Couldn't this be implemented on top of IP? It seems to me this is already kind of how mail exchanges work, they hold mail until the recipient (or next relay in the chain) downloads it.
I was thinking this, as well. The brilliance of the IP hourglass lies in the fact that IP makes very few assumptions about anything above or below it, thus you can put just about anything above or below it.
IP has no notion of connection, and thus no notion of the reliability thereof. That's TCP's job (or what-have-you). I understand the top comment's complaint, but I don't think IP is the problem.
Another case: satellite internet. You can't assume a reliable connection to anything when "beam it into space" is an integral step in the chain of communication. Yet, it works! Whether or not a particular service is reliable is an issue with that service, not the addressing scheme.
IP is an envelope with a to-address and from-address. The upper layer protocols are whatever's inside the envelope - a birthday card, a bill. The lower-layer protocols are USPS, FedEx, the Royal Mail, etc. Blaming IP for partitioning problems is like blaming the envelope for not making it to its destination.
But the addresses, both from and to... they're both transient names for computers. Not for people, not for data, and they must remain unchanged for the duration of the interaction. That biases everything above that layer in significant ways.
You can't say "get me this data from wherever it might be found" because you have no means of talking about data except as anchored to some custodian machine, despite the fact that the same bits might be cached nearby (perhaps even on your device).
You also can't gossip with nearby devices about locally relevant things like restaurant menus, open/closing hours, weather, etc... you have to instead uniquely identify a machine (which may not be local) and have it re-interpret your locality and tell you who your neighbors are. You end up depending on connectivity to a server in another state maintained by people who you don't know or necessarily trust just to determine whether the grocery store down the street has what you want.
It creates unnecessary choke points, which end up failing haphazardly or being exploited by bad actors.
The things you are complaining about are things that are handled by higher level human-scale protocols. They can and are layered on top of the existing low-level hardware-scale protocols.
You might think that those layers suck because they are layered on top of low-level protocols. If we just baked everything in from the start, then everything would work more cleanly. That is almost never the case. Those layers usually suck because it is just really hard to do human-level context-dependent whatever. To the extent that they suck for outside reasons, it is usually because the low-level protocols expose a abstraction that mismatches your desired functionality and is too high-level, not one that is too low-level. A lower-level abstraction would give you more flexibility to implement the high-level abstraction with fewer non-essential mismatches.
Baking in these high-level human-scale abstractions down at the very heart of things is how we get complex horrible nonsense like leap seconds which we then need to add even more horrible nonsense like leap second smearing on top to attempt to poorly undo it. It is how you get Microsoft Excel rewriting numbers to dates and spell correcting gene names with no way to turn it off because they baked it in all the way at the bottom.
> But the addresses, both from and to... they're both transient names for computers. Not for people, not for data, and they must remain unchanged for the duration of the interaction.
This is true, but
1) it's an easy problem to solve in many cases (DHCP works great)
2) the exact mechanisms by which an address could be tied to a particular resource are innately dependent on the upper portions of the protocol stack, simply because the very idea of what a "resource" even is must necessarily come from there.
3) the exact mechanisms by which an address could be tied to a particular piece of hardware are necessarily dependent on the lower parts of the stack (MAC addresses, for example)
#2 and #3 illustrate that IP benefits from not solving these issues because doing so would create codependency between IP and the protocols implemented above and below it. Such a situation would defeat the entire purpose of IP, which is to be an application-independent, implementation-independent mover of bits.
It's true that IP itself has a significant problem with devices that roam between networks. I believe that there were some attempts to get a solution into IPv6, but they were abandoned (sadly - that could have perhaps been the killer feature that would have made adoption a much easier sell).
I don't think you're right about neighbors though. IP does support broadcast to allow you to communicate with nearby machines. Of course, in real networks, this is often disabled beyond some small perimeters because of concerns for overwhelming the bandwidth.
My father, who was part of the military occupation force in Japan. He also was a professional historian and economist. The economy remained flat until big business was allowed to resume operation.
> I'm no expert, but the more common narrative is the Korean war was a stimulant for the Japanese economy.
People can't stand the idea that the free market works. :-/
Politics is just "how people think things should be". Therefore politics are everywhere not because people _bring_ them everywhere but because they arise from everything.
Your comment is in fact full of politics, down to your opinion that politics shouldn't be included in this discussion.
