Chris Beams: …and I like to think that we’ve done a pretty decent job of that, but given that we’re actually adding quite a bit of complexity into the picture… Like you said, Coinbase, or Bitstamp, or any centralized exchange that people might choose to use today, are extremely convenient, by comparison to what they were a few years ago, and indeed, by comparison to Bisq. It’s just a higher sort of profile of engagement that we have to ask the user to understand and comprehend, and so on. There’s a kind of essential complexity to doing this in a peer-to-peer way that I don’t think will ever be lower than the essential complexity involved in interacting with a centralized exchange.

We also don’t think that that’s a fundamental problem, that there’s that greater complexity, because what you’re getting for it is greater privacy. Indeed, much greater privacy with Bisq, and that’s really the core value proposition or reason that Bisq exists.

We’ve talked about security so far, right? Using Bisq, and using all these other things that we’re talking about is a great way to make sure that your funds don’t get stolen and can’t be stolen; you’re eliminating a trusted third-party, you’re eliminating a security hole by taking a centralized exchange out of the loop - that’s great, that’s security, right? But then there’s privacy, and that’s where we get back to the beginning with Bitcoin, and saying “We have this amazing global blockchain etc. It’s all permissionless, it does for money what the internet did for information.” The blockchain and Bitcoin have the potential to do for money what the internet did for information.

[28:04] If you think about pre-web, we had a select set of gatekeepers, media organizations - TV, radio, news outlets etc. Post-web we have an explosion of people becoming their own TV, radio, news and consuming the TV, radio and news of other self-producers and self-publishers. That dream of the internet and the web has been totally realized and continues to be realized to ever greater degrees today. And where we are now, certainly where we were in 2008-2009 was very much like we were in the media landscape pre-internet, with regards to banks and money and finance and so on. There’s gatekeepers - there’s a few banks, there’s financial institutions, there’s governments, there’s regulatory bodies etc., and they have a whole lot to say about what’s possible with your money, with money in general, and so on, and that’s why Bitcoin has been so deeply exciting to so many technologists.

A glance at the news today is all about the price and all about an 18-year-old kid who got rich because he bought $1,000 worth of Bitcoin when he graduated high school, or whatever it was five years ago. Those are fun stories, and of course it’s sensational, and it’s all also true, right? People made a lot of money. But why did all of these people get engaged and why have all these people been in this space now for years and years? It’s because of what’s possible. It’s because of that amazing promise of what happens when we have essentially the internet of money, if you will, or more broadly, the internet of value exchange. We now have the possibility to exchange value at a distance, with people who we don’t have a high degree of trust with, and that was simply not possible prior to Bitcoin without having a trusted third-party, some intermediary, a Paypal if you will, in the middle.

So if that’s what Bitcoin made possible, it starts to make sense why we thought Bisq was so important, because you wanna have the ingress and egress from that system, right? Getting into Bitcoin from fiat - people call it national currencies “fiat” in the space, if people aren’t familiar with the term. So US dollars, yen, euros, whatever - that’s all fiat money… Getting into Bitcoin from fiat, so buying Bitcoin for dollars, getting out of Bitcoin, selling your Bitcoin for dollars or euros - that’s a really important part of the system. It’s not Bitcoin itself, this kind of ancillary thing at the edges, but it’s incredibly important, because as people exchange that money, and if they’re doing it via, say, a centralized exchange, if they’re doing it anything other than a person-to-person or peer-to-peer over the internet way, then somebody else besides you and your counterparty knows about that transaction, has a record of that transaction, and centralized exchanges are - the vast majority of them - subject to regulations that say they have to know their customer, they have to get ID verifications… This isn’t perfectly true, but in many cases - most cases - you’re dealing with requirements where people have had to give their identities to these organizations. That information can get out, and does get out. It can get out via hacks, you can get doxed, it can get out via government requests, it can get out in a number of ways. It’s just as vulnerable as the Bitcoin that you’re storing there, actually.

[32:06] When you couple that privacy risk with the fact that Bitcoin is itself a totally transparent system of value exchange, in that it’s a perfectly trackable, perfectly treaceable, you can follow the coin through every single transaction on the blockchain - putting your name, having the possibility of putting your name and personal information on any one transaction, especially the first transaction where you buy your first Bitcoin, or anytime you buy a new Bitcoin, that means that it’s possible for entities that you might not want to be able to, to track that coin all the way through the Bitcoin blockchain, and that does happen; that technology is getting more and more sophisticated as we speak. The so-called chain analysis systems and companies - that’s what they do.

