2024-04-25: Webinars, Emacs, Tor
(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. Honked on about Decentralized Archives
Actually, TechSoup🄽 ran a great air-quote webinar air-unquote, and boy do I not say “good” and “webinar” together very often. TRANSFER Data Trust🄽, OpenArchive🄽 and Starling Lab🄽 all have tight tech demos, and you could palpably hear the audience going “wait, this is interesting”. Also: I wore my Zoom Makeup™ so watch out for that. All is vanity.
2. Read memos on the state of Filecoin
Lots of people writing things, lots of things to catch up on. We knew people would want the Foundation to play a bigger role in the ecosystem as Protocol Labs has nucleated into lots of more varied, smaller organizations. Lots of things to build on, lots of potholes to fix, and coordination to be done.
3. Went to a San Francisco Emacs Meet-Up
I know, this is me playing to type, but hilariously it was due to Liz nudging me to go out and socialise. I think Emacs meet-ups are the definition of minimally socializing myself. It took place at I think maybe a bicycle non-profit? And we all good-naturedly stared into our laptops as one of us spoke, like an alcoholics anonymous meeting where everyone is still swigging from flasks under the table. There was a great bit where I piped up to say that someone in the remote chat had a suggestion, and it turned out the suggester was actually in the same room, just typing instead of heckling.
The non-heckler was also the next speaker, Radon Rosborough🄽, who famously got threatened with legal action — though not during this meet-up. No, it was for this cool page, where you can try out practically every computer language ever (an exaggeration, please don’t write in and sue me). They talked about deep, concurrent Emacs stuff that had even the regulars disturbed. “Radon, you are in a state of sin”, muttered one after his talk.
TIL
- Claude🄽 , the competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4, really likes XML. I find this hilarious, because it’s like XML was designed for a computer that occasionally thinks about human-readable tags.
Links Du Jour
- Radical Archives and the New Cycles of Contention: Post-Occupy-era analysis of the importance of archiving, by the splendid Kimberly Springer🄽.
- Tor: From The Dark Web to the Future of Privacy, fantastic history of the Tor Project by Ben Collier🄽. I romped through it, nodding all the way. Subtle, insightful and accurate!