I think that's meant to be covered by the "IPv4x when we can. NAT when we must" part, in particular "ISPs used carrier‑grade NAT as a compatibility shim rather than a lifeline: if you needed to reach an IPv4‑only service, CGNAT stepped in while IPv4x traffic flowed natively and without ceremony."
It seemed strange that the need for CGNAT wasn't mentioned until after the MIT story. The "Nothing broke" claim in that story seems unlikely; I was on a public IP at University at the end of the 90s and if I'd suddenly been put behind NAT, some things I did would have broken until the workarounds were worked out.
> "ISPs used carrier‑grade NAT as a compatibility shim rather than a lifeline: if you needed to reach an IPv4‑only service, CGNAT stepped in while IPv4x traffic flowed natively and without ceremony."
What's the difference between that and dual stack v4/v6, though? Other than not needing v6 address range assignments, of course.
Try an IPv6-only VPS and see how quickly something breaks for you.
Dual-stack fails miserably when the newer stack is incompatible with the older one. With a stack that extends the old stack, you always have something to fallback to.
To replace something, you embrace it and extend it so the old version can be effectively phrased out.
> Try an IPv6-only VPS and see how quickly something breaks for you.
Who's arguing for that? That would be completely non-viable even today, and even with NAT64 it would be annoying.
> Dual-stack fails miserably when the newer stack is incompatible with the older one.
Does it? All my clients and servers are dual stack.
> With a stack that extends the old stack, you always have something to fallback to.
Yes, v4/v6 dual stack is indeed great!
> To replace something, you embrace it and extend it so the old version can be effectively phrased out.
Some changes unfortunately really are breaking. Sometimes you can do a flag day, sometimes you drag out the migration over years or decades, sometimes you get something in between.
We'll probably be done in a few more decades, hopefully sooner. I don't see how else it could have realistically worked, other than maybe through top-down decree, which might just have wasted more resources than the transition we ended up with.
I don't see IPv4 going away within the next fifty years. I'd not be surprised for it to last for the next hundred+ years. I expect to see more and more residential ISPs provide their customers with globally-routable IPv6 service and put their customers behind IPv4 CGNs (or whatever the reasonable "Give the customer's edge router a not-globally-routable IPv4 address, but serve its traffic with IPv6 infrastructure" mechanism to use is). That IPv4 space will get freed up to use in IPv4-only publicly-facing services in datacenters.
There's IPv4-only software out there, and I expect that it will outlive everyone who's reading this site today. That's fine. What matters is getting proper IPv6 service to every Internet-connected site on (and off) the planet.
With you on “IPv6 only will become a thing for many clients”, but servers (or at least load balancers) will absolutely not stay v4-reachable only.
They’re already not. For example, I believe you won’t get an iOS app approved for distribution by Apple these days if it doesn’t work on v6-only clients.
> With you on “IPv6 only will become a thing for many clients"...
That's not what I said. I said that having a globally-routable IPv4 address assigned to a LAN's edge router will stop being a thing. Things like CGN (or some other sort of translation system) will be the norm for all residential users.
> ...but servers (or at least load balancers) will absolutely not stay v4-reachable only.
Some absolutely will. There's a lot of software and hardware out there that's chugging along doing exactly what the entity that deployed it needs it to do... but -for one of handful of reasons- will never, ever be updated ever again. This is fine. The absolute best thing any programmer can do is to create a system that one never has to touch ever again.
> That's not what I said. I said that having a globally-routable IPv4 address assigned to a LAN's edge router will stop being a thing. Things like CGN (or some other sort of translation system) will be the norm for all residential users.
That's still what I would call a v6-only (with translation mechanisms) client deployment. Sorry for being imprecise on the "with translation mechanisms" part.
> Some absolutely will.
Very few, in my prediction. We're already seeing massive v6 + CG-NAT-only deployments these days, and the NAT part is starting to have worse performance characteristics: Higher latency because the NATs aren't as geographically distributed as the v6 gateway routers, shorter-lived TCP connections because IP/port tuples are adding a tighter resource constraint than connection tracking memory alone etc.
This, and top-down mandates like Apple's "all apps must work on v6 only phones", is pushing most big services to become v6 reachable.
At some point, some ISP is going to decide that v6 only (i.e. without translation mechanisms) Internet is "enough" for their users. Hackers will complain, call it "not real Internet" (and have a point, just like I don't consider NATted v4 "real Internet"!), but most profit-oriented companies will react by quickly providing rudimentary v6 connectivity via assigning a v6 address to their load balancer and setting an AAAA record.
I agree that v4 only servers will stick around for decades, just like there are still many non-Internet networks out there, but v4 only reachability will become a non-starter for anything that humans/eyeballs will want to access. And at some point, the fraction of v4-only eyeballs will become so small that it'll start becoming feasible to serve content on v6 only. At that point, v4 will be finally considered "not the real Internet" too.
Sure, I agree. I'm not sure how you got the notion that I thought a large percentage of systems out there will never get IPv6 support. There's a lot of solid systems out there that just fucking run. They're a small percentage of all of the deployed machines in the world.
> That's still what I would call a v6-only (with translation mechanisms) client deployment.
When people say "IPv6 only", they mean "Cannot connect to IPv4 systems". IMO, claiming it means anything else is watering down the definition into meaninglessness. Consider it in the context of what someone means when they envision a future where the Internet is "IPv6 only", so we don't need to deal with the "trouble" and "headache" of running both v4 and v6.
Yeah, it's my understanding that that's been the situation for a great many folks in the Asia/Pacific part of the world for a while now. Lots and lots of hosts, but not much IPv4 space allocated.
