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The Zen of Reticulum

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Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#61

Post by AndrewKemendo »

perching_aix wrote: post #58
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trajec…

> 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?

Couldn’t have said it better myself

Desperation is just a manifestation of manic ignorance unfortunately

The only solution to ignorance is education and I’ll go back to my original point which is this precise thing was discussed over and over and in detail over the last half century of computing in multiple places

Most notably one of the most popular well distributed books that discusses this explicitly is Rodney Brooks’ mythical man month

So my original critique is that engineers do not even utilize the core literature for which there is global consensus on these problems

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#62

Post by drob518 »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #45
AyyEye wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not with flood routing.

flood routing works fine locally, from there on use IP to connect the local networks, no need to reinvent the wheel.

Sure, but The Zen of Reticulum repeatedly says that all that centralized infrastructure is bad, bad, bad. So, it seems a bit like cheating if you still need all that to scale.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#63

Post by ComputerGuru »

MarsIronPI wrote: post #40
subscribed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What? If I'm in a militia group that resists oppressive governments, I intend to kill people. Therefore I'm not allowed to use Reticulum to coordinate with my mates, even though most people would agree that I'm not killing immorally.

> even though most people would agree that I'm not killing immorally.

They’d only agree in the abstract. As soon as you name the oppressive regime you’re fighting against, suddenly a huge chunk of those people will come up with reasons to no longer support you.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#64

Post by solaris2007 »

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…

If you can't figure out how to store dependencies locally you shouldn't be operating a network so everything kind of balances itself out.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#65

Post by reticolon »

tbrockman wrote: post #53
reticolon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately that cannot work. You don't know in advance the traffic destination or source.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#66

Post by perching_aix »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #61
perching_aix wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trajec…

> 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? Couldn’t have said it better myself Desperation is just a manifestation of manic ignorance unfortunately The only solution to ignorance is education and I’ll go back to my original point which is this precise…

How would desperation be "manic ignorance", when desperation is specifically when you think/know something is unlikely to impossible, yet feel cornered enough to go for it anyways? The only interpretation I can imagine that fits, you clearly did not mean.

This really just reads like finding their efforts unreasonable, then presenting that opinion as a foregone logical conclusion they were merely too stupid / ignorant to realize, and doing so from a position of hindsight with zero evidence no less. It's purely just tropes and ideas. And even if we keep to just reasoning about ideas, if technology was not able to shape society, politics, or the way people interact, we ourselves wouldn't be talking, so I beg to differ on it being such a foregone conclusion in general.

If I really had to consider a critique along these lines, the only salient difference I see specifically to ventures like this is that they concern themselves very little with what there's a cultural moment and narrative space for, due to being convinced whatever they're doing needs to happen. Ventures need these though, hard work and a sound idea is not sufficient (or sometimes even required), just like with anything else. It needs to find and retain an audience, and have that scale. Same for purely political ventures, really. Opportunity, luck, commitment, and capability is what takes the win. This project, and ones similar, do provide at least the last one for those coming later.

It's Fred Brooks by the way, and the book is about project management deadlines vs staffing strategies according to the synopses I found. I continue to fail to find the connection between that and this. Conversely, the proverbial law usually mentioned in relation with the book is Brooks' law, not Conway's. Not sure if that was a mistake or intentional.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#67

Post by MarsIronPI »

VLM wrote: post #59
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.

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…

> 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).

Don't most actual free software licenses include a warranty disclaimer? So said military would have no grounds to sue, since there's no warranty or guarantee of function provided.

Thing is, I want to like Reticulum. It's a great protocol, way better than Meshtastic. It has a great vision. IMO it's not abandonware (yet) but even if it was, I'd probably be willing to maintain it for myself. I just wish it was FOSS.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#68

Post by MarsIronPI »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #18
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.

The maintainer is actively saying they’re stepping back from the project so explain to me how the license is going to be enforced?

And just because e.g. AI companies violate copyright to train their models and get away with it, doesn't make it right. The same principle applies here.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#69

Post by animuchan »

subscribed wrote: post #25
animuchan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The comment that started this thread is as follows:

> 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" [...]

So if you're a lawful good human-harming person, you are prohibited from using Reticulum by this Zen document.

If, however, you're an unlawful kind of human-harming person, then you likely don't feel the pressure from the Zen document to stop using Reticulum.

(And surely you can't flip the logic like you did right there: "engineers are implicitly allowed to use X" doesn't convert to "users of X are implicitly engineers".)

So no, I'm saying that of all users intending to cause humans harm with this tech, only criminals are permitted (or at least, aren't meaningfully restricted) to use Reticulum. Only in this niche case.

Re: The Zen of Reticulum

#70

Post by HelloNurse »

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…

Not only any computer of last resort would have software installed in advance and easily prepared redundant archives to install it again, but "pip install" is perfectly fine for other use cases: testing Reticulum, regularly updating everyday computers, improvised installations on someone else's computer, etc.
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