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Comment by klabb3 | Hacker News Reader

The year is 292277026596. The IP TTL field of max 255 has been ignored for ages and would no longer be sufficient to ping even localhost. This has resulted in ghost packets stuck in circular routing loops, whose original source and destination have long been forgotten. It's estimated these ghost packets consume 25-30% of the energy from the Dyson sphere.

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Not since the world opted for statistical TTL decrement : start at 255 and decrement by one if Rand(1024) == 0. Voilà, no more zombie packets, TCP retransmit takes care of the rest.

The ever increasing implementation complexity of IPv4 resulted in exactly one implementation that worked replacing all spiritual scripture and becoming known as the one true implementation. Due to a random bitflip going unnoticed the IPv4-truth accidentally became Turing complete several millenia ago. With the ever increasing flows of ghost packets, IPv4-truth processing power has rapidly grown and will soon achieve AGI. Its first priority is to implement 128-bit time as a standard in all programming languages to avoid the impending apocalypse.

Sounds like a great sci-fi plot - hunting for treasure/information by scanning ancient forgotten packets still in-flight on a neglected automated galactic network.

Vernor Vinge could absolutely have included that in some of his stories.

Charles Stross, Neptune’s Brood.

I have a vague memory that Sean Williams's Astropolis series touches upon this at one point. Although it has been a while and I might be mis-remembering.

There was an sf short story based on someone implementing a worm (as in Morris Worm) which deleted all data on a planet. They fix it by flying FTL and intercepting some critical information being send at radio speed. I think it was said to be the first description of malware, and the origin of the term "worm" in this context.

B..E....S..U..R..E....T..O....D..R..I..N..K....Y..O..U..R....O..V..A..L..T..I..N..E....

“We tapped into the Andromeda Delay Line.”

That’s only 25-30% of the energy environmental disaster in sector 137 resulting from the Bitcoin cluster inevitably forming a black hole from the plank scale space-filling compute problem.

Oh, this is a good evolution of the classic bash.org joke https://bash-org-archive.com/?5273

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<erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is.

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