Here's everything that happened in episode 32 of season 2023 of Planet Dyne.
Who said Monday mornings can't be thrilling? In the last episode, some dynes resurrected the mailing list and it was possible to hear the chanting through the firewall. The spam machine was getting hot, dropping links like a b52 with a paint-job. It could explain why you are here now, dyne. But what matters is that it's good to see you! This spot has been kept warm for you. Make yourself comfy! One dyne with a smooth but quite funny voice is reaching for you: "WB! what's bussin? Seen anything that made you want to hack lately?"
Encyclopedia
Paywalls, paywalls, paywalls.
One dyne feeds everyone with a paywall. Nobody gets angry because it can happen. It’s no dyne’s fault if some website decides to enshittify itself. Luckily a snippet is quickly pirated for every dyne’s participation.
"Wikipedia has simply become crib notes for the establishment, at least for any topic remotely political. And even Larry Sanger, one of the two co-founders of Wikipedia in 2001, who coined the name, agrees, saying his creation had “become an establishment mouthpiece”.
— The Australian
Younger dynes find out that maybe there was a reason why teachers warned against using Wikipedia as an information source for writing school projects. Could also be because the mainstream still doesn't understand the religious virtues of copy-pasta… Wikipedia remains enjoyable for many things, but in some topics well known by dynes, it can look a bit shabby. Even wrong. Some chapters of Wikipedia are definitely monitored by groups that do not have the purest intentions. Monitored very closely at that. Sometimes the wisdom of the crowds is not very wise. If it was, would there really be a page for the Hawaiian Pizza? And why does Wikipedia detect mobile devices and redirects them to the mobile version, but doesn't detect desktops to redirect back?
SLM (Smol Language Models)
Dynes are smol language models contained inside a bag of meat. Individually they work OK, but together they shine. This might sound trivial, but it explains why this opinion piece by Pablo Chavez resonates in some dynes. The world is full of competition, but where is the collaboration? Mood gets a bit gloomydoomy, but a dyne can cope.
After all, being a space punk has its percs at times. Plus, the dynes over at the Zenroom chat break the news that forkbomb has a new website. And it’s looking like amazing bizniz!
Also there's a lot of potential fun packed in the Large Language Models. Like feedback loops!
Has anyone actually taken the output of any of the LLMs and just run output to input to output to input over and over, like those xerox art projects, where you end up with a sheet of gray noise?
Will LLMs will create the equiv. of Drexler's "gray goo", but in text?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
— @tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
Zapoy in CCCamp
Do dynes dream of electric sheep? Maybe sometimes. But we know for sure that many dream about going to CCCamp. One lucky dyne is actually going to hold a workshop about name, autonomy and innovative ways with dynamic sig(0) keypairs for secure DNSSEC updates. They’re most likely going to connect with some wise ones from Devuan and maybe you? Another dyne that is going too, is looking into holding a Zenroom workshop. This sparks a conversation about artificially generated natural language. You see, albeit Virtual, Zenroom is a mad juicy machine built by dynes. And because dynes care about dynes (including those who can't code), they built this virtual machine so that you can tell it what to do, WITHOUT all the funky computer characters and stuff. See this snippet of Zencode for reference (Zencode is slang for "Speak nerdy to me"):
Scenario 'ecdh': Encrypt a message with the password
Given that I have a 'string' named 'password'
Given that I have a 'string' named 'header'
Given that I have a 'string' named 'message'
When I encrypt the secret message 'message' with 'password'
Then print the 'secret message'Zenroom can read LUA but it likes when you Zencode it. Seeing how the robot-overlord can now write natural language too, wouldn't it be cool to let it lose on the dataset of examples written in Zencode? The dynes then disappeared from the chat, so it is likely that some hacking went down. But before leaving they put out a reminder: Zencode might be something easy to write for an AI, but what dynes really love about it is the determinism and also that human dynes can easily review it. One day, perhaps, the robot and dynes will communicate on the same dimensional level. And there will peace upon the galaxy. And the bonfires will be epic!
