2025-06-23: Grief, Language, and IPNI
(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:
Some things never change, and other things change beyond belief: I am, as ever, scrabbling to catch up with almost everything, but this time it is after two and half months dealing with the rapid sickness and then the passing away of my father.
He was 94: we spent the last month of his last year together, talking. I flew to the UK to sit with him during the day, and worked in the evenings as best I could as he rested. Since his death, I’ve taken some time off. My mind has been pulled constantly in his direction, of course, and I’m still unsure when the grieving and the thinking about grief ends, if at all. People say it never goes, but it grows less harsh.
If you’d like to know more about John Patrick O’Brien, tech pioneer, engineer, radio ham, walker and political activist, his memorial is preserved, hopefully for all time, at https://bafybeiardekruhkghg5v4ptyi3lxzdu4xifacxoxmwtlc3jorv4rkv2ojy.ipfs.dweb.link/ (or https://archive.org/details/john-patrick-obrien-memorial-2025 in case of rain). He was a good man. I try to summarise his life at around 23:30 minutes in.
Anyway, as I collect myself, I decided to restart this habit. My father wrote in little notebooks, and one of his last projects was using AI to transcribe the notes from his Pennine walks.
So my long walk back to work today began with my favorite thing, talking to smart people about worthy projects. In this case, WikiTongues, who are focusing on preserving and revitalizing small population languages. We talked about the knife’s edge right now: if AI is going to help guide people in usage, is it better to isolate and protect a corpus (but lock it out from potential misuse from those who can’t or won’t grant it its context), or keep it open for everyone to share. We lean heavily on the second option, but I understand — and projects like this must be led by — opposing views from the languages’ guardians. But who defines who should be a guardian? And what if there is disagreement?
Chatted to Tanisha about the transition to our new head of governance. I’ve been acting in that role for far too long, and Tanisha Katara 🄽 came along to help when Lucky left. Tanisha basically inhaled our entire ecosystem and has been talking to everyone, and we’re now trying to condense that down into a map that can help our incoming hire get up to speed.
Thinking about:
We had a close shave with IPNI — it had become a single-point-of-failure in a lot of parts of the IPFS/FIlecoin space, and then began to wobble badly. It’s fixed up for now, but we really should try and sail away from any SPOF-infested waters. What’s FF’s role in this? We can — and did, somewhat — help in fixing the problem juuust after it reached crisis-point. I think our job is not to lead a technical solution, but get consensus from the stakeholders on what the options are, probably to take on the burden if it truly needs to be centralized, but work to research and support alternatives which aren’t, either in preference, or to guide us to that in the future.
Link du jour:
- Cataphracts — table-top war games generally concentrate on strategy (broad war goals) or tactics (how do you win individual battles). But what about the art of operations: how to supply and move your armies. Inspired by Bret Devereux’s fantastic blog posts on these subjects, Sam Sorensen wrote a war ops game set in an alternate Black Sea of the 1300s. (Yes, I think about the Byzantine Empire at least once a week, why do you ask?)