distraction

focused on doing work-related research today, so not much progress made on upskilling. maybe "sideskilling" would be a better word for broadening my work-relevant skills, actually.

my research efforts primarily still centered around ai inference, training, data centers, infrastructure, &c.

book talk

caught a nice Internet Archive "book talk" [1] with Nathan Schneider [2]. his book Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life [3] formed the basis for the chat.

i wonder if he's heard of tezos.

there's decent overlap between the ethos (ideologies?) of blockchain communities & decentralized/small web communities, but a few barriers prevent much co-mingling between the two. the gross speculation & greed from crypto people is one. the anti-blockchain/anti-tech mindset from the 'regular' people is another. writing off blockchain is understandable. but i do think it could benefit communities if they took an earnest look at the tech, sans 'investor' input.

"blockchain" sounds bad. a "decentralized, global, transparent source of truth" sounds _less_ bad at least, if not good.

rushing to adopt the tech isn't necessary, by any means. until investing in & using blockchains become distinct activities, chances seem slim that a middle ground between meaningful implementation & overzealous hype will be found.

most blockchains' zero-knowledge [4] capabilities also need some work before adoption picks up. pseudonymous transactions (which includes on-chain voting) won't work. voting needs to be truly anonymous, while also being 100% verifiable. that's where zk stuff comes in. "prove X or Y is true about a voter without revealing any information about the person."

this tech would make voting in large-scale elections better too. more transparency. people could SEE that their vote counted, that it was included in the tally.

anyway. if anyone wants to dig more, i'd say ignore bitcoin & ethereum entirely initially.

filecoin is cool because it helps the internet archive preserve stuff. [5]

gitcoin focuses entirely on enabling communities (especially those creating public goods) to raise money. [6]

greenpill network isn't a blockchain, but they host a great podcast on "the regenerative crypto-economic frontier." [7] in other words, finding novel ways to improve the distribution & use of resources by communities. unlike many crypto stuff, it's aim is to benefit education, public goods, and have a positive real-world impact. they have some free ebooks you can read, too.

celo, which i've followed for many years, has a huge focus on benefitting individuals & communities in places with inadequate (or corrupt) financial systems. it's a carbon negative blockchain designed to be mobile-first and accessible to a global audience. the idea of community-based lending seems wonderful. instead of predatory banks lending at high rates, decentralized finance (defi) enables *community members* to provide capital to other community members. because of the differing dynamics (borrowing from respected peers versus un-respected, faceless banks), borrowing rates can be lower, terms can be more flexible, and so on. this can enable community members in other countries or underserved communities to access capital to start a business, make a substantial/meaningful purchase that it would take too long to save for, and so on.

opera (yes, the browser company) has a built-in celo wallet that users in africa to easily send & receive payments. [8] notably, this also makes it easy for individuals in countries with high inflation to effortlessly swap from local currencies to more stable ones, preventing rapid loss of purchasing power. this wasn't possible pre-blockchain.

even if the current iteration of all this defi stuff isn't its final form, it's an exciting experiment that provides hope we can all someday escape the clutches of behemoth banks and centralized companies.

tezos [9] has the best art [10] & culture (& relationships with artists, museums, orgs) of any "layer-1" blockchain. its technology, in my opinion, is also best-suited for on-chain governance. i think its approach to scaling is better than ethereum's too... but who cares about any of this!?

ba zi

used a ba zi website [11] someone in a discord server mentioned to come up with my chart. or pillars? idk what it's called. ba zi is an ancient chinese system of fortune telling. sort of like star charts, i would assume. but i also know little of those.

then, i created a custom kagi [12] assistant that has my ba zi information stored, thanks to kagi's newly released (today!) ability to create multiple assistants, choose which model they use, and specify which parts of the internet they should include information from, if any.

i asked it about the timing of me having to move soon. i'll explore more later. i have a professionally done ba zi reading to compare this kagi assistant's output too, so it'll be interesting to see how accurate it is.

this is just for fun though!

another task, another kagi assistant

i set up another kagi assistant to proofread this post. i instructed it to ignore capitalization and grammatically incorrect sentences because i like those. just check clarity, typos, repetition. also formatted in gemtext format, ofc.

it did well. on first pass, it

- asked if i intentionally use "&c" instead of "etc" (yes)

- told me i used [11] twice for citations (whoops)

- suggested a few terms i could clarify (good idea. i'm too lazy to do it for all words, but i did it for "ba zi")

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

1: [archive.org] Book Talk: Governable Spaces

2: [social.coop] nathan's mastodon profile

3: [nathanschneider.com] Governable Spaces website (you can read it on Nathan's site for FREEEEE or you can order a physical copy)

4: [marginalia encyclopedia] Zero-knowledge proof

5: [fil.org] The Filecoin Foundation Announces 50,000 FIL Grant to the Internet Archive

6: [gitcoin.co] About Gitcoin

7: [greenpill.network] Green Pill