Rubenerd

A Twitter discussion made me wonder why IPv6 adoption contines at a snail’s pace, despite IPv4 exhaustion and surging prices. Nuintari claimed that NOCs became addicted to NAT, which is probably true, but insufficient an explanation.

Tailscale’s Avery Pennarun theorised back in 2020 that it had something to do with its design:

IPv4 evolved as a pragmatic way to build an internet out of a bunch of networks and machines that existed already. Postel’s Law says you’d best deal with reality as it is, not as you wish it were, and so they did. When something didn’t connect, someone hacked on it until it worked. Sloppy. Fits and starts, twine and duct tape.

IPv6 was created in a new environment of fear, scalability concerns, and Second System Effect … its goal was to replace The Internet with a New Internet — one that wouldn’t make all the same mistakes. It would have fewer hacks. And we’d upgrade to it incrementally over a few years, just as we did when upgrading to newer versions of IP and TCP back in the old days.

We can hardly blame people for believing this would work … here we are 25 years later, and not much has changed.

Others are even less charitable, with teknikal_domain saying IPv6’s complexity makes it actively hostile. Certainly IPv4 and NAT might be the most extreme example of Richard Gabriel’s worse is better that I’ve seen, especially in the enterprise.

People have been talking about this for decades, but I’ve noticed an uptick in popular coverage in the last twelve months. Rupert Goodwins:

Incompatibility equals obsolescence. IPv6 isn’t quite the network Itanium [Intel’s first attempt at a 64-bit CPU, which was ignored for AMD’s 64-bit extensions to x86 –ed]. There is no doubt that an IPv6-only planet would be superior, more efficient, support a bigger variety of services and have better security. The trouble is, until you get there, the opposite is true. If running an IPv4 network implies a certain amount of resources required and a certain threat landscape to manage, then adding a parallel IPv6 network means adding to those costs and liabilities. It doesn’t get you much in return.

I think this gets close to explaining the root problem from the business side. This related thread about IPv6 training is illustrative; even among those who wish they could use it, they’re limited by the constraints and operating environment of the real world.

Darrell Root put it best, even if we’d prefer it not to be:

Hard to convince overworked IT departments at enterprises to deploy.

A large Australian energy retailer sent us another letter threatening to disconnect our non-existent gas supply if we didn’t open an account and start paying. I’m tempted to take them up on the offer, then lodge a formal complaint that there’s no gas being delivered over our invisible pipes!

The welcome pack came with their chunky Standard Retail Contract. I’m always interested to read sections on data collection and privacy, and this one was especially fun. Here’s what they included on page 27, paragraph 6:

We may also collect personal information about you by accessing data from other sources and then analysing that data together with the information we already hold about you to learn more about your likely preferences and interests.

Had I not known this was for a power and gas company, I’d think it was for a web startup. Have companies always been doing this? Or is this learning about your preferences stuff that’s so rife on the Internet now spilling over to unrelated industries?

The language is full of goodies:

• You “may” collect? Does that mean we’re granting you permission (yes, you may do this), or that there’s only a chance that you’ll do this?

• What are these “other sources”? What are their terms of use? How do they store data? How did they get our information? Where am I consenting to a business relationship with them?

• “Information we already hold” is what? How long do you hold it? Where? What data security is in place? Do you keep it private, or share it back with your “other sources”?

• What do our “likely preferences and interests” have to do with delivering gas to our homes that may or may not even have gas lines? Giving us coupons for heaters? Thinking that our “interest” is drying clothes? Or are you selling this information? If so, to whom? Are they given our contact details? How do they store our data?

These contracts go into so much legalese and detail on claims and terms for which they’re potentially liable, but transparency around privacy and data security is still very much in the dark ages.

But above all, I just find it funny that a gas company wants to know my interests in the first place. I’m not sure my preferences for retrocomputers, anime, FreeBSD, and travel are that useful for someone selling hydrocarbons to a non-existent pipe.

Speaking of feeling old given the time since something was released, I saw Black★Rock Shooter has been around for a decade and a half now. 2007 was only a few years ago, right?

Anime News Network summarised it well:

The Black Rock Shooter franchise began with an illustration by huke of the eponymous character, which he posted on pixiv on December 26, 2007. The illustration inspired a song of the same title by supercell using the Hatsune Miku Vocaloid, and later spawned a 2010 original video anime (OVA) and a 2012 television anime, as well as spinoff manga, games, and figures depicting the character.

