for storing data that may only be important to that user. That's why he's dissecting Filecoin and its economics.

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#48

Post by ksk »

frabcus wrote: post #30
frabcus wrote: post #28

I think the main thing that this misses is the potential benefit of an open protocol. We still don't have a standard open equivalent of Dropbox.js (deprecated). That is, a user controlled account which a browser or phone knows about that can store files, and that every app that needs to store files can read and write to . Proprietary solutions and B2B solutions will never meet that need - it needs to be something tha…

To show this is possible: Note how ubiquitous git is now as such a filesystem and protocol for developers. Remember how that has come about over the last 10 years. Imagine the same thing happening with a consumer targetted file storage system and protocol.

git is popular because of many external factors, some of which (github gitlab, etc) are centralized closed systems. I don't think git by itself would have become popular. I'd say that in today's world, you need someone somewhere making mad cash for a protocol to become that popular. Could an open storage protocol achieve that?

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#49

Post by basch »

frabcus wrote: post #28

I think the main thing that this misses is the potential benefit of an open protocol. We still don't have a standard open equivalent of Dropbox.js (deprecated). That is, a user controlled account which a browser or phone knows about that can store files, and that every app that needs to store files can read and write to . Proprietary solutions and B2B solutions will never meet that need - it needs to be something tha…

It's not exactly what youre describing, but isnt e-Mail a decentralized file store? Sure, most mail is google, microsoft, or verizon by now, but still, you can spin up your own compatible instance and participate with others.

Almost any client you can dream of can access IMAP mailboxes and send through SMTP.

Re: The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”

#50

Post by s73v3r_ »

filecoinp2throw wrote: post #39

I disagree with his argument that for anyone to use P2P storage, it has to be less expensive than S3. It's true that this will be hard to do, for all the reasons he listed. But some amount of people will be willing to pay a premium for P2P storage, because it can't be censored or ordered to be deleted as easily as data stored on S3. Pirates, journalists, and activists will appreciate this use case. There's also anoth…

"It's true that this will be hard to do, for all the reasons he listed. But some amount of people will be willing to pay a premium for P2P storage, because it can't be censored or ordered to be deleted as easily as data stored on S3."

Some will, but most won't.

"Pirates, journalists, and activists will appreciate this use case."

Journalists are probably the only group among those that would have the money to spend on it.

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