Started by Mark bc7291552be7a58f... ·
Anonymous wrote:
What does the word "network" even stand for, after all? You people ever wondered how to distinguish this kind of misunderstanding? Like, if someone says the network is: for people, for individuals, for me, etc. Who will be right and who will be wrong?
The network is the infrastructure, the infrastructure is the network, maaaaan
The Dude wrote:
The network is the infrastructure, the infrastructure is the network, maaaaan
I don't get it. What is infrastructure? But tbh it's a rhetorical question. Every page on wikipedia eventually leads to philosophy.
Anonymous wrote:
I'm just saying that this thing might occur again and the cause of this problem lies in the design itself. Like, there's no point blaming this guy for being "dumb" if network allows it's users to act like this. I just don't see how this can be prevented without additional restrictions and surveillance.
Ok let's just remove Reticulum from the equation here.
Imagine email was the new big thing.
Imagine if I prompted a LLM to go vibecode an email client and just fed it "Go make me a email client, here's the docs for SMTP."
I have zero hand in any of the code. Hell I haven't even read the code. Or understand how SMTP works. I am totally reliant on the LLM word generator to tell me everything.
My vibecoded email client now starts doing stuff like:
and other assorted nonsense.
There is only so much software can do to to avoid something like that. Imagine I then went around, running like a chicken without its head promoting my email client to other people.
This is the problem Reticulum is experiencing. It isn't anything the protocol could do to fix. It is a social cohesion problem.
LLMs are fallible. While the technology behind them has been around a long time, the idea of "vibecoding" has not. People treat it like some magic sooper smart general purpose artificial intelligence instead of the grep-on-crack search engine word predictor combo it really is.
I have no other way of illustrating the problem in a way it would make sense to people.
I feel a growing need for a reti-firewall project :/ Any public network will always have bad actors and idiots. We need the tools to protect our own corners of it.
The next logical step is some type of stamp system for Destinations themselves.
There's a branch on Aleph git with some scaffolding for Identity-level stamps, but what's truly needed is Destination level stamps to disincentivize this type of network behavior. I would also put forth this to be an opt-in layer versus something "baked in".
a8d24177d946de4f1f0a0fe1af9a1338:/page/tree.mu`g=reticulum|r=reticulum|ref=dev_stamps
v3 hidden services on the Tor network have something similar
https://onionservices.torproject.org/technology/security/pow/
Naturally, stamping has a larger impact on nodes running on low performance hardware, right? Wouldn't Microreticulum be at risk of getting "throttled" by the nature of cycling through hashes to achieve the appropriate stamp cost?
Anonymous wrote:
Naturally, stamping has a larger impact on nodes running on low performance hardware, right? Wouldn't Microreticulum be at risk of getting "throttled" by the nature of cycling through hashes to achieve the appropriate stamp cost?
Not if it was in a transport role, it's just forwarding packets.
This would only affect someone initiating a link, and in this scenario, only if the destination is advertising a stamp cost.
Has anyone tried to contact one of the "idiots"?
I could try to, if you think it could help in some cases.
Because I think, we all have pictures in our mind, but some (most?) of
the "idiots" could just be naive 12 year olds who don't know what they
are doing. This will not make building up resilience less necessary,
but it may still be helpful. I dunno.
Then, my second thought is: of course do people come here with their
habits. The first thing a lot of people will do after they discovered
Reticulum/ Nomadnet is to ask: what can I do here? How can I even find
out? Wait... here is a search engine. Let's try it.
I myself, for example, I discovered reticulum while I was searching
for an alternative to Signal. I don't have a background using mesh
building (I'm a programmer and mathematician, if you wonder). And
since in the past paths often misbehaving, I sometimes used such a
search engine to simply save time.
What I want to say is: now that reticulum gets more known, and a lot
of new people are attracted (which is not a bad thing) - it could have
a good impact to guide them more.
Why not share some more links to nodes to get people started? How do
I find a node where I can browse Retipedia? What can I expect to do
here - and what not? Where can I ask questions? Are people expected
to look at those long lists of node names that are used to be offered
a lot, like "Amber Pages" or "Amber Hubs"? They exist, but most nodes
have names that don't tell me much. So, nearly every newcomer will
ask: how am I supposed to get along with this? I heard there is a lot
of crap software around - how can I avoid it - what are the
trustworthy programs?
Keep in mind that there are a lot of nice people around that don't
have a technical background at all. Without guidance, a lot of
newcomers will use a search engine as soon as they find one.
With other words: let's not forget the social component, finally, a
reticulum net always is something social! If you don't like how
(some) people are using it - please speak to them. You have a lot of
control what people will be doing. You can ask for help to improve
these things. OTOH, I don't think you will be able to solve every
kind of problem with technical means alone (although they probably are
the main part).
An example: having a guide like "this is reticulum/nomadnet, your
first steps, what you can expect here and what not" would be very
helpful and could also prevent undesired developments. At least, this
is something I missed, sometimes I felt a bit lost. People must know
how they can do better, else they will fall back to what they used to
do in "the Internet".
Please note that I do not speak about the 10 or maybe 20 percent of
people who don't know what they are doing and/or don't care, but about
the big majority of people who do.
