2024-05-09: Vagueness, Quiet, Orson Welles
(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. Stared into space
I declined a couple of meetings where I would not be missed (I hope!), mainly to scribble things down and pull things together. I know these entries can be a bit… vague, and sometimes that’s because my work is sensitive. Sometimes, I really am vague, as lots of pieces whirl around me. A trap I know I fall into in this mode is to try and fit the pieces all together just on my own. Liz and I are both working on hard problems right now (she’s back at Mozilla 🄽), and we give each other running commentaries throughout the day, which helps to pin things down. But even so, I need to just bounce things around with other smart people. Today was a day when I felt unclear at the start, but talking to Clara Tsao 🄽, Stef Magdalinski 🄽 and JV 🄽 began to help clarify it al.
2. Sat with Stef
Stef Magdalinski 🄽 is one of my oldest friends, and my god have we seen a lot. I tease him about being grumpy, but it’s because stuff that isn’t right bugs him until he can fix it, whether that’s ethically right, or technically right (the best kind of right). Our timezones are out of sync at the moment, so we don’t get to talk as much as we should — and when we do, one of us is fading. Today, though, we were in sync, and beginning to move from grumpy to ahh screw it, let’s fix it all.
3. Walked with JV 🄽
JV is one of those people who, in conversation, is like a pace-setter who runs too fucking fast. You just want to go on a nice jog, and he’s already waggling his butt into the distance, throwing out names and ideas. Fortunately, he also goes for literal walks, which — if I call him on the phone just then — I believe slow his mind down enough for me to keep up. We talked about Apple Vision Pro 🄽 (I’ve been avoiding it because of the shoulder of doom, but he made me miss it so much I’m typing from inside it right now), and alsohow to re-charge the Filecoin ecosystem. We need to re-introduce the tech to a new generation of crypto-ey people, and also we face the usual decentralized world blues: fit and finish, how to build a self-re-inforcing culture of excellence rather than an atomized sense of powerlessness. Docs, UX, abandonware. Maintenance, rewards, collegiateness, vigor. It was good to walk with him and talk about these things.
TIL
- Still thinking about how we could dogfood our ecosystem’s tools. I realised that I hadn’t checked in on Quiet 🄽, Holmes Wilson 🄽 ‘s decentralized, IPFS and Tor built, Discord/Slack alternative lately. It’s getting better! I love how his team is working to build something rock solid, minimalist and multi-platform first, and then slooowly growing its feature set. It’s limited in scope for now, but still usable. The Tor setup at the start is slowwwww, but that’s the only gripe for me so far.
Want to fool around with it with me? Join the Quiet Monologue community here! Expect rough seas!
Links Du Jour
- Talking of not quite ready but looking interesting, I want to play with Tableland’s Basin sometime soon. A decentralized database, constantly backing up onto Filecoin.
- The true(?) story of that Orson Welles’ slurred wine commercial.