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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Edit: wait, you might be right. As I understand, net neutrality is for the last mile ISPs, not the L1/L2 providers. So uh… what I explained below isn’t relevant. Eh, I’ll leave it in case people wanna learn stuff.

    It was a bad explanation, assuming you had knowledge of network infrastructure things, but it does make sense. I’ll explain things if you’re interested.

    Net neutrality is the idea that ISPs must treat all content providers equally. Your phone is not a content provider (most likely. You could run a web server on your phone, but… no). YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, TikTok, and your weird uncle’s WordPress site are content providers. Without net neutrality, ISPs can say, “Hey YouTube, people request a ton of traffic from you on our network. Pay up or we’ll slow down people’s connections to you.” The “neutrality” part means that ISPs must be neutral towards content providers, not discriminating against them for being high demand by consumers.

    For the L1 and L2 part, that’s the networking infrastructure. The connection to your home is just tiny cables. I don’t recall how many layers there are, but it’s just “last mile” infrastructure. The network infrastructure between regions of the country or across the ocean are giant, giant cables managed by internet service providers you’ve never heard of. They’re the kind of providers that connect AT&T to Comcast. These are considered L1 or L2 providers. The data centers of giant companies, like Google for YouTube’s case, often pay these L1 or L2 providers to plug directly into their data centers. Why? Those providers are using the biggest, fastest cables to ferry bits and bytes across the planet. You might be pulling gigs from YouTube, but YouTube is putting out… shit, I don’t even know. Is there a terabyte connection? Maybe even petabyte? That sounds crazy. I dunno, I failed Google’s interview question where they asked me to estimate how much storage does Google Drive use globally. Anyway, I hope that gives you an idea of what L1 and L2 providers are.

    I’m not a network infrastructure guy, though. If someone who actually knows what they’re talking about has corrections, I’d love to learn where I’m wrong



  • I run a group that does free software programming education in Seoul. There’s a similar group in LA. When I came to Korea, I just set up a meetup account, paid the fee, rented some space, and started teaching people stuff and studying together. Great way to make friends. Been running it for 7 years now. I’ve had about a dozen or so people come say the group has helped them change their career to IT for the better. A dozen sounds like a small number, but it’s a huge impact on those people

    So be the change you want to see. If you have a skill that can help people improve their lives, whether it’s career or life stuff, share it! Learning a new skill is hard, and having a community to support you in learning, goes a long way






  • 100/100 for 22,000 KRW/month (about $16.50 USD).

    Other options with my provider:

    • 500/500 for 35,750 KRW ($26.85)
    • 1000/1000 for 41,250 KRW ($31)
    • 2500/2500 for 44,000 KRW ($33)
    • 5000/5000 for 55,000 KRW ($41.31)
    • 10000/10000 for 82,500 KRW ($62)

    And that 100/100 is effective. Shit downloads fast

    One of many, many reasons I’m not fond of going back to the US. Maybe Europe next, we’ll see. For now, Korea is pretty sweet


  • (Edit: what I’m about to say is a good bit wrong, but I’m not going to try and hide my mistakes. This article has a more complete history: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/why-israel-and-palestine-conflict-war-history-b2426050.html)

    I don’t support the violence at all, but this isn’t a (direct) result of imperialism.

    After WW2, the Allies were like, “what do we do with all these Jews? We don’t want them in our countries.” Then they thought, “why not Jerusalem?” But a bunch of Arabs were living there, but the Allies really didn’t want more Jews, so they just dumped them all in modern Israel, told the Arabs this is Jews’ land now, and recognized Israel as a state. Palestine has a right to be pissed. So this isn’t so much an imperialism problem as much as a racism problem.

    But still, Hamas are evil fuckers that take shit too far. Israel definitely is not the good guy and is not helping the situation at all, but this kind of escalation just makes shit worse for everyone.



  • My dude, I think you’re not super familiar with these technologies.

    The most basic form of a content delivery network is a set of globally distributed servers that replicate content from a source of truth and a network to direct traffic to the closest server with a valid replica. So the cost here is servers.

    With Lemmy, this problem is solved by eliminating the need for individuals to own many servers and a lack of need for trust between servers. The effort and cost is distributed among individual humans, making it manageable.

    Now, if you’re familiar with blockchain, you probably perked up when you heard “lack of need for trust.” That’s what the blockchain was built for! Perfect fit, right? Ehh, not so much.

    There’s two problems: acting as a proxy for content requires trust, and some single service needs to direct clients to the right local server. If I can arbitrarily join some network of serving content, I can always tell other servers in the network that I’m serving what they ask… and then serve ads. There’s no (reasonable and fast) way for the network to verify that I’m serving the correct content to every client. There’s no way to avoid the need for trust. Additionally, DNS, which directs you from mysite.com to 120.1.2.1, isn’t intelligent. It can’t direct clients to a geographically (or route-efficient, fucking ISPs) local IP. The best it can do is pick a random one from the pool. So when you go to lemmy.world, DNS can’t pick the correct server for you. So some set of servers needs to do the logic to select which local server to actually get content from. Those servers need to be central for the whole content delivery network.

    This company you linked is just another company using “blockchain” to get investment money. If you read through their page to get a cursory understanding of how things work, an easy question comes up: what is the purpose of media tokens? Sure, maybe you can buy CDN time with it, but when you pay that token to someone providing compute… what do they do with that token? It’s worthless, just like crypto currency. Fucking scams. All that said, blockchain is a super, super interesting technology. There’s just very, very few suitable applications of it.

    I’ve worked in IT for about 12 years now. Everything from infrastructure monitoring to data analysis to data engineering to DevOps to backend engineering to product management. I’ve worked with systems serving tens of users and tens of millions of users. Happy to answer any questions. I love this shit.

    If someone could figure out a trustless, decentralized way to implement a CDN, I’d eat that up in a second, but with my current understanding of the internet and available technologies, I don’t see a way it can work. At least, not with making every web page take >3s to load, which would absolutely kill websites.


  • TheBeege@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldI can't code.
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    1 year ago

    What are these answers…

    Wrong place to ask, but whatever.

    It depends on what you want to build. If you’re not sure, start with Python. It’s likely easiest to pick up and get running. There’s a book called “Automate the Boring Stuff.” I think there’s an online version. (Edit: link - https://automatetheboringstuff.com/)

    If you don’t want to set up Python (or any language, really) on your computer, there’s a tool called a REPL that you can find online. So you can just search “Python online REPL,” and you’ll get a functional online environment to code. Now, you won’t be able to do stuff interacting with your local computer this way, like reading files, but it’s good for learning the basics of the language.

    In terms of software for writing code in on your local computer, Visual Studio Code (NOT to be confused with Visual Studio) is a free, lightweight code editor. It supports every language via plugins.

    If you do go the Python route, make sure to learn about virtual environments before you do ‘pip’ or ‘conda’ anything. Also, unless you’re doing data science things, stick to pip. (Maybe some personal bias there, but I hate anaconda.) If you’re starting from nothing, it’ll be awhile until you get there anyway, so don’t worry too much about it.

    Most importantly, find a community that welcomes new learners. Learning to code is absolutely fucking brutal, so having supportive people available makes a world of difference. Bonus points if you can find an offline meetup in your local area.