zelly

Go discourages C FFI but it runs those in kernel threads just to be safe. If you are using a lot of C FFI calls that all block, then it could be a problem (all cores are blocked).

Tier 1 and 2 is as much of a monopoly as public utilities. If they all deny me service, it would be as hard to get connected as it would be to build my own water pipeline.

Hypothetically, how would you go about staying online completely independently?

Let's say you build your own data center, buy the real estate (because a landlord could be pressured to cancel your lease), purchase all the network equipment, and hire your own full-time employees.

You still need to lease an IP block and a fiber connection from a carrier (like AT&T, Century Link, etc.). Couldn't they deplatform you too? Is there any law that says AT&T etc. cannot refuse service? Otherwise, is there any way to get an indie data center on the internet without going through any other company?

Every other utility seems to be regulated. For example even if you have a Confederate flag or a picture of Stalin outside your house, the local electric and water companies are not allowed to turn off your service as long as you are paying the bill.

PRs welcome

Why does the vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 work so well but there was no vaccine at all and still isn't for SARS?

we could have had decentralized computing (urbit) for a while now but you keep playing

You would have the same problem in Rust/Tokio and many other languages. The compiler is not able to know which calls could block. Suppose you have this async state machine server on a single thread, super fast, but somewhere it opens a file synchronously, let's say on a network mount to make things worse. No way a purely static VM-free language can help against that. Go (see: goroutines) is able to automatically suspend at those points and continue execution elsewhere. It comes with a big runtime but you get what you pay for.

It's single threaded and completely userspace. Rust async/await is a fancy way to write poll/epoll. It can limit the amount of time your program is blocked on IO (insofar as the implementation is as you would expect it (not guaranteed by the language)), but it will not do parallelism. For example you wouldn't async/await a prime number calculation--you'd have to use OS threads.

There will always be more downtime on Slack/Discord. There are more users, more updates. Slack/Discord is a giant distributed system with nodes all around the world. An IRC/XMPP server on one machine that 100 people use is not going to crash unless intentionally.

it's trivial and essentially free (<$5) to run an IRC server supporting tens of thousands of users.

it also doesn't take gigs of memory on client devices.

it's a GPL violation as far as i'm concerned, so anyone who uses it deserves what they get

the SDK will always be free, but that's not the business model. the business model is get more people to buy Windows licenses. to that end, they give you a second-class experience on non-Windows (both for development and end-users). eventually you cave and just use Windows and Visual Studio, and rationally so, because you would be at a competitive disadvantage if you did not.

someone has to pay to keep machines running and urbit's game theory is the only tractable one. you could either be a chattel slave farming sponsored content clicks in perpetuity (a la fb and twitter) or you could be mooching off someone running a site out of generosity (a la activitypub). urbit is an alternative to both of those.

Interesting, I remember being able to pay cash a couple years ago, but now I see most airlines stopped accepting cash, ex: https://www.dallasnews.com/business/airlines/2020/07/07/sout...

Even Amtrak is now not accepting cash anymore:

https://www.amtrak.com/purchase-train-tickets

Looks like the only option left is drive a car and fill up at gas stations which accept cash (for the time being). I'm not super familiar with EV charging stations but I don't think I've seen one that accepts cash, if that's any hint as to where we are headed.

Dark times

I don't think a new social network should be centralized. what the world really needs is a user-friendly interface for urbit

thats pretty cheap considering the convenience and availability it offers

if there are any that don't sell your data, they are legally required to let the government see all the transaction data due to 9/11

the only way to free yourself from counterparties is to use cash or crypto. no company will help you.

you can go to an airport, which has never closed, and buy a ticket in cash

you can purchase things in cash at Walmart, Target, etc. which has never closed during the pandemic

This is intentional

They'll just throw out all the ones spammed from your IP. If you become obnoxious they will call the FBI because this would be a CFAA violation.

Linking directly to the image file (and in fact a cached version of the full image) is one of the best reasons to use DDG.

Reverse image search is also intentionally gimped, unlike non-US jurisdiction Yandex which is quite good.

It's certainly for legal reasons, not technical, but Image Search has gotten progressively worse every year. It used to be godly effective 10 years ago.

It should violate the duplicate content guideline, since 100% of Pinterest content is not original and lifted from another website.

Then again G also ranks those Markov-generated "blogs" with nonsensical text, not sure what to call them but you've seen them. It seems SEO is still alive and well despite all the claims of its death.

Python is basically pseudocode so if you don't like Python then you don't like programming.

Julia or Swift

I'm hoping the default choice becomes Julia. For one, it's Lisp. Imagine tensorflow or whatever being distributed as one Julia codebase, no separate C++ to compile, no need because Julia can do it all. I hope it replaces R, Mathematica, Matlab, Excel VBA.

paywalled article

GCP PaaS stuff allows gRPC and WebSockets but that's it from what I've seen.

My intuition is that network transfer uses almost no energy, on a marginal basis, because the network links are always on anyway. When you pay for bandwidth, you're paying the amortized costs of building and maintaining the infrastructure.

Rendering a SPA on a client device consumes CPU time, which definitely uses energy proportional to the number of client devices.

Assume the server uses less clock cycles to render than the client--e.g., because of optimized software, hot caches, or tuned hardware.

Therefore rendering on the server should always be more energy efficient than on the client.

Just pull fiber and you or the next owner won't have to worry about it in the next 50 years. You can buy pre-terminated or use quick connectors. Most don't realize that fiber is cheaper to produce than copper; the expense comes from the fancy SFP switches and routers.

Wireless is horrible. In urban settings, the RF pollution will lead to all kinds of misery. If you are doing anything important with the connection, it must be wired. It's also bad security because I can drive by in a van and knock out your whole block's internet connections because so many people equate internet with WiFi.

Wait until you see the "data transfer" costs for what is basically or literally free from the bare metal/colo hosts. $10 is too much for what you're describing. You could be paying $0-$3.

Most users of the top public clouds are paying 2-10x more than they should just because using the public cloud "is what you do".