Welcome to the Spritely Institute Discourse - Introduce yourself here!

I have no recollection of that discussion. I am surprised that I’d say anything wouldn’t work unless it was something that was trying to support delegation with ACLs. Maybe that’s why I brought up SCoopFS.

2 Likes

Hello. I am here. I do not yet know what here means. I always get Discourse, Discord, and Disqus mixed up.

2 Likes

Welcome @alanhkarp, @danny, @danfinlay, and @chip! Lots of incredible people showing up in this thread. Looking forward to all the conversations ahead! :slight_smile:

1 Like

H’lo there folks.

I am the token Icelander that also hangs out on #erights and #spritely on irc under same nick as the screen name here.

Plus I have an github account under same.

Been patiently explaining CapTP and Safe serialization under mutual suspiction to @cwebber over the last, feels like, Jovian year.

2 Likes

Hey @zarutian, nice to have you here!

Yes, you’ve been instrumental in expanding my understanding of many key ocap concepts. Thank you and look forward to your participation in the group! :slight_smile:

Hello all!

My name’s Ludovic Courtès and I’ve been active in GNU Guile (Scheme implementation) and mostly GNU Guix, a toolbox for reproducible software deployment and a standalone GNU/Linux distribution.

My first contributions in free software were on the GNU Hurd, a capability-based operating system. This was an eye-opener and a great intro to ocap, and then @jar’s “Security Kernel” paper really changed my perception on these matters, by bridging the gap between what I had seen in the OS landscape and what I had learned in Scheme.

@cwebber has already developed ideas on how Guix could benefit from Spritely, notably in their recent FOSDEM talk. I’m excited to follow progress here and see how we can connect the dots!

3 Likes

Welcome @civodul! Good self-introduction, though I am going to add one more piece! Wait, two! (Three!)

  • @civodul wrote a very interesting ocap-relevant dissertation also: Cooperative Data Backup for Mobile Devices. This dissertation can be seen as a broad overview of what choices one can make in an encrypted content-addressed storage system. It had a big impact on me! Since the end system looks a lot like Tahoe-LAFS, I think it’s fair to say it’s very ocap relevant.
  • Related to that, @civodul wrote libchop as an example implementation.
  • Finally, there’s a goldmine of interesting links in Ludovic’s Bibliography section; you have to click all the links on the left hand side to get through them, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there!

But yes, @civodul is well loved for his work on founding and maintaining Guix. Guix has a big role to play in Spritely I think/hope, and hopefully vice versa too, so I’m thrilled you’re here!

2 Likes

I think that’s totally possible. A lot of the current Ethereum security model is account-based, which means a lot of norms that are very ACL-like: Each token has one balance per “account”, and so it has a current architectural norm where users receive funds for many purposes into one account, which really can “mix the books”.

I don’t remember what aspect you were commenting on, unfortunately, but am glad in retrospect that I had an extra pointer to ScoopFS from you :slight_smile:

1 Like

Hello! I am here now too. Just watching, mostly.

2 Likes

I’ll finish introducing @vonguard - He’s Alex Handy, a member of the Board of Directors, and founder of The Made (The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment.)

Alex was key in getting the rights to Lucasfilm’s Habitat so we could open source it all, and ultimately brought back to life at http://neohabitat.org

gm. I’m bengo. I’ve been using the web since my family got me a computer in like 1996 (I was 6) and my sister showed me you could write to it using frontpage 97 or homestead.com. In the mid 2000s I learned a ton from the emergence of blogging, podcasting, etc as facilitated by standards like RSS and AtomPub. I found it worthwhile to start blogging and podcasting about xbox 360s and learned enough linux, ftp, wordpress to make it happen, and php to help make it look cool. I started learning some ruby on rails too because it made programming look doable. Along the way I tinkered with old versions of things like openid.

In 2008 I went to undergrad at University of Kansas and took a campus job at ittc.ku.edu to pay the bills. I learned more linux, but mostly was twiddling my thumbs so I taught myself javascript, python/django, and some more sql and helped the internal staff upgrade the intranet to use web apps instead of MS Access.

