2024-04-05: Cow-ork, Open $ource, Military-Industrial Non-Profit Complex
(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
1. Co-working with the Funding the Commons Berkeley 2024 crew
Always reassuring to see others fitting everything together a complex event, with NONE OF THE RESPONSIBILITY. Talked with Beth McCarthy about Berlin and San Francisco scenes, the many many subcultures of crypto and other geek clades, and the challenges of building a conference that crosses multiple groups. Commandeered Liz Henry to help us find good attendees, speakers. She came up with many! I would never have thought of Luis Filipe Murillo Pestered Luis Vila to come join us at short notice. I think he’d like it. I think you’d like it. Join in!
2. Talks in my back-pocket
As backup-reserve talker, there’s a possibility I may be asked to give a 10-20 minute talk in an unclear slot. To preserve air of amazing improvisational skills, I have been spending hours thinking about what I would say in such eventuality. Two areas I’m thinking about: The Difficulty of Giving Money To People, about the cultural and technical blocks that can stop people working in the commons from accepting or even wanting your filthy lucre. The other would be the gulf between public goods production and corporate culture, and strategies to bridge it. They’re sort of the inverses of each other.
3. In shoulder news
It still hurts. Apple Vision Pro still helping, and oddly calming too. Like a horse wearing blinkers. I just clip-clop through the document in front of me. Best AVP app so far has been Moonlight the open source client for an open source screen-streaming server Sunshine, so I cna use my linux laptop in voortual roolity. Works better than the Mac remote display right now. Technical solutions to physical problems (caused by other technical solutions, probably).
TIL
- Bits of the JavaScript ecosystem are calming down, says Simon Willison to the point where old unmaintained code may work perfectly well. Not true a few years ago!
- The Tornado Cash developer, Alexy Pertsev trial in the Netherlands just wrapped up. Judgement is due in May, and it doesn’t sound like the court was sympathetic. Which is horrendous, because Pertsev sounds like he did everything he could — short of denying individuals privacy in their financial affairs. We should be gathering around to protect Pertsev and our rights to build human rights protecting software.
Links Du Jour
- My first Tiktok link du jour: the Archaic Smile.
- Point: The Deaths of Effective Altruism, Counter-Point: On Leif Wenar’s Absurdly Unconvincing Critique of Effective Altruism.