who is going to use a VPN (an internet privacy tool) from Google?

Exactly. That would be like using a web browser made by Google so they have direct access to your internet browsing history. Ridiculous!

We are talking about addresses, not counters. An inherently hierarchical one at that. If you don’t use the bits you are actually wasting them.

Bullshit.

I have a 64-bit computer, it can address up to 18.4 exabytes, but my computer only has 32GB, so I will never use the vast majority that address space. Am I “wasting” it?

All the 128 bits are used in IPv6. ;)

Yes they are all “used” but you don’t need them. We are not using 2^128 ip addresses in the world. In your own terminology: you are using 4 registers for a 2 register problem. That is much more wasteful in terms of hardware than using 40 bits to represent an ip address and wasting 24 bits.

you are wasting 24 bits of a 64-bit register

You’re not “wasting” them if you just don’t need the extra bits, Are you wasting a 32-bit integer if your program only ever counts up to 1000000?

Even so when you do start to need them, you can gradually make the other bits available in the form of more octets. Like you can just define it as a.b.c.d.e = 0.a.b.c.d.e = 0.0.a.b.c.d.e = 0.0.0.a.b.c.d.e

Recall that IPv6 came out just a year before the Nintendo 64

If you’re worried about wasting registers it makes even less sense to switch from a 32-bit addressing space to a 128-bit one in one go.

Anyway, your explanation is a perfect example of “second system effect” at work. You get all caught up in the mistakes of the first system, in casu the lack of addressing bits, and then you go all out to correct those mistakes for your second system, giving it all the bits humanity could ever need before the heat death of the universe, while ignoring the real world implications of your choices. And now you are surprised that nobody wants to use your 128-bit abomination.

IPv6 = second system effect. It’s way too complicated for what was needed and this complexity hinders its adoption. We don’t need 100 ip addresses for every atom on the earth’s surface and we never will.

They should have just added an octet to IPv4 and be done with it.

At a stretch, I guess you could say that a battery that’s going bad doesn’t make a sound.

But yes, electric motors are way more reliable than internal combustion engines and objectively superior. You would never use an ICE over an EE for any application where you have a reliable supply of electricity.

you just need to get in the habit of plugging in like you would your phone

Yeah but not everyone lives in suburbia with ample plug-in options available to them. Where I live the street-side charging spots are usually occupied, and the parking spot that I rent has no charging.

For journey’s long enough for it to be more than a single charge you really should be stopping for more than a few seconds anyway as you need recharging.

True to some extent, I have to check my travel logs but I do feel like stopping for an hour every 300km or so is longer and much more often than I would normally stop on long road trips. My (diesel) car has a range of well over 1000km so often I stop for only 15 minutes for a coffee and to stretch my legs, or just for a restroom stop and a driver swap. We usually plan just one big stop (1h) for dinner. Most destinations I’ve been to I could reach without refueling at all.

There’s also the issue of contention for charging spots. On gas stations near the big highways towards popular destinations you often already have to queue to get gas. This will become worse when EVs become common place and people occupy a charging spot for an hour instead of a fuel pump for 30 seconds to top up.

Little anecdote: every year around the holiday season, there are several company wide e-mails from EV driving co-workers requesting to swap cars (with a co-worker who has a CE car) to go on holiday. So I think the practical experience may not be as rosy as you paint it.

I run a pihole as well, but it is a very rudimentary tool compared to browser based adblockers like uBlock origin. It can only block DNS queries, and can’t for example block ads if they are served from the same domain as the main site (i.e. youtube) or block specific elements on a page or block a specific script from running.

only this time they’ve got a decade of research behind them and maybe they get the bomb first

Maybe that’s why we’re living in the universe where this didn’t happen, because in the universe where it did, we wouldn’t exist (many worlds/anthropic principle interpretation)

At 17:00 everyone’s got a beer on their desk and by 18:00 the doors are locked and the lights are out. One Thursday a month the table is used for beer pong after work and we play card games like Exploding Kittens.

I’d rather go home at 17:00 and do all those things with my real friends, or you know, spend some quality time with my partner.

I feel like that’s more a boomer thing.

You don’t even have to NAT the fuck out of your network. NAT is usually only needed in one place: where your internal network meets the outside world, and it provides a clean separation between the two as well, which I like.

For most internal networks there really are no advantages to moving to IPv6 other than bragging rights.