Then I got bored and dropped out of KU, and moved to San Francisco in 2010 to join a pre-product startup called Livefyre, which was making a ‘real-time comments widget’ (and corresponding b2b business) powered by XMPP that eventually generalized to be like a “social media as a service” platform. Pretty much right away I started attending ‘evented web’ and ‘webhook’ and ‘DiSo’ meetups and learned about https://activitystrea.ms (xml, used by fb and myspace at the time, just like fb chat and gchat would interop via XMPP) and Activity Theory and was intrigued, and I also found the semantics useful in my day job wrangling social media streams for our customers, though it was frustrating applying these ‘standards’ to a fledgling business because the ‘standards’ kept changing all the time, and my customers didn’t like that. For the most part the authn/authz/social APIs I helped design for customers were non-standard (exception being implementing OIDC in 2016), but I always had a hunch we shouldn’t have been starting from scratch. During this time I learned a lot from consuming every book and talk that @crock put out.

In 2014, some of that activitystrea.ms work got passed along to W3C. I attended an in-person Social WG meetup at Mozilla SF, and that’s when I bumped into @cwebber who happened to be presenting a first draft of ActivityPub that day. I’ve been a big cheerleader ever since, and have learned a lot from following @cwebber et al’s research into things like dpki, ocaps, robust composition, etc.

After Adobe bought Livefyre in 2016, I quit. While backpacking around southeast asia, I tried to ‘save’ some Activity Streams 2.0 / ActivityPub features from being cut before the Social WG charter expiration by implementing them in distbin, which I think was one of the first public implementations of AP. I also made a small manual test suite, for which @cwebber was nice enough to thank me in the AP spec.

Before COVID, I was trying to increase the adoption of open software and decrease platform risk by prototyping permanent.computer. When COVID hit I stopped that to work at https://dfinity.org for a year on implementing capability-based authz using WebAuthn. Recently I joined Protocol Labs to work on web3.storage and study cryptoeconomics. Since I joined, I have been surprised how many new colleagues not only have heard of spritely, but are also huge cheerleaders (e.g. @danny who I met at dinner last week). On the side I hope to experiment with cooperative sustainability of https://activitypub.com and tinker more with things like CapTp.

3 Likes

Hello everyone. I’m Dale Schumacher. My interest in empowering decentralized communities led me to the Actor model of computation, which naturally expresses ocaps. Some of my exploration is documented on my blog “It’s Actors All The Way Down”.

I’ve built several experimental actor-based systems, including implementations of the Humus language for describing pure-actor programs. I’m very interested in language semantics and systems constructed from small sets of powerful orthogonal primitives. I’ve created actor-based implementations of several LISP/Scheme/Kernel variants, and other language-construction tools like PEG parsers.

Recently, I’ve been building an actor virtual machine prototype that implements instruction-level concurrency among (potentially) multiple cores. On that foundation, I’m building a concurrent Scheme with actor extensions.

Much of my work is open-source and hosted under https://github.com/dalnefre and https://github.com/organix

2 Likes

Welcome @dale.schumacher (and, since I forgot earlier, also welcome @bengo)!

:wave: I’m Jakob Kreuze. I’m an incoming graduate student at Brown University and (assuming all goes to plan) I will be doing my research on the intersection of distributed systems and formal methods. I was introduced to Spritely as a result of Christine being my mentor when I did Google Summer of Code some years ago, working on the initial implementation of guix deploy.

Thank you for welcoming me to your community!

4 Likes

Hey welcome @zerodaysfordays! It’s nice to have you here. (And thanks for all the review of the paper you sent to me directly earlier!)

Hi everyone! I’m Leilani H. Gilpin, a new Assistant Professor at UC Santa Cruz (go slugs!) During my PhD, I worked on creating propagator-inspired explanatory tools for autonomous vehicles using mit-scheme.

Thanks for the invite and I’m excited to be a part of this community! I’m a not-so-secret computer language nerd, although I’m “technically” an AI person.

4 Likes

The next wave is arriving! Welcome @lgilpin, @zerodaysfordays. @dale.schumacher, and @bengo!

Pardon our dust as we’re still arranging things around here, but make yourselves comfortable. With the new Guile version of our object capability framework and our draft whitepaper, we need plenty of eyes on our work.

3 Likes

To others: @lgilpin is the person whose work I cited a whole bunch in my Propagators, Brainy, and Spritely talk.

Welcome @lgilpin! Thrilled to have you here. And thanks for all the feedback you’ve already given on the whitepaper (especially, but not only, on the Scheme primer section)! :slight_smile:

1 Like

Hello, I’m David Thompson. I write software for a living, currently specializing in DevOps, but I don’t have any notable contributions to free/open standards or software for decentralized network communities to mention. However, I am a friend of Christine’s (we even co-presented at a LibrePlanet conference years ago), I am a supporter of ActivityPub and Spritely, and I have written my fair share of Scheme code. I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone is up to around here. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Welcome @dthompson! Good to have you here. :slight_smile: