Not boring, and a bit of a condescending prick

Continuing with the "crowdsourced open source design" idea, after a few review iterations, a set of principles on how we can develop and publish them is now public: https://github.com/SysDesignMeetup/sdm I promise to not spam this channel much, but want to get the word out broader, that this thought has now graduated from a mere idea to something that we're executing upon. My dream of some Architect's Corner born out of the @SysDesignMeetup and our community has taken a major step towards becoming reality!

One of the ideas we are flirting with is to sketch out some “open source design” of a nontrivial architectural component. If done well, not only it could serve as a reference document on how to prepare such designs, but also a blueprint based on which we could implement the prototype. I think there’s room for such a design out there today, from contracts and protocol specifications (HTTP JSON to gRPC to binary) all the way to components’ implementation and unit/integration/load testing. As an example problem I keep coming back to either the Total Order Broadcast engine or a simple De-Duplicator. The former can be viewed as an extension of a service mesh proxy, which inserts a sequence ID into every requests, guaranteeing that each and every ID would be unique. The latter can be viewed as something similar, but less so on the transport level, focusing on respecting the logic of idempotency tokens instead. Do you think this would be a good idea? Would you be interested in participating in parts of such “open designs” one way or another? Let me know pls.

I’ve used this argument a lot, but have never seen it employed seriously before. So, as I’m not likely to be a genius, I must have missed something major in tech and/or sci-fi, so do enlighten me pls. The argument is: in the context of sustainable human colonies (underwater, the orbit, Mars, anywhere), why do we need large populations to retain large gene pools? We can print the desired DNA molecules today, and we have plenty of DNAs scanned and stored. This data is virtually impossible to lose and/or to erase. And we can control the DNA of an embryo. I.e. we can have a woman conceive and carry to birth a human child of a desired DNA. Thus, even with no artificial wombs whatsoever, the human race as we know it today may well, in theory, proliferate in the conditions as harsh as a spacecraft traveling thousands of years with very scares food supply. Because we literally only need a single-digit number of women to be alive at a time. Plus a hard drive with plenty of further DNAs to choose from. Plus that very technology and the means to operate it, which also has to be single-digit humans, and they don’t even have to be women. Not hundreds of thousands. Nowhere near this huge number. This, or what am I missing?

https://medium.com/miro-engineering/how-miro-leverages-open-policy-agent-to-implement-authorization-as-a-service-763f08469e5 — Peter, our Staff Engineer, wrote an in-depth blog post about what we are working on at Miro these days.

Blockchain and Web3: just released this new episode! • https://tinyurl.com/sdm-blockchain • https://tinyurl.com/sdm-blockchain-slides The history and the state of the art of blockchain and Web3 from first principles.

