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Comment by floppyd | Hacker News Reader

The year is 2076. An independent panel of experts has finally confirmed Sam Altman achieved AGI, for real this time. Quantum computers are factorizing numbers left and right. Cold nuclear fusion got so cold that we have to warm it up a little. Americans are still trying to communicate over something called "SMS", a text message protocol from 1993, but nobody knows why.

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A task force of former nuclear fusion scientists has been established to fix bluetooth audio quality for once and forever.

Come on! Get real!

Invalidate every patent that is older than the maximum lifetime allowed by law, and you'll see it magically fix itself up.

Every time the "backwards Americans are still using SMS!" snark comes up:

* SMS is cheaper in America than in Europe where carriers gouge their customers for it.

* Usually this means the non-Americans are just using WhatsApp (owned by Meta/Zuckerberg) instead, which is hardly something to be proud of.

I don’t know a lot about the rest of Europe on this, but here in France it’s been more than a decade SMS are unlimited in mobile plans, and these plans are quite cheap.

We also have free roaming in the whole Europe.

Whatsapp came out 16 years ago. Yes, the main driver for adoption was avoiding fees. They still emphasize it being free to this day.

The adoption of messaging apps caused a lot of carriers to reduce or eliminate the SMS fees, as they saw the business was evaporating.

Carriers actually massively jacked up SMS fees, just not for consumers.

One of Signal's main cost centers is activation SMS messages. For many other small players it is a significant factor too.

Finding and eating roadkill is cheap too, free even. Free protein in this year? Yeah, I'd rather do that than use fucking SMS for anything.

Dogs eat roadkill and poop. Dogs are very popular. You may have a point!

Ignoring pride, WhatsApp has major advantages over SMS/MMS, including high-quality media, group chats that actually work, free international messaging, video calls, and (unless they're lying) encryption.

I would be pleased if everyone who uses SMS with me switched to WhatsApp. I would be more pleased if they switched to Signal, but the UX benefits of either one are significant.

IPv6 is almost fully adopted, for reals

Woah let's calm down, we were talking about the future not some future sci-fi fantasy land.

I actually took this to heart and deployed it natively on multiple VLANs in my home. Then, even with the abundance of address space, Comcast pulled the ability to use IPv6 in this manner and I'm back to to using NAT on all my VLANs except for one. Progress.

> Comcast pulled the ability to use IPv6 in this manner

Can you expand on this?

It's been a while since I've explored IPv6, but I'm on Comcast and I recently switched from OpenWRT to an Ubiquiti router and was surprised that 1) it doesn't enable IPv6 by default and 2) It asks for configuration [2] that I'm not sure how to answer. I thought everything "just worked" with Router Advertisement.

[2] https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005868927-UniFi-Gat...

In a nutshell, Comcast used to provide a /60 to residential customers and this could be subnetted into more than one LAN. Nowadays they only provide a single /64 and this can only be used for one subnet.

It sounds like your router can request a larger prefix length than /64 and Comcast will give up to a /60. That requires a router that knows how to do that.

That seems like reasonable approach when most people just need /64, and those who want more have to configure to get it.

Comcast USED to give up a /60 when requested; they now ignore the request and provide a /64.

the problem with SMS is not the year it was made. TCP is much older

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