Holy shit has anyone thought about how insane the internet is
I can talk with someone literally on the other side of the earth with mere MILLISECONDS of delay

@otter speak for yourself, I need to send individual bytes by setting abacuses into the right configurations and sending them to my nearest internet center (run by the post) via vacuum tube. This message took me 10 minutes to write, and 35 more to send.

At least I have an upgraded system compared to my mum, who has to send the abacuses via horse carriage, since she lives in the countryside. her ping can be weeks in bad weather

@_r @otter the pigeon with your TCP packet was really unhappy about the 8908969 packets it transmitted since yesterday

@_r what, do they send you abacuses back too?

@otter yeah. one abacus stores around 5 bytes (it’s not a 1:1 fit, since they use a different encoding from binary - they couldn’t switch over to binary abacuses yet because people were relying on support for bi-quinary ones)

@_r are the abacuses loaned or do you have to pay for every one

@otter loaned. they keep track of how many they send me and how many I send back. If I have more download than upload, I need to send some blank ones until I have an acceptable level of spare ones left. if I cancel my subscription I have to send them all back.

@_r so do you just store all your data on the abacuses or do you use any other methods of storage
also do you have to manually parse HTTP responses

@otter you can use ping as a type of harddrive. https://youtu.be/JcJSW7Rprio

@otter no storing data, I just remember everything. also, ABIP (abacus to internet protocol) has a few shorthands for HTTP, but I do need to manually make API requests to akkoma, which takes most of my time sending a message. lots of unnecessary data…

@_r @otter do you need to do TLS in your head?

@noisytoot @otter I use the abacuses to help me do the particularly hard math