And many people are happy to not know what an IP address is either. That's fine.

I find it amazing how that lack of curiosity about how computers work extends into modern software developers, I guess that the majority of the industry nowadays are people that do things like "bootcamps" and go into it for the money.

I have no need for ipv6, however I wanted to know about it so spent a couple of hours setting myself up with it. I don't bother with the latest fads that last 3 or 4 years and then are replaced by a new fad, but ipv6 has been around long enough that it's clearly not a fad.

I have plenty of curiosity around how computers work. I've implemented compilers and interpreters, designed CPUs (I made a RISC-V CPU in Logisim which could run programs compiled with clang!), designed ISAs, back in university I had a lot of fun both writing a networking stack from almost-scratch (starting with only C and the raw ethernet packet API in Linux, building toy versions of ARP, IP, routing daemons and TCP) and writing a toy kernel, I have an ongoing game project where I'm writing the engine from scratch in C++ and using plain OpenGL to render, and this past year I've taken up PCB design and CAD. All this just because I want to learn stuff and make stuff. Don't assume that just because someone doesn't share your particular interests, they lack curiosity.

IPv6 has been around long enough that it's clearly a failed project. It's been 30 years and it hasn't even breached 50% adoption. It's not even at the hard part yet, which will be the long tail.

>IPv6 has been around long enough that it's clearly a failed project

You have a very radical definition of "failed". Take your emotions out, and perhaps you would get a more objective evaluation of the technology.

For one, it's very clear that IPv6 has only, truly received global attention after the depletion of IPv4 address space -- someone has already linked the Google IPv6 adoption page, go have a look at it, look at the flat line before 2012. That means we have spent about of 10~15 years of time deploying IPv6, not 30 years, and getting to 50% adoption in such a time period is not what I'd describe as a failure.

Secondly, if you are defining failure as "less than 50% prevalence in 30 years" then HTTPS before 2014 will probably fall under the same category too. (Don't underestimate the age of SSL/TLS.)

Do you consider HTTPS a failure?

The only way this stuff trickles down to the masses is people that know what they are doing forcing it on them through their products. Very, very few 'engineers' actually go out and learn the state of the art these days in my experience, with most just culting around whatever the current marketing fad is.

Hell just look at SDWAN land and everyone acting like it is the second coming of jesus when it is just a fancy marketed version of technologies that have been available for decades.