2024-03-28: Contracts, Block Parties, Xerox PARC
(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 Today
Lots of talk about the best way to help Filecoin Storage Provider's🄽 work more successfully with our non-profit partners. Right now, when you have a lot of data (say, 0.5PiB), a storage client will make a direct deal with a provider, almost certainly with a Service Level Agreement🄽, and other contractual agreements. It is the way of enterprise; but I tend to think in terms of a piece of code that takes your data, sorts out a deal, and then uses the technical features of the network to provide the features you want, and ensure (or compensate for) any service failures. I always get the impression that this is how, say, the Internet works at the lowest level (I don’t have contracts with any of the websites I visit; I don’t have contracts with the software I use), but that after some high-level point, those technical guarantees become backed by legal guarantees. And yet, the higher I’ve gone up that stack — right to the “Tier 1” ISPs, and multinational companies, and even nation states it’s still mostly just software, financial risk-management, and social connections/censure. I’m not saying that legal contracts don’t hold it all together, but I wonder at what level they best operate.
Talk too, of the best metrics to judge ecosystem health. I feel out of my depth in such conversations, and should probably re-read How To Measure Anything. (And then maybe Against Method to re-balance myself). The Filecoin culture is to lean toward dashboards to bring all of this down to a human-comprehensible level, but I wonder if there’s more investment we can do in visual models and simulations — we’re not really trying to show where we’re going as to understand and explore counterfactuals that we could move into. I have always wanted to turn CryptoEcon Lab🄽‘s internal models into accessible playthings.
And if that all sounds like hand-wavy, it may be because I’ve been dealing with my shoulder all day, and have been passively listening in zoom calls more than doing. Even actual hand waves hurt. This afternoon I got someone to peer at me more medically, and in person. The act of an expert probing your own body until you go “ARGH YES THAT IS WHAT HURTS,” and yet it surprises you more than them. How can they know you better than yourself? Now I have that ghost feeling: an absence of pain which my brain doesn’t yet trust.
TIL
Out on the prediction markets, People don't think TikTok will get banned this year. Nor do they think ByteDance will have to sell.
SF’s crypto folks held an AI Block Party tonight in SF. Reports indicate they finished all the pizza and ice-cream, so I guess it went well? I wonder what their Folsom St neighbours (traditionally hosts to other kinds of block parties) made of it? Another one happens on April 26.
Software that helps users manage unfriendly software always has such hardcore-sounding names: ad-blockers, DRM-crackers, jail-breakers. Now one subset has a politer name for DC policy circles: middleware is the term for "software or services that act as intermediaries between different platforms, or between users and platforms, which facilitate interaction and data exchange with the goal of empowering users with greater control over content moderation, curation, and their overall online experience”. There’s a Stanford symposium on middleware coming up on April 30th, headed by the Foundation for American Innovation (who FFDW supports).
Links
What Xerox PARC should have done. A great sprawling “what if” investigation of how Xerox could have profited from its invention of windows, icons, the mouse, networking, etc, from “Albert Cory”, a great writer/speaker from that time.
Standard Ebooks. Volunteers take public domain classics, and lovingly package them into beautifully formatted ebooks you can read for free on Kindle and other readers.