You know, I was beginning to second guess myself. Maybe the nimbys know something I don’t? After all, nimby rights matter too! I don’t live in Astoria or run a business, I only travel and shop there. Maybe their safety concerns have merit?

We had our group ride of support, and I have now personally seen the two-block section where the repainting work was already completed, before the court injunction took effect, (and where car parkers actually obey the new parking markings), and it is marvelous. The bike lane is comfortable and with great visibility of street and sidewalk, much better than the slalom course it was before. There are two parking spaces between each pair of columns that can fit two cars with ample room or an extra long delivery truck. With a couple extra physical improvements, like flying island bus stops and extra-wide sidewalk cutouts at intersections with ramps for curb-level bike path crossings, Astoria 31st Street redesign could become a reference model for all the other elevated track streets in the city. Having seen it, the design just makes sense and impossible to imagine going back the way it was.

As a person who spends inordinate amount of time thinking about street lane width allocation and reading DOT engineering proposals, I can now confidently say that the nimbys were complete shitheads all along, as they always are, all the time, and I should have never doubted myself. And if you had any doubts too - don’t.

It looks cool, I’d use it! When you start making fun of me I’d just shrug and carry on, because I don’t care what judgements some weirdo makes about my accessories.

The crazy thing to me is that as you look at galaxies further away, they become bigger in the sky. Obligatory xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2622:_Angular_Diameter_Turnaround There could be huge dragons out there occluding half the sky, but they’d be beyond the last scattering surface of the cosmic microwave background.

First thought was ISP intermittent packet loss, but

Ping is unaffected
no packet loss or jitter
Speedtests of any kind always return when problem is occurring / when problem is not occurring

Suggests otherwise. My second thought was DNS crashing, but

DNS seems irrelevant

You already got it covered.

Some websites like Facebook and Google work
VOIP does not seem to be affected

Really weird situation! Try using wireshark to listen on the interface and observe what’s happening. Are packets going out but none returning? Are they returning with errors? Retransmissions? Are some destinations fine but others get no reply?

Could you geographically locate the IPs that work vs. the IPs that don’t? My next suspicion is that there is some upstream backbone link that cuts out, so stuff with local CDNs like facebook continue to work, but a lemmy server on another continent is unreachable. Try traceroute.

it’s not geography aware, it’s network topology aware

Yes, I’m using “geographic awareness” here as shorthand for the same algorithm that BGP uses to calculate shortest route. As far as I know, BGP has no knowledge of “countries” or “continents”, it makes decisions purely on local policy and connectivity info available to it. However, the resulting topology map does greatly resemble the corresponding geographic map, a natural consequence of the internet being a physical engineering structure. I’m not sure how publicly available the global BGP data is. If you were designing a backbone-bandwidth-preserving P2P app you would either give it BGP data directly, or if that’s not available, give it the world map to get most of the same benefit.

topology that is often obscured by the ISPs for a variety of benign and malevolent reasons

The multicast proposal would need to be routed through the very same ISP-obscured topology, so there is no advantage over topology-aware P2P.

I’m not sure this math is mathing

As a graph problem, it does look to me within factor of 2 is practical.

First consider a hypothetical topology-aware “daisy chain” scheme, where every swarm user has upload ratio of exactly one. Then every backbone and last-mile connection gets used exactly twice. This is why I say factor of 2 is the upper limit. It’s like a maze problem where you can navigate an entire maze and only traverse each corridor twice. Then look at the more practical “pyramid” scheme where half the users have upload ratio of about 2. Some links get used twice but many get used only once! UK-UK1 link is the only one to be used 3 times. Notably observe that US-JP and US-UK transcontinental links only get used once, as you wanted! Overall this pyramid scheme looks to me to be within 20% efficiency of the optimal multicast scheme.

we’re still using “someone else’s computer” … at “we’re” using “our computer” and that’s the royal “we”. Multicast is all switch no server, all juice, no seed

What do you think backbone routers are? They are computers! Specialized for a particular task, but computers nonetheless. Owned by someone other than you. Your whole lament is that you can’t force those owners to implement multicast on their routers. I think using the royal “our” computer, something we can do right now without forcing anyone else, is much better by comparison. If you insist that P2P swarm members, they who actually want to see your livestream, are not good enough, that you only want to use “your” computer to broadcast and no one else’s, then you are left with no options other than bouncing HAM video signals off the ionosphere. And even the radio spectrum is claimed by governments.

MBGP table will be megabytes long and extremely dynamic

I think you underestimate the size. Imagine if multicast were ubiquitous, billions of internet-connected users each with dozens? hundreds? of multicast subscriptions. Each video content creator is a multicast, each blogpost you follow, each multi-twitter handle, each lemmy community you subscribe to. Hundreds easily. Thats many gigabytes, possibly hundreds of gigabytes, of state to fit into every router. BGP is simple because you care only about the physical links you actually have. You can stuff entire IP ranges into a single routing table entry. Your entire table could be a dozen entries. Fits inside the silicon. With multicast I don’t think you can fold it in, you must keep the entire many-to-many table on every single router^[1]. And consult the 100GB table to route every single packet, in case it needs to get split. As you said, impossible with 1990s technology, probably possible but contrary to business goals in 2020.

