Pied Piper’s New Internet Isn’t Just Possible, It’s Almost Here (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Pied Piper’s New Internet Isn’t Just Possible, It’s Almost Here (2017)

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38 pointsmgh213 comments

The there is no "New Internet" without the fictional tech at core, which is, lol, lossless compression of anything. Because of that the fictional truly decentralized internet scales.

I think the author is missing the parody on ignorant/naive tech-optimism in face of the factual constraints of reality. The "make the world a better place", but really fuck things up joke.

> fictional tech at core, which is, lol, lossless compression of anything.

We have plenty of lossless compression algorithms already[0], am I misunderstanding what you meant?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_compression#Lossless_...

Not of anything, though.

Anything, not something.

>It's provably impossible to create an algorithm that can losslessly compress any data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_compression#Limitatio...

I think that's the joke in Silicon Valley.

Edit: And for the "New Internet" Argument, you especially cannot compress encrypted data efficiently, as that would mean you can discriminate information against random noise, and therefore break the encryption. So you cannot overcome the bandwidth limitations, can't scale the decentralized network arbitrarily. The Silicon Valley New Internet is based on magic. It's a take on the "Problem -> [Hype-tech magic box] -> Solution" type of "idea", you find a lot in people... When people dream, not solve problems. It's 6 seasons around something not possible fundamentally.

He's talking about the show Silicon Valley, where they came up with a compression algorithm that was so good it was theoretically impossible.

As someone following ethereum developments, I would agree we're getting very close.

If you're not familiar with the scene I suggest checking it IPFS, ENS, eth.link domains, and Cloudflare's support for these developments.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-distributed-web-resol...

I suppose it would be doomed to a war of escalation, but a "new internet" based on parasitic storage using the big players "free plan" resources would be neat. Something like torrents, but with data held in various free gmail, google drive, onedrive, etc, accounts.

This reminds me of my friend's workaround for the 5mb disk quotas they put on our shells in the 90s.

He discovered filenames could be up to 2MB in length and did not count towards the quota, so he built a pseudo filesystem using a directory full of 0 byte files with huge filenames.

IIRC this was a thing around 2007-2008, there was some software that used GMail inboxes as general purpose storage and people used that to exchange mp3's and such.

Pied Piper's system was a joke about ethereum, wasn't it? Of course it's real-ish, like everything else in the show.

Yeah, with this show, I think that we are able to even debate whether that's true or whether such and such character or company depicted is based on a particular real one is part of the point.

> Their idea: Use a peer-to-peer network built atop every smartphone on the planet, effectively rendering huge data centers full of servers unnecessary

While it's most likely technically feasible to do this, I'd imagine crap network operator data plans would scupper it.

You have to sell it right. Telcos pay for transit. They don't pay for what stays in the confines of their network. IPFS within a single networks environment could greatly reduce their internet transit, saving them big bucks. Sold right, you could get that zero rated.

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