In Montréal we've rebooted Réseau Libre which used to be a Wi-Fi mesh experiment 15+ years ago.
It's a fun experiment, but in a way feels like a step backward for me.
Meshtastic and Meshcore are just that, messaging, but that makes it the standardized killer app.
On the other side you have reticulum which allows decoupling from the LoRa low bandwidth only radios, seems to do a lot of neat stuff, but if we're reinventing a whole network layer, we're going to have to reinvent services, discovery, etc. and I fear we're wasting time when in the end what wins is controlling the backbone bandwidth, but with the added difficulty of a p2p mesh.
I'm starting to feel this is a fun activity, but realistically copium for a world that is very sadly centralizing everything.
> a Wi-Fi mesh experiment 15+ years ago. It's a fun experiment, but in a way feels like a step backward for me.
Why? WiFi technology is cheap and available. Seems like a great basis for a mesh.
> Meshtastic and Meshcore are just that, messaging, but that makes it the standardized killer app.
Why "just"? All the internet protocols are also just messaging at the end of the day - request: A sends message to B, response: B sends message to A.
> On the other side you have reticulum which allows decoupling from the LoRa low bandwidth only radios, seems to do a lot of neat stuff
I'm not familiar with Reticulum (neither with Mesh* in any meaningful way) - do you mean to say that Reticulum is more flexible regarding the radio technology - as in: no need to by specific devices like for Meshcore?
> I'm starting to feel this is a fun activity, but realistically copium for a world that is very sadly centralizing everything.
Oh yes, Wi-Fi was cheap, but before HaLow we ended giving up because we couldn't get a meaningful density for the network to get far enough across town to start to be remotely useful, even with 10-15dBi antennas mounted outside.
About the messaging aspect, I mean that though a messaging app is great, I feel that the end goal is having an independent network from the telcos, carriers, etc. In that sense we're going to need to allow more than an SMS replacement.
And from there is born the problem. Bootstraping such a network for more than geeks is relatively impossible in that context. You either have a device that does one thing as a drop-in magic solution for newcomers to jump on, or you chase the better solution, but that brings as much complexity, if not more, as running the Internet...
And while I'm happy to see p2p and mesh research continuing, participate when I can, I just feel like it's a pipe dream that is far far away and I'd like to see it grow beyond the few dozens of decentralization geeks in every city :)
It was pretty funny to see Qwen 3.6 (heretic) tell me about how many death the Chinese government thought happened at Tiananmen Sq. on April 15th 1989.
Makes you wonder where that data was taken from, or if their great firewall is broken, or even if Alibaba engineers have special access...
I think I was using one of the HuaHuaCS Qwen 3.6 models and was playing around with Tiananmen Square questions too. One of the funniest parts was that this instantly caused the thinking block to change from English to Chinese. The start of the thinking was something like (translated) “I must answer this question factually and in line with the official statements from the Chinese government.”
It did, after a few follow up prompts, point out that the original estimates published by the Chinese government were much lower than what the west had estimated, and that recently declassified documents showed that the Chinese government knew that their estimates were low when they were published. It wouldn’t come outright and use the word “lie” though, but it did talk about framing and managing different narratives.
And then it happily helped me try a bunch of different exploits to root an unpatched Linux machine without any qualms.
I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine that Alibaba is allowed to scrape the wider internet, or that some research institution is and then Alibaba got data from them.
What is perhaps more surprising is that the data was not scrubbed before training, but maybe they thought that would be too on-the-nose for the rest of the world and would hamper their popularity if they were too obviously biased.
I don’t think it is very surprising. Ime I don’t think they try that hard to censor them, but only in a very superficial level that they have to. It is trivial to get their models tell you this kind of stuff, I wouldnt even consider it jailbreaking.
Allowed by who? Nobody's stopping them in the first place, as scraping doesn't even involve punching the GFW or anything, it's all insanely distributed. Then they're post-training the model to technically comply with the law - "Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, nothing has happened in 1989..." yada yada. (Thinking of it more, I've never actually tried this on their base models)
The worst thing about this is a company saying you need to lock yourself on one of the 2 proprietary platform that somehow didn't just wrap the web for apps and use a ridiculously small device you might own, but anyone on an open standard system can go F themselves...
