THE EDGE OF INSANITY

A while ago I read this post by Sean Conner, where he reflects upon 
a quote from a John Carmack (but seems to have left out the link 
for where the quote came from):
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog%3a2023/01/09.1

The quote is:

  It is amusing to consider how much of the world you could serve 
  something like Twitter to from a single beefy server if it really
  was just shuffling tweet sized buffers to network offload cards.
  Smart clients instead of web pages could make a very large
  difference.

He makes the point that this is a valid argument against the sort 
of websites that he (and I) prefer - suitable for display by "dumb" 
clients (web browsers without Javascript). He expands upon this to 
describe the concept of a client program as an "edge" to a network. 
He beleives it's better to put the smarts in the client than in the 
whole network. I'd be inclined to think that both server and client 
were edges of the internet. Actually the network getting smarter 
with stuff like CGNAT is in fact all that enforces the distinction 
by creating a sub-class of internet connections that don't work as 
servers. But I do get the point overall.

These days everyone (except me, posting here from a computer made 
over 25 years ago) browses the web with vastly over-powered client 
(or "edge") computers. Yet for sites like Twitter, the server 
is/was expected to do lots of the display formatting work for the 
client as if it were some slow old thing like I'd use. The 
suggestion is that instead the web browser should just be host of a 
Javascript program that does the formatting and navigation on the 
client, using all those CPU cycles otherwise going to waste at the 
client side, thereby taking a lot of jobs off the busy server.

But I think this whole discussion just backs up what I was saying 
in my last post:
gopher://aussies.space/0/%7efreet/phlog/2023-01-08Beginning_the_Internets_Flying_Car_Era.txt

There I talked about how the internet has settled wholly into the 
form of the web, excluding all other protocols as effectively 
obsolete, and this just backs that up because, for pity's sake, 
Twitter shouldn't be a website in the first place!

The web was meant for browsing documents. Dynamic stuff like 
searches and buying goods is fine to add on top of that. But as a 
discussion platform it's rubbish. What would be a single beefy 
server shuffling tweet-sized buffers? Forget the web for a second 
and he could be talking about NNTP and Usenet! Yes, the protocol 
that pre-dated the Web, and which Web forums, then Twitter (etc.), 
took over from (except with people like me). With it, all the 
formatting's done by the NNTP client (newsreader), which just 
requests the posts it needs in plain-text and figures the 
presentation out itself. The same could be said of IMAP, POP, and 
SMTP, which most people seem to be abandoning now for web-based 
email clients, along with all the other even more rarely-used 
protocols, FTP and so on.

So really this whole thing has gone full circle. From an original 
problem of "how do we make private discussions, public discussions, 
file sharing, and document retrieval work over the internet?", now 
it's turned into "right so everyone now just uses the thing we made 
for document retrieval, how can we morph that into something that 
does all those other tasks just as efficiently as the old programs 
that everyone's forgotten about?". The answer arrived at is 
actually, on a technical level, a terrible replacement for the 
likes of NNTP - a very inefficient programming language 
(Javascript), required to run proprietary client programs which are 
re-downloaded every time you use them, which communicate using 
their own private 'protocols' on top of HTTPS, and without support
for any third-party alternative clients.

It's insane, but it means that the user only has to know about the 
web, because that's where everything has settled at (no doubt 
helped by how the web has proven to be the best protocol through 
which to generate revenue). Unfortunately downloading your emails 
using POP may be set to go the same way as technologies like 
telegrams that preceeded it: Just another quaint example of how 
people used to do the same sort of things in times past.

On the up side, fast internet and low running costs for provider's 
server hardware means that using NNTP is now cheaper and faster 
than ever, if only you can still find someone else using it to talk 
to. I doubt that's what John Carmack was talking about as 
"amusing", but this whole thing sure seems funny to me.

 - The Free Thinker