Creating all of this is cool, but I don't know, it looks like a gimmick.

The whole argument is: "Every other page I find myself on now has an AI generated click-bait title, shared for rage-clicks all brought-to-you-by-our-sponsors–completely covered wall-to-wall with popup modals, telling me how much they respect my privacy"

Well, you'll still need content outside your friends group. Even with the "Promised LAN" you'll continue having the same experience.

And what for? What are the use cases? Exchange files? Jokes? Chatting? The examples given: "It’s incredible how much network transport and a trusting culture gets you—there’s a 3-node IRC network, exotic hardware to gawk at, radios galore, a NAS storage swap, LAN only email, and even a SIP phone network of “redphones”."

Ok, fun. But you'll still need WhatsApp/Facetime to talk to your mom, the whole internet to search and learn, sometimes social networks to communicate or to get a job, etc etc etc.

Eh, I'm not sure how gimmicky it is. Without knowing how it's used, maybe the use of the network itself is just for fun, and nothing wrong with doing computer stuff for fun!

But the networking chops to set something like this up are super practical. My current project has forced me to go from "i know how to use sockets in serious applications" to "i run GCE instance snapshots unmodified in a kernel-level TAP web of lies with tricky DNS overlaid to migrate complex workloads that can't go down to bare metal instances colocated in weird places". This is a pretty radical shift in perspective for a historical "network stuff, got it" guy like me.

In the words of that guy from the 10x programmer meme video: "cloud edge is a hype!" The cloud is terrible in 2025: arthritic Xeon SKUs no one wants marked up 10000%, FinOps is like a casino that knows the whales need to neither win too much nor lose too much: they have active calls to action when the grift is so insane that they know you'll eventually do the books and churn out forever. The security theatre around IAM and shit is like going to the DMV, it's a whole thing to make an S3 bucket now.

There are bright spots: fly is the perfect tool for a busy admin who needs to keep an eye on a bunch of prompt engineers with docker and confidence, but for the most part?

Going back to bare metal is just a strict upgrade, and once you do that, knowledge like the knowledge these folks have from operating this thing? It becomes a whole new set of superpowers over and above standard out of the box networking. Standard networking is great when it meets your needs, but if it's all you know, you don't realize how big on an appetite your business has for wizard stuff.