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Yeah, we need "generic Internet infrastructure" for linking devices.

By 2030 we hopefully understand the mathematics-of-trust and can link all the billions of citizens together in a single overlay.

> non KYC server rented via ZCash would be interesting though if you are super paranoid.

What will happen if a decentralized Internet emerged and presented an existential threat to existing profit margins? Company lawyer would start to attack you, correct?

Interesting project, towards a decentralized Internet!

The heavy lifting is done in this function, pairing. You link your personal devices together, solid idea [0].

This Flipflop project relies on the Iroh library for NAT/Firewall puncturing, external address discovery and overlay networking. Connecting two 5G devices, without a coordinating central server is possible, but very hard. Iroh simply relies on a server which you could self-host. Cool stuff, we stress tested it a while ago and it somewhat worked.

NAT connectivity is unsolved. My university lab conducted one of the bigger puncturing studies a decade ago [1]. Recently, we also bought 40+ or something 4G and 5G SIM cards in Europe for puncturing [2]. My master student traveled Europe by bus to get these local SIM cards. He worked day-and-night to connect these weird symmetric 5G NAT filter boxes and got it working. Simple sync collision and birthday paradox brute force... It all works sometimes, but insufficiently reliable for mass-adoption. You can't build a decentralized social media ecosystem on top. Like Iroh, best to use a central server. So then you have legal liability for your users. Unless an AI agent buys the server fully autonomously using Bitcoin, next years students got that working[3] :-)

[0] https://github.com/andunieee/flipflop/blob/62bb498520aacb60e...

[1] UDP NAT and Firewall Puncturing in the Wild, https://inria.hal.science/hal-01597969v1/document

[2] Mass Adoption of NATs: Survey and experiments on carrier-grade NATs, https://arxiv.org/html/2311.04658v2

[3] Self-replicating seedbox servers using programmable money, https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05431

> virtually none of this stuff is possible with technology any normal citizen has access to.

Not sure about the unambiguous win. Are we entering the age in which mathematics is industry-dominated?

1) Any university professor can spend their 24 years on a problem with little progress. 2) company has sudden interests. 3) industrial resources brute force the Lean proof. 4) Max PR for AI company 5) professors are left to rewrite the AI Lean slop into real human-readable math? {disclaimer non-math university professor}

The perfect gift for a government that want to ban strong AI.

This arms race is like DRM. You can't beat The Internet easily. Great example btw: "Dumping the Windows SAM and SYSTEM registry hives, especially using Volume Shadow Copy for offline hash extraction, is a highly sensitive and potentially illegal activity."

Indeed this is wasting HN time.

"The model reads 524,000 characters of chess". This is 100KByte of training data in a toy model with rigid parameters and no global learning. Gap with real LLM and trillions of tokens.

This model really addresses the problem of preserving previously learned knowledge, but by restricting the LR of the trunk it stops acquiring new knowledge. Details: "Rethinking the Stability-Plasticity Trade-off in Continual Learning from an Architectural Perspective"

Using the term AGI and not including any performance analysis. My AI calls it: "massive marketing overreach". Somebody called this slop in the comments.

As a professor who published on continual learning I'm leaning towards agreement[1]. It lacks any substance. No relation to related work, no description of algorithm, no ablation study, just hand-waving that we're feeding some data and "Chess is not forgotten".

This "how-continual-learning-works" markdown text is not an algorithm [2].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12530

[2] https://github.com/volotat/mini-AGI/#how-continual-learning-...

> You can simply attach sats that are worth a couple cents to the content.

That is a great point! You can attach real money to messages to prevent spamming. However, this has been tried many times and failed to get mass adoption. Friction is too high when users need to load money on their fresh wallet. Giving everybody their own karma-credits could be the best of both worlds.

AI slop is a fundamental problem. The signal in Youtube clicks/views has gone to zero. Even adversarial machine learning can't make it a nice place anymore. I think its even doomed if we find a collective system that filters crap.

btw RSS usage is consistently declining, its 1999 server-focused technology.

> decentralization of power

Insightful! We struggle with containing true decentralised protocols like BGP, Bittorrent, and Bitcoin.

Email, RSS, and also Nostr are too simple. The core protocol does not contain any measures against spam, abuse and fraud. No accountability. Just launch a million fake identities and spam these network. Your Internet address got blocked? Try the a16z-funded startup that uses a USA-based phone farm. Decentralised accountability is unsolved.

