There's so much artistry and time & effort put into these, and they end up feeling l ike a yellow smudge behind a crack on a dim screen in my life.

First, if the mesh can use Internet or other transports then it will, and it will be built out in a way where these become a necessity. If all you want is a silly new way to text your friends, then something like reticulum will be ok. But if you want a serious solution for emergency response and free communication -- free as in "no one can stop me or control what is said no matter what" then building something independent from scratch is critically important.

Second, the author also misses an important piece of functionality of meshcore: If I lose power, the mesh still works.

This is hugely important for emergency preparedness and disaster recovery. Especially in places prone to any form of natural disaster.

It's certainly the early days, and it's clear that there's a long way to go, but I really feel that these fully decentralized solar powered networks are hugely important as a simple alternative to the corporate behemoth the internet has become.

Looking at their source code [1] it starts with this simple line:

import os as g,zlib,socket as s

And already I'm perplexed. "os as g"? but we're not aliasing "zlib as z"? Clearly this is auto-generated by some kind of minimizer? Likely because zlib is called only once, and os multiple times. As a code author/reviewer, I would never write "os as g" and I would absolutely never approve review of any code that used this.

Anyway, I could go on. :) Let's just stop fetishizing byte count

[1] https://github.com/theori-io/copy-fail-CVE-2026-31431/blob/m...

Wow. Just Wow. I presume that's for each chip, and there are 1152 chips in a pod so that's 331TB HBM and 442TB SRAM per pod. Just wow.

Otherwise you're doomed to "sample size of one" level of relevance.