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mightyham

485 karma · joined December 7, 2021

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mightyham··on I spent a week without IPv4 (2023)
Typically firewalls will record the src and dst header values of outbound IP packets then temporarily allows inbound IP packets that have those values flipped.
mightyham··on I spent a week without IPv4 (2023)
I already am aware of how NAT traversal works. Linking a generic article explaining it is not a meaningful response.

Also NAT is a pretty simple abstraction, it's literally a single table.

mightyham··on I spent a week without IPv4 (2023)
> it just has to be established from the local side

This is exactly the problem. Unless you expect users to manually share their IPs with every other user in a given lobby through an external service, you would need to make a central peer discovery and connection coordination mechanism which ends up looking pretty similar to classic NAT traversal.

mightyham··on I spent a week without IPv4 (2023)
You're just asserting that without explination. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but afiak the only difference in NAT hole-punching is that clients don't know their public port mapping ahead of time. This actually doesn't make a huge difference to the process because in practice, you still want a central rendezvous server for automated peer IP discovery. The alternative being that each peer shares their IP with every other peer "offline", as in manually through an external service like IRC or discord, which is a horrible user experience.
mightyham··on I spent a week without IPv4 (2023)
> Peer-to-peer communications such as gaming usually have to deal with NAT traversal, but with IPv6 this is no longer an issue, especially for multiple gamers using the same connection

You know the list of "benefits" is thin when the second item is entirely theoretical. Even though IPv6 doesn't have to do NAT traversal, it still has to punch through your router's firewall which is effectively the same problem. Most ISP provided home routers simply block all incoming IPv6 traffic unless there is outbound traffic first, and provide little to no support for custom IPv6 rules.

Even if that were not an issue, my bet is that there are close to zero popular games that actually use true peer to peer networking.

mightyham··on I spent a week without IPv4 (2023)
For consumer traffic, your probably right. In data centers, cloud computing, and various enterprise networking solutions, IPv4 is still king. I'm sure IPv6 would work fine in all these use cases, but as long as many large tech companies are not exhausting the CIDR ranges they own (or can opt for using private ranges) there is no impetus to rework existing network infrastructure.
mightyham··on Peter Thiel's Apocalyptic Worldview Is a Dangerous Fantasy
> such that they almost meld into Stalin or Mao

Stalin was an ideological authoritarian that executed political rivals and used lethal force, price controls, and other governmental tools to control the economy and the general working population. The idea that Sanders and Mambani advocate anything close to that is laughable.

The rhetoric on both the right and left that liken today's politics to extremism in the 20th century is a ridiculous anachronism that needs to be called out more often.