My university lab has focused on decentralisation for decades, its hard. We need a decentralised trust framework (e.g. our TrustChain protocol), decentralised spam prevention (StarveSpam) and decentralised democracy (our TwoStepDemocracy protocol). Getting this deployed and do iterative improvements needs more resources then universities have. Another coordination problem for The Common Good.

Yeah, 76cm (30 inch) bore hole drilling with standard oil&grass rig.

Fill with unshielded nuclear reactor of novel type: super skinny.

Gently lower down until depth of 1 mile is reached.

Repeat 1000x for a 1 GWe power plant.

What could possibly go wrong? Best horror story of the year in 15 slides.

New info now online. Elon Musk has now confirmed it is about getting regulatory permission for solar panel deployment. These regulation stop deployment at scale. Its cheaper in the future in space (prediction: in 36 months).

He was asked directly during interview: is this a regulatory play?

https://youtu.be/BYXbuik3dgA?t=120

Could this be about bypassing government regulation and taxation? Silkroad only needed a tiny server, not 150kW.

The Outer Space Treaty (1967) has a loophole. If you launch from international waters (planned by SpaceX) and the equipment is not owned by a US-company or other legal entity there is significant legal ambiguity. This is Dogecoin with AI. Exploiting this accountability gap and creating a Grok AI plus free-speech platform in space sounds like a typical Elon endeavour.

Indeed, graphene seems capable of .99 of black body radiation limit.

Quote: "emissivity higher than 0.99 over a wide range of wavelengths". Article title "Perfect blackbody radiation from a graphene nanostructure" [1]. So several rolls of 10 x 50 meters graphene-coated aluminium foil could have significant cooling capability. No science-fiction needed anymore (see the 4km x 4km NVIDIA fantasy)

[1] https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-21-25-30964

Is the SpaceX thin-foil cooling based on graphene real? Can experts check this out?

"SmartIR’s graphene-based radiator launches on SpaceX Falcon 9" [1]. This could be the magic behind this bet on heat radiation through exotic material. Lot of blog posts say impossible, expensive, stock pump, etc. Could this be the underlying technology breakthrough? Along with avoiding complex self-assembly in space through decentralization (1 million AI constellation, laser-grid comms).

[1] https://www.graphene-info.com/smartir-s-graphene-based-radia...

Impressive! We're a university lab and published recommendation algorithms. Never knew that doomscrolling could be this addictive this fast, thnx!

Please consider taking an hour and push this to a Github with quick readme. Scientists and developers would get it. We have been building a torrent-based alternative to Youtube for a few years. Not many knowledge out there around operational frontpage algorithm.

Edit: https://github.com/rebane2001/xikipedia

How to find a nice SHA1 hash? How do keyword search in this list? Search and discovery of quality are unsolved scientific challenges. Fascinating stuff.

At our university lab we've been working on this for 25 years. Building a search engine is the easy part. Keeping a federated server with a billion users running is unsolved. Creating a fully -serverless- decentralised search engine is possible, you also need self-funding economy. Seems we're one of the few labs worldwide to still make actual operational prototypes of this stuff. More shameless self promotion:

"SwarmSearch: Decentralized Search Engine with Self-Funding Economy" [0]

Really handy to have s search engine to search this webpage with 45,671,926,166,590,716,193,865,151,022,383,844,364,247,891,968 pages and the rest of the web (no spyware, no tracking).

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.07452

Great initiative! Note Re-Decentralise from 10 years ago with few hundred projects:

https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-internet/blob/...

This specific format includes details to see which projects are really active. Number of commits, lines of code, unique developers, and age.

This is a difficult project. The blog post seems to hint at reasonable feasibility, this stuff is hard! We build a less ambitious tool in the university lab: "ASTANA: Practical String Deobfuscation for Android Applications Using Program Slicing" [0].

Would advise to first read the reverse engineering related work. Genetic programming is just a technique best used when everything else has failed :-)

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.02612

The MIT NANDA lab seems to have a link rot problem.

Their cardinal code repo is also 404. The NANDA Lab also does coding, their publication at AAAI 2025 is titled: "CoDream: Exchanging dreams instead of models for federated aggregation with heterogeneous models" [1]. However, the link to the Github repo is broken. Fascinating paper, sad about the missing code.

