2024-04-04: 404 Day, Taxes, RIP Fission
(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
1. Coffee with Erin
Erin O‘Connor🄽 (we have a lot of Irish surnames in our org) manages our devgrants program. I’m going to sneak-preview here and say we have a documentation microgrants category coming up soon, so if you know any bits of the ecosystem that could do with a document refresh — or you want to get paid to do it — ping me or erin@fil.org. THAT IS A SNEAK PREVIEW DO NOT GET ME IN TROUBLE.
2. In A Tizzy with Public Goods Funding-a-palooza
It’s (Filecoiniverse) Public Goods Lab Week next week in Berkeley, which means there are like sixteen to the power twenty-three things happening all at once, and they are all happening in San Francisco. Here is a partial list of them, including Funding the Commons (on open source and AI), Earth Commons (similar, but for ecologies), an AI unconference at Gray Area and more! I’m a little overwhelmed with everything I have to do for it, but I’m going to drag Raymond Cheng🄽 and Beth McCarthy🄽 off of FtC to my house tomorrow for co-working/moral support/if necessary, hostage taking.
3. My Taxes!
I get paid partly in Filecoin itself, which is slowly becoming less of an issue, even on tax day. The last couple of years I paid an accountant to sort it out, but this year I just used Koinly and it appears to have worked it all out for me. (If the IRS comes get me in a few months, consider my positive review of that revoked.)
TIL
- Talking of flipping the bit on reviews, Beeper🄽, the multi-platform chat client, is actually turning out to be quite useful. After a few teething problems🄽, it’s now in a place where I’m getting Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, all sending me notifications in a reasonable way. Here’s that invite again. (I watched Beeper pretty closely in the EFF days, because it’s the very model of an adversarial interoperability🄽 play. Adversarial interop is one of the ways you keep tech networks open — you can regulate interop, as the EU is doing (and the US was considering), but that sets a floor. Adversarial interop lets you raise the ceiling, as long as the legal climate is clear enough that it’s okay. I see a lot of people nervous because they think that they will get sued, even for matters that are settled law, or increasingly because they worry that it is somehow inappropriate. It is totally appropriate for users to control how they interact with the websites and services that are offered them, and to have third-parties help them with that basic freedom.
- I also learned today from Cory that it sounds like newest cool search engine Kagi actually does a bit of adversarial interop with Google and others, taking a look at Google's search results via their API as it forms its own. Someone on HN said this was “impolite”; I imagine Google will soon step into the boots of the MPAA before it and start asking regulators to help arrange a more polite form of marketplace. (In France, the fashion industry have lobbied for a ban on Temu because its “fast fashion” offers are also too fast, too cheap, and too out of control for that market.)
- RIP, Fission: Brooke and Boris and their team were some of the smartest people I know in an extremely smart ecosystem, I hope they stick around. Two of the RetroPGF nominations we gave last week were for Fission projects: it wouldn’t have been enough, nor in time, but it showed how key the work was.
Links Du Jour
- Happy 404 Day! Here’s some great 404 pages, including my favourite, Slack’s nod to its origins in the (much-missed) online game, Glitch. (Here’s a talk I gave on that pivot and what it means for folks moving from their weirdo crypto ideas to real world product fit). Not sure I managed to mention the founder, Stew Butterfield’s fantastic resignation letter.
- By the way, thanks to Stew + co open sourcing the assets of Glitch when it died, fans rebuilt it, and it still lives on. That’s how you make art live for as long as it is loved.