I really liked this one in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough_Lift_Lock
Built as a real working lift lock (originally 1904), rather than as a tourist attraction. Powered by a little bit of extra water in one of the buckets to tip the balance and drive the pistons.
There's also another unusual way - the Caisson lock.
Its design is TERRIFYING.
The boat is floated into a tube that get sealed at both ends and then (in the dark..) that tube is winched down into a completely flooded chamber until it (hopefully) lines up with the egress port at the bottom. The tube with the boat in is unsealed and the boat floats out.
Ooof, I'd never seen that. Thanks! From the wikipedia link:
> The May 1799 test at Oakengates carried a party of investors aboard the vessel, who nearly suffocated before they could be freed.
(!) ...and eventually they built a flight of nineteen locks instead, with a steam-powered pump to return water. The lift locks (and Falkirk Wheel) are a really impressive and elegant solution in comparison.
Oh that is terrifying; interesting, it "was first demonstrated at Oakengates on a now lost section of the Shropshire Canal in England in 1792". That little bit of rural UK was hot and happening from 1700 to 1800 and doing a lot of canal and river transport; it claims some part in the Industrial Revolution. Within 20 miles around Oakengates around that time was:
- early good quality cast iron; Abraham Darby in Coalbrookdale in ~1710 smelting iron from low-sulphur coal/coke for the first time, dominating the market in iron pots and pans.
- his foundry casting iron parts for early Newcomen steam engines in 1715 [2].
- the first iron bridge in the world[3] in 1781, now a town called Ironbridge. John Wilkinson invented a method of boring accurate cylinders for Bolton & Watt static steam engines, a friend wrote to him about the proposed iron bridge and he funded it.
- the first iron boat in 1787 in Brosely; the Trial by the same John Wilkinson, "convincing the unbelievers who were 999 in 1000".[7]
- the first iron framed building in the world, ancestor of skyscrapers. Thomas Telford[5] was a surveyor and engineer in the area, took inspiration from the iron bridge and started making other things out of iron, became friends with a flax mill owner whose mill burned down; they decided an iron framed building would be more fire resistant, and they built the first one ever[6] in 1797.
- very early high-pressure steam engine and high-pressure steam locomotive. Richard Trevithick around 1800; Coalbrookdale foundries built a static high pressure engine and a high pressure locomotive[4] within a couple of years of his Puffing-devil road locomotive and Pen-y-Darren rail locomotive were trialled in other parts of the UK.
Then Regression To The Mean happened and the area faded back into history.
Yes, the Kelpies are suprisingly striking. I went along thinking they'd be a modestly interesting thing to see but the scale and sculpture work makes them a real "Wow" moment when you see them up close.
It's clearly hard, but there are tools for doing exploratory visualization of high-dim data. GGobi http://ggobi.org/ and all the ones that arrange points but try to get local neighborhoods correct (t-sne, umap, et al.).
Yeah, but still "scary" because you have to be really careful to not fool yourself and pay attention even with those algorithms. For example, a good demonstration with tsne
https://distill.pub/2016/misread-tsne/?hl=cs
Some things that may be of interest. First relevant to the posted article:
A site that has used neural nets to classify go moves that good players would probably make that weaker players (of varying ranks) would probably not: https://neuralnetgoproblems.com/ (code available on github)
https://ai-sensei.com/challenge (behind login wall, and in future possibly a pay wall) is a similar idea, but the difficulty of evaluating the position is determined by how users of the site perform in practice.
And more generally, but relevant to your comment:
Players can play humans at an appropriate rank on OGS https://online-go.com/ (not as popular as the Eastern servers, but probably popular enough) -- or against calibrated rank "human-like" AI players by painfully setting up the right katago models themselves, or by paying for a subscription on ai-sensei.com
A go education site that's currently largely by and pitched at Westerners: https://gomagic.org/ for leveling up from the basics.
And a lot of books are now available easily and electronically in English (and some in German): https://gobooks.com/ --- I'd recommend "graded go problems for beginners", "tesuji", and "attack and defense".
Some good sites aren't (fully) available in English, like https://www.101weiqi.com/ -- but there are chrome and firefox extensions to translate just enough of it to make it usable.
[To help search engines: go is also known as weiqi and baduk]
This post is for those interested high-performance matrix multiplication in BQN (an APL-like array language).
The main thing I got out of it was the footnotes, in particular: https://en.algorithmica.org/hpc/algorithms/matmul/ is a really nice post on fast matrix multiplication, and is a chapter of what looks like a nice online book.
Sorry for the low value post, but worth it to draw attention to those who might overlook it -- that algorithmica page is really, really good. Learned something.
> generating DTMF tones yourself and injecting them into the audio stream?
When I was an undergrad I had an audio file for each digit and a winamp playlist for each of my frequently dialed numbers. I'd hold my (landline) phone against the computer speakers and double-click the playlist to dial. I'm sure I spent more time setting this up than it ever saved, but it was somehow pleasing that this ridiculously over-powered speed dialer worked.
Back in the days of phone line modems, there used to be a program that you could type in a number, the modem would emit the corresponding tones, and then you could pick up a phone and it'd already be connected. I can't remember what the one I saw was, but I'm sure there were multiple different ones, and I also vaguely recall there were dedicated physical machines that could before that.
You could do this with any terminal program. Your modem won't emit any noise until it hears a carrier tone, so you could just dial, pick up the extension, hang up the modem.
Which has been discussed previously: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=The+IPv6+mess