this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
812 points (98.1% liked)

Programmer Humor

19821 readers
2 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Context:

People have been asking for IPv6 Support on GitHub since years (probably a decade by now)

... and someone even got so annoyed that they decided to setup a dedicated website for checking this: https://isgithubipv6.live/

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Imho

Ipv4 and peak oil are similar.

We're constantly running out; but every fes years, we figure out a new way to extract more oil/make do with the addresses we currently have.

Someone sells of their underused block, or more people move to the services with excess IP addresses if they need one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

We’re constantly running out; but every fes years

critical difference here was also the consumption of oil. It's gone down significantly since then as processes have moved to other materials and more efficient methods of manufacturing, due to the price increase of oil. Likewise, our oil consumption has gone down, and our ability to extract it HAS gone up, just not all that much. The big difference is that there's just more oil that we know about now, than there used to be.

IPV4 addresses are a static pool, that never changes, the only thing that changes is the adoption of them, as certain things move to IPV6 they're still likely to hold IPV4 in some capacity, as IPV6 isn't fully rolled out almost anywhere.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

critical difference here was also the consumption of oil. It’s gone down significantly since then as processes have moved to other materials and more efficient methods of manufacturing,

Do you have a source for that? Because this seems to suggest fossil fuel and oil demand might of roughly plateaued the last few years, the dip looks pretty welly correlated to Covid.

IPv4 addresses are a static pool, yes. But we're continually using them more efficiently, the same as Oil. The difference being that Oil has a limit on the amount of energy contained in its chemical bonds, but you could quite happily host 1,000 or 10,000 websites on a single server.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Do you have a source for that?

yes sorry, what i meant to say was "the expected usage of oil over time" When a lot of the early to late 90's "we're running out of oil stuff was happening, a lot of predictions would've been based on continued increased usage of oil. Rather than it just randomly plateauing. It's likely that the predicted curve would've have been significantly more exponential than presented.

And we're also talking on a more local scale here, so this would be more centric around a single country, or north america specifically. Or perhaps assuming that third world countries would start industrializing or something. There are any number of factors that could have influenced the potential consumption predictions.

another interesting tidbit, this was also just after the time we thought we were going to build a lot of nuclear power, so arguably that influenced the older variants of the graph as well as the modern consumption of oil for power production, for example.

IPv4 addresses are a static pool, yes. But we’re continually using them more efficiently, the same as Oil.

Yeah but idk about this one. Perhaps at the scale of CDNs and proxy distribution, but generally, i don't see this being very possible, simply because in order for a site to be supported strictly by IPV6 it must be supported by all connecting clients, and considering that most clients today are uh, not IPV6. If you want your service to work, it's going to need to be IPV4. I mean sure internal communications, but those aren't real so you can use any subnet range you want, it makes no difference.

but you could quite happily host 1,000 or 10,000 websites on a single server.

it depends on what you classify as a server, what you define a website as, and how you define the usage of it, but yeah generally, ignoring the fact that this is irrelevant, it's about that simple.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

And we’re also talking on a more local scale here, so this would be more centric around a single country, or north america specifically.

North America is an interesting example here, because North America HIT peak oil once, way back in the 80's, and it was only with the invention of Fracking that it came back.

Yeah but idk about this one. Perhaps at the scale of CDNs and proxy distribution,

Once upon a time people debated if virtual hosts were best practice or if that would affect their SEO. We've definitely progressed since then, both to conserve IP addresses, but mainly because DDOS prevention is best done centralised (Looking at you Cloudflare).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

We're constantly running out; but every fes years, we figure out a new way to extract more oil/make do with the addresses we currently have.

It's a supply and demand situation. We run out of things not only when they are physically exhausted, but also when it's not economically viable to find ways to make more. But when demand increases enough, it will eventually become economically viable again.