Comment by phs318u
5 days ago
The fact that this comments section indicates such a yawning chasm of gaps in knowledge (much less, understanding) - in a forum whose users are generally known to be more technically savvy than most - is exactly why IPv6 is still not widely adopted. There is confusion about the less obvious benefits, confusion about how it works, confusion about the dangers (how do I adjust my well honed IPv4 spidey senses?), and confusion about how I transition my current private network. An epic failure of change management.
Here’s a prediction. Linux on the desktop will have >50% penetration well before IPv6 does.
IPv6 already hit 50% https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
It's so funny to see predictions that aged worse than milk. Ipv6 adoption isn't up to individuals, it's up to ISPs. We consumers aren't supposed to know about ipv6. The change will be silent and continuous.
“Given addresses” != adoption. Hell, I had to disable it in osx because it breaks the damn hotspot connection functionality. Wasn’t using it, it’s just there, breaking shit and being useless.
Google's stats are tracking the percentage of people that reach Google over IPv6. That means they've not just been given addresses, but they configured them and are actively using them. How can that possibly not count as "adoption"?
That’s Apple’s fault. Why are you blaming it on IPv6? Oh, because Apple can do no wrong.
Measly 30 years after it was approved. We will likely get AGI before we finish the transition.
> The fact that this comments section indicates such a yawning chasm of gaps in knowledge (much less, understanding) - in a forum whose users are generally known to be more technically savvy than most - is exactly why IPv6 is still not widely adopted.
No, it isn't. Everyone here has the causality backwards. We don't know it because we've never needed to know it, and we've never needed to know it because it's not really required for anything (i.e. the cost of adopting/learning it > benefit).
This has been a frustrating HN discussion to read, to be honest, because the consensus view strikes me as so off base. It's not that IPv6 has been miscommunicated, or that it hasn't been taught enough to undergrads. It's that it has been designed with virtually no incentives to encourage people to actually adopt it, with the entirely predictable consequence that no one adopted it. Therefore, none of us need to know it, schools don't need to teach it, etc.
Folk are internalising the wrong lesson here. Incentives matter. No amount of mandated IPv6 instruction or well-intentioned blog posts explaining IPv6 are going to change anyone's incentive structure. And then when those things fail, there's a predictable and tiresome tendency to blame the users for not switching.
If you want people to adopt new tech, make it actually do something new. Give people some reason to want to switch. "It mostly does the same thing as the old tech did, but it also takes effort and money to learn it / switch to it" is a terrible pitch, with entirely predictable consequences, and it's far too common in technical circles.
> with the entirely predictable consequence that no one adopted it
As the sibling comment pointed out: it's very close to 50% adoption, you just don't see it https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
> There is confusion about the less obvious benefits, confusion about how it works, confusion about the dangers (how do I adjust my well honed IPv4 spidey senses?), and confusion about how I transition my current private network
Could you be specific about what the misconceptions are?
I had Copilot produce this for you based on the comments in this discussion (as at just before the timestamp of this comment).
https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/656dEMHWyFye5cCeicgGv
Interesting that this is getting downvoted. I truly wonder why. One of the things LLMs are good at is summarising and extracting key points. Or should I have gone to the trouble to do this myself - read the entire comment thread and manually summarise - when the person I was replying to hadn’t done that? My comment was meant in good faith: “here’s the info you wanted and how you can easily get them yourself next time”.
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One would think that in 30 years there will be some sort of best practises established. Some articles to refer people to. Or at least some people to share their experience and answer practical questions.
And yet there is still only "you doing it wrong, and I won't tell you how to do it right"
IPv6 existence is questioned not because people fail to configure it. It’s because they do not understand the problems it solves. Those problems are so large they’re invisible at the individual human scale. You either know them (which is not a secret) or invent superficial charges against the design.
No. People fail to configure it. Then start to question why this piece of garbage exist.
It doesn't matter what problems it supposed to solve if it doesn't work.
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> less obvious benefits
if they are so unobvious that nobody knows about them, perhaps they are not benefits at all, but fringe minutiae?
Perhaps. Who knows? <<< that’s the point I’m making.
> such a yawning chasm of gaps in knowledge ... in a forum whose users are generally known to be more technically savvy
There is a heck of a Dunning–Kruger joke to be made here.
No. It's not adopted everywhere because it's awful. At least on the data center side.