2024-04-08: Main Character Syndrome, Tim O’Reilly, Table Saws
(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. Filecoin Retro Public Goods Funding Is Go
Mostly I just went “lgtm” on this, but look at the lovely website! Meanwhile, just when I was thinking “oh it’s a shame we can’t do a more concentrated retroactive awards for public goods, for other parts of the ecosystem” — another RetroPGF launched,, this time for folks contributing to a healthy libp2p🄽 world. This is more centered in the Optimism🄽 collective: that makes total sense, because libp2p is a key dependency for their platform, as well as being part of the Filecoin universe.
2. Coffee with Pan Chasinga🄽 and Sonia John🄽
Two of my fave people from back when the Foundation could fit in the palm of your hand. Sonia is in Nairobi, Pan originally worked in Bangkok before moving to the US. We talked mostly about the impression of the US in the rest of the world, and how people always know so much detail about US politics. We agreed that the United States has “main character syndrome”.
3. You Don’t Even Want to Know
A familiar pose: sitting in a parked car outside a social event, on an incident response call with terrible audio, theorising a dozen explanations for strange half-understood happenings: none likely, but all possible, and working to develop a strat that works in every scenario. Can’t really talk about it, but glad to have Kurt Opsahl🄽 who has overseen many of those tricky scenarios, on our team. We’re not the main characters in this story: trying to help others not be too.
TIL
- In 1999, Steve Gass invented a way to stop table saws before they cut through fingers. Twenty-five years later, it might finally be universally adopted. in the US The story of why it took so long is twisty, and the heroes and villains are not quite as clearc-ut as you’d might expect. Great tweet-sized storytelling by Daniel Vasallo.
Links Du Jour
- The always readable thinker Tim O’Reilly🄽 on Why AI Has an Uber Problem
- How hardware-based capability security would have helped stop the lz backdoor🄽, by the folks building CHERioT🄽. Viva the Capability Conspiracy🄽!