Notices by Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social), page 4

Insightful words by @brainwane https://www.metafilter.com/183159/Odious-ideas-are-not-entitled-to-hide-from-criticism#7786619

I'm seeing a lot of calls for re-examination of FOSS values. In a sense I agree largely: I've myself been arguing for critical re-examination and re-articulation of FOSS principles. However, I see a lot of people calling for things that have been shown to be broken (the non-composability of CC *-NC and *-ND licenses are an example). That's making me fairly nervous that we're going to undo a lot of the structures that have allowed for collaboration and enter an era of confusion.

I am interested in a critical analysis and re-formulation of the foundations of our principles. Principles matter, and it's probably about time that we examine them more carefully than relying on the thinking of one person, even if that person has done a good job at the *philosophy and principles* portion historically.

This is also a problem because we *do* need principled positions right now. I look at the OSI license discuss / review mailing lists right now and see us at the edge of people really screwing up everything, and having clearly articulated principles is how we can resist breaking those things.

But thus far all those principles rest on the reputation of one person, and that person isn't doing a good job of maintaining their reputation (and thus ours).

What to do next?

(That's not to say that what rms said in particular this time isn't deeply... troubling and significant, just that the pattern and the difficult situation it puts us in is what I'm interested in bringing to light to my fellow activists.)

I'm not as interested in discussing the details of what RMS said this time as I am in recognizing this as a regularly occuring pattern of behavior, and how hard it makes life for the FOSS community to push for the ideals we collectively believe in.

If a single person or organization in the environmental movement does something that seems deeply problematic, it doesn't feel like it threatens the end of environmentalism.

So how did we end up in this state? How can we change that?

I might seem all over the place, but I've actually been very singular in my focus towards distributed, rich virtual worlds for over a decade. It's just a lot of work to get there:

- MediaGoblin lead to ActivityPub
- ActivityPub is a distributed social system
- Liberated Pixel Cup gave us base graphical assets
- XUDD, 8sync, Goblins are all actor experiments so I can understand the technical foundation
- Datashards lets us securely distribute assets
- Ocaps bring us security

Here's the other thing: exposing like and follower counts on the fediverse is, quite frankly, mostly bullshit. It's so easy to fake, either by giving a number that isn't true or by generating fake responses trivially.

On that note, we had massive turnout of implementors from across the fediverse spectrum, but Mastodon's dev team was missing. I know some people wanted to make it, but couldn't, so I'm not blaming anyone, but we made so much progress and so much connection at APConf that it really struck me how important getting everyone at the table is.

First up tomorrow morning is
Mark Miller's keynote! Then it's the unconference! So. Excited. But I'd better sleep (if I can reduce my excitement level enough to sleep, that is!)

Ok, the Datashards presentation went really well! @emacsen and I did a demo where I uploaded the Death Star plans to a datashards store, converted it to a QR code, which @emacsen then scanned from my screen on his laptop and displayed to the audience.

And the web store was oblivious to the data we were transmitting!

@freemo @emacsen Luckily there is a @librelounge episode all about that :) https://librelounge.org/episodes/26-announcing-datashards.html

> Tonight [@cwebber] is talking about random number generators in their sleep -- coherently enough to give me a definition
-- @mlemweb https://twitter.com/mlemweb/status/1162569465864818688

New episode of @librelounge out about Datashards, a project @emacsen and I have been working on for secure, collaborative, decentralized storage primitives for the web. https://librelounge.org/episodes/26-announcing-datashards.html

Datashards is inspired by Tahoe-LAFS and Freenet, but generalized. If you remember the Spritely Magenc/Crystal/Golem secure storage/distribution demos, Datashards grew out of all that!

I need to select a functional queue datastructure but I have no idea whether to select a... banker's queue? Physicist's queue? Or...?

What kind of job should the thing that schedules my jobs have? :P https://docs.racket-lang.org/functional-data-structures/Queues.html

AWS role-based (ACL-like) permissions still fucked, now responsible for bank losses https://blog.cloudsploit.com/a-technical-analysis-of-the-capital-one-hack-a9b43d7c8aea

can you guess what I'm going to say

come on you already know

we need ocaps

Announcing the ActivityPub Conf 2019 speakers list! https://dustycloud.org/blog/activitypub-conf-2019-speakers/

super mario carp

8chan's founder says "shut it down" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/04/technology/8chan-shooting-manifesto.html

pretty tired but that's fine