2024-04-22: Shanties, diplomacy, and promises.
(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. Soft persuasion
In a decentralized system, you have very little command abilities. There are far more elements than you can ever have any direct control over or a contractual relationship with. And you yet have fine-tuned dependencies on far more of them than you would in a more top-down world.
Ironically, in crypto, the prevalence of financial flows in every direction mean that payment become much more decoupled from contractual relationships. You don’t pay someone to do something, a gazillion people are (ideally) paying a small amount in some way to get them to gently shimmy in a certain direction
Anyway, this means that there’s often a lot of sloppy social and diplomatic communications, rather than hard and fast contracts, smart or not.
And thus it was that I spent a lot of time on the phone today.
(Actually I think regular business is like this too, it’s just that we don’t have as established names for the decentralized relationships as we do for things like “vendor” or “customer”)
2. Thought about legibility and coordination
It’s often the case that you have say that you’re doing one thing, when actually aiming to do something quite different. This doesn’t have to be underhand — a good example is when you’ve got some subgoal in service of a longer-term goal. The problem is that if you’re good at precisely expressing the requirements of the subgoal, but you leave the longer-term goal less concrete or defined, people swiftly assume that the subgoal is the point of the action — or the institution.
(This cropped up in a conversation about a company far far away from the Filecoiniverse, who we knew had been set up to solve a big problem, even as they were ostensibly getting funded to solve an intermediate problem. Now they are abandoning the “irrelevant” bits of the org, and focussing on the intermediate problem, because that’s what the funding stipulated. But none of them really wanted to work on the funded problem that deeply! And they all know that it can only be solved by tackling the big problem! This was not a boardroom coup or any such thing. They are all the same people. It’s just that easy to institutionally forget the Unwritten Aims.)
3. Waited for a laptop
I have a new laptop🄽 coming! We are given an annual office allowance on the anniversary of our first day at work. I joined on July 4th (oh yeah), but I have only recently realised that I could buy the laptop I’ve my eye on before then, and just ask for remunerated later on in the year. Are the extra few months of a new laptop worth bearing the cost? Judging from my constant hitting of reload on the DHL delivery app, I am guessing so.
I’m doing one of my regular bounces between platforms, this time from Guix-on-Debian-on-Thinkpad to … well, realistically Guix-on-Debian-on-a-VM-on-MacOS-on-A-Macbook Air. Usually I do this when something intriguing is happening on the incoming OS, but (apart form Vision OS), I don’t really have anything drawing me to Apple, except for the M3 processor. It’s just good to know what every part of every ecosystem is exploring.
TIL
- Accidentally discovered Promise Theory🄽 by Mark Burgess🄽 after admiring his handwriting on Twitter. Given the extreme amounts of autonomy, limited forms of compulsion, and high numbers of promises in a decentralized network, it seems very relevant to my interests.
Links Du Jour
- Spent the weekend working on our FIL-RetroPGF-1🄽 proposals. The FILRetroPGF 1: Filecoin Orbit Ambassadors🄽 application was straightforward, but I’m happy with how much detail I could give in the process of picking the potential FILRetroPGF 1: Lotus Dependencies🄽. The other project applications are great too!
- The LessWrong Rationalists have broken all their own rules regarding AI and produced an album using the aforesaid technological abomination. I like the Litany of Tarrrrski, a paean to true knowledge in the form of a pirate shanty.