[StavrosK]

I don't know man, when we say "defenseless", we mean it has no defense. "Useless", it has no use. We don't mean "it has so many uses that you can't really pick one". That would be "useful", I guess, which is pretty much the opposite.

[jarfil]

"Priceless" has so much price that you can't pick up one.

[rounce]

It means that the price cannot be meaningfully quantified en masse, the price is set at the moment of purchase.

Art is a good example of this as it generally has no immediate utility, and even it cultural significance is created less by the piece itself, but rather by it's philosophical foundation which is not part of the purchase (nor even ownable).

The Mona Lisa may be 'priceless', but all the money in the world is just a lot of money.

[FLUX-YOU]

'Distributed' just isn't exciting any more

[derefr]

People effectively map “server” to mean “centralization botteneck” or “Single Point Of Failure” these days. In both of those senses, this system is “serverless.”

[StavrosK]

Why do we need to keep inventing new terms, though? We have perfectly apt terms already, "decentralized" and "distributed", with much more exact meanings.

[derefr]

Well, "distributed, decentralized, peer-to-peer network" worked well enough, back when, to differentiate e.g. Kademlia from Napster.

But interestingly, people also called BitTorrent a "distributed, decentralized, peer-to-peer network", even though BitTorrent requires trackers. None of those adjectives allow the differentiation of the Kademlia design (a network of dumb nodes with smart, active clients that walk them) from the BitTorrent design (a network containing both dumb client nodes and smart server nodes, where the clients register with the servers.)

"Serverless" is the word for what Kademlia is and (pre-DHT) BitTorrent isn't. Or what differentiates a wireless mesh routing system from a 1980s BBS store-and-forward architecture. Or what differentiates IPFS from, say, the network consisting of all Lotus Notes clients + all Lotus Domino servers.

(The funny thing is that AWS Lambda is not "serverless" by this definition. AWS Lambda is just a PaaS with a CGI-alike ABI. Now, if Lambda was an ABI standard; and everyone ran a mesh of their own Lambda nodes; and your newly deployed Lambda function could end up running on any random node, without a first-class "server"/second-class "client" node separation; then that'd be "serverless." It'd also basically be Ethereum or Urbit or another of those wacky architectures, rather than Lambda any more.)

[codesnik]

serverful, then?

[StavrosK]

Yes, or just nothing, as that's the default anyway.