The more I think about it, the more I find IPv6 a huge overly complicated mistake. For the issue they wanted to solve, worldwide public IP shortage, they could have just added an octet to IPv4 to multiply the number of available addresses with 256 and called it a day. Not every square cm of the planet needs a public IP.

People have choices. If they want to keep using the Lemmy.ml community, that’s their freedom. The alternatives exist, if they want to switch, they can.

Because network effect is a thing, it’s really the illusion of choice. When a lemmy.ml community has 50k subscribers and the equivalent lemmy.world or programming.dev community has just a tenth of that, it’s not really a choice. People will always gravitate towards ml and the smaller community will never gain critical mass unless some strong enough outside force influences that decision.

Which brings me to …

Intrigued by your name change, you are really pushing for this.

I think defederation from lemmy.ml together with raising awareness about ml should be the outside force to move communities off lemmy.ml.

If you use shred instead of rm to delete a file, the contents should be unrecoverable for all practical intents and purposes.

I don’t believe shred can work recursively on a directory structure, like rm, so you’ll have to cobble something together with the find command I guess.

If human skin was sometimes completely patterned

If?

Gingers would like to have a word with you.

It’s when you have to set static routes and such.

For example I have a couple of locations tied together with a Wireguard site-to-site VPN, each with several subnets. I had to write wg config files and set static routes with hardcoded subnets and IP addresses. Writing the wg config files and getting it working was already a bit daunting with IPv4, because I was also wrapping my head around wireguard concepts at the same time. It would have been so much worse to debug with IPv6 unreadable subnet names.

Network ACLs and firewall rules are another thing where you have to work with raw IPv6 addresses. For example: let’s say you have a Samba share or proxy server that you only want to be accessible from one specific subnet, you have to use IPv6 addresses. You can’t solve that with DNS names.

Anyway my point is: the idea that you can simply avoid IPv6’s complexity by using DNS names is just wrong.

You do need to know it when you’re working with subnets and routing tables.

Unless you have anything but a flat network structure with everything in one subnet, working with IPV6 is a giant PITA.

It’s not even about which view is right or neutral. On .world posts and comments critical of the US aren’t mass censored like .ml does with posts critical of China, Russia or the former USSR.

Just disconnect your network cable, press this magic key combination and type this undocumented command: “MSBLAOIGKSDF /ACZSF”

The way that I see it, the issue with lemmy ml’s administration and moderation is not quite political in origin. It’s about transparency

Well it’s really both. The issue is the combination of a number of factors which on their own would be fairly easy to deal with, but put together they are very problematic:

1. The admins are political extremists
2. lemmy.ml has a very prominent position in the lemmyverse, because they were first and got a headstart
3. The admins are actively using their position to heavily police discussion according to their extremist political views. The fact that they’re not being transparent about it is aggravating, but not the root problem.

This prominent position of lemmy.ml is the fundamental difference with the hexbear or lemmygrad situation. Those instances can easily be contained at the user level: most people can just block and ignore them entirely because nothing interesting happens on those instances for non-extremists. Not so with lemmy.ml, which hosts a number of large bona-fide communities.

So I think it’s necessary to make a concerted effort to reduce lemmy.ml’s prominence in the fediverse, so that political extremists can’t put their thumb on the scale to nudge discussion in a certain direction. Part of that effort is raising awareness about lemmy.ml’s nature, which is what this PSA does, but that likely won’t be enough due to network effect. It will take more to get people to move their communities to other instances. If other large instances, like lemmy.world, would block lemmy.ml that would provide a real stimulus for a large amount of people to move away from lemmy.ml.

With that out of the way, most of your suggestions boil down to “use lemmy.world instead”. I don’t have anything against LW’s administration, but I think that it’s foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further

I agree that spreading out more would be desirable, but on the other hand “just use lemmy.world instead of lemmy.ml” is a very simple and practical suggestion to move away from ml.

But emoji’s are not derived from the Simpsons. They’re derived from the yellow smiley face ideogram that originated in the 1960s, it was designed by the artist Harvey Ball.

It’s yellow, not because it’s supposed to represent whiteness, but because the company colors of the State Mutual Life Assurance Company it was designed for were yellow and black, and because it feels sunny, bright and positive. It’s an anthropomorphized representation of the Sun, and does not represent a human with a specific skin color.