It’s also set to get another anime in April, which was news to me:

Illustrator huke revealed on Thursday that a new anime project for the Black Rock Shooter franchise is launching. The project is titled Black Rock Shooter: Dawn Fall.

The B★RS universe is so open, this new series could be about practically anything! Like Expelled from Paradise, the 2012 anime also used CGI in its fight scenes, which drew mixed reactions. I thought it was well executed for the time, and even stands up relatively well a decade later.

Speaking of standing up though, that’s not the primary reason I bring this up. huke’s decade anniversary art from five years ago (cries again in old man!) is getting possibly one of the most intricate figures I’ve ever seen! They’ve captured her expression and detail so well here, even down to the scuff marks on the paint in the upper-right:

But this is the most amazing part: check out that base! This is less of an anime figure and more a table centrepiece:

From the official minisite:

The base features a light source that acts as indirect lighting for the whole figure. The faint glow of the crystallized blue flames and her mechanical wings have been faithfully brought into figure form.

It says something when these kinds of collectables are even getting their own detailed websites, and even smoke machines for photography. Gone are the days of those marble paper lightboxes.

Someone on social media posed the question, which I thought would be fun to answer. It’ll also be under Pieces of Eight on my Omake page.

• Our air fryer
• Takeaway coffee
• A split keyboard
• Technics SL-J300R quartz lock, direct drive, linear tracking turntable
• Esther Golton’s discography
• Redundant hard drives
• Pandan essential oil for our diffuser
• Plane tickets

If I had to cheat and add a ninth one, is a phrase with ten words.

Trix Farrar:

Git is not version control! It is a means with which file trees are to be kept in sync. The fact that it allows mutable history invalidates it as “version control”.

It reminds me of Poul-Henning Kamp’s comments, as quoted on Makefile.feld:

Git is a tool which allows people and projects to manage, modify, fork and merge the many different views, instances, variations and modifications of a work in progress across barriers of distrust.

The crucial word there was “many different”, which is the exact opposite of what a VCS strives for.

A lot of the features Git provides, features which are what makes it great as a colaboration tool, flies in the face or or directly invalidates the guarantees you normally expect from a VCS, most notably progression of time & version, immutability and consistency of view.

I just finished reading the announcement for the latest version of the KDE Plasma desktop. They have a bunch of helpful videos showing new aspects of the design, and how updated features work.

There’s a bunch of goodies in here, but I’m most keen to try the new Overview effect task switcher, and the new Breeze Light and Dark themes. The team have also done work to improve positioning Desktop Panels, something that has been a bit clunky in the past. Even the launcher looks a little better organised.

I love the polish and attention to detail, from the screenshots and features themselves, to the writing of the announcement post. KDE are firing on all cylinders, and it’s a delight to see.

If you’re interested in trying KDE, FreeBSD has it in ports, or I can also recommend KDE Neon or Kubuntu if you want to give it a try.

It took us more than a year on our little Minecraft server, buying a map from a villager, and wandering more than 16,000 blocks from our spawn point, but we got here!

There was mercifully a nether portal just near it, so we can get back home faster. The next step is to make a little building for it to match the mansion, and build a nether rail back.

What’s curious is that it didn’t spawn anywhere near a woodland or forest at all. The area is featureless tundra. The map topology also changed completely as we walked closer to the building. Our world started in 1.16, so maybe 1.18 changed the area.

We thought we had some big buildings by now, but this mansion is huge. It probably drawfs the footprint of our scaled-down Suntec City replica.

I missed this news, via Jeff Geerling:

Yesterday Raspberry Pi announced the 64-bit version is finally official. It’s no longer hidden away in a crusty forum link, it’s linked straight from their public downloads page and the Raspberry Pi Imager.

The download page still displays the default 32-bit version first, but having 64-bit as an official option is a big step.

Going to 64-bit isn’t an automatic win in and of itself; the original few generations of hardware don’t support it, and you do lose a bit of memory. But as more software targets 64-bit specifically, I’m sure we’ll start to see it listed as a requirement.

64-bit FreeBSD has also been available for a while. Those interested can check out this page published by the FreeBSD Foundation.

I’ve been getting stuck into reading and watching videos about the Dassault Mercure again recently, and it’s got me thinking whether the aircraft would have had more success being launched today.

The French Mercure entered service in the 1970s as a fuel efficient narrowbody optimised for short-haul routes. Its conventional appearance belied a surprising number of technical innovations, and its collaborative development helped set the scene for Airbus, one of the two big Western aircraft manufacturers.

