Yeah, I remember when I was trying to parse XML into some lua tables and it forever stumped me how to represent something like
<thing important_param=10 other_param="abracadabra"> stuff </thing>
You just have to have different ways to turn different tags into stuff in your program and that's a huge amount of overhead to think about when all I want is a hash map and maybe an array.
Anything an API returns should just look like 1720533944.963659 .
There's no reason to store dates as anything other than UTC. User-side, sure, timezones are useful. Server doesn't have to know.
Oh, I know the experience pretty well. The fun fun fun of having something stuck at 98% for a week or more :D
I was thinking, if the creator themselves would seed their stuff it could work - although I admit it'd have to have some kind of seed schedule and maybe some heuristic to see which videos were still available or not. There'd be problems with bandwidth, but I think it would at least allow a decentralised video network to exist, even if it would feel a bit more like watching anime in year 2010.
And yeah, fair point. I don't really do live streams so I didn't think about them. Honestly don't know what a solution for that even could be, in terms of "everyone hosts a little bit to spread the load and price".
Don't really think it'd be that big of a mess for premiers, but then again I don't see a big issue in waiting a day to get good content. Y'all are spoiled with cdns and social media /s :D! In my experience torrents propagate pretty quickly so it could still work. Think the bigger issue would be the fact that people have preference for different resolutions, so you'd end up with massive torrent downloads that have 4k, 2k, 1080p, 720p, etc. Or multiple torrent files for different resolution. The worst outcome would of course be "creator just dumps 8k 60fps content on the network and tells you good luck".
Either way, I won't pretend like torrent net could match the service of youtube right now - but I do think it could actually make a video network actually work, without prohibitive costs for the hosters and subscriptions for the basic users. It'd still be nice to support creators and the trackers but those aren't as big of an ask as "host hundreds of 4k videos per creator forever".
[edit] as a last minute thought - I think I know another reason why torrents may not work so well. You'd have to have an app or a browser extension to use them, which limits the accessibility compared to "open url and watch".
I feel like the true decentralised approach to video that may work... Are torrents. Don't know if PeerTube works that way, but if you're allowing people to eat your bandwidth with direct streaming, you're gonna run into problems sooner or later.
There are usually plenty of choices for ISPs here, actually. But switching between them isn't likely to give me IPv6 since either they share a magistral or the hardware is just plain old. That, and IPv6 is just not a thing anyone markets.
...and with the current fuckery going on, I doubt many of them have budget for big upgrades. Or maybe even access to hardware to buy.
Yeah, here in Russia the ISPs and IT infrastructure guys seem to be treating IPv6 like it has cooties. I can't find an article (and it'd be in russian anyway) but as far back as 2022, if you get IPv6 you can expect a variety of issues with it, ranging from "you need to reboot your router every once in a while" to "you technically have v6 but good luck actually browsing v6 internet".
And of course, why would they give you a stable IP when they can charge for it :T. At least it's only a third the price of a stable IPv4.
My current ISP technically provides v6 according to their site - but my connection doesn't have it, and since there's nothing about it in the years-old contract, I'd need to redo that if I want to complain.
Imagine actually having ipv6 available through your ISP.
...and ever if my ISP actually provided one, getting a static one costs money so there's no difference in the end.
Well, kinda-sorta. I've yet to hit ip block when browsing without a VPN, but VPNs and proxies definitely are getting blocked pretty consistently.
And seeing how wonderful the situation here is right now, I'm pretty familiar with VPNs at this point.
Yeah, I guess that's a local slang.
Yeah, I just checked, getting a static IPv6 here in Russia from my ISP costs ~.4 eur per month. IPv4 is ~1 eur, so you get a discount if you go for v6! Oh and despite my ISP saying they support v6, connection I got doesn't have it at all. Probably whatever hardware they got in my house doesn't know what it is.
Mordor itself, Russia. Technically, most ISPs support IPv6 here but as I said each has something weird in config that makes using it... Fun. I don't remember specifics since I'm mostly looking at it from consumer side, but I could try finding the article (in russian) that talked about it.
My current connection doesn't have IPv6 at all according to https://ipv6-test.com/, although I'm not 100% if it's because of provider or Cisco AnyConnect blocking shit.
When you when you sign up for internet here, you get a dynamic IP, it's been that way for... As long as I can remember, really. Definitely more than ten years. I know in Moscow people used to get white IPs way back when, but that's long gone. Not really a problem since most people don't host anything.
Man, the variable scoping thing is insidious. It will never not be weird to me that
ifs and loops don't actually create a new scope.And then you try to do a closure and it tells you you didn't import anything yet.