You are concerned about the battery life of your phone when you use the bandwidth of 2 video streams compared to watching just 1? Yet you expect every single router owner to plug in hundreds of gigabytes of extra RAM sticks and spend extra CPU power and electricity to look up routing tables to handle your multicast traffic for you. You are just offloading the resource usage onto other people’s computers! Not “our” computers - “theirs”. Remember how much criticism Bitcoin got for wasting resources? Not the proof of work, but the having to store a duplicate copy of 100GB’s of transactions blockchain on every single node? All that hard drive space wasted! When “Mastercard” and “Visa” can do it with only a single database on a mainframe. Yet now you want “them” to do the same and “waste” 100GB’s of RAM on every single router just so your battery life is a little better.

If everyone suddenly used the internet to this full potential, then we would get the screws turned on us. … Multicast would essentially fly under the radar.

This does not follow. Didn’t you say that multicast was already sabotaged by the very same cablo-distribution networks to maintain their send-monopoly? You expect to force the ISPs to turn multicast back on and somehow have it fly under the radar, but P2P would get the screws turned? It can’t be one and not the other! If you plan to have the governments force the ISPs to fall in line and implement multicast standards, then why couldn’t you have the same governments (driven by democratic pressure of billions of internet users demanding freedom, presumably) enshrine P2P rights? Again, remember that P2P is something we already have, something that already works and can be expanded with no additional cooperation from other players. Multicast is something that would need to be forced on others, on everyone, and require physical hardware updates. If there are future restrictions on P2P, they would be easier to defend against politically and technologically. If you cannot defend P2P, then you for sure do not have enough political power to force multicast.

[1]: Thinking about this, maybe you could roll it in a little. Given N internet users (~a billion), each with S subscriptions (say a hundred), C number of content feeds (a hundred million? 10% of users are also creators, 90% are pure consumers), and each router has P physical links (say ten), then instead of N*S amount of state (100GB’s), each router could fold it down into C*P amount of state (1GB’s). As in “If I receive a multicast packet from [source ip=US.5.6.7] to [destination ip=anyone], route copies of it out through phy04, phy07, and phy12”. You would still need a mechanism to propagate table changes pretty rapidly (full refresh about once every minute?). Your phone can be switching cells or powering on and off. You don’t want to multicast packets to a powered-off IP - that would be waste of resources!

And how do you detect oversubscribing? If a million watchers subcribe to 1 multicast livestream - it’s fine, but what happens when 1 troll subscribes to a million livestreams? If I subscribe to 1 million video streams, obviously my last-mile connection cannot fit them all. With TCP unicast, the senders would not receive TCP ACK replies from me and throttle down. But with multicast, the routers in between do not know about my last mile, or even if my phone is still powered on since later than a minute ago. All they know is “if receive multicast from IP1, send to phy04; if receive multicast from IP2, send to phy04;” etc. Would my upstream routers not get saturated trying to send a million video streams to a dead IP? Would we need to implement some sort of a reverse-multicast version of “TCP ACK”?

Ahh! Malicious compliance. Beautiful.

While I agree that P2P is the next best thing and torrents are pretty awesome, they are unicast and ultimately they waste far more resources, especially intercontinental bandwidth than multicast would.

Tell me if I understand the use case correctly here. I want to livestream to my 1000 viewers but don’t want to go through CDNs and gatekeepers like Twitch. I want to do it from my phone, as I am entitled to by the spirit of free internet and democratization of information, but I obviously do not have enough bandwidth for 1000 unicast video streams. If only I had ability to use multicast, I could send a single video stream with multicast up my cellular connection, and at each internet backbone router it would get duplicated and split as many times as necessary to reach all my 1000 subscribers. My 100 viewers in Japan are served by a single stream in the trans-Pacific backbone that gets split once it touches land, is that all correct?

In that case, torrent/peertube-like technology gets you almost all of the way there! As long as my upload ratio is greater than 1 (say I push the bandwidth equivalent of TWO video streams up my cellular), and each of my two initial viewers (using their own phones or tablets or whatever devices that can communicate with each other equally well across the global internet without any SERVERS, CDNS, or MIDDLEMEN in between, using IPv6 as God intended) pushes it to two more, and so on, then within 10 hops and 1 second of latency, all 1000 of my viewers can see my stream. Within 2 seconds, a million could see me in theory, with zero additional bandwidth required on my part, right? In terms of global bandwidth resource usage, we are already within a factor of two of the ideal case of working multicast!