Here’s a photo by ignis of one at the Museum of Air and Space in Paris. I happen to think its cockpit and lines look more futuristic and modern than its contemporaries, but that might just be me!

Disappointingly for aviation fans, it didn’t succeed in the market. I’ve seen the following reasons cited by historians:

• It’s short range made sense in France and parts of Western Europe, but limited its utility across North America.

• Airlines with fleets of 737s and DC-9s were happy to trade fuel efficiency for flexibility. In a pinch, both American airframes could be redeployed for routes the Mercure wasn’t designed for.

• Airlines couldn’t justify spending extra on spare parts, expertise, and pilot training when they had existing narrowbody fleets.

• A falling US dollar made the aircraft comparatively more expensive.

Note that only half those reasons were a direct result of the Mercure’s design. Like so many engineering stories, the outcome came down to economics. It’s no good having an optimised, technically sophisticated aircraft if the financial model doesn’t make sense for operators… even if you have the government backing your project.

But that was then. Airlines are operating under a very different environment than they were in the early 1970s, and part of me thinks an equivalent Mercure built with 2020s tech could succeed today.

Fuel is the biggest difference I can see. It wasn’t a concern prior to the first energy crisis, but it commands a significant portion of the operating budgets of modern airline companies (especially those that aren’t as shrewd as the likes of SIA with their fuel hedges). Airlines also have larger fleets today, so probably have the capacity and appetite to operate more aircraft types if they can save money in this key area.

This change has kinda happened. Airbus partnered with Bombardier to relaunch their CSeries jets as the A220. The A220 has much shorter range than narrowbodies like the re-engineered 737 or the A320, but it offers significant fuel savings. Sound familiar? This time, regional jets in North America and Europe have snapped them up, because the economics make sense.

But there are other considerations. High-speed rail, especially within France and Germany, have made the routes the Mercure was originally designed for obsolete. But budget airlines also exist now, and I could see a Mercure flying with the likes of AirAsia around Indonesia and Malaysia.

It seems to be now, with the incredible perceptive power of hindsight, that the Mercure was the right aircraft at the wrong time. I guess it always pays to be one step ahead, but not two.

Jon Udell wrote a post at the end of January talking about another effect lockdowns and Covid have had:

I realized that commuter culture had, for several generations, sucked the daytime life out of neighborhoods. What we initially called telecommuting wasn’t just a way to save time, reduce stress, and burn less fossil fuel. It held the promise of restoring that daytime life.

All this came back to me powerfully at the height of the pandemic lockdown. Walking around the neighborhood on a weekday afternoon I’d see families hanging out, kids playing, parents working on landscaping projects and tinkering in garages, neighbors talking to one another. This was even better than my experience in the 2000s because more people shared it.

Let’s hold that thought. Even if many return to offices on some days of the week, I believe and hope that we’ve normalized working from home on other days. By inhabiting our neighborhoods more fully on weekdays, we can perhaps begin to repair a social fabric frayed by generations of commuter culture.

Save for a few years in my childhood that I barely remember, I’ve usually only lived in apartment buildings in what my American friends would call downtown areas. But I can imagine those neighbourhoods would feel more alive with people treating them as places to live, rather than the terminating stop on a commute route. That can only be a healthy thing for a community.

(It’s probably why I’ve long found the idea of living in suburbia so depressing. Their environmental impact aside, they just feel so disconnected and isolated).

It’s been interesting witnessing this in Chatswood. The area is one of Sydney’s commercial and high-density residential suburbs, physically split by a commuter train line. I’ve felt little difference living on the residential and shopping side, but the business district has felt like a ghost town since mid-2020. It’s clear people were commuting to these skyscrapers from other areas, and those works are now all WFH. I walk around the area for evening exercise, and there are scant few lights on anywhere.

Life snapped back to normal quickly after Australia’s first set of lockdowns, but I feel like there’s been a shift in the last twelve months as Omicron became endemic. Even people who’ve since returned to offices only do so part time, and with the understanding that home is the default.

It raises some interesting questions. Will we get to the point where we’re repurposing business parks? Will councils acknowledge that mixed-use zoning has become the de facto standard, and work to integrate the needs of remote workers into their plans? Will public transport be seen as a general public good, and not a funnel for commuters wishing to all go to one place?

This also dovetails nicely with ideas like this for more local shopping.