How it works
Transit Tuesday.
Everyone screenshares whatever they're actually working on. Your live environment, mid-thought. At least one person is contractually required to say "this was working this morning."
Screensharing is mandatory unless you have a doctor's note.
The chatroom is always there when you need it.
For some reason it's also there when you don't.
Half of us have it muted, and a stubborn remainder are still in the old Telegram chat they weren't checking when we started the Matrix one.
Every crypto community eventually produces someone with a manifesto and a token, quietly convinced they've solved civilization. We used to find that very funny, then we counted our own manifestos.
None of them have tokens, which we consider a moral distinction and everyone else considers a technicality.
Walk into an Ethereum dev event and you can read the room in about four seconds. Half of them run Arch, or NixOS, or never quite left CCC congress. The rest are here for the merch and free money. We are, unfortunately, extremely the first half, and serving it.
Humans built the wheel, New York, wars, and venture capital. We are very proud of this.
Most of what we build here is a wheel someone else already invented. We build it again anyway, partly so nobody else can repossess it, and partly because reading someone else's code is worse than writing your own, badly.
No investors, answering to each other instead, which is principled except when your friends aren't free on a Tuesday to be answered to.
Dolphins built none of it. They just swim around and occasionally rescue a drowning sailor.
We used to think that was because they hadn't figured out capitalism yet. Increasingly we think they figured it out first.
Guessing what we're building next is basically brute-forcing a hash: technically possible and comically slow.
We used to explain hash functions with long division and call mathematics the language of the universe. We still stand by the long division.
We have, at various points, used Euler's identity, eiπ + 1 = 0, to explain Truth, Value, Fairness and Debt.
The library is open. We used to call cryptographers throughout history poets, and infinite players redrawing the boundaries of conflict, communication and secrecy. Someone in this group wrote that sentence sincerely. We know who. We're not saying.
Building our own environment
We're building the tools for this too, anti-capture down to the fibres. Cryptographic systems that give each builder control of their own experience. Unix-like, composable, mostly harmless.
We say "composable" and "anti-capture" like we've got it all figured out. We don't. Half this toolbelt is duct tape held together by good intentions. It works anyway.
There used to be an official system for this. Directions, Discoveries, Difficulties. Bi-weekly for full-time projects, monthly for part-time ones. It had a name and everything. Nobody follows it. We just tell each other what's going on.
We still try to dignify the phrase "testing in production."
Quantum photons are observed.
Nassim Taleb gets a mention.
Chomsky is involved.
Chomsky's point is that you can't run a controlled experiment on a country, since there's no second, identical Earth to test against. Sadly, everything we try has to be a patch on this one.
Quantum outcomes are only predictable probabilistically. You might think that's a metaphor for a roadmap. It isn't. It's that roadmaps are all quantum in nature.
Taleb's point is that people trust predictive models far more than the models deserve. We read that, and nod seriously.
"Test in prod" really means the code is broken but we're sick of it so we're shipping it anyway.
Come play
No application. No evaluators. Four questions from the heart.
This isn't a test. It's an invitation to learn something with us.
Category is: come as you are.
Why do these things have application forms? Applying to meet people you're about to be friends with is a strange thing to do. We're a different kind of strange.
Nobody grades your answers. You'll probably feel like you're oversharing. That's the correct amount.
This whole thing has technically been an early draft for two years. We've decided that's just what drafts are now.
We have a theory called waves of centralisation. Decentralise, consolidate, decentralise again, historically inevitable. We have citations, but decided an animation of water was better.
Your horizon can be infinite while you're standing in a finite field. It's just true of a game of Snake, and it's true of joining something like this.
Think of the answer to these questions:
- What do you keep opening tabs about?
Tabs: alternative social media designs, comedians and their processes, permaculture.
If you opened my browser tabs right now, you'd get a chaotic mix of automated workflow error logs, multi-platform analytics dashboards, obscure game mechanics breakdowns, music DAW projects, platform appeal emails, and late-night road trip route maps.
- Anything you're building, learning, or tinkering with? Links welcome.
I'm writing a mental poker implementation, mostly for learning some more advanced cryptography.
some signage and event tools for CCC
- Anything you've been stuck on, or powering through, right now?
- When do you feel most like an imposter?
I feel like I'm an imposter, when I'm around people who actually know how to code.
When I propose a solution that's vaguely valid in my head and then hit the reality of having to implement it.
Imposter: here, since there are so many talented coders (seriously).
Every time metrics plummet or a custom workflow breaks overnight after a platform update, I catch myself wondering if I've just been building a house of cards on pure luck.
No need to answer all four. Just write what comes to mind and throw it out there in the group chat:
Nobody's sure which room is the main chat at this point, but someone will read you and say hello back.
There's a call most Tuesdays, 2pm Berlin time. The link usually gets made up the same day and shared by someone in Matrix.