2024-06-04: Travel, Form, Content
(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
Travel and surviving it
Ah, I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep this daily update up and travel to Consensus 2024 🄽 at the same time! Clara Tsao 🄽, who is a travel and conference fiend, said even she was frazzled by the end of last week. I took Monday off to recover, and still spent a chunk of it weakly digging myself out of a backlog.
Consensus 2024 🄽 was as much driven by policy issues as technology this year. Marta Belcher 🄽 pointed out it’s an America thing. When you’re based in a country where all of crypto is in this regulatory no-man’s-land, without real clarity or predictability: everything edges nervously toward policy. I think it’s probably also a mark of a tech moving through the lazy arc of societal assimilation. It feels a little discordant, given that I’m not sure this tech is really made for mainstream absorption; like p2p 🄽 in the 2000s, it will have to remain weird and in the wilds to stay relevant.
The most jarring crash of those two worlds for me was Eric Voorhees 🄽’s keynote at the Coincenter tenth annual fundraising dinner. He gave the lawyers and businessfolks there for the oldest crypto policy non-profit a rip-roaring cypherpunk speech, fire-and-brimful of 1990s comparisons between crypto and the American Revolution and the “separation of money and state”. I can still eat this stuff up, but you could see people looking a little lsot. “I think it was a Jan. 6th thing?”, I heard someone summarise it (inaccurately, but maybe in broad rhetorical tone?).
There was a lot of attention on DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure) 🄽, which has now expanded to swallow AI; I gave a couple of talks in that space that were a little old-skool themselves — one because the Morpheus team gave me the title “OPEN SOURCE IS UNDER ATTACK!” and the timeslot just before everyone went to get beer. I understood the assignment, and went full revivalist preacher myself (video up soon).
The other talk, on the last day, hungover at the booth, mentioned the death of Geocities, and you could feel a whole generation sigh. I made the topic “mortality”. I still promised everyone eternal life, though! That’s what every preacher must offer the crowd.
Borissed a bit
(Okay, this one is saved from last Monday). I broke my Memorial Day slackness with a call with Boris Mann 🄽. Two fishes swimming in a shoal; we zoom in the same direction, dart away from each other without arguing, then flip back the same way I achieved my sly aim which was to pressgang him into helping with UNNAMED CAPABILITY CONFERENCE PROJECT 🄽, to glean his knowledge from putting on multiple successful Causal Islands 🄽 events. But that was all completed in a flurry of fins at the end. Mostly we talked about a fairly constant model we have of a ground-up Object Capabilities 🄽 revolution, where both legacy software (including OSs) and pervasive interoperability are made tractable through fairly narrow, low-energy LLM usage. I think this is a vision that’s been pretty constant for me over the last 2-3 years, and it’s always good to hear from someone who has been walking that way possibly longer, and who doesn’t think I’m insane.
Maybe I am insane though
@Brynn O'Donnell is back from the AI/UN conference that I had previously warned, and I quote myself here, “sounds like bullshit”. It was apparently good! Of course, it may have driven me bonkers while being perfect for Brynn — which is what Hunter Treseder 🄽 argued all along.
A useful reminder that at every event you attend, there is somebody in the corner thinking “This is all insane.” I’ve spent years either being that person, or spotting those people and listening, just to course-correct. But when it’s your own event, you do take a little psychic damage. And anyway, you can’t be the revivalist preacher, and try to look cool with the atheists — at least not without ending up being the Cool Youth Pastor. Right, kids?
TIL
Andrew “Boz” Bosworth 🄽 (”Agrippa to Zuck’s Augustus” as someone on Hacker News 🄽 described him) wrote a piece on “Inbox 10’ , or improving your “ability to efficiently ingest the information around you.”
I’ve levelled up doing this several times, usually after having these (literal) info-overload headaches until I got a system together. His advice is really very good, and I’m not just saying that because he smacks on Google Docs. I’m going to try and apply some of this. In some theoretical spare moment.
Link Du Jour
- A Public Goods Funding 🄽 -related link: Ben Southward on Advance Market Commitments — when a government or group say “if you create a vaccine for pneumococcal disease/covid, we promise to buy $billion for it”. Stripe Climate is doing one for carbon removal, but just as good — they wrote up how to do it yourself.