2024-04-17: Meetings, Limits, Charlie Brown
(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 At Work
1. Had Meetings
A lot of Filecoin people are in town this week, with many face-to-face meetings. My shoulder is still painful, so my stamina for sitting/standing isn’t great, but I’m dropping in where I can.
Today was a set of discussions of Fil Plus🄽, Filecoin’s somewhat controversial “social layer”. In a nutshell, the block rewards part of the Filecoin economy don’t automatically differentiate between making storage available for the network (where you prove you have space available, but the space is just full of zeros, ready for use), and storing actual data. How could they? If there was a difference, you could just store random data instead of zeros and get the extra benefits. So Fil+ is a human-managed program that gets you extra block rewards if you can show that you’re storing “real” data. How one proves that is left as an exercise for the reader, and unfortunately for them, the various Fil+ team members. It’s a hard problem.
2. Worked with Juan Benet🄽 and Molly Mackinlay🄽
Lots of great new people to work with, including Marta Piekarska-Geater (MPG)🄽, Will Scott🄽 I’ve only had a couple of chances to plot with Juan and Molly who are really key developers of the Filecoin vision. I like them both a lot, but strangely I think I’ve got to know them as people and advocates before I’ve actually worked with them. They are very in demand, because people use their ideas as a mooring point to anchor the rest of the work. (Not everyone agrees with them and sometimes they don’t agree with each other, but they’re very good at establishing a relatively coherent position, swiftly).
3. Made my excuses
Despite being fascinating, I left the meeting earlyish — I had other work to do, I was fading fast, realised an unfocused fidgety Danny is not necessarily useful for the team. I also skipped dinner with all these great people. I think I would have done the same before now: I know my limits. Or rather, my limits are self-enforcing. But I would definitely have felt guiltier about it.
TIL
- Lions OS is a new Capability Conspiracy🄽 operating system — SEL4🄽 with Micropython and Musl. A fast secure mini-OS for embedded systems in other words. Australian-y.
- Systems Distributed is a New York conference, June 27-28 for systems thinking in tech. Looks great with some good speakers, like Richard Feldman🄽. Not sure I can make it but have FOMO already.
Link Du Jour
- As a neurotic anxious kid, Charlie Brown comics were my jam. Watching 20 Minutes of Charles Schulz Drawing is deeply calming to me.
- My TikTok account. Not active, but I accidentally looked at my old posts much to my initial horror. But you know, some aren’t too bad. A little cringey — but on TikTok you have to own your cringitude.