Daily Journal 📓

The iconic Dallas game developer, rocket engineer, and VR visionary has pivoted to an audacious new challenge: developing artificial general intelligence—a form of AI that goes beyond mimicking human intelligence to understanding things and solving problems. Carmack sees a 60% chance of achieving initial success in AGI by 2030. Here’s how, and why, he’s working independently to make it happen.

Today, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) announced it has joined the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) as a new member. The DPGA is part of the response to the United Nation’s call to end poverty, protect the planet and improve the lives and prospects of everyone, everywhere.  The announcement was made as part of the opening keynote at the Free and Open Source Developers Meeting (FOSDEM) and celebration of OSI’s 25 year anniversary.

I was curious to get an update about Fastly’s Fast Forward program, which launched in November to support open source internet projects. It turns out, one of the programs Fastly is financially supporting is Mastodon, the open source Twitter alternative.

Despite there being many winners and losers over the course of more than six decades, we can identify a clear pattern that led to the formation of each cohort of technology companies: major technology breakthroughs can act as platforms for new companies and business models.

leaps in software coinciding with leaps in hardware have always led to much bigger markets than an advance in software could create on its own.

As a heuristic, our Platformization Conjecture could be written that the environment for a successful technology startup, over decades, can be simplified as follows:

• Company success is more likely when founded to exploit a new leap of technology.
• Company success is more likely when founded during a period of higher-than-average interest rates.
• Company success is even more likely when companies are founded to exploit a technology innovation that involves both software and hardware during periods of higher-than-average interest rates.

Maybe it would be more accurate to say that platformization transfers attention away from the tool and its uses to a growing space around the tool – from the sword to the blacksmith shop to the surrounding town square, eventually the whole bustling town – torch-wielding mobs and all. ==Tools want to be used; platforms want to be hung out in.==

The Rust community has a popular concept of “fearless X”. Fearless concurrency, fearless refactoring, etc.

Rust GUI should be fearless, for the reasons I’ve described. And fearless GUI is GUI that has other virtues:

An A plus would be implementing Bret Victor’s learnable programming. #Bret Victor

Chaos pilots are people who can creatively lead a project through uncertainty. They have negative capability, but they also have other critical skills, such as the ability to create structure within chaos and take action. Leaders who are chaos pilots are able to drive a team forward on a project even as the environment around them fluctuates.

Contributing to open source, in a long-term, productive way, is hard. It doesn’t happen overnight. It requires learning a lot of general skills and specific quirks about your chosen project. The only way for most people to get there is to have long term relationships with people who can teach them. Those relationships can be started at a sprint or a hackathon, or via a random comment in an issue tracker, but they can’t be nourished there. That’s a much longer process.

The key difference is that it’s made to be compatible with #ActivityPub. So instead of being oppositional to the leading protocol, it’s complementary.

• via Erlend Sogge Heggen in Noosphere Discord

• ((63e09982-0080-45ea-8c84-9c6b28ca3156))

• Nobody really likes C++ or CMake, and there’s no clear path for getting off old toolchains. Every year the pain will get worse.
• C++ is becoming a legacy language and finding contributors in the future will become difficult, while Rust has an active and growing community.
• Rust is what we need to turn on concurrent function execution.
• Being written in Rust will help fish continue to be perceived as modern and relevant.

Your public key is the smell of your breath, since anyone can come up to you and smell it. Now whenever you author an activity, you’ll create a signature, by licking the activity. Only you can create this signature, and other people can verify it’s yours based on the smell of your breath. (This is a very bad analogy, but it makes up for that by being fun!)

They are essentially inheritance diagrams that show what kinds of activities there are, and actors, etc. Posted here in case they are useful for others, too.

Friends, let me put it this way. If you open source your product, you set the value of that product at $0. If you open source your software and collaborate with others who want to better their own lives with it, you can capture value on your product.

https://twitter.com/adamhjk/status/1618805828580179968

In the responses, Dirk Riehle The Open Source Distributor Business Model

Terence notes that the Open Graph Protocol is… if not dead, abandoned.

Speaking of Twitter, OGP doesn’t have everything Twitter needs, so they manually extended it and added their own proprietary stuff. Who knows exactly why, but one might think the stewards of OGP weren’t exactly on the ball.

On the Google front, they’ve decided to go with their own proprietary “structured data” thing like this:

Copilot is an epistemic agent: it’s not query/response, which is a model which presupposes that I do not change; it scouts ahead and helps me build knowledge. I have a better mental model of my domain, I know more, than I did before I started.

software has gotten harder to build in one very particular and important way: it’s gotten more complex.

I’ve tried to break up the explosion in complexity into the following categories:

• The complexity of rising standards
• The complexity of too many choices
• Complexity and technical decision making in the era of abundance
• The complexity of large teams and aging code bases
• Aspirational complexity

• I believe that we’re having this conversation at this exact moment because we’re at the tail end of a decade of cheap money. The relative ease of raising capital has both contributed to the trends that have brought us to this point of discontent, and allowed us to put off dealing with the challenges it created.

this is why startups are hard. You have to do both: go as fast as you can for as long as you can. Sprint the marathon.

Speed is a competitive advantage in itself. In fact, it’s the only sustainable advantage that startups have. Startups are famously under-resourced compared to big companies; they lack money, brand, people, scale, reach, robustness and pretty much everything else. The one thing that startups can do better than incumbents is move fast.

Seeing some takes that locate tech’s mass layoffs’ silver lining in the fact that fired workers are now free to make startups + retake tech from the bigs But startups don’t compete w big tech anymore. They license big tech infra & compete w each other to get acquired by big tech https://twitter.com/mer__edith/status/1616887234606530561

Today sustainability is seen mainly in terms of “paying the maintainers”, long after we should know better and first address the dynamics of inclusive governance. Getting Back to a Social Frame

Web3 is a set of expectations, about what the internet can and should be: native money, assets, ownable identity and media, transparency, automation, control, privacy, new institutions and more meritocratic and equitable outcomes. “Web 2.0” vs. “Web3”

• Since they speak about the need for global, decentralized governance structures, I’m surprised there’s no mention of The Network State. It’s by no means a a flawless thesis, but it very effectively paints a picture of what building internet-nations will look like.

• ((63c56969-361a-40e5-8d0a-878becc24827))

• Primavera de Filippi throws down with a counter-meme to Balaji’s Network State. ==Commons over exit.== #plurality – Nathan Schneider @ntnsndr

  • The slide image says:
  • Coordi-nations
    • Voluntary communities of value-aligned individuals
    • With a common, yet implicit agenda for society
    • Collective identity, relying on self-determination
    • Exist alongside other nation states, but introduces new layers of sovereignties to domains that are not inherently territorial

One thing I’ve noticed is that everyone is going to great lengths to make something that replaces the clients we’ve known for years. That’s an excellent goal that eases a transition in the short-term, but ignores how a new open standard(ActivityPub) can be leveraged in new and different ways.

Federation exposes a lot of different data sources that you’d want to follow. Not all of these sources will be Mastodon instances: you may want to stay up-to-date with someone’s Micro.blog, or maybe another person’s Tumblr, or someone else’s photo feed. There are many apps and servers for you to choose from.

==It feels like the time is right for a truly universal timeline.== That notion excites me like the first time I posted XML status to an endpoint.