2024-05-15: Concepts, Retros, Tyres
(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 Today
1. Concept Noted
Ever since I joined the Filecoin Foundation , I've wanted to do a joint with NLNet 🄽 , and today I spent some time sketching out what we might do: basically, have an interoperability fund to encourage the gazillion different decentralized protocols we have to interconnect. I really wanted to talk to Dan Lynch 🄽 who did so much to make the Internet hardware interoperate successfully, but he passed away this year. It's not the greatest idea to name things after people, but I do feel this —if we pull it together—could be a memorial to him in some way.
2. Blamelessly Retro'ed
First of a few meetings to do a post-mortem on STFIL 🄽 . Of course, the whole thing went down just before Ken Toler 🄽 had put the finishing touches to an actual incident room process, but it sure helps to have some pre-formed lessons to learn from. I kept circling the strangeness of trying to run a process that crossed multiple organizations, but in retrospect that's not really so strange: most incidents have to cross institutional boundaries. It's funny how atomized we ended up making things though — thinking in terms of pulling together people rather than orgs. I think that's absolutely the right way to go about it, but given the breadth of the challenges, there's always some vertigo to zooming in on single people and then back out again.
3. Kicked some AI Tyres
Playing around with Gemini AI 🄽 's new public 1 million token model (see below), and a top sekr1t Filecoin assistant LLM. The assistant was actually pretty good - not sure what model it's using behind the scenes, but it did a better job not hallucinating under conditions of a relatively small set of docs.
TIL
Okay, guys, guys, I may have stayed up a little too late last night trying to grok Anytype 🄽 . Last time we spoke, I was craving an API for it (especially given me banging my head against the limits of Notion's own API and even that of the (better in many ways) unofficial Python API. Of course, in theory, what with Anytype being open-source and self-hostable, I should be able to do whatever I want, fix whatever bug I see, add whatever feature I crave, but we all know it's not really like that (not until we get to moldable software at least).
Well, except… Anytype's actually pretty well-designed under the hood (I think, to be fair, because they've learned a lot from watching Notion, Obsidian and others, and also taking several years to ship with a lot of VC/crypto funding). Not least the client software all talks to a piece of middleware called anytype-heart, which sits on your own machine and takes commands from the local front end via gRPC. I've never used gRPC, but I know enough to understand that it is a human-readable set of calls that are sorta self-documenting. The code is small enough that I can throw whole wodges of it at Gemini AI 's long context length, and ask questions of it using Simon Willison 's llm and files-to-prompt tools.
Pretty soon I was able to login, read, search, and write pages to Anytype just as I'd been able to the Notion API — plus I had a much clearer idea of what else the code was capable of.
Anytype isn't perfect. It's everyday usable, but isn't without its papercuts (I'm building up a little buglist). But all the frustrations I've had with Notion — from its slowness, to its vague feel of corporate fragility — are nowhere to be seen here. Anytype has that feel of good open source software: a bit messy around the edges, but good bones, and a firm foundation.
(Cue them selling out and changing the license, i guess. j/k!)
Links Du Jour
- Christine Lemmer-Webber and Dan Finlay , two of the smartest people I know, chat for nearly two hours on the future of truly secure computing. THIS IS WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT.
- I love this interview with Magic: The Gathering's designer, RIchard Garfield, because the author, Nick Zarzycki, really wants to frame it as a tale of enshittification and late capitalism, but Richard keeps breaking out of the tired format. Not least by waylaying Zarzycki into playing a game based on Richard Posner 🄽 and Glen Weyl 🄽's Radical Markets 🄽 .