2024-05-22: Votes, Votes, National Security
(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. Opened the Envelope
The FIL-RetroPGF-1 🄽 (remember that?) is done, and the awardees were announced. I'm glad that the couple of projects (FILRetroPGF 1: Lotus Dependencies 🄽 and FILRetroPGF 1: Filecoin Orbit Ambassadors 🄽 ) were in the top five awardees, getting 4315FIL and 3795FIL respectively (or $25K and $22K in your Earth money). I admit that i was surprised that in the end the amounts were relatively small and divided over a lot of projects — 100 projects were funded, and 66 of those got more than 1500FIL/$10K. I was imagining there would be a few big winners, and then a long tail of smaller amounts. Excellent, detailed analysis by Kiran Karra covers the rest. Now I have to pay everyone!
2. Gossiped
It's so cheering to just sit on multiple group chats and DMs and just hammer out disposable opinions. I was pretty down yesterday, but even though there's a lot of fatigue — it's been a long few weeks — just talking to people about it snapped me out of it. I find it hard to know what the balance is, because I still have these social anxiety qualms ("I'm not sure I'm going to enjoy walking with [friend who invited me out for a walk]", I said to Liz Henry 🄽 the other day, and she scoffed in my face, in the most compassionate sense of the word "scoffed"). But I'm still fairly enamored of people.
3. Counted the Votes
The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21 🄽 to its friends) passed in the House, pretty resoundingly — 71 Dems and 208 Republicans. This is the one that I mentioned tries to define decentralized governance of technology, which has to be a pivotal moment. Hard to tell what its chances are in the Senate, but it's good to have something written to focus on instead of the craziness of crypto non-regulation in the US.
TIL
- There's a guy at Founders Fund who thinks open source AI both sucks, and is a national security risk.
Links Du Jour
- Enjoying watching Robin Berjon 🄽 messing around with CIDs and simple content-addressable websites at his LUCID project.
- One of my favorite guilty pleasures is reading Moly's Chinese Doom Scroll: daily excerpts of trending Weibo posts, translated and roughly contextualised. Today's was on the not-so-subtle ways the authorities are nudging citizens to have more babies.