There is the "Economic Turing Test", you let it find a job and earn money for itself. If it can do that reliably, across a wide range of jobs, that should fit most definitions of AGI.
And even if it wins, it won't matter much, since it is only one of many issues with the current Internet that prevents people from connecting to each other. Even with IPv6 you'd still have no way to find the other person and the moment they hop between networks, their IPv6 address won't stay the same either.
Ultimately I think none of this will be solved at the low level, it needs something like Iroh or libp2p where you build a new network on top of the Internet infrastructure, so that you can have things like persistent cryptographic identities and addresses that you can carry with you, largely independent of the underlying network architecture.
Internet deserves some blame too, when you have 8 billion people, but only 4 billion addresses, you are naturally going to end up with a lot of centralized services to work around those limits.
You’re right but it’s a point I’ve tried to make for years to no avail.
The V4 limit is one thing that does this. The other is DNS, which is inherently hierarchical because it’s a tree. The whole structure of the net and the web promotes the emergence of aggregation points, which then amass insane amounts of largely unearned power and influence through sheer network effect.
“The medium is the message” is a much deeper statement than people think. The structure of the medium and the sympathetic structures it encourages to form around it are the message. IPv4 with NAT and DNS with its real estate model directly encourage the formation of aggregators and siloes and that’s where it starts.
People don’t get it. I’ve given up trying to explain. Systems thinking isn’t as titillating as conspiracism, doomerism, or misanthropic cynicism I guess.
Does not seem convincing to me so far and i like systems thinking. Do you have a link, where you wrote more?
I think a fundamental problem is that micropayments don’t work. Instead we pay with attention, i.e. by watching ads. That already worked before the internet, in tv and radio and newspapers.
> People don’t get it. I’ve given up trying to explain. Systems thinking isn’t as titillating as conspiracism, doomerism, or misanthropic cynicism I guess.
OK, you've explained it, and I think I buy that explanation. But now what do we do about it? At least the conspiracism gives us an enemy to be angry at and maybe try to fight.
It would be more analog to HTTP not specing out how CDNs should work, or Usenet not specing out how DejaNews is going to work. It's infrastructure stuff neither the client nor the simple server has to care about.
The Nostr spec covers what matters, cryptographic identities and unique message ids, that make dumb relays that duplicating messages from elsewhere possible (an area where HTTP or Activity Pub fail at).
Looking at my complete grey friends list in Pidgin, with not a single user left active, it looks like everybody left around 8-12 years ago. Many of the old servers are offline as well.
Adoption by too narrow an audience can totally poison a protocol for the rest of us.
Bit torrent is a superior way to move data around (as compared with http downloads). But its early associations appear to have forever tainted it against widespread adoption.
Lack of BitTorrent support in browsers is big thing that is missing. Brave and Opera have it, but all the mainstream browsers don't. Thus torrent downloads never got out of its specific niche.
That said, I don't think piracy is to blame here, but more the murky nature of copyright in general, with BitTorrent you automatically become redistributor of everything you download and that's just a huge liability and privacy risk that I can easily see browser developers wanting to avoid.
Also browser developers have gotten lazy, they couldn't even find the resources to keep FTP alive, so I doubt BitTorrent would have survived for long even if they tried adding it.
Why should they keep FTP or Gopher alive, or support Gemini, when they're just worse HTTP? I think they should make it possible to write a new protocol handler though.
I don't think I'd even call it that. FTP had one purpose: it was an early protocol for remotely managing files. It never had any intent to support dynamically generated or otherwise "virtual" content (as supported by e.g. CGI scripts and mod_rewrite in Apache), and I don't think anyone has ever made a serious attempt to implement that. There's no practical use case for it.
Even as a file management protocol, though, FTP sucks. Its connection management is primitive in the extreme - one TCP connection per transfer - and that ruins performance for transfers involving many files, and is difficult to pass through firewalls and load balancers. FTPS encryption is an afterthought, and makes small-file performance even worse (as each connection requires separate TLS negotiation). There's no standard format for directory listings, just ad-hoc parsing of "ls -l" output. Support for modern filesystem features like extended attributes is largely nonexistent. Need I continue? :)
The strange way FTP manages connections goes back to FTP being older than TCP/IP itself, and thus using older circuit-switched networks. It wouldn't have been unusual for a server to dial up the receiving machine on-demand, which didn't have to be the machine running the command session. Before SMTP came around, email was commonly implemented on top of FTP.
