2024-04-02: Beware Gordian Knots, Retro Public Goods, Notion Enhancer
(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
FIL-RetroPGF-1🄽 submissions sent off. Perusing through the final nom list gave me a few new Filecoin-related works to delve into. We avoided nominating FF-funded projects this round (too weird-feeling, though we may overcome that weirdness in time): the closest we got was this entry the Filecoin Orbit Ambassadors — these are volunteers who we help out with events but do not pay directly.
There were a couple IPFS-related one-offs in the last six months that we felt have had positive long-term effects in Filecoin-land: the inclusion of IPFS in Curl🄽 , and Fission’s independent IPFS Mainnet Conference🄽 at EthDenver, where some plotting of how to continue the IPFS public mesh as a long-term commons was plotted out.
We also proposed (using the XZ Backdoor as a topical lead-in) donating to as many of the open source dependencies for Filecoin’s primary node software, Lotus, as would take our lucre. We offered to take on the legwork involved in doing this Lotus Dependencies🄽 project.
Finally, the UCAN WG🄽 is a cross-org group working on a 1.0 standard for our ecosystem’s favourite authentication/capability thingummy. It’s one of the smartest innovations to come out of our space, and promises to be very useful for Filecoin as we get more granular in access and permissions.
(One note to self: I accidentally did the bad thing of Giving Without Asking🄽, when I added someone as a sorta-DRI (Direct Responsible Individual) while they were on vacation. It’s fine now, but should have spotted it while doing it. It was mostly due to me trying to make sure I was not undermining the org chart, which I never have good instincts about.)Talking of decentralized standards! Planning for Funding the Commons Berkeley 2024🄽 continues and I am running a workshop on how we can support standards as public goods. Please come to it, or email me thoughts, or suggest people in the Bay Area who I can rope in at short notice. I have been allowed sneak peeks at the schedule, and it will be a blast!
Today also Hunter Treseder🄽 and Kaitlin Donovan🄽 at the Social Impact Team🄽 teased apart a tiny yet Gordian knot of my own humble creation. Part of my job is to go “Hey! This thing you are doing sounds like this thing these people are doing! You should talk!”. This time I unfortunately glued too many people together, and they got a bit stuck. Thanks to the SI Team, we managed to cleave them into two stages, so that one group could do their bit, without waiting for us to resolve the second group. Writing this down so I remember this: along with Giving Without Asking🄽, this one of those things I’ve done before, but rarely remember to anticipate. Beware Gordian Knots🄽!
TIL
Notion Enhancer is an open source browser extension and native(ish) app for Linux, MacOS, and Windows. I haven’t played with it much, but hoping it fixes (or lets me fix) some of my Notion annoyances. (Don’t worry too much about the big red warning, it doesn’t apply to the extension, and it’ll soon be fixed in the nativish app.”)
Links
Best editorial on the XZ backdoor, by Jonathan Corbet of Linux Weekly News. (You should subscribe!)
Best new invention name is “Gaussian Splats”. It’s too good a term to ruin with facts, but AFAIU, it’s a fast, ML-improved way to display 3D environments from a bunch of 2D images. I think you deduce a 3D cloud of fuzzy point-like things from parallax between the images, then use the fuzzy things to create photorealistic renders. I think the fuzzy things are 3d Gaussians, and the rendering is the splatting?? Please God do not trust me on this. Read this if you want more details, but mostly play around with this fancy paper and this cool hack to get the idea.
A nice reply on the datahoarders subreddit by Brewster Kahle, in response to folks worried that there’s only one Internet Archive.
The number of people that financially support the Internet Archive is strong and has been growing, now over 150,000 people a year donate – this is necessary because it is very expensive, but more importantly, it puts us all together as a community to make this work. Please consider donating. The Internet Archive works with over 1,000 libraries and archives worldwide– that is why the collections are so fantastic. Please consider partnering.