So Bisq’s raison d’être here - really why does it exist - is for the protection of individual privacy, to give people who want it, people who need it, people who value it, the ability to get in and out of Bitcoin without ever putting their personal information on these transactions.

Adam Stacoviak: Or at least aware that the outcome you got was a possibility, and potentially even likely. It’s the whole risk, the idea of risk… Like, you know, you lost all your money on Bitcoin over the holiday season? You’re the idiot. Those people that are pissed…

Jack Dorsey: I mean, the other thing I’m really proud of is this is not a strategy that came from me. It came from Alysa, who runs the seller business, and Brian, who runs the Cash App. They worked together, because – I’d been pushing them for some time to push the ecosystem together and find the connections between the two, because we know they’re there. They might start off as very small, but it came out of that push where they’ve found an obvious connection that was large, and that was Afterpay.

And we met with the entrepreneurs Eisen, Nick and Ann and just loved their values and what they’re trying to do in the world, and how much humility they have, and what they care about, and it just felt like a fit. It felt like one thing, so we made it one thing, even though it was a very large thing to do, the biggest thing we’ve ever done, and extremely risky… But I trusted Brian and Alysa because they did the work, and they showed why this connection makes sense, and why it’s the future, and why it’s really important for each one of the businesses, but more importantly for our business, Block. The majority of my time right now is focused on the smaller things, like Tidal, and the Bitcoin stuff, and…

Jack Dorsey: I mean, the other thing I'm really proud of is this is not a strategy that came from me. It came from Alysa who runs the seller business, and Brian, who runs the Cash App. They worked together, because – I'd been pushing them for some time to push the ecosystem together and find the connections between the two, because we know they're there. They might start off as very small, but it came out of that push where they've found an obvious connection that was large, and that was Afterpay.

And we met with the entrepreneurs [unintelligible 00:33:34.26] and just loved their values and what they're trying to do in the world, and how much humility they have, and what they care about, and it just felt like a fit. It felt like one thing, so we made it one thing, even though it was a very large thing to do, the biggest thing we've ever done, and extremely risky… But I trusted Brian and Alysa because they did the work, and they showed why this connection makes sense, and why it's the future, and why it's really important for each one of the businesses, but more importantly for our business, Block. The majority of my time right now is focused on the smaller things, like Tidal, and the Bitcoin stuff, and…

Nader Dabit: Yeah, no magic feeling… And again, how fortunate was I to even be able to say something like that, right? So I recognized all that stuff. But I was looking for something, the next thing to excite me. I’d been speculating as an investor in crypto since like 2015, so buying and selling Bitcoin back in the day, and then other things more recently… And one of the ones that I looked into was something called the Graph Protocol. And it was the first time I kind of looked past the token as an investment and tried to understand why it was there and why people were buying it and using it… And when I started kind of looking into that project, the first thing I realized was that they were using GraphQL, and that was kind of like a big part of it… And that was really the first big eye-opening moment for me as a developer, when I started realizing that these tokens and these crypto-economic protocols were actually there for something other than speculation… Because honestly, at that point, even 6-7 months ago, I didn’t understand how smart contracts work. I didn’t understand anything past just buying and selling.

[08:12] So I started diving into why they use GraphQL, and that kind of took me down what a lot of people call this rabbit hole of the entire ecosystem, and Web3, and all of the people, all of the communities, all of the projects and all of the stuff happening. Conferences, all types of stuff. And I became really, really fascinated, and I became really excited, and I wanted to continue doing research. I started reading and I started buying books, and really getting – I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was one of those things, like “Oh, this is freaking cool.” The reason that these things have become popular isn’t just because it’s like another currency, but there’s actually other stuff… And when you start peeling back the layers and seeing all this stuff, it really spoke to me as an engineer, because the problems that they were solving and the stuff that they were doing seemed so much more fun and interesting than anything I’d worked on really in my career, ever.

So yeah, at that point I did start considering “What if I wanted to make a move in this industry?”, but it wasn’t really anything I took too seriously, because of a bunch of different reasons… One of those being it just seemed so risky to me to turn down a half a million dollar type of opportunity that I had on the table to maybe join an industry that I knew nothing about; and I had zero experience… Like, why would anyone hire me anyway? And if I did, would I be successful? That’s kind of where I was maybe a couple of weeks before I ultimately tried to get into the role I’m in now. So that’s hopefully an overview of how I decided to even consider this area.

