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transcriptaseyesterday at 10:18 PM3 repliesview on HN

The basic thing proponents don’t understand is that nobody in their right mind can intuitively understand IPV6 addresses because they look like MAC addresses with trisomy and are a pain in the ass to remember or type for absolutely no benefit to the non-network engineer. And there are infinitely more people with home routers and a few dozen devices than there are people running ISPs, fortune 500s, and data centres. Play with your convolution all you want, in 20 years the rest of us will still be happily assigning 192.168.x.x and ignoring it. V4 space running out is no more the average persons problem than undersea cables or certificate authority.


Replies

Dylan16807yesterday at 11:23 PM

> nobody in their right mind can intuitively understand IPV6 addresses

If someone can't understand "it's longer" then what is wrong with them?

And using hex instead of decimal for magic computer numbers should be more intuitive, not less.

Also structure-wise the first half is the subnet and the second half is the host. That's much more intuitive than IPv4.

> absolutely no benefit to the non-network engineer

If you do anything peer to peer at all, calls or file transfers or games, there's a benefit. And the typical benefit grows over time as more and more ISPs install CGNAT.

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justsomehnguytoday at 3:55 AM

> intuitively understand IPV6 addresses because they look like MAC addresses with trisomy and are a pain in the ass to remember or type

I have north of 500 IPs I have some relation to. No way I would be bothered to remember them. Typing? Do you type IPv4s all day long? And it's still copy-paste 99% of times.

> for absolutely no benefit to the non-network engineer

Non-network engineer should work with names. And non-engineers don't 'work' with IPs at all. Look at your granpa - he's typing 'bbc' into the search form in the browser to get to bbc.com.

> nobody in their right mind can intuitively understand IPV6 addresses

And 99% of so called engineers can't understand even IPv4. So this is a moot point.

ssl-3today at 10:26 AM

I agree.

It's easy to tell someone to connect to something like 203.0.113.88. Many of us here, and also normal folks, have been saying dotted-octets like that for decades, now, and there's a familiar patter to the way that addresses like this flow off of the tongue.

It's hard to tell someone to connect to 2601:3c7:4f80:1a01:4d2:3b7a:9c10:6f5e. It's literally difficult to say, like saying it is intended to be some kind of test. And on the other end? Sure, we "all" "learned" hexadecimal at some point in school, but regular humans don't use hex so it sounds like missile launch codes (at best) or some kind of sadistic prank (at worst) to them. It reeks of phonic unfamiliarity and disdain.

(This is the part where the DNS folks invariably show up to announce that I'm holding it wrong. And I love DNS; I do. But I'm really not interested in maintaining public DNS for the dynamic addresses at home on my LAN.)

(After that, it becomes time for the would-be abbreviators to appear and tell me that the address for this computer is wrong, somehow, as if I ever had an active part in selecting the address to begin with.)