2024-03-27: Retro Public Goods, Elinor Estrom, Samuel Pepys
(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
Stef Magdalinski🄽 and I met with some of the FIL-RetroPGF-1🄽 team: Kiran Karra🄽 and Tom Mellan🄽. Retro Public Goods Funding is the Web3ish way of encouraging open source and other collectively beneficial work. Essentially, you set a precedent of paying for acts that benefit everyone in the ecosystem, after they've been done. There's no direct connection between doing the good thing and a guarantee you will get paid, but there is a possibility of it happening, so in theory, more public good production gets done. This particular form of public goods funding was pioneered by the Optimism🄽 ecosystem, but this is our first time in Filecoin-land, and we're still working out the kinks. Is it ok to reward someone who was already paid to do the work? Who out of a collective action should get the $$$ (or FIL FIL FIL in this case)? How should you decide? Who should vote? Even the Optimists are still iterating on these questions. For this first Filecoin version, we're just going to be as expansive and generous as possible, and then focus down. In the meantime, nominate your favorite Filecoin public goods here. There's 200,000 FIL (c. 2 million dollars) to be distributed to them, and another RetroPGF in around four months.
I dropped into the Gray Area🄽 ‘s DWeb For Creators Course🄽, which FFDW🄽 supports. It was very professional and detailed. I admit I was worried that a program for artists that cost $2,500 would not get a lot of uptake — particularly when it uses the term DWeb🄽 instead of the perhaps more commercial-sounding Web3🄽. They filled all the places, though, and not only with scholarship students. My old EFF-comrade, Mai Ishikawa Sutton🄽 gave a great overview of the values and philosophy of the space. It was very progressively-framed, which wasn’t unexpected, though I think that misses some of the stranger bedfellows of the movement. For instance, Mai contrasted Milton Friedman🄽‘s view that corporations should only serve stockholders with Elinor Ostrom🄽's idea of the commons, but I’m not sure that you would get from that that both of them are generally seen as being on the side of emergent order and decentralization vs command-and-control systems (and that Elinor Estrom is highly regarded in Friedmanesque circles).
Otherwise, mostly trivial catch-up. My neck is still very stiff, and I’ve been struggling to work at my desktop machine without my left shoulder seizing up more. I have an Apple Vision Pro🄽 (look, I’m a sucker for new interfaces, and I’ve been saving up since the announcement last June, ok?), and right now it’s much more comfortable to work in. A lot of people bounce off the AVP because they find the headset too heavy and awkward, but I find it lets me relax my upper back more. Also my focus in thyberthpace, for now, seems better. You have to imagine me writing this wearing giant cyber-spectacles, on an all-black keyboard. As if you didn’t already.
TIL
Every time you push code to Github, you might appear (very briefly) on their giant office screen. (Every company that does this has a story of having to jam in some anti-swearing/nude filters VERY QUICKLY).
Ethereum’s beacon consensus layer uses the gossip layer of the Filecoiniverse’s libp2p library: here’s a dashboard of the network. 2,530 in well-known cloud centers, 2,163 on residential IPs.
You don’t just have forks in the crypto space: tokens can also vote to merge. SingularityNET, Fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol, three AI tokens, are close to a deal to merge their tokens. “They would collaborate under the guidance of a so-called Superintelligence Collective”, Bloomberg writes, sinisterly.
Links
My interview on Mike Masnick’s TechDirt podcast is online. There is a lot of barely-contained mutual glee in this, which I hope comes across.
Pepysdiary.com was started by my friend Phil Gyford🄽 in 2002. The front page of the site shows you the entry of the 17th century diarist, on the date he wrote it. It’s cycled through the entire collection twice already, from 2002-2012, and 2013-2022, and is now into its third run. Readers contribute new annotations and explanations, maps and footnotes: I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s now the most comprehensive guide to Pepys’ world extant. An amazing testimony to the ability for online artificats to persist and grow over time, with the right guidance. (Phil also runs the mailing list, haddock, that has kept me relatively sane and grounded since the 1990s — a twenty-eight year group chat for friends.)