(1) A DNS file drop: Split small files into TXT records and rebuild them client-side. Useless for big files, perfect for config blobs, tiny payloads, and cursed demos. Also someone can write an S3-compatible client.
(2) Redis DNS:
- GET foo.cache.example.com -> TXT record returns value chunks
- TTL is the eviction policy
- Cache invalidation becomes even more of a hate crime.
I get the sentiment, but "I don’t like magic" feels like a luxury belief.
Electricity is magic. TCP is magic. Browsers are hall-of-mirrors magic. You’ll never understand 1% of what Chromium does, and yet we all ship code on top of it every day without reading the source.
Drawing the line at React or LLMs feels arbitrary. The world keeps moving up the abstraction ladder because that’s how progress works; we stand on layers we don’t fully understand so we can build the next ones. And yes LLM outputs are probabilistic, but that's how random CSS rendering bugs felt to me before React took care of them
The cost isn’t magic; the cost is using magic you don’t document or operationalize.
When everything is magic I think we need a new definition of magic or maybe a new term to encapsulate what's being described here.
The key feature of magic is that it breaks the normal rules of the universe as you're meant to understand it. Encapsulation or abstraction therefore isn't, on its own, magical. Magic variables are magic because they break the rules of how variables normally work. Functional components/hooks are magic because they're a freaky DSL written in JS syntax where your code makes absolutely no sense taken as regular JS. Type hint and doctype based programming in Python is super magical because type hints aren't supposed to affect behavior.
I took classes on how hardware works with software, and I still am blown away when I really think deeply about how on earth we can make a game render something at 200fps, even if I can derive how it should work.
Nicely done. I poke at DNS a bit over at StackFox (https://stackfox.co/site/wirewiki.com), and anyone who’s spent time looking at DNS knows how much work goes into this.
A couple thoughts:
1) Nameserver “redundancy” that isn’t.
All the ns1/ns2 setups that collapse onto the same provider or ASN once you follow the trail.
2) Authoritative drift.
One server quietly serving an older serial or odd TTL for a while — invisible until something breaks. With global data, quirks like that become obvious.
Anyway, inspiring job. Wirewiki already feels like something that should have existed but somehow didn’t.
You're the second person in these comments who points out faux name server redundancy. Interesting. I hadn't considered it as a major theme, but I'll move it up the list a little.
> Authoritative drift.
This is why I query all authoritative name servers (as well as delegating name servers when querying NS records) in the DNS propagation tool. I haven't seen any other site do this. This feels like such an obvious thing to me, but somehow I'm the only one.
Now let's do
(1) A DNS file drop: Split small files into TXT records and rebuild them client-side. Useless for big files, perfect for config blobs, tiny payloads, and cursed demos. Also someone can write an S3-compatible client.
(2) Redis DNS:
- GET foo.cache.example.com -> TXT record returns value chunks
- TTL is the eviction policy
- Cache invalidation becomes even more of a hate crime.