2024-05-21: Speed, Consensus, Booms
(If you work at FF/FFDW 🄽 links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
Three Things I Did At Work
1. Sped Down
How fast should things go? I have a feeling of going up the rollercoaster, where the machinery s-l-o-w-l-y ratchets you up to the top, only to fling you down. Nothing is on fire at the moment, but I can't really prepare for the next thing. What I should be doing is filling in the details of the slower-moving, last things. I need to concentrate on the recent past a little, and project out, rather than look ahead directly.
2. Got ready for Consensus
I don't think I've traveled much while writing this posts, but next week I'm off to Austin, and Consensus 2024 🄽 . If you're in town, come grab me. Here's some of the events we're running; knowing you, I think you'll enjoy the Stand for Privacy Happy Hour. Ping me if you want to go (I'm always at danny@fil.org).
3. Debugged
By contrast, hacking on code is a bit of a relief (and maybe a distraction). I reverse-engineered Anytype 🄽 middleware protocol, and built a little Python library, Anytype-utils 🄽 that can dynamically call it. It's barely a hundred lines long, and already the complexity of the whole endeavour feels like looking out over the roller-coaster. And that sense of ownership over your environment changes. When I see a bug in Anytype 🄽 now, I feel like I should fix it, that it's my responsibility. I don't know whether that's empowering or not. Rollercoasters are supposed to be fun, though, right?
TIL
- David Rosenthal is a crypto-sceptic, and more generally a decentralization sceptic, but he comes from a place of great knowledge about these topics (as well as storage, and data preservation — he was one of the key figures behind LOCKSS). Here he's put down his collected thoughts on how Decentralized Systems Aren't. There's not much in here that I haven't heard before, but it's good to see it all in one space, and argued with sincerity rather than just exasperation or hostility (which gets in my way, if not anyone else's).
Links Du Jour
- US business booms and depressions since 1775. Great piece of visualisation (and a bit of propaganda) from 1943. Hacker News commentary.