A lot of ideas that float around with respect to AGI Alignment seem to converge to a rather trivial dichotomy: Do you want to help people better achieve their goals / live happier lives as they themselves would like to? (1) Or: Do you believe people, en masse, are not good enough at making decisions for themselves, so that, to a certain degree, some form of "positive propaganda" would be a push for the greater good? (2) If you would have asked me ~ten years ago, I would most definitely argue that (2) is a recipe for disaster, while (1), although quite hard, is the way to go. Looking at the world today though, I am far less convinced. Because even if — even if! — we believe human beings are good at deciding for themselves, and even if — even if! — we believe in some form of a well-functioning democracy, so that the will of the majority of people is what drives the society forward ... I have major questions about the sustainability of such a model in the long run. To put it blunt: I am not positive I would definitively pick such a society, however much of a utopia it may sound, over a different society, some more similar to the 1990s / 2000s USA. Because I am legitimately afraid such a society, however much of a utopia it might be, would not legitimately enable me to execute on all my desires. Despite the fact that, objectively, none of my desires can abuse or in any way harm the other citizens / inhabitants of such a seemingly perfect society. Not sure what to make of the above thought. But to me it does, at the very least, serve as good reminder that we are nowhere near being able to postulate the AGI Alignment problem well enough. Because, with a perfect AI or with no AI, we, humans, are having major trouble deciding for ourselves what our lives should be in the long run. Go figure ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sometimes, if I catch myself having sad thoughts about the state of IT, I remind myself that for literally every historical period of human existence I would be worse off. I love employing critical thinking to solve problems, and I was born into an ordinary family. With these inputs, thus, looking around, nothing to complain about, really. Then the thought goes on, to the point where I have to admit that I do believe, and almost assume, that in the future life would be even better. So that if a Dima born in 2100 would look back to 2023, he would be quite upset about what the 2023 Dima has to put up with. This is, of course, normal; that is what is called progress, and this, too, is nothing to be unhappy about. When I look into the past I feel terrible just thinking about how much crap would I have to put up with in order to just not be burned alive, regardless of how much evidence I can present to support my views.. The next thought is to wonder whether this trend can, and/or will, at a certain point, stop or reverse. And here it gets really sad, because it seriously looks like it may well be true that the 90s and the 2000s were a better time for us, first-principled technologists. Of course, we did not have powerful mobile devices / mobile internet, and the concept of working from home was largely non-existent. And, of course, we had corporate structures that are a lot more "traditional", in a sense that acquiring real-life professional skills and growing one's career was substantially more difficult back then than it is today. But disrupting it was also much easier. Or at least so it seems. Now, looking back at the risk of being burned alive, this facet of problems was virtually non-existent in the 90s and the 2000s, but today -- just look around. There's no shortage of topics one is supposed to either not have the "wrong" opinion on, or explicitly not touch in any conversation, unless with close friends. And this trend, that has been brewing for some fifteen years by now, begins to touch on the topics that have direct impact on what the companies declare to be their values. To the point that major executives literally admit that they have to employ Orwellian double-think in order to stay sane while being effective at their jobs. Just to make it clear: I'm fine, I got used to this, I can see the value of PC when it comes to merely extending the idea of politeness so that a bunch of people of very diverse sets of backgrounds and values can be effective at getting things done together. But looking at companies that claimed to be "a big family" with their employees just a few years ago, and are now too shy to pre-announce upcoming layoffs internally, effectively keeping everyone in the guessing mode day after day ... that's just wrong. And this openly contradicts the declared values of most of these companies, and yet this contradiction is supposed to be something that all of us just turn a blind eye to. Kind of surreal to watch, if you ask me.

A semi-crazy idea: a decentralized mesh blockchain run on the hardware of pet lovers, powered by their pets. Say, you have a hamster, or a few to officially indulge the use of the pronoun of the year. You feed them well, and treat them well; please stop reading here if it's not the case. Now, you'd love your hamsters to play and you get them a running wheel. Here's the thing: at this point, modern technology can run a proper blockchain that would only require less computational power than your hamster generates. First of all, this already is a wonderful plot, because we're saving trees and overall care for the environment. Second, there are tons of cases for blockchain that are general-purpose, and yet widely under-utilized. My favorite example would be a blockchain Twitter. Everybody can post a short message, and everybody else can read this message. This short message can be encrypted, so that only those with the key can decipher it. And the original author can publish the key later, granting the public access to whatever they have written before, with accurate timestamps in the past. Imagine a journalist reporting from a dangerous area. The area is so dangerous that they can be lost in action there, while their material may well be of supreme importance. So, it would be nice to be able to report right from that area, so that only the select few people could read their report live, but, later on, these notes could be made public. And all of this may well happen over a mesh network powered by hamster lovers in that area and across the globe. With no external power supply, and with no global Internet available. And everyone can use this Twitter. For free. The "price" of posting one Tweet is measured in the computational power you have contributed to running this mesh network, and its cost is roughly the amount of energy a few hamsters generate by spinning their wheel for several minutes. Ah, and this Twitter would be immutable. So nobody, including Elon Musk himself, would be able to delete content from there. The very idea is infeasible, of course. For far too many reasons, and for most intents and purposes. But it's a cute idea regardless, isn't it?