Need Nerd Sniping Ammo

Social Framing
1

I weave in public and try to connect people and interests that may overlap or complement each other. Spritely is among many initiatives I follow and make other people aware of. However, I am not an expert on the topics of the topics of discussion right now. My own interest is as an eventual end-user.

That poses a problem. I lack the time to deep-dive and become expert enough to give a brief enough accurate summary to trigger excitement with other experts and nerd snipe them to check out Spritely in detail. These experts are time-constrained same as experts here are, and only TL;DR new subject areas in the vast seas of IT information.

Passing information around, such as links to Heart of Spritely Paper, presentation recordings, etc. isnā€™t working.

Example: Trying to interest Freenet for Spritely

Freenet is building Locutus. I name-dropped Spritely on chat ā€œDid you consider what OCaps can do for you?ā€ā€¦

Reaction by active contributor (the typical 5 sec. 1st impression hunch):

seems like some kinda programming model
Promise Pipelining but not that interesting tbh

Reaction by creator of Freenet, Ian Clarke:

Sounds similar to how permissions work in OO software, a function can only act on the parameters passed to it. With Locutus, capabilities are specified through cryptography - so a delegateā€™s capabilities are determined by what private keys it knows - potentially very granular.

And they move on with other thingsā€¦

Update 2023-06-05: Since posting I learned the controversial background of Ianā€™s Locutus project, and withdrew myself, deleted Spritely-related comments in Locutus GH discussion. The example is still relevant otherwise.

Something similar to the above happened when @cwebber and I tried to convince the Solid Project that thereā€™s a better way than ACLā€™s. And in a 1 minute first-hunch impression Spritely was discarded in one of their working group chats as ā€œold and uninterestingā€ (something along these lines).

As a lone ā€˜weaverā€™ spending time to promote Spritely, and no one having time (understandably) to lend a hand, is discouraging. What I need is nerd sniping bullets with armor-piercing depleted uranium tips that I can rapid-fire to trigger interest.

It would be fabulous if there were some brief elevator pitches, preferably tailored for particular audiences. Quick reference cards that you can pass around and that have enough of a TL;DR of the Spritely initiative on them to nerd snipe any other initiative and make them snap to attention.

3 Likes
2

I just joined this forum post DWeb Camp in order to take part in @frandallfarmer 's pattern language thing. So I know almost nothing about Spritely, but I have to confess that @cwebber fatally nerd-sniped me about two years ago when she explained OCaps to me. I wonder if some things just land with some people and not with others.

To me, the compelling point of OCaps is that the model is completely leak-proof (save for trust-manipulating attacks such as one human might perform on another). The grantee never actually gets access to the resource, they simply exercise the privilege of operating on a reference to the resource. Thatā€™s a powerful model and kinda makes ACLs obsolete.

(And yes, it does sound exactly like permissions in OO programming, because objects canā€™t help but use a capabilities model AFAICT.)

2 Likes
3

The solid folks have been uninterested in capability security at least as far back as 2011:

sigh

2 Likes