mightyham··on IQ differences of identical twins reared apart are influenced by education
How about the fact that the human mind and genetics are simply fascinating and interesting topics. I would imagine that people don't care as much about running and high school testing because they are fairly niche interests relative to abstract thinking in general, something that almost everyone spends much of their life doing.
mightyham··on Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)
I was also, in fact, referring to the bulk of legacy code bases that can't just be fully rewritten. Almost all good engineering is done incrementally, including the adoption of something like safe_c.h (I can hardly fathom the insanity of trying to migrate a million LOC+ of C to that library in a single go). I'm arguing that engineering effort would be better spent refactoring and rewriting the application in a fully safe language one small piece at a time.
mightyham··on Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)
Goofy platform specific cleanup and smart pointer macros published in a brand new library would almost certainly not fly in almost any "existing enormous C code base". Also the industry has had a "new optional ways to avoid specific footguns" for decades, it's called using a memory safe language with a C ffi.
mightyham··on What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)
I get you are probably being purposefully derisive to make a point by saying the name of the dark ages is because of our ignorance, but that's also just not correct. The general consensus of historians is that Europe suffered from widespread material simplification during the early middle ages, compared to classical antiquity. The name was coined by earlier historians, generally less concerned about mixing moral judgements with scholarship, that viewed the period as less enlightened than those surrounding it.
mightyham··on Peter Thiel sells off all Nvidia stock, stirring bubble fears
I agree that it's very difficult to fully understand what his real positions are, and interestingly I think he clearly wants that to be the case. Peter Thiel is interested in and has actually written extensively about Straussianism which is an intellectual movement obsessed with analyzing esoteric meanings in philosophical literature.
mightyham··on Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
Is the irony not lost you that Joe Biden pardoned his own son for crimes he was absolutely guilty of. I don't see how that is any less corrupt. This isn't whatboutism either because I'm not trying to say that what Trump is doing is okay, I'm pointing out that this behavior is not particular to Trump and his supporters. The large majority of Americans are fine with corruption as long as it's their team.
mightyham··on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1
I can tell you from personal experience that improving/maintaining uptime (by doing root cause analysis, writing correction of error reports, going through application security reviews, writing/reviewing design docs for safely deploying changes, working on operational improvements to services) probably takes up a majority of most AWS engineers' time. I'm genuinely curious what you are basing the opinion "Delivery of those nines is not a priority" off of.
mightyham··on Dutch government takes control of Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia
I don't see what the meaningful difference is between trade barriers (assuming by that you mean tariffs) and tax incentives for specific industries. Moderate, targeted tariff policies, especially ones that gradually decreased over time, can achieve the same effect of bolstering domestic industry while still allowing a healthy amount of foreign competition.
mightyham··on Rating 26 years of Java changes
In one of James Gosling's talks he tells a funny story about the origin of this design decision. He went around the office at Sun and gave a bunch of seasoned C programmers a written assessment on signed/unsigned integer behaviors. They all got horrible scores, so he decided the feature would be too complicated for a non-systems programming language.
mightyham··on The case against social media is stronger than you think
To me this just reads like fear mongering and shilling for the status quo political establishment. I've recently been learning a bit about Russian history and it has similarities to their conservative nobility throughout the 19th century trying through various means to suppress the spread of liberalism in the public and intelligentsia: the point being that Russia had serious social ills like serfdom and radical political ideas were absolutely warranted. Social media is destabilizing for the influence of establishment sources of information and more of the public (right and left) is finding out more accurate information about how the world works, then coming to natural conclusions about how to address various social ills. Polarization may be increasing, but people forming stronger opinions is also exactly what you would expect in the face of increased revelation about unsolved social problems. Ultimately, I'm optimistic about the long term effects of social media on politics.
mightyham··on QUIC for the kernel
I don't believe that's true. You would still need something like UDP hole punching to bootstrap the inbound flow on both sides first. Also you would still only be limited to UDP traffic, TCP would still be blocked.
mightyham··on QUIC for the kernel
In practice, P2P over ipv6 is totally screwed because there are no widely supported protocols for dynamic firewall pinholing (allowing inbound traffic) on home routers, whereas dynamic ipv4 NAT configuration via UPnP is very popular and used by many applications.
mightyham··on The Art of Lisp and Writing (2003)
> No, it hasn't. None of it has, ever.

Are you denying that dictionaries and comprehensive books on English grammar exist?

mightyham··on The Art of Lisp and Writing (2003)
> English Language is the best general purpose conveyance of arbitrary ideas, and it has syntax rules just like programming languages. It's "best" by the metric of being "easiest for humans to understand". That's what I mean by best, in this case.

This is the point I take issue with. I agree with you that lisp is the simplest and "best" programming language. Unlike lisp, there is no clear "best" natural language that is more simple and composable than all other natural languages (I know that's not what your claiming, just pointing that out). The dimension of your "best metric" for language is pretty bizarre though; all you are saying is that spoken/written language, in general, is better than grunts and pointing. If you actually compare the space of natural language and the space of programming languages, which is much more interesting imo, I think you would have to agree that non-lisp programming languages are more similar to natural language because their development was more practical and unprincipled than lisp.

mightyham··on The Art of Lisp and Writing (2003)
> Oh, the police is gonna show up if I verb something that isn't a verb? People only ever use grammatical constructs and vocabulary that they have learned in school?

That's not at all what I said in my comment and I'm not at all refuting your point that languages change and can vary depending on who is using it.

mightyham··on The Art of Lisp and Writing (2003)
I didn't say poetry has to have all of those things, but it has to contain some of them or it simply isn't poetry. I would challenge you to find me one good example of poetry that has none of the features I listed.

This whole poetry topic is really besides the point anyways.