What I, personally, also would like to know is: where do you see
reticulum, nomadnet etc. several years in the future? What would be
good developments? Or is it all more or less already good as it is,
and you don't want too much more going one (social stuff, for example)
at all? What should I as a user better avoid or not expect to find?
Why?
So I think this is my main point (apart from avoiding negative bias
because dumb people are causing so much harm): a welcome page that
gets people started, that is updated regularly, and guides people that
don't want to cause harm but just lack knowledge at the moment.
Does that make sense? I could offer my help - although I'm a newcomer
(and I also don't have too much energy left all the time). Mark
should probably not get an additional task...
BTW1 - 72a2d9c12215802605779f4366d48335 (Community Wiki) already answers a lot of questions. If I picked the correct node, I wish I had discovered it earlier.
BTW2: reticulum.at - it also looks strange. People speak German in Austria. I speak German. Reading that page's text feels strange. Probably not written by humans.
Rudi Mentaire wrote:
BTW2: reticulum.at - it also looks strange. People speak German in Austria. I speak German. Reading that page's text feels strange. Probably not written by humans.
Nothing better than the feeling of artificial text
Want to add to the P2P comparison. I am sure most people here already know a lot of this but its always good to recap old lessons. to Zeniths point right out the gate some standards I hadn't really thought about testing for in projects is safe default env vars and opt out that's easier to obey (hence my meshData change). Zenith already pointed to the lessons learned in P2P with bitswap and bartercast and choking as a solution. The freeloader problem will always be a problem for your network and the answer is a technical solution that addresses a social problem. One worrying thing here I see is a confusion on what constitutes an anti-adversarial systems and anti-dumbstuff systems. most of what is being described here won't stop any of this behavior. simply making abuse more expensive makes the network less accessible and while it would deter and adversary it does deter someone oblivious to the offense. I could see a clear QoS system existing here right now all you have is an on off switch with the black hole (though that might have changed in 1.5?) I am sure whatever libtorrent or whoever has now far exceed anything we had back then for this issue.
Roogle crawler was stopped. I apologize for any issues this may have caused.
I have an idea.
What if there was a section for people, that want to vibe-code stuff Reticulum. There they would post their ideas and old dogs would actually give feedback on it, maybe guidance on how to do it properly, like Mark did for the search engine above, or NOT to go a specific way, what actually one needs to understand and how deep to properly guide an LLM for the job etc. Does this sound reasonable? Or just cut and clean - if you don't understand the code, don't mess with LLM's and Reticulum?
Mark's reply above gave me this idea.
Slop PRs in repos has become a ubiquitous problem in open source, because people just jump in without care to read documentation or get guidance, and it takes much longer to sort all the slop than it does to just write the good code yourself. There is debate on whether LLMs are getting good enough for this problem to go away on its own. Pointing to a short reticulum best practices list to always include at start/end of LLM context is probably the best you can do for the effort/benefit.
I don't know what is exactly going on with this vibecoded reticulum.at one man show thing but it is unrelated to other Reticulum initiatives around Austria and really casts a bad light onto the other communities really doing hard work atm.
I think its just one person trying to form a community. Apparently using ai to build the website. Not much else to it, and no bad intention I am pretty sure. Just dont take it as a representation for all of austria. We dont need national borders to form a community after all.
hey mark how about you just get better at designing to be resilient to bad actors, or admit that one guy can’t do everything and get better at working with others/running this thing like a real grown-up software project instead of a megalomaniacal fever dream
makes a network for everyone
gets mad when everyone starts using it
Bad Actor wrote:
hey mark how about you just get better at designing to be resilient to bad actors, or admit that one guy can’t do everything and get better at working with others/running this thing like a real grown-up software project instead of a megalomaniacal fever dream
makes a network for everyone
gets mad when everyone starts using it
Nice manners! Marvel style! Blame - awayy! YOUR network should be resilient to us!!! It's your fault you don't aprreciate idiots more!!! It has to withstand our abuse!!! WE ARE ENTITLED TO ABUSE IT!!! IT IS... OUUUURSSSSSSSSSS.... Megalomaniacal Bad Actor. Bad, bad bad actor... DOWN! DOWN!!! EAT LESS SUGAR! WATCH LESS TV! Build something with your hands for years, sacrifice and upbring. Become a real meaningful human being. And than watch Bad Actor puke ill mannered vomit over you, bark like a dog and pee over your effort, because HE CAN, because he is ANONYMOUS! The world is full of you.
Anonymous wrote:
hey mark how about you just get better at designing to be resilient to bad actors, or admit that one guy can’t do everything and get better at working with others/running this thing like a real grown-up software project instead of a megalomaniacal fever dream
makes a network for everyone
gets mad when everyone starts using it
If abusing the network with a slop-scraper is "usage" in your book, then you can go and eat dirt, Anon.
Mark made a network for everyone. He has the right to get mad anytime.
You can also shove that anonymous advice of yours up where the sun doesn't shine, Mr. "Real Grown-up".
I fucking dare you, what's not "grown-up" enough for you in Mark's development practices?
Anonymous wrote:
hey mark how about you just get better at designing to be resilient to bad actors, or admit that one guy can’t do everything and get better at working with others/running this thing like a real grown-up software project instead of a megalomaniacal fever dream
makes a network for everyone
gets mad when everyone starts using it
How about not beeing an asshole to everyone? - You did not stop me, so its your fault.
Great
