2024-06-05: Tops, Tails, Tone
(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. Topped and tailed
It’s no-meeting Wednesday at the Foundation, which means I have zoom calls with those who don’t keep Sabbath instead. 7AM with the Filecoin ecosystem war room 🄽, then 5.30PM-7PM talking STFIL 🄽 with Chinese lawyers and @Jenks Guo in Australia. A lot of “hurry up and slow down” in both: trying to speed up things, but getting stuck in naturally syrupy process. Frustrating.
2. Was temporarily daunted
I’m usually very optimistic: about people, the world, the Internet, the future — you name it, I’ll give you a reason why it will all be fine. But I admit, today, the hair-tearing frustrations of actually getting stuff done and well got to me (something that I know drives a lot of people in our space crazy on a daily basis).
Talking with @Stef Magdalinski , we agreed that we’ve been in far worse work settings for that. Everybody we work with has the best of intentions, and is also trying to get things to proceed in the right direction. But working in a decentralized environment, you just don’t have the same structures, and enforcement abillities to lean on. The syrup of autonomy gets everywhere. I mean centralized systems have their own bureacratic stifling, but at least there’s comfort in process and roles and well-worn grooves. It’s like we’re all working together, to push the same string uphill. The alignment’s there, but it always feels like it’d be easier to pull in the other direction.
3. Tried to set the right mood
I enjoy reading Daniel Norman 🄽 ‘s writing — for instance, this piece on local-first and IPFS. He’s the IPFS developer advocate, but look how humble and upfront he is about IPFS’ challenges right now. Striking the right tone like this is hard: too optimistic, and you slip into just misleading others. Too pessimistic, and you’re equally inaccurate, and dispiriting too. The failure mode I am trying to avoid is to be optimistic in public and pessimistic in private. I think Daniel strikes a good middle ground, and he’s an inspiration to me on that.
TIL
- My old pal Matt Webb 🄽 has been building a Home AI Simulator — wiring up an LLM to a simulation of an automated home, and seeing what weird emergent behavior crops up. It’s a great way to get a better understanding of what current AI can and can’t do, without just hurling it out there and (optimistically) selling it as doing everything. Well, until the AI starts wondering whether it’s living in a simulation. Matt’s detailed write-up.
Links Du Jour
- Susie Bright is a San Francisco icon. Mostly known in my generation as a boundary-busting 80s sex positive feminist writer, but I had no idea that was Susie after she settled down. Before that she had an entire other past life in the radical communist, anti-racist world of the 70s, which she is reminiscing about on Substack. Here’s her latest piece on her gun history — rebelling against pacifist parents and learning to carry, arming up with the Black Panthers and to fight racism, having cops and union members of the Klan aim guns at her… all (American) life is in here.