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2023/05/28 #

  • What makes culture so fascinating?

    I’ve always been fascinated by culture. I’m not sure what I find so appealing about the whole idea. Personally I've always been more attracted to fringe and subcultures, things that are a bit odd, outside of the mainstream. I wonder what it is exactly that I find so fascinating.

    There is something magical and mysterious about culture, but also re-assuringly imprecise, like drifting clouds or bubbles in an enormous lava lamp. You can interact with it. It’s a highway for your imagination, but it’s massively multiplayer.

    You don’t even need an internet connection, it’s an infinite World Wide Web with no boundaries, hosted entirely in our brains, distributed peer-to-peer, no wires or transmitters required.

    It’s like invisible super high level software, it doesn’t exist, but it does.

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2023/05/27 #

  • Gifs, Culture, Media, AI & Vegetables (Issue #116)

    This week’s newsletter is out! (2023-05-27)

    In this week’s edition:

    Last week’s media narrative continues, the notion of how tech affects the greater culture has been popping up quite a bit this week, which I love, an assortment of AI related discussions, javascript dev natterings, and the return of the daily linkblog.

    Issue details:

    • Title: Gifs, Culture, Media, AI & Vegetables
    • Issue: 116
    • Page: issue webpage

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2023/05/26 #

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2023/05/25 #

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2023/05/12 #

  • Money liquidity and hunger

    Here’s a calculation / research I’d like to see done. What follows is very macro and hand wavy but hopefully you’ll see what I’m trying to understand. I want to get a better sense for how close to capacity the money system is running in relation to the most essential thing for humans: food.

    We have the technology to make food on an enormous scale, there’s more than enough for everyone, but money isn’t making it to lots and lots of people, and so neither is food. Many people are starving and thirsty, and that’s unacceptable.

    Economic conditions are causing people and institutions to hoard making the situation worse. Forget for a second the exact mechanism that money gets into the hands of people, imagine that’s solvable. Forget all the difficult social issues, just focus on the numbers. The question that needs answering broadly speaking is how much money liquidity is needed in the system to feed every single person per day/month/year?

    Base it on current prices in your location in regular shops people use. Don’t get overly complicated, it’s just an estimate, it doesn’t need to be super optimised. Just price out 3 healthy microwave meals per person per day. You just want to have the minimum worst case. Is that amount, larger or smaller than current total money liquidity? Is it even possible? Remember to multiply by the total population of earth, I guess that's currently around 7 billion.

    It should then be obvious how much people and institutions can hoard before starvation shortages occur. The only way to make things sustainable is to manage this pool of money. In many ways money is like water, it’s not a coincidence it’s called liquidity. It’s a resource we all share.

    I suspect that the total money is way way way more than the required liquidity to feed everyone. How we have things organised currently clearly isn’t working very well. There are a few people standing around the money spigots and they aren’t letting the water get to people that desperately need it.

    When you know the answers to these questions, then it should be easier to figure out how to get that money into the hands of people, whether it’s jobs, UBI or something else, first figure out what’s possible, set targets and make a solution that fits.

    When hunger is solved, many of the world’s problems start to disappear as they are often self inflicted, because hunger is used as a weapon of control, but really it’s a massive escalating humanity foot gun that will at some point affect us all.

    Bonus question: how do you ensure evil people don't take such an estimate and re-engineer the money system so there is always not quite enough to feed everyone?

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2023/05/06 #

  • Reading through the Bluesky protocols

    There’s been a huge amount of activity in the alternative social medias space the past few weeks. Whereas the focus in social media for the past 10 years has been on centralised systems such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook etc, the current focus is towards decentralised systems. Many have been expecting and waiting for this change for a while now, and they have been building open protocols that would enable such a transition to become a reality.

    I've been trying out some of these new decentralised Twitter alternatives and related open protocols. First I tried out Nostr, with mixed results, though I remain intrigued by it’s possibilities, and I very much like it’s simplicity. Then I took Scuttlebutt for a spin, and that was ultimately very disappointing for my situation, but I could see how it could be quite cool if you already had a group of people. I also did somewhat of a deep dive into ActivityPub, a social media protocol started a number of years ago, that has gained a lot of traction recently. In some ways it feels a bit old fashioned in its design, but you can actually build some very interesting things on top of it.

    The latest hot decentralised social network to blow up is Bkuesky. It was started what feels like a couple of years ago and got a lot of attention since it was being led by the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. At the time his vision was for Twitter to be powered in some way by the new protocol. The project sort of faded into the background but resurfaced in the past month, and it appears they have been very busy designing and building.

    It’s still invite only, and sadly I don’t have an invite yet, though I have added my name to the waiting list. The hype cycle is in full force, with loads of articles being written about people’s initial experiences, and it sounds very much like how I remember the first few years of Twitter to be like. Other people agree with the sentiment. Oh goodness maybe the good old days are back, this time with hellthreads and people being very silly. Hellthreads, fun in social media, not so fun in real life. Let's please remember the difference.

    With no access to the network I decided to have a read through the protocol docs, to get a sense for what the foundations look like. A good place to start is this blog post because it highlights some of the key high level design goals:

    I note that they started out doing an ecosystem review, looking at existing solutions including ActivityPub and SSB for social, Matrix and IRC for chat, and RSS for blogging. That’s essentially what I’ve been doing on a smaller scale! Great minds… :)

    The high level mission:

    Bluesky’s mission is to drive the evolution from platforms to protocols

    Why would I be interested in all this? What are they trying to build?

