In the midst of recapitulation season, a fresh issue of Planet Dyne is landing in your super calculator. Take a look at the future in four dimensions, leaning on the past and enjoying the moment.
There's a fine line between reminiscence and nostalgia. Both are useful, learning from the past is paramount to navigate the present and build a future. But the future never rests. This edutainment post is a mixture of all times known to the world wild web, hand-written by a human dyne, for fellow dynes like you. It will not list the 10 worst pizzas of 2023, nor will it give you a hint on the unbelievable things that happened next. But hopefully, it will make you want to subscribe! And maybe even help Dyne.org focus on hacking the planet.
✒️ DID for credential issuers
After the right amount of party-hard hacking, the dynes in Zenroom are back at DID hacking. Wasting approximately -0.1 time, they've implemented a DID for credential issuers, containing multiple public keys including the zero knowledge proof BBS and Coconut, as well as a P-256 public key compatible with the EUDI-ARF standard. For the JSON hungry, here's an example fresh out the DID Explorer:
If you just embarked on this journey, DID means "Decentralized Identifer". It is a dear topic on Planet Dyne. Because it's applications can have a very deep impact in society. If objects, organizations and possibly even dynes are to be identified by hashes, it better be done in sovereign ways that respect dynes' integrity and privacy. Planet Dyne is very lucky, some of the most knowledgeable minds in the field live here. Come say hi sometime, fellow dyne!
Either way, the future of the project is looking bright: there's even a standard on planet W3C.
🚲 Does time ride a bike?
Popular culture would have it fly, but do we know for sure? Most likely there's an online community that does. But how to find it? As it looks today, many of the answers to that question would point to some centralized data-harvesting silo. Take for example the contemporary scene for cryptocurrency: a large portion of its documentation teed-bits and clarifications is hidden in some super interesting convo in a meme-battered Discord channel. Chances are that this Discord is the documented project's official one, but it could also be created by aficionados looking for some clam. Nobody can tell for sure, because Discord won't let you join all guilds in existence. The good practice of websearch-fu is helpless here. The walls of the goodest guilds are impenetrable to the search engines' crawlers! Heck, it's getting harder and harder to even enter those guilds as a human: the more popular they are, the harder the anti-spam guards. Proving humanity has become close to inhumanly difficult. And if you succeed, good luck with the local lingo! Ah, Tribalism... Now that is a promise that the Internet delivered on!
The web was once decentralized and beautiful, until a couple of rich kids turned it into an interactive TV. Or at least so it can seem to the untrained navigator of the Interwebz. The decentralized web still exists, more beautiful and mature than ever. And it's at reach! You just have to put on your infinity pants and get out there on your quest. One good place to begin is Redecentralize.org
🌱 Large Lentils Mortar
LLMs are all the rage and fuzz. Massive amounts of time and energy is consumed to fear them, revere them, build them, run them and implement them. In everything, preferably. There is seemingly no problem that this solution can't claim to be it's own. Dynes pride themselves in talking to each other without intermediaries and engage in comradery still estranged to robots. But the fascination is strong on this planet too: Who wouldn't want a personal all knowing daemon to crunch the basic daily maths? Maybe we'll get there. One way to get there is to acknowledge that technology is always political. This is an effective way to protect the fringes that bias may overlook. It also happens to be a technique applicable to anything tech. Not just warmongering rapping parrots.
One good dyne shares good lecture on LLMs, fairly fresh one at that. As an added bonus, it promises not to be a retrospective on LLMs. Despite it being clear that 2023 was a special year for artificial intelligence.
💳 And now, a word from our sponsor
🥗 The Salad Theory
We got theories! Brown theories, yellow theories. We got blue theories, red theories, fresh theories! Come get some theories! Have you ever wondered why Cesar salads have croutons? Or why pasta-salad sometime has no lettuce? Well, like most things in this universe, there are maths behind it. And some residents of a far off galaxy have crunched the numbers for you in this delicious Salad Theory.
🧠 Brain on my head
It's alive! Aliiiiive! The data output and input of dynes is very small compared to a robot. Sure, a dyne can listen and read real fast, sometimes in many languages! But that's nothing compared to the amounts of MP3s and books a powerful robot could listen to in one second! This is worrisome for some scientists. So they are trying to raise the hopes and mitigate these worries by hard-wiring brains to the computer.
Naturally, this assumes consciousness is a brain thing which, yeah! Makes sense... the eyeballs are there... and when the voices inside the head of an annoying dyne are disturbing, they can give very real headache! Also, data suggests that it is possible to translate brain activity into their corresponding thought! The potential is endless: picture yourself pushing some fresh hack to the repo and being able to read the mind of the critics pressing the blame button! No more fake-ass code-reviews! Just raw unfiltered human brain-farts. Imagine the purity of the comment fields!
I am not finished yet to start my career at twenty without having gotten my license I never have to pull out and run back to my parents to take me home.
Fletcher Reveley
What could go wrong? Well the good news is that there is already a distinction between "invasive" and "non-invasive" methods. And one of the players in camp "non-invasive" took the leap to go open source in 2024! They'll even follow the model of successful for-profit open-source companies like Red Hat and others in the tech industry.
😺 This is going to be great!
🙌🏿 That's it for this edition of Planet Dyne!
Come co-create the next epsiode, and don't forget to hike, cement and subculture!
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