Raul Jordan: Yeah. I think it’ll be really hard for Bitcoin to switch over. Bitcoin prides itself on kind of being unchangeable, immovable. It’s unlikely that they will adopt something as radical as this. They have a very strong perspective that proof of work is the only way to go, for example. We don’t share that mindset.

The one mindset that I do share though is that I think it is risky to launch a proof of stake network from scratch. So proof of stake, by virtue of its name, you are staking something; you’re putting something up at risk, that has value, that you don’t wanna lose, in order to secure the blockchain. If you launch a project with proof of stake - where does the value come from? You’re staking something that doesn’t have any value, and you’re telling me that it’s gonna go securely?

So I’m a lot more skeptical of projects that launch pure proof of stake. I think it can be very dangerous. But like I said, Ethereum is already proof of work for a long time, it already has this massive security pool, and migrating to proof of stake makes sense for Ethereum. So I think there’s a trade-off. But yeah, we’re working on that…

Brendan Eich: The story of my life. I was a Unix kernel hacker at Silicon Graphics before I ended up at Netscape, and I always worked on platform code… I think you see - it’s pretty explicit now - open fintech through the Symphony Foundation and other things… You see a lot of companies realize that open source is better for quality assurance, recruiting, lots of things that traditionally they would have to pay for themselves, so they can share the cost of platform code, or what Georgios Kontaxis calls evolutionary kernel code. This is the sort of stable code that’s conserved like the best DNA in a population. It’s like the TCP/IP or JavaScript - once you stabilize it, everybody can build huge systems above, and sometimes even below it. You can have multiple link layers and go from Ethernet being 10 Mbps on copper, all the way up to fiber (metropolitan Ethernet or whatever ATM cells) and still have this TCP/IP in the middle, and sure, IPv6, but it’s not really taking over, and it’s all evolutionary. JavaScript ES6, here we go again!

The platform code, the evolutionary kernel code that’s sort of “the commons” in the best sense of the word, is a cost center. When I was at Silicon Graphics, as I developed hot, killer graphics, workstations and then high-end multi-processors and low-end desktop graphics workstation machines, eventually to be killed by the PC and the GPU in the ’90s, the kernel group that I worked in and the network software group got kicked around. It was a cost center, it was an albatross, or else it was a source of talent for building out something important for the multiprocessor business. So they got kicked from the “hot product” group to the “not hot product” group and back. I think it even got divisionalized a little bit, not fully forked. HP did the same thing.

I see a pattern here, where open source is serving the commons, it’s not serving the differentiated, risky or for-profit innovation, that for better or worse some of that stuff stays proprietary. But anything that starts to become a platform, starts to become a cost center and needs to have its costs shared if it’s of interest to many other players. And how do you fund that? I wouldn’t say it’s exactly like publishers, because publishers often are for-profit. But not always - Dow Jones was a long-time family-owned and subsidized… In some ways we need Carlos Slim and Jeff Bezos to prop up the nation’s number one and two papers of record, right?

[01:00:22.27] Newspapers have been in a decades-long decline, and they always relied on advertising and subscriptions, and subscriptions never paid for the whole thing; they were always a minority of the revenue needed to run a newspaper business, even back in the heyday, the golden age of newspapers. Because people would subscribe, and there was some revenue you made there, but advertising paid the bulk of it, and that’s still true.

The way I look at this is not to say “We must have advertising. Advertising is always good.” There was a TV executive I heard about in the ‘50s who said, “It’s inconceivable that television will ever be other than free and advertising-supported”, and of course we have Netflix now, so never say never. Maybe the Brave donation model, in some future frictionless micro-donation, micro-payment, micro-royalty world will suffice. We still have free television with ads for sure, even with Netflix. But if you look at how costs are covered, you have to look at what’s happening today. If 70 billion is spent on ads in the U.S. (I think this year, or maybe it was last year), and Facebook and Google are taking a lot of it (they’re taking 80%) and the increment in spending from last year - maybe it went from 60 to 70 - of that 10 billion increment they’re 90%, that’s not leaving a lot for the publishers. And if you look at how the publishers do their ad businesses, they have to pay if they sell direct ad space. If they do indirect, they’re at the mercy of malware, like I said, but they’re also getting far less, because there’s so many people in the middle, cutting out from the pie; by the time the pie gets from the marketing side to the publisher, there’s very little left - 35-40% or less.