    An open and durable decentralized protocol for public conversations can allow users a choice in their experience, creators control over their relationships with their audience, and developers freedom to innovate without permission from a platform.

    Some the features and goals that stood out to me:

    We want users to have an easy path to switching servers, even without the server’s help.

    We want to give users the option to participate in global conversations the way they do on large social networking platforms.

    Make global conversations possible while preserving the freedoms users gain from interacting through an open protocol.

    Build around trust from the start by exposing what’s going on under the hood and allowing users to adjust their experience.

    Work towards a transparent and verifiable system from the bottom up by building a network that is open by default. We’ll do this by giving users ways to audit the performance of services and the ability to switch if they are dissatisfied.

    All very great. We are talking about systems that will mediate our day to day interactions, so it’s important to get the high level stuff right. This definitely feels like it’s in the right direction to me.

    On a more technical level, the whole system is built around the idea of self-authentication, the key pillars of which are:

    The three components that enable self-authentication are cryptographic identifiers, content-addressed data, and verifiable computation.

    With the pre-amble out of the way, I moved on to the protocol, or to be more precise, the collection of protocols. There’s an overview that lists the various relevant documents and various guides that look at concepts in more depth. I spent what was probably about an hour reading through everything.

    My first impressions:

    • It’s quite short
    • Very easy to read, it’s not a bullet point heavy W3C hellspec
    • Quite a lot of new concepts and entities but they are very clear and differentiated
    • Initially I was a bit put off by how many documents there were, but actually the way things are divided up makes sense
    • Feels like it’s been well thought through
    • Entities are loosely coupled to avoid lock-in
    • Lots of different types of ids, but users mostly probably won’t need to interact with these
    • Compared to the others I’ve read, it feels the most professional and well put together
    • I like that you can easily drop down into the technical detail and see how things are strung together

    As I read through these docs, I found myself nodding my head quite a bit, and was pleasantly surprised by some of the elegant design. Whereas some of the other protocols in this space feel a bit disorganised, convoluted and like they were mostly designed on paper napkins, Bluesky feels like a design that is more towards the Cisco side of the technical design spectrum. I am overstating things here somewhat. The other protocols aren’t paper napkin protocols and the Bluesky AT protocol isn’t a Cisco concoction. Neither of those characterisations would be desirable for social media. But broadly that’s the sense I get.

    I like it. I like it quite a lot. I can envisage it being very cool. I can imagine many interesting tools and services being built on it. It could be amazing. Having said that, I can also see possible dangers. There are a lot of new things introduced, and it might take a while to really iron out the wrinkles.

    We will have to remain vigilant to be sure we haven’t done something dumb. How these protocols get used in practice might be unexpected. I think it will be important to have a diversity of protocols going forward. Keep using and improving the simpler protocols ‘just in case’. Remembering that it took close to 10 years to figure out that entirely centralised systems weren’t desirable. It could take the same amount of time or longer to really get to grips with modern decentralised social media.

    I’m looking forward to being able to build and participate.

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2023/05/04 #

  • Scuttlebutt and Manyverse first impressions

    I've been exploring Twitter alternatives the past few weeks. Ideally I'd like to setup server instances for each of these, and write some rudimentary clients to post some messages into these networks. However I'm severaly resource and time constrained at the minute, so that's just currentky not possible. :(

    I figured I could at least try what's out there and write about it. A few weeks back I wrote about my experience setting up Nostr and Damus. That ended up in me having to put a pin in the whole affair, but I have been thinking and reading more about Nostr since. I haven't openned the app again though.

    So I also took a look at Scuttlebutt and it's accompanying app Manyverse. The first thing that jumps out at you about this project is the amazingly friendly looking website, cool back story and cool tech.

    Scuttlebutt can be transformative for society, decentralizing and enabling local community development free of big corp. It is a fast growing decentralized social network. As an alternative to the large corporate social networks it enables autonomy for the users and a free zone from big data harvesting

    There's a bit of a hippie vibe, which is kind of cool. They have some videos but my internet connection wasn't good enough to watch them.

    Based on the description on the website, it's great for situations where you are offline a lot, you don't even need a network to sync up with others, it can be direct device to device, or through online room servers or relays. The founder apparently lives on a boat.

    The getting started guide looks quite straight forward, though there is a 'get an invite code' step. First warning sign. Anyhow, forget about that for now. Choose a client and get that setup. I chose the iOS Manyverse app.

    The Manyverse iOS app installed without any issues. It's a great looking app, appears to have all the functionality you would expect. It's clear and obvious where everything is, feels very neat and organised. Only problem is, it's very empty of people, and by empty of people, I mean like not even a single other person. It was literally just me.

    I setup my profile as best I could and wrote a few short posts. The cool thing is that you can do this totally offline, and sync later. At least I think that's the idea. The main issue is the 'invite code' step. How do I do that?

    So I read the docs some more and click around. I do some google searches. I also notice a place in the app to connect to servers. Eventually I find a list of servers. These all seem very small scale. After successfully connecting to a few different servers, it appears to be a total ghost town. Digital tumbleweed is passing me by. Is this project still alive?

    My patience has wained. My back hurts from standing, an unfortunate feature of my current internet connection. After around 30 mins of fussing around, I still can't figure out how to connect to anyone.

    Several weeks previous to this, I had spent a while reading through the developer docs, and I was very impressed. It looks like it could be a very robust protocol. I imagine that if you are already a group and need to keep in touch in a decentralised async way, this would be awesome. As a new solo user though, I feel like there was such a lot of promise but ultimately it was very disappointing because I couldn't connect with anyone at all.

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