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Is there really nothing like BitTorrent for git, or have we just not heard about it because of GitHub's network effects? It feels like this problem was solved long ago for binaries.


From today:

HardenedBSD Is Now Officially on Radicle

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47944864


the fact that you, as the creator of a "competitor", post this as-is without a "At $co, we…" run-on is a good look

Oh, that's pretty cool! Now I can't decide whether that approach or one based on AT is better...

Pick whichever. We <3 the Radicle team and they're admittedly solving a much harder problem (gossiping git!) and rather elegantly at that.

Yeah I’ve met the Radicle people a couple times. I’ve never given it a thorough review but, for their goals, their designs have always seemed strong, and they’re pleasant people to chat with.

The main difference was atproto wanted to tackle scale, so we went with a servers & aggregation model. Radicle is going for device-to-device networking as a primary goal.


Do you think it will be possible to use them together? Having some sort of unified distributed system is intriguing to me. (e.g. can the Radical foundation and AT-proto foundation integrate, even?)

There is also ForgeFed/vervis

gittorrents were talked about and built at least 15 if not 20 years ago.

the issue isn't mirroring of data, this is a solved problem. everything else that a forge does is a problem - issue tracking, PRs, reviews, CI/CD, authn, authz, secrets, audit trails, ...


BitTorrent also enabled search engines to be built easily, which created discoverability. Unfortunately it's a much harder problem for git repos, especially when competing with GitHub search.

Radicle may be what you're after

Git is already distributed by itself. The management-part is what's missing (mergerequests, permissions, issues..), and it's disputable whether this is really necessary, or just a nice to have.

Things Fall Apart

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned


Let's not forget the really big gamble (inventing EUV) was made in the 1990s by US national labs: Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, and Lawrence Berkeley.

Every country tries to claim critical dependency for innovations. I guess you parochially mention that one because you remember that narrative (maybe because it makes you feel better).

I maliciously searched for examples of the French thinking they invented the transistor.

Turns out the French do have a claim of inventing it simultaneously (at the same time as Bell) and the French even commercialised their version since their tech had different parameters (Apparently it was two German inventors working for Westinghouse in France on a project for French telecoms as I recall). The history of invention/commercialisation is usually wierd.


>Apparently it was two German inventors working for Westinghouse in France on a project for French telecoms as I recall

So the Germans invented it! JK

I like how you put this. It always seems weird to me how some people get hung up on these claims when it's so obvious that history is full of basically simultaneous inventions.


Except ASML licensed the technology from the US Government, after the government labs built the first EUV fab in 2001. Not to take anything away from ASML...all the US companies that also licensed the tech failed to commercialize it, but the US Government blocked Canon and other Japanese companies from acquiring the technology. The entire reason ASML has the technology and nobody in Japan does is geopolitical.

Inventing EUV lasers.

Optics and photoresist materials too. The partnership developed the first EUV lithography in 2001: https://www.llnl.gov/article/27641/euvl-partnership-makes-it...

I mean, your brain has an order of magnitude more neurons than there are people on the planet. I think humans are just incapable of wrapping our heads around the sheer number of tiny things that fit in small macroscopic spaces.

Why would a machine need to make anything? Is a robot arm not a machine? How about a trash compactor? Are the 6 types of simple machines not machines?

A machine is a device that uses energy to perform work. Typically by applying or transforming force, motion, or both.

The space shuttle can be thought of maybe as a collection of machines working in concert, but thinking of it as ONE machines renders the meaning of machine less useful.


In my understanding a device has its origin in giving advice and does something specific for you (a pen is a writing device, a mixer is a cooking device, a phone is a communication device, a bus is a transportation device etc.).

A machine on the other hand has its roots in its mechanisms. It physically transforms something by applying mechanical power, and that's not necessarily done for you (e.g. printing device VS printing machine).

Whether a device can be composed out of many smaller devices, or whether a machine can be composed out of many smaller machines just doesn't seem to be relevant. That being said, language evolves with time and certain concepts find some overlap in general usage.


Device comes from Latin dividere, meaning "something which is divided". Later with old French devis (disposition, desire, purpose, or decorative emblem) and deviser (arrange, plan). A device is something planned, designed, potentially intricate. A device doesn't always need to be mechanical/physical as there are "literal devices" and one can be "left to their devices". I'd say "device" is more like "a planned thing" if giving a basic definition.

A machine is almost always a device, but a device isn't always a machine. A fancy earring can be a device, but it is clearly not a machine.


> the relational model can subsume "graph" queries, but for all the reasons Codd laid out back in the 60s... network (aka connected graph) databases cannot do the latter.

Except network databases have little in common with graph databases...they're much more closely related to hierarchical databases.

I would say that Graph databases are now a strict superset of relational databases, not the other way around. In a graph database a node's named edge can naturally point to a node of any type or having any property schema. Doing this in a relational model requires one of several approaches that could only be classified as fighting against the model (or torturing it, as my PI liked to say).


Working with relational databases after getting used to Neo4j feels like wearing handcuffs.

how does this compare to gpt-oss-120b? It seems weird to leave it out.

GPT-OSS 120B (really 117B-A5.1B) is a lot bigger. better comparison would be to 20B (21B-A3.6B).

OSS-120 is too old to be relevant, and four times the size.

It seems like Claude has taken Github's place in terms of developer reaction to it being unavailable. It's like everyone forgot how they did things 18 months ago.


I'm so old I remember working on databases that were designed to use RAW, not files. I'm betting some databases still do, but probably only for mainframe systems nowadays.



> Oracle® Database Platform Guide 10g Release 2 (10.2) for Microsoft Windows Itanium (64-Bit)

Well, I guess that at least confirms Oracle on Itanium (!?) still supported RAW 5 years ago.

I'm guessing everyone's on ASM by now though, if they're still upgrading. I ran into a company not long ago with a huge oracle cluster that still employed physical database admins and logical database admins as separate roles...I would bet they're still paying millions for an out of date version of Oracle and using RAW.


> still supported RAW 5 years ago

I seem to remember Oracle 10g was first released over 20 years ago? It has been EOL for much longer than 5 years...


Oh you're right! I was looking at the last documentation update timestamp, but the original release was 2006. That makes a lot more sense than Itanium support in 2021.

It took me way too long to get that.


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