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take it from me, an Arab from Arabia: when white men talk about bringing you "democracy" they're probably trying to kill you
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Ramsey Nasser
@nasser@merveilles.town
hometown 4.2.17+hometown-1.1.2
تعي نقعد بالفي / مش لحدا هالفي
2593 Followers
233 Following
50 Posts
Joined October 14, 2020
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-github-availability/
git is a remarkable piece of technology that was designed to be decentralized out of an understanding that centralized systems are brittle and represent single points of failure
github effectively undoes the benefits of decentralization. we can do better, the future does not look like this.
draft blog post -- with illustrations!
this was finished as part of the residency requirements and is phrased accordingly. I think the final version I'll post on my site will be phrased slightly differently and acknowledge the residency. but the substance is more or less locked as a documentation of the first prototype and the core principles 🙏
comments + feedback appreciated
just found out the lead singer of low roar passed away in 2022... that makes me incredibly sad
this is fun and came together fast. might polish it up and use it to perform at the livecode.nyc 10th anniversary show 👀
found the dispossessed quote i had been thinking of for years:
There were no rules of parliamentary procedure at meetings in PDC. Interruptions were sometimes more frequent than statements. The process, compared to a well-managed executive conference, was a slab of raw beef compared to a wiring diagram. Raw beef, however, functions better than a wiring diagram would, in its place — inside a living animal.
we gotta bring cgi back
here's a chippy little jam on an NES square wave that leans into 8fl's new capability of properly allocating columns and turning off running sounds. read about leaving "space" in a composition and that manifests in 8fl as a bunch of slows (* in tidal mini notation)
noodled on a little compiler last night thats an implementation of a kind of web version of https://code.emma.coop/ramsey/oskar targeting p5.js. using kdl as the syntax but i will probably write my own parser at some point to get rid of those annoying quotation marks
way to go Hungary 🙏🇭🇺
whoa what if SAWA just stood for "Simple Administration Without Administrators"
https://m.twitch.tv/sierra_offline
streaming!!!!
reaching the limits of my patience w ledger-cli... its an incredible piece of software hamstrung by a bizarre refusal to produce machine readable output. it can only reliably print out human-readable formatted ascii tables that confound parsing and we are trying to generate financial reports from it. it has a "csv" mode that is completely janky and underdeveloped...
whoa the merkle tree, the data structure that underlies git history, was originally... patented 😮
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@eestileib @mcc I'm no expert but it honestly sounds like a terrible way to build a network. or at least a pretty confounding way to build a network that you intend to be federated and decentralized in any capacity...
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people really resonated with sawa's goal of implementability too. inspired by 100r (https://100r.co/site/weathering_software_winter.html) sawa is committed to being every easy to extend with new storage and network backends. I have it down to 9 verbs, 4 for the key value storage system and 5 for the network.
for storage:
- get
- put
- drop
- list
for network:
- hello
- have
- want
- give
- thank
sawa is entirely driven by it's storage and network layer and as a result entirely derived from these 9 verbs. if you can implement these verbs, you can offer sawa a new storage and/or network backend.
the current prototype uses leveldb for storage and socket io for the network. but storage from redis, the filesystem, s3 or whatever are totally doable. networking over meshtastic or local Bluetooth are also totally doable, just implement the verbs.
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one perspective can be to think of decisions being made in "namespaces". decisions with the same unqualified "identifier" can exist in different namespaces simultaneously and indefinitely. a collection of namespaces can then be merged with union semantics. decisions absent in one namespace but present in another will show up in the union unchanged. decisions present in multiple namespaces with the same identifier and value will show up in the union unchanged. decisions present in multiple name spaces with the same identifier and different value constitute a disagreement that the system can identify. what the namespaces are and how disagreements are handled is something you would build on top of this.
