The internet was designed with a narrow waist

This works well for transport and storage, but not so well if you need to understand and transform the data. For the problems with ad-hoc extension mechanisms, see:<p>On Variance and Extensibility &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;acko.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;on-variance-and-extensibility&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;acko.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;on-variance-and-extensibility&#x2F;</a>&gt;<p>In particular, the section on &quot;The Mirage of Extensibility&quot;, which uses ImageMagick as an example.<p>&gt; One solution is to do both. You declare a standard schema upfront, with common conventions that can be relied on by anyone. But you also provide the ability to extend it with custom data, so that specific pairs of Input&#x2F;Process&#x2F;Output can coordinate. HTTP and e-mail headers are X-able.<p>&gt; The problem is that there is no universal reason why something should be standard or not. Standard is the common set of functionality &quot;we&quot; are aware of today. Non-standard is what&#x27;s unanticipated. This is entirely haphazard. [...]<p>&gt; X- fields and headers are the norm and have a habit of becoming defacto standards. When they do, you find it&#x27;s too late to clean it up into a new standard. People try anyway, like with X-Forwarded-For vs Forwarded. Or -webkit-transform vs transform. New software must continue to accept old input. It must also produce output compatible with old software. This means old software never needs to be updated, which means new software can never ditch its legacy code.<p>Also see: IPv6. IP packets being so universal makes upgrading very difficult.

As someone who teaches basic programming type things, and enjoys hacking away at things <i>solo,</i> I really like this reframing and reconsideration of that good ol&#x27; &quot;Unix Way&quot; type of thinking, and why I&#x27;m a huge fan of Bash for everything, and it makes me wonder why it isn&#x27;t more &quot;text everywhere.&quot; In the back of my head I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ll ever be convinced that those reasons aren&#x27;t mostly arbitrary. (i.e. language&#x2F;tool developers for other developers subconsciously fomenting lock-in)

It&#x27;s interesting to apply this at various levels of abstraction.<p>Almost all raster image editors work on a grid of RGB(A) pixels. Whether it&#x27;s PNG, JPG, WebP or whatever - they&#x27;re all deflated to a pixel grid.<p>Wireless technology strikes me as the opposite of the narrow waist. Sure, it is all just variants of basic radio tech. But Bluetooth audio and WiFi are fundamentally incompatible - despite using more-or-less the same spectrum. 2G phones can&#x27;t send or receive 5G.<p>What a great article. Good food for thought.

C APIs like ioctl, setsockopt, etc. are perhaps also an example of narrow waists which aren&#x27;t mentioned in the article. I&#x27;ve been looking for a term for these kinds of functions, which seem to be quite successful long-term in terms of API design.

Ha! Just a few months ago, I came across Cloudflare Research&#x27;s <i>Address Agility</i> blog post (since published in SIGCOMM [0]) that squeezed Internet&#x27;s waist down to a single IP (dubbed <i>Ao1</i>), and instead reasoned that perhaps with popularity of TLS, a naming scheme (like the SNI field) is all that&#x27;s needed, because given the pigeon-hole principle, there will always be more names (variable length puny-codes) than IP addresses (fixed-length hex&#x2F;octets).<p>Telecom industry perhaps deployed something similar in <i>Multi-protocol Label Switching</i>. Other address translation schemes such as the HTTP <i>Host</i> header, and Google Maglev-esque <i>Virtual IP</i> load balancers (in-use at BigCloud providers) are other attempts at addressing hosts using something other than public IPs (which enabled <i>domain-fronting</i>, once employed by <i>Signal</i> before it was outlawed [1]), squeezing Internet&#x27;s <i>narrow waist</i> further.<p>I am mostly interested in <i>Ao1</i> from an anti-censorship point-of-view (IP fronting) as that&#x27;s the last frontier as far as <i>stateless</i> firewalls go, while names, DNS and SNI, can be hidden away today with DoH&#x2F;DoT and ECH (encrypted client-hello), respectively.<p>That said, I like the term <i>Simplfying Assumption</i> better as described in a series of posts on it by <i>apenwarr</i> [2][3] while the classic <i>The Rise of Worse is Better</i> pits C against Lisp, arguing that sacrificing correctness, consistency, completeness for the sake of simplicity of the implementation, is a worthwhile trade-off [4].<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.cloudflare.com&#x2F;publications&#x2F;Fayed2021&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.cloudflare.com&#x2F;publications&#x2F;Fayed2021&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <i>Amazon threatens to suspend Signal</i> (2018), <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16970199" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16970199</a><p>[2] <i>The strange story of etherpad</i> (2011), <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apenwarr.ca&#x2F;log&#x2F;20110313" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apenwarr.ca&#x2F;log&#x2F;20110313</a><p>[3] <i>Conspiracy theories</i> (2004), <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apenwarr.ca&#x2F;log&#x2F;200411" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apenwarr.ca&#x2F;log&#x2F;200411</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dreamsongs.com&#x2F;RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dreamsongs.com&#x2F;RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html</a>

Interesting article. There&#x27;s a typo - &quot;Instructure Set Architectures&quot;. The fingers just want to type the word &quot;structure&quot; I guess.

I like the blog but they really need to set up a feed. They recommend subscribing on Reddit but that also has a lot of non-blog content.

Would sexprs also fall into this narrow waist category?

The bridge design pattern!

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;End-to-end_principle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;End-to-end_principle</a>

Is it just me or does ‘narrow waist’ feel unnecessarily gendered when the name of that so-called waist is actually ‘neck’?