FTP was written for an early version of TCP/IP (which wasn't called that). Maybe you're thinking of UUCP, which did often run over dial-up circuits and was used for email, but didn't require two connections.
No, I was thinking of FTP, but I was probably off the mark anyway: I'd noticed that FTP was mentioned in the RFCs and surrounding discussions long before RFC 793, and that it seemed to be behaving like a point-to-point network, but it hadn't occurred to me that it might have just been using an ancestor of TCP/IP -- some variant of the "Host protocol" perhaps?
Hard to get the full context, it was before my time: my beard may be grey now, but I'm not that old.
The original version of TCP/IP was (is currently thought to have been) called Network Control Program/Protocol or NCP. There's a reason current legacy IP is version number 4.
Yes, in every way except that servers and clients normally support upload while HTTP ones don't. This is the main reason to use it.
But you should use SFTP instead. This is SSH's replacement for FTP. It's not the same as FTPS which is useless.
We don't have to keep old protocols that offer nothing alive. Maybe a couple of clients and servers to demonstrate with, but it's a museum piece, not useful code. That's not an insult - museums are important. But we don't run Network Control Protocol (IPv1) on the internet, either.
I took a bioinformatics class, students were emailing large files around via the university's email portal. The files were frequently corrupted somewhere along the way. I had to show them how to check hashes and then they would just repeatedly download the file until they got one without errors. But then the sysadmin showed up and asked us to stop downloading multi-gig files repeatedly from his server.
I proposed bittorrent as the solution and the sysadmin lost his mind.
Without the piracy stigma, I think we'd just have integrtated it into email clients. The user doesn't need to know that the "attachment" is actually a torrent file, they should just "download" it and end up with a reliable copy of what was sent.
Maybe they want to torrent Linux ISOs but can't because their ISP/VPN blocks the torrent protocol. Http for server->client downloading is inferior but we are stuck with it.
Nostr relays can censor however much they want. And users can just add other relays and route around it. That's fundamentally different from most other protocols, where user identity and posts are tied to a single server, and there is no means to just broadcast to another one.
On Lemmy for example you can't even find a post another server, since post ids are tied to a server. So despite post actually being cached on multiple servers, it provides absolutely nothing that helps with censorship or crash tolleranze.
Not my experience. I had to give up on it since it was just completely flooded with spam, and unlike mail readers that have ways to mitigate it, XMPP clients were ill prepared. Might still work if you keep your address hidden, but as chat-like alternative to a public email it just stopped working years ago.
What do you mean? You have to accept a friend request before someone can message you. It's more spam-resistant than email, not less. That said, I don't know if there's anything that prevents spamming friend requests.
And how am I going to find the valid friend requests under the hundreds of spam ones? I used it just like a chat version of public email, for bug reports and such, so I don't know who is going to message me beforehand.
You can mediate friends requests by having servers generate an invite link, you can generate QR codes your friend can scan on a side channel, ... There are ways
I think that's a symptom of the provider you chose, not the XMPP sphere itself. I've used Jabber/XMPP for just over 15 years and while I've seen plenty of bullshit going on in various highly popular MUCs (join-floods, phishing attempts and such) I've never personally been subjected to spam directed at me.
It's a nice example how one can generate infinite outputs and avoid the problems that normally come with combinatoric explosions from offering too many options. Say you have a program that can use Gtk or Qt, but also supports MP3, Ogg and other formats, all optional, you'll end up with:
That quickly gets out of hand, but you don't have much other choice here, since flakes don't provide a way for the user to say "enableOgg = true", flake outputs are reproducible and thus don't have options.
With this approach you can leave it to the user and they can pick an output like:
foo.withGtk.withOgg.withMp3
The flake generates that output on the fly, it's still reproducible, and works the same way as an option, but it's actually an output, not an input. Since everything is lazy, that output is only created when the user requests it.
PS: `.override` is the other way to do it, but that doesn't work well together with `nix profile`.
Because the economic, social, and climate impacts are at best uncertain and at worst devastating to the majority of human beings on the planet. It's always surprising to me that people don't intuitively separate the usefulness of AI from its risks. It feels like everyone has to be a doomer or a booster.
There is the "Economic Turing Test", you let it find a job and earn money for itself. If it can do that reliably, across a wide range of jobs, that should fit most definitions of AGI.
reply