> English - or any other natural language - is much more variable than Lisp.

I don't feel like you are actually addressing what I'm saying, so let me reiterate it more clearly. I'm not making any assetions about the absolute creative power of lisp or writing. It is the author of the article who points out that lisp's distinguishing feature, compared to other programming languages, is it's ability to specialize and mutate its own verbiage/syntax to better fit certain problems or modes of thinking. I am simply pointing out the irony that this charactistic of lisp also distinguishes it significantly from natural language, even though the author is attempting to argue that programming lisp and writing literature are similar.

mightyham··on The Art of Lisp and Writing (2003)
Not sure what you are arguing with in my comment because I never said that languages are static; obviously they change. But to pretend that language, as practiced today, is not well defined is absurd. Every part of English grammar and syntax has been methodically systemized, and this information is widely taught in public education programs. Some common set of definitions/rules (may vary by people or region) is conformed to by speakers of the language.
mightyham··on The Art of Lisp and Writing (2003)
Even though there is much more freedom in poetry, it is still defined by a specific set of rules/features: verses, rhythm, stanzas, spacing, meter, and rhyming. It's only because of these restrictions that it is so obvious when writing is or isn't poetry. These features and forms can streched, but unlike lisp they cannot be completely redefined.
mightyham··on The Art of Lisp and Writing (2003)
Ironically, this author gets the relationship between lisp and writing totally wrong. Lisp may be much more artistic, but programming in Java, for instance, is much more akin to writing than programming in lisp is. Written languages have well established vocabulary and grammar, that cannot be changed or redefined by the writer. The author is completely correct that lisp is more of a "programming medium" than a "programming language", since the language itself can be molded and changed by the programmer in very self-expressive ways. However, he doesn't follow through with this observation to the obvious conclusion that this feature of lisp, as a medium, makes it fundamentally different from human language.
mightyham··on First American pope elected and will be known as Pope Leo XIV
Who are you talking about?
mightyham··on I'd rather read the prompt
While I agree with the thrust of the article being that students are cheating themselves by relying on LLMs, it's important to reflect on ways in which educators have encouraged this behavior. Anyone who has been to college in the age of the internet knows that many professors, particularly in the humanities, lazily pad out their class work with short menial writing assignments, often in the form of a "discussion board", that are rarely even graded on content. For students already swamped with work, or having to complete these assignments for general ed courses unrelated to their major/actual interests, it is totally understandable why they would outsource this work to a machine. This is a totally fixable issue: in-person discussions and longer writing assignments with well structured progress reports/check-ins and rounds of peer review are a couple ways that I can think of off the top of my head. Professors need to be held accountable for creating course loads that are actually intellectually interesting and are at least somewhat challenging to use LLMs to complete. When professors are constantly handing out an excess of low-effort assignments, using shortcuts becomes a learned behavior of students.
mightyham··on Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers
It is complicated because tariffs are not just "passed off". In the real world, tariffs are almost always marginal, meaning each company is willing to absorb some of the cost, ie lower profits. In parent's example, the US has a large steel industry and rail companies relying on imports cannot arbitrarily raise prices because they need to stay competitive with companies using domestic. Markets are also dynamic and simply comparing pre/post price may work temporarily, but for a persistent tariff that metric will become increasingly meaningless as price inevitably fluctuates due to other factors.
mightyham··on Why Pale Blue Dot generates feelings of cosmic insignificance
This is definitely not true from a philosophical level. Contemplation of an infinite god/cosmos, and the seemingly infinite nature of time are core aspects of early Greek philosophy, which heavily influenced the philosophy of each of the Abrahamic religions.

As you started alluding to, the reason the west may seem more fearful of the infinite is likely because of widespread secularism, not western religion. An infinite cosmos is not nearly as scary to someone whose life purpose is appeasing an all good/infinite/timeless/immutable being, as it is for someone whose life purpose is managing their dopamine levels.

Somewhat related: being someone who grew up in the west, I've always wondered how Hindus and Buddhists deal with evidence of the big bang. It fits fairly naturally into Abrahamic traditions that believe in a beginning to the universe. Though, it is fairly important to the philosophy of those eastern traditions that time and space (samsara) has no beginning or end.

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