Still, that’s a lot of money. That’s billions of dollars a year, and these companies need to get it, so how would you go about replacing that? Assume for a moment things need to be replaced as is, that we won’t get a better model, we won’t find fusion energy, like Sam Altman thinks would make electricity free - I kind of doubt that - but ceteris paribus (all else equal), how would you replace that 70 billion? I think about that a lot. First of all, I think a lot of it is wasted on ads that never are viewed. This is the big scandal that’s been breaking for the last year or so, thanks to my friends at White Ops Security; there was another group whose acronym I’m forgetting - ANA I think, that did a study that showed there was a lot of fraud and kickback nonsense going on…

[01:02:56.04] A lot of ads aren’t being viewed. Facebook recently announced that its video ad metrics were off, way high from what they actually were. And they were charging accordingly, so people are kind of mad about this. But we have computers, we have smartphones; we could theoretically do a very private platform that measures what you’re interested in without giving away your data profile or your privacy, and matches valuable opportunities to you and give you a cut. That makes me think there’s a way to fund the web even if it’s not a commons. But certainly, for things like a publisher site that is more of a commons - obviously, Wikipedia is an example, but there are others - or all the open source software that everybody wants to share the cost of, because it is a cost centre, it is even an evolutionary kernel in some sense, and it has to be sustained by everybody who’s chipping in. I think there are ways to fund it, it’s just we haven’t found the ways to do it. That’s why Brave’s doing Bitcoin under the hood. It’s not because we love Bitcoin; we don’t want everyone to learn about Bitcoin. We do not intend people to have to become Bitcoin gurus. We haven’t announced yet, we’re doing a deal where you can easily just trust us with your credit card to do a recurring small charge to get Bitcoins; you don’t have to think about it at all. Currently, the way you fund your Brave wallet while we’re doing this Brave payments, beta is with Coinbase (we’ve partnered with Coinbase), but you still have to think a little bit about Bitcoin. And the publisher side, they’re getting Bitcoin out; we’re gonna make that easy to get fiat [currency] out.

We’d like to use something like Bitcoin though because we think there’s a future where you have a frictionless system - no interchange charge, none of the hidden charges that are associated with the credit cards where fraud sticks the merchant with the overhead or the cost of having funds clawed back to the bank. The interchange charge is like 2,15% or something (it varies), but the hidden cost of fraud is high, and a lot of merchants have to eat it. It’s not a good deal for them, especially the small businesses.

[01:04:57.10] So I think there’s something coming to the web in terms of frictionless payments, whether it’s Bitcoin, or Ethereum classic, or son of daughter of redhead’s stepchild of both… There’s something coming there, and the important properties are the permissionless property, no intermediary, frictionless property… Ideally, it would be anonymous and capable of doing micro transactions with Bitcoin as not currently. But that’s why Brave has this Brave payment solution - we solve that ahead of some next-generation solution that is coming to Bitcoin. And we want to, again, make it just work with your native fiat currency. If that happens, then I think it will be easier to micro-tip, micro-donate, have micro royalties.

Think about the Ted Nelson’s project Xanadu vision, and now think about VR if it ever takes off, or AR, because it really should be in our sunglasses. In ten years it probably will be, then all the great stuff creative people build for the augmented or virtual world - you can’t really DRM it. It’s a shared world, there’s too many eyeballs to ray trace and path trace to. You can’t say, “These are encrypted pixels and you cannot touch them, or we’ll put you in jail under the DMCA.”

All your models and your texture art - they’re gonna be out there, just like they were in Second Life. How do you protect that stuff? Well, you can watermark it; that’s a traditional method, it goes back to real-world paintings and documents. That is more of an identification system for prosecuting gross copyright violations after the fact. What if you could just have automatic micro royalties, like

Ted Nelson envisioned? People are looking at or using, or borrowing, or creative-commons-ing, meshing up some bit of art - there’s a micro royalty associated to the artist. That can be automated too, and that’s another thing that I think you can do with cryptocurrencies if you do them right. That should be part of the web standard, future AR web. I’ll pause there because I’ve said a lot, but you can see that there’s a big vision here, and I hope it’s exciting to everybody because it goes way beyond just browsers.