It is true that my 100 peertube subscribers in Japan could be triggering my video stream to be sent through the intercontinental pipe multiple times (and even back again!), but this is only so because the peertube protocol is not yet geographic-aware! (Or maybe it already is?) Have you considered adding geographic awareness to peertube instead? Then only one viewer in Japan will receive my stream, and then pyramid-share it with all the other Japanese.

P2P, IPv6, and geographic awareness is something that you can pursue right now, and it gets you within better than a factor of 2 of the ideal multicast dream! Is factor of 2 an acceptable rate of waste of resource usage? And you can implement it all on your own, without requiring every single internet backbone provider and ISP to cooperate with you and upgrade their router hardware to support multicast. AND you get all the other features of peertube, like say being able to watch a video that is NOT a livestream. Or being able to read a comment that was posted when your device was powered off.

Also, I am intrigued by the great concern you give for intercontinental bandwidth usage, considering those pipes are owned by the same types of big for-profit companies as the walled-garden social networks and CDNs that are so distasteful. From the other end, the reason why geographic awareness has not already been implemented in bittorrent and most other P2P protocols is precisely because bandwidth has been so plentiful. I can easily go to any website in Japan, play video games with the Chinese, or upload Linux images to the Europeans, without worrying about all the peering arrangements in between. If you are Netflix you have to deal with it and pay for peerage and build out local CDN boxes, but as a P2P user I’ve never had to think about it. Maybe if 1-to-millions torrent-based server-less livestreaming from your phone were to become popular, the intercontinental pipe owners might start complaining, but for now the internet just works.

Agreed! That’s why I much prefer the “Is there any possible way you could be pregnant right now?” phrasing. Which is straight to the point of “we are about to operate on your abdominal section that could cause fetal loss if we are not aware of it, assuming you care about that sort of thing.” But if you are getting the period question, then it’s just a nurse checking off a box on an insurance checklist when you are there for an ear infection, and 100% of the time it is not relevant then.

Woops, sorry! I got immediately multiply downvoted 100%, I haven’t posted in this community before so not familiar with the culture, and even though I thought my response was relevant, it didn’t look like the community was interested in such an opinion, so I withdrew my post. I said something like that unless I am literally there do get tested for a suspected pregnancy, I would tell them it’s none of their business, or more politely, “given the current political climate, I do not answer questions like these”. Thanks for checking up on me!

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Yeah, I don’t think it’s possible for the concept to click until at least learning how to calculate Fourier transforms by hand. Before then all I could say when hearing about orthogonality was “Uh-huh, sure”, but you never really believe it. Only when you have calculated something like “what is the frequency of the delta function?” and seen the answer with your own eyes, not through someone’s interpretation, do you start believing it.

End of Eternity (1955) by Isaac Asimov (and its reimagining in Palimpsest (2009) by Charles Stross) involve a time-traveling secret organization that has its headquarters hidden away in time/outside of time. They don’t so much drain resources though as manipulate history to ensure a safe course.

The numbers in the meme are off. One sperm is 750MB, or about 1 CD, so full human is 2 CDs. Or a couple 1.4MB floppies if you only store the diff from the reference genome.

he started firing, [Police Commissioner] Tisch said, killing a police officer working a corporate security detail

“He was doing the job that we asked him to do. He put himself in harm’s way. He made the ultimate sacrifice,” Tisch said.

Off-duty police officers working as private security are not doing the job we the public asked them to do! During the time they are getting paid, they are protecting corporate interests, not the public in general. Frankly, “corporate security detail” is a corrupt impersonation of a police officer - they wear their official police uniform, they act under the color of law, but they are not serving the police or the public. Fucking Cyberdyne Systems/Omni Corporation privatized police cyberpunk shit. Irks me how this police “impersonator” is getting full honors from the police commissioner, and photos in the AP of police and medical staff standing at attention in respect of the ambulance carrying the body, and meanwhile the other security guard killed who did not daylight as police during their off-the-clock hours doesn’t even get a name mentioned.

shot a guard at a security desk

Only their gang members matter to them.

Robin Hanson is in the house!

One year ago I was literally being told “This can’t be genocide! Only 4% of population has been killed.” Now what?

FBI Surveillance Van 2, FBI Surveillance Van 5, FBI Free WiFI (not honeypot)

Don’t like how the headline says “plummets”, which implies an uncontrolled fall. The correct terminology here is “dives”. They took “plummet” from the quote of a passenger, to whom the experience was indeed like random drop, but in the headline they use active voice with intent (“to avoid a potential collision”), which is the perspective of the pilot, so active control terminology should be used.

It’s a future hologram that looks correct when seen from any direction.

There is a crazy idea that since Peano arithmetic has not been proven to be consistent (and cannot be proven so, by Goedel’s Theorem), if you ever find a counterexample you can use nondisjunctions like these to immediately effectively prove anything. This may have dubious effects on objective reality. “I have one apple and one apple. Since I can prove that 1+1=5, I now have 5 apples.” And boom! You got 5 apples.