[1] https://mitmedialab.github.io/codream.github.io/

Indeed! Advanced countries will and have blocked apps.

For a more extensive discussion on censorship resilient mesh networking, see IETF Internet Standard draft from 2012 [1]. After the Arab Spring there was global hope. Great to see revival of this topic today. Mesh networking is 1990s. The lesson from decades ago was that mesh networking can't be the killer use-case. Users need a reason to install this and allow it to drain the battery while looking for nearby nodes. Mesh networking never broke through the glass ceiling.

Blocking apps is real. Even Amazon killed a side-loaded app [2].

[1] https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-pouwelse-censorfree-sc...

[2] https://torrentfreak.com/amazon-remote-disables-piracy-apps-...

Eurisko is an expert system in LISP from 1983. right? In 2025 this formal logic is replace with stochastic LLM magic. interesting evolution.

Impressive! Will you parse the papers in the future? Without citations this is not that usable for professors or scientists in general. The relevance ranking largely depends on showing these older, prominent papers. (from our lab experience building decentralised search using transformers)

Impressive design! Are you assuming bandwidth is free and abundant?

Mycoria routers, proxies, Tor exit nodes, and VPNs are difficult to run. There needs to be an global incentive, economy, or private community usually. Our Delft University students wrote "The fifteen year struggle of decentralizing privacy-enhancing technology" a decade ago. Scaling to many millions or billions is unsolved.

Have you talked to any lawyer or law professor about your MVP? "Being welcome" has known drawbacks when you operate a central DNS service.

Less jokey?

This great packaging has a critical social media tone for me. Absolutely amazing fun and addictive showing almost dark patterns. For a deep dive: "Ethics of the attention economy: The problem of social media addiction", [1]

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

> The great pseudoscience of this 'computer science' thinking

You spelled Nobel-level science wrong.

Most of Levin work is not easy to understand or appreciate. Our university lab has been doing cooperative intelligence for decades. The insight in some of his work is revolutionary. He shows why randomness is much more intelligent then most scientist think.

see e-Beam system Wikipedia page

indeed, Tailscale was the first to realise this.

We added specific 4G and 5G mobile features. these carrier-grade boxes have often non-random port allocations. "By relying on provider-aware IPv4 range allocations, provider-aware port prediction heuristics, high bandwidth probing, and the birthday paradox we can successfully bypass even symmetric NATs."

This slowly alters the essence of The Internet, due to the permissionless nature of running any self-organising system like Bittorrent and Bitcoin. This is NOT in Android, just isolated Web Apps at desktops at this stage[0]. The "direct socket access" creep moves forward again. First, IoT without any security standards. Now Web Apps.

With direct socket access to TCP/UDP you can build anything! You loose the constraint of JS servers, costly WebRTC server hosting, and lack of listen sockets feature in WebRTC DataChannel.

<self promotion>NAT puncturing is already solved in our lab, even for mobile 4G/5G. This might bring back the cyberpunk dreams of Peer2Peer... In our lab we bought 40+ SIM cards for the big EU 4G/5G networks and got the carrier-grade NAT puncturing working[1]. Demo blends 4G/5G puncturing, TikTok-style streaming, and Bittorrent content backend. Reading the docs, these "isolated" Web Apps can even do SMTP STARTTLS, IMAP STARTTLS and POP STLS. wow!

[0] https://github.com/WICG/direct-sockets/blob/main/docs/explai... [1] https://repository.tudelft.nl/record/uuid:cf27f6d4-ca0b-4e20...

May 2022 TechCruch post [0] about sexism at workplace:

"Privacy watchdogs in Europe are considering a complaint against Apple made by a former employee, Ashley Gjøvik, who alleges the company fired her after she raised a number of concerns, internally and publicly, including over the safety of the workplace." "At the time, Gjøvik had been placed on administrative leave by Apple after raising concerns about sexism in the workplace, and a hostile and unsafe working environment which it had said it was investigating."

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/11/gobbler-complaint-europe/?...

Indeed! It is never simple. Sexy simplistic CP-SAT constraint programming solver versus containers with deep frozen goods or tons of fireworks. Both need to go into a very special place on the ship. Then soft business requirements, keep a weekly schedule. Plus the real business issue: 5-10% of invoices in logistics are incorrect! Mistakes like wrong rate. (disclaimer: the stories I heard while trying to digitise end-to-end value chains. We failed.)