2024-03-25: Single file archives, fractal perimeters, deadname UUIDs
(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.)
(Originally posted on the #monologue-danny Slack, which is where folks in the Filecoin Extended Cinematic Universe can jump and ask me questions, set me tasks, and find out what I'm doing. Also available on the Filecoin Foundation Notion🄽, which may have limited access outside our org -- which is why some 🄽-links won't work for you. Blame ACLs! Viva the OCAP Revolution!)
Three Things I Did Today
Collective noodling at The Gathering🄽 about how much to share our (planned) kanban. It’s a deep question! As a battle-scarred openness advocate, I smugly noted that while publicly visible discussions can lead to gossip and misunderstandings, it’s not as if secretive systems are famous for eliminating it. (Not sure my weird flex of admitting “I mean, I did almost write a book about this” was as relevant. Like, oh, how close exactly did you get to writing a book? Was it some index cards? Another abandoned newsletter? Yes?).
Anyway, the note here is that decentralized, open (and Object Capabilities🄽) systems can lead to a lot of discussions like this because of their fractal perimeters, and one of the reasons why people prefer closed centralized (and ACL) set-ups is that you don’t have to think about the problem. Even though it still lurks.Chatted with Ian Davis🄽 about the FFDW Data Library🄽 project. One of those meetings that I feel some existential despair that I will ever wrap my head around the problem halfway through, and then come close to a breakthrough, only to realise your partner has already walked through 95% of the problem. But you get to spend the second part of the meeting on the 5%! In this case, we’re struggling with the “where do you put the metadata?” in an immutable, IPFS/CAR world? The real problem, though, as ever, is “do we come up with our own solution, or adopt someone elses? And if so, which one?” We (rightly) settled on the “someone else’s problem” solution, and Ian’s doing a great landscape sweep to find the right partners. The big conclusion was: documenting that search, and crediting all the ecosystem partners working on it, is as important part of this project as the data in the library itself.
Talking of closed: a couple of potential FFDW partnerships prompted me to offer to write an internal memo -- currently half-finished and private, sorry! I wanted to write it not because they are great candidates, or poor candidates, but because they’re great candidates who are so good that we don’t really have an opportunity to document why we might not want to accept them anyway. So I’m writing a sort of “minority report” piece, which is helping me frame the edges of FFDW and Foundation policy. It’s only half-finished, but I’ve already ended up coining a term, Movement Core🄽 to describe some of our relationships — especially with key players like EFF, Creative Commons, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and others.
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TIL
I did not know there were simple tools to turn an (online) web page into a single offline HTML file! It does not always work, which is why MHTML and conifer/webrecorder exist, but these may produce a file that is easier to pass around and view:
SingleFile - a browser extension and command-line tool. Easy to install and use!
Monolith - command line tool: more designed for text mangling and analysis.
Simon Willison🄽‘s Shot-Scraper - the most sophisticated, a great python tool.
Hacker News discussion from whence these came.
Links
Thoughtful discussion on the Guix🄽-devel list, in which they wrangle about dealing with removing deadnames from software repositories after a person has transitioned. This is potentially a deeply fractious debate (and one that Software Heritage did not manage to handle well), but I like how they are moving to a potential technical solution to a social problem🄽, which is to store UUIDs in the repo, mapping to identities external to the immutable core. Keep an eye on it!
The 1990s Visionaries Who Saw The Digital Future - Reason mag turned the headline into calling these folks libertarians, presumably for the hits and make it more relevant for their readers, but really this is a bit broader than that crew. Touches on a few projects that were influences on Filecoin.
Someone is building an IPFS bridge for Hugging Face (found in the terrifyingly completist ainews newsletter)
Much less completist: for those of you who would like to read this outside of Notion or Slack, the Danny Monologue update is now available as an email newsletter. WHICH YOU ARE READING!