808 day
By now it’s only Tuesday (in the saga of course, relax! If you are unsure what day it is while reading this, here's a very useful tool). Low and behold: It’s also outernational 808 day! This means that Roland, some synthesizer dude with many birthdays, is celebrated. Some dynes prefer to celebrate the 1st of January, others are looking forward to the 9th of September. But everyone agrees that Roland makes kick-ass music machines. He certainly did not forget to put a replication limiting code to his synthesizers: the scarcity of 303s these days has led them to cost an arm and a half!
Music on the other hand is cheap. At least in terms of Fiat currencies. It's cheap, but just like electronic waste, it's precious! In the last episode, dynes were a little reserved about what they were currently listening too. But that's OK, it's possible to take the experimental path instead and discover how GNU/HURD is striking back. The article confirms that it's 2023 and IRC is still the best option for chatting. Many dynes agree, even if most of them rarely log in to irc.dyne.org anymore. But that's a detail right now, because the dynes in Dark.fi have modified ircd to be encrypted and peer-to-peer. Only drawback is that it needs to run an ircd on each client, because e2ee is between daemons. Can it get more futuristic than this? Probably next episode, yes.
Whip it like cream!
One dyne comes in handy with DIY whips. It's never too late to crack a supersonic boom at the dystopian state of digital identity in some nations. How would Indiana Jones deal with corporations nesting in the space of dynes' identity? Being a colonialist looter, he would probably do what he does best: steal all the base. Maybe if the handle of the whip is built with a base-ball bat it's easier to kick some corporate ass? A sovereign solution is overdue. Although to be fair, many dynes have been working overtime to define an interoperable and customizable standard for DID.
Things are still salvageable. If you embrace the dyne in you and participate in the next episode, who knows what could be achieved! Grandiosity for sure, dyne!
Dog days
Episode 32 unfolded in August, which is known as "Dog Days" in the northern hemisphere. It’s hella hot, so everything rots. But no bitrot happening on planet dyne. Instead it's time to clean up the infra. Some testing machines for Interfacer needs to go. But that's fine. Production machine is out on the world wild web already. Although chances are the Interfacer is still a secret to you.
Would Keanu settle it with pinball?
It remains unclear, but there's near consensus among dynes that Keanu is a worthy opponent to the church of emacs. It's likely he would use a font that contains the character "Ö" if he needed to anyways.
There's a time for everything
The now is volatile, but potentially a good moment to contemplate details. Corporate consolidation is one such detail: it's here, it's happening, but not obvious to everyone. Then again, the brands consolidate, but keep their name and logos, as if there was diversity. This creates an opportunity for one of the smallest dynes to generate political agitation through conceptual amalgamation. Naturally no one actually gets triggered. This corner of the internet is old enough now. Nice try though.
Tactics & Practice
Aksioma, a neighboring planet of dyne, releases a podcast! This is ground for celebration. Also it's Friday! Most dynes stop hacking to start hacking on something else for the weekend. But the podcast leave ripples. Tactics and practice of surveillance in the digitization discourse of the OECD is being transformed. A brief genealogy is shared.
Federated breakfast on the beach
The weekend gets wild. It's almost hard to follow. Ranging from dumpster diving to Bonfire releasing version 0.9.6, via Bluesky Federation Architecture, Graffiti art and desert islands to die for.
DEFCON 31 is live revealing Veilid, an open-source, peer-to-peer, mobile-first networked application framework. It is conceptually similar to IPFS + Tor, but faster and designed from the ground-up to provide all services to dynes over a privately routed network. The network also enables dynes to develop distributed applications without a 'blockchain' or a 'transactional layer' at their base. Veilid can be included as part of dyne-facing applications or run as a standalone robot for power dynes who wish to help build the network.
That's all for this recap of Planet Dyne the Think & Do tank, Season 2023, Episode 32!
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