**
> thanks to that universal language, I can express my thoughts to most people in India, China, Japan, South America, etc due to having 1 common language
Personally my impression is that native speakers just run circles around everyone else during meetings and such. Being _truly_ comfortable in the language, mastering social cues, being able to confidently and fluently express complex ideas, mean that they effectively take over the room. In turn that means they will hold more power in the company, rise in rank more quickly, get paid more, etc.. There's an actual, significant consequence here.
Plus, anglos usually can't really speak another language, so since they don't realize how hard it is they tend to think their coworkers are idiots and will stick to do things with other anglos rather than include everyone.
> Diversity is more complexity
In a vacuum I agree, but within the context of your comment this is kinda saying "your existence makes my life too complex, please stop being different and join the fold"; and I can't agree with that sentiment.
You raise an interesting point about the nature of politics. I’ve been thinking about this a bit, but it seems to me that radical/revolutionary politics are talking about how people want things to be while quotidian political ideas are more about how people ought to do a few things. The distinction here being people’s timelines and depth of thought. If a policy has some seriously bad consequences, people may not notice because they weren’t really thinking of things should be, just the narrower thought of how a thing out to be done (think minimum wage driving automation rather than getting people a better standard of living, or immigration control driving police militarization). Of course, for most politicians, I am not sure either of these are correct. I think for politicians, politics is just the study of their own path to power; they likely don’t care much about whether it’s how things are done or how things ought to be so long as they are the ones with the power.
I don’t know that this comment really ads anything to the conversation, but I do find it all interesting.
Edit: also, on topic, languages are fun. The world is boring when everything is in one language. Languages also hold information in how they structure things, how speakers of that language view the world, and so on, and in those ways they are important contributors to diversity of thought.
The jab at mask-wearing during the pandemic is off-putting and senseless. The author even mentions "side effects" which aren't in the linked article at all. (if you're having side effects from wearing a mask, you're in dire health already)
We know (proven) that viruses spread via cough, droplets, etc. We know (proven) masks are effective at stopping these droplets. Does the author come into operation theaters and mock the surgeon for wearing a mask, based on that one study he read?
**
From personal experience, I'm starting to notice a pattern when talking to or reading from some "too senior" engineers. They'll just dismiss your concerns out of hand and disregard anything they don't care for as irrelevant, based on their experience in a different context with PHP or Ruby or whatever twenty years ago.
I understand it's good to be able to see beyond the current hype, and notice long patterns, and trust in your own competence; but at some point it goes too far. I hope I won't end up like this.
This is well established: Generally, women will pursue men with higher socioeconomic status, men do not make a distinction and optimize for sexual attraction.
Not a US corporation but when it came to light that French defense contractor Thomson-CSF (now Thales) had bribed Taiwan official to award them a defense contract, no less than six whistleblowers died, three of them defenestrated; most famously Thierry Imbot, who fell from the fourth story closing his window shutters on a windy evening, supposedly the night before he was to meet a journalist.
But people _do_ die when exposing corruption of the rich. Such as Daphne Caruana Galizia and Ján Kuciak for the Panama papers. Would you call their deaths "hollywood films"?
And it'd be natural to think killers would try to hide their traces, such that most such deaths would look like an accident or suicide.
I am more skeptical of the perfect staging to make it look like a suicide theory.
Both of those killings were in pseudo-mafioso states. Both were also immediately recognized as murder. State-sanctioned murder of your own citizens on your own soil is a lot less commmon in a country like the US, although there are well as Mafia and organized crime murders. But I think successful staging as a suicide is uncommon outside of Hollywood and repressive governments.
Just a correction, Kuciak wasn't killed for Panama Papers, but regular investigative journalism into the corruption of the rich (your point still stands).
> injecting money into the economy, which always results in inflation
This can be disproven by simply plotting the quantity of money in circulation compared to the inflation rate.
For instance from 2005 to 2020 the US went from 6.5 to 15 trillion dollars in circulation yet inflation was around 2%.
Same story for the eurozone which went from 3 to 9 trillions euro in circulation, with similar inflation (despite the Quantitative Easing policy of injecting currency in financial markets).
The eurozone provides another clue in that its member states experience different inflation in spite of sharing a common currency.
The true effects of injecting money in the economy are more complex than a straightforward increase in inflation. Most notably, since economic projects must be financed before they can be undertaken, injecting money in the economy can result in the economy increasing in size if there is spare productive capacity and resources.
There are indeed cases like Venezuela where injecting money results in inflation because there is a supply crisis (more money attempts to buy the same quantity of goods) but it cannot be generalized to all economies.
Is giving voice to crackpots really helpful to the discourse on AI?
reply