2024-06-26: Audiences, Reviews, Reactors
(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.)
Working on:
Reviews
Hello! This week I had, and gave, performance reviews. There is a natural irony in getting compliments on what you have achieved, in a week which otherwise feels pretty low on achievements. Booked travel, did expenses, started to get an idea of the next two weeks and where/how I’m going to be. Chewed on gnarly stuff, but it is not yet digestible.
Introspected
The newsletter is back by popular demand (hello @Peter Rabbitson again!); though to be honest s I’m writing it and feeling a little glum at the lack of progress, I realse that these notes are partly what gives me a sensation of forward progress. Also, though, I’m doing a lot of soft, people-y things at the moment that all feel a little bogged down or emotionally complex. Time to do more code, or public performance, or otherwise gritty and constrained.
Audiences
Realised, once again, that one trick to accurate communication online is to understand you’re speaking to multiple audiences simultaneously. With STFIL 🄽, there’s different things to say to big lessors, small lessors, Chinese lessors, US lessors, non-US and non-Chinese lessors. Online, everyone assumes you’re talking directly to them, and when you speak it’s easy to just imagine one person, or flit uselessly between multiple as you edit.
I wondered idly whether the Twitter nucleation helps with this: I can say one thing on Mastodon, one thing on Farcaster (note to self: must use Farcaster again), one thing on Bluesky, etc. But then you just sound two (or n)-faced.
Thinking about:
"The academic-reactor designer is a dilettante. He has not had to assume any real responsibility in connection with his projects. He is free to luxuriate in elegant ideas, the practical shortcomings of which can be relegated to the category of “mere technical details.” The practical-reactor designer must live with these same technical details. Although recalcitrant and awkward, they must be solved and cannot be put off until tomorrow. Their solutions require man power, time, and money."
— Admiral Rickover, The Paper Reactor
Definitely involved in building some reactors right now.
Link du jour:
- How to Fix “AI’s Original Sin” — Tim O’Reilly 🄽 stalks out a position on AI and copyright, based on his old idea of “an architecture of participation”.