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I'm anticipating some scale issues with the fairly straightforward way I'm storing data. I have ideas towards them, but I'm also realizing that because of its decentralized nature there's entire categories of scale issues sawa just opts out of. getting this to work with thousands of concurrent users running through a single server is technically difficult and also a non-goal. I think an explicit part of sawa's answer to scaling is to make standing up your own server extremely easy, easier than mastodon.
progress on the main limitation i encountered and the last bit of big architecture before i can call it "done" for this stretch -- scheduling OFF events. this has proven to be quite tricky as it interacts with renoise column allocation and livecoding in subtle difficult ways. i ended up implementing an "abstract sequence" data structure that is a blend of renoise and uzu semantics to act as an intermediary representation and that seems to have solved it!
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@mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe I'm working on something I think is different and simpler. bottoms out in a crdt file per issue/merge request/ticket that gets stored into the repo and reuses existing hosted repository infrastructure for distribution. ie you should be able to use codeberg while I use source hut and we should be able to collaborate. the tool opens a local server that presents a web interface. it's more like git bug than anything.
radicle as far as I understand had a more involved bespoke p2p protocols with seeder nodes, which isn't what I'm getting at.
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@mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe yeah it's the main missing piece. email chains aren't the answer. I'm prototyping something based on automerge that runs locally that I think has some promise.
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specifically an *entirely offline* deployment of sawa is possible. you could move data back and forth on thumb drives for all it cares.
interestingly, storage is the real linchpin. the network layer exists to update the storage in response to peer activity and dispatch events that the user interface can respond to. but sawa actually works without any network adapter at all. the full implications of this are not totally clear yet.
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in SAWA the namespaces are the cryptographically signed "voice documents" of each participant. decisions are what documents to associate with each page and what pages exist. disagreements are handled by merging the conflicting documents via automerge and something a bit more sophisticated soon that enables people to negotiate write policies.
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it is this one
https://git.sr.ht/~nasser/overhead/tree
but it has no clear way to use it lol. will update + document it at some point. also get it on my more modern coroutine stack.
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@mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe that's exactly the idea 🙏 discovering force push with lease in git was the real game changer. the storage overhead shouldn't be more than the crdt file which is compressed (it's automerge) and old objects can safely be deleted by git gc. and yeah would absolutely love feedback once I have a prototype esp from someone principled and versed in decentralized computing!
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@SpindleyQ@gamemaking.social yes!! the current sawa prototype *is* a pet name system 🙏 just didn't have space to get into that
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@donaldball thank you that's really great to hear! I'm preparing a write-up for my residency as we speak and will post here. Early incomplete unlisted blog post is at https://nas.sr/text/sawa/ but does not get into the protocol or these verbs.
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eg for a sneaker net sawa your storage adapter could read/write to you file system/leveldb/sqlite and your network adapter could hook into USB mass storage events to react to a thumb drive being plugged in with new data. if you can implement the verbs sawa can't tell the difference between that and web sockets.
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@cblgh@merveilles.town absolutely! I'll be rereading the blog post and thinking about it!
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@mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe access control is similar to what I've been experimenting with in SAWA which effectively bottoms out in a kind of namespacing, in this case the remotes are the namespaces. locally you can track whatever remotes you want, some of which may be your own, some of which may be collaborators. the issue branch referring to the crdt file lives on every remote. git fetch will pull them all in but we don't have to proactively merge and update your local state. just having access to everyone's file is enough the present a merged view in the local web UI. if you take action like editing or commenting on the issue then you'll build on that merged view and you can commit that locally and push it out to your remotes.
no signaling planned but I think periodic git fetch might be enough? and yeah if people want to build something more elaborate and p2p they can, it's not foreclosed on, just orthogonal
@migratory@jorts.horse yup -- fixed!
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@kris@todon.eu @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe aahh this is interesting! same name I was considering too! will check
Boosted by @joe@f.duriansoftware.com
deployed a prototype of CUBA
https://x.nas.sr/cuba/
it is a livecoding visual thing inspired by my work on the compiler for Larry Cuba's programming language OSKAR https://code.emma.coop/ramsey/oskar
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@esoterra oh I see what you mean! no not yet, nothing public. not for any good reason. I should share the source of that talk, it's a good example of what the system can do
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@SpindleyQ@gamemaking.social yes that's fair. *global* user readable names require some kind of hegemony/centralization is the more complete expression of the idea. I'll update, thanks for the feedback!
@mattly@hachyderm.io no_ne