this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2025
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Ive had this thought for a while.
If humans ever go to other planets, its going to be VERY hard to keep software up to date without some serous thought and relay stations. The speed of light is a hard restriction.
Lots of devices are only designed for "always on" capability. What happens when its near impossible to "phone home"?
Local mirrors and caching proxies.
I've worked in an environment like this. We had a local server for Windows and Mac updates. Direct updates were blocked. It's a solved problem, you just need developers to participate.
Interesting. The article seems to claim otherwise? How would Paul have fixed the issues he was coming across? If you had to, say, do Windows/Mac updates in the current architecture in a remote place, how would that work? I thought updates were required by MS/Apple?
They're not required if you disable or block them. In an enterprise environment, you deploy a local update server, like I said.
As far as your personal devices are concerned, though, you're on your own. If your iPhone refuses to do something because it wants an update, you'll just have to wait to do that thing until you get home. We don't have the bandwidth to spare.
This is what IPFS is for. Instead of linking to a location that would be way far away off planet, it links to the content which could very well be cached on planet or on a relay station closer. Sure, one person has to pull it down from the incredibly far away place, but once it's pulled down at least one time, everybody else pulls it from the more local version that that person has. However, though, timeouts will need to be increased. Maybe not to some insanely stupid amount, but they will need to be increased somewhat.
This is one of the reasons why I preach against Electron apps and the “storage is cheap” argument. Additionally, it may also be really expensive for people in 3rd world countries to buy storage.
Maybe Microsoft will let us have local accounts again?
Microsoft will absolutely not be making it on the interplanetary scene.
2880 is the year of the Linux desktop?
Instead of sneaker-net it will be rocket-net... and at a certain point you need an ~~on-prem~~ on-planet support team to just figure things out.