Samuel Goff: So a couple of things. First of all, when it comes to blockchain, specifically Bitcoin and others that are based on proof of work, not proof of stake, I have a real issue with… Because the energy intensity of the computation is so high that you could power multiple countries now. Right? And so what’s happening is a lot of dirty energy sources such as natural gas, coal, oil, things that, where increasingly, it is economically unsustainable, because grid-powered solar and wind have completely leapfrogged them in terms of cost efficiency. If you’re building brand new energy sources right now, by far, you can build anywhere from six to nine times more grid-scale, solar or wind, compared to nuclear, which is the second cheapest, or third cheapest, I should say… But everything else is more expensive by comparison. But the problem is, you go to an oilfield where they have these toxic gases, and they set fire to those toxic gases as a way of making it safe. Well, that’s wasted energy.

So what’s happening here in Texas is a bunch of Bitcoin miners set up in the oil fields, and they’ve harvested that heat energy, what would normally be just waste heat. And that becomes an additional revenue stream for those oil extractors, those oil companies. And so it basically takes what was a dying revenue model, a dying, industry, and it breathes new life into it, and it slows down our adoption of renewables. And it takes – basically, it vastly increases our risk of transforming our environment to a place where it’s going to kill people to go outside, whether it’s due to the extreme heat and humidity, or the extreme cold, because the natural conveyor belt that used to exist has kind of collapsed, or it’s sometimes collapsing.

Dan Guido: There is Ubuntu [unintelligible 00:46:35.22] updates turned on, and that’s configurable. If you wanna turn that off, that’s fine. Some people may perceive risk, and - “Well, what happens if somebody sends down a Trojan software update, and somebody’s backdoored WireGuard, or whatever? …and now, instead of protecting my keys, it tarballs my keys and sends them out to a remote server.” Stuff like that has happened.

I think the Bitcoin community, the Python community, the npm community, Ruby Gems as well - all of these package managers have at some point had [unintelligible 00:47:07.08] dependencies, they’ve had developers that had their accounts compromised and malicious packages uploaded… Or Chrome extensions too are pretty popular for attacks like this. So that’s another reason why we wanted to limit the software on Algo VPN to the minimum possible, because I don’t wanna inherit all the supply chain risk.

Chris Lamb: But it’s pretty scary. I mean, to go back to the psychology idea - imagine being that developer. You’re sitting at home… How much money could you make by adding a backdoor to that Bitcoin wallet? How much would it cost to hire a bunch of heavies to go around at his house? I think the economics would work out; the moral economics perhaps wouldn’t, but just in terms of money… Yeah, very scary.

If I was that [unintelligible 00:41:21.24] person, I wouldn’t wanna put myself in that situation. I wouldn’t wanna put myself at risk for being targeted in that way.

Jerod Santo: [50:46] Yeah. Well, you developed good habits, so that will be a real virtue for you, to maintain those habits. I would add options trading to the list of things you should not get into when you get out, because your Robinhood account can also be an entertainment that turns into disaster… And I’m sure you’d like to avoid future disasters. I think your open source work is far more profitable and way less risky than options trading options. But tell us about the open source. How long did it take you to get into? How did you get into it? What do you work on in the open? etc.

Glauber Costa: Yes. 100%. And we will. And I want to clarify that now, because with LibSQL it became very clear to us in maybe a month that that was not going to happen. So with LibSQL – I joked about it today, we had this goal of replacing SQLite for 10 minutes, because it’s a dream etc. It’s obviously a big prize. It’s obviously this big prize etc. As I wrote in my blog post, were we bummed about it? No, because we built a pretty successful business on top of the code, on top of LibSQL, which is today our company, Turso. So for us, it was this exercise of – if you heard the expression “Shoot for the stars, because even if you miss, you’re going to hit the moon…” For us it was like “Yeah, it turns out – I don’t think it’s going to be possible for us to replace SQLite with the fork.” But that’s us hitting for the stars. We didn’t hit the stars, we hit the moon. The moon’s great. Again, we built a super-great project, we’re having fun. LibSQL brought something to SQLite that wasn’t there, which was like the serverless, and running this on serverless environments, on the cloud platform, syncing databases… One of the things that we do with Turso is you can sync your databases between different devices, and backups, and all of that. And this is going great. I mean, this is going fantastically for us, and so we were never sad or disappointed that this thing that crossed our mind – can you imagine how amazing it will be if people just start using our fork instead of SQLite? We were never disappointed at that.

But when we put the rewrite out, it became very clear - and I’ve been using this analogy from chemistry, that the reaction was right. LibSQL was something that the market was clamoring for. I think what it became very clear seeing the reaction of Limbo now is just that the activation energy is not enough to make the reaction happen.

[20:15] And after talking to a lot of people - and there’s a whole story of what happened after we announced this… I talked to a lot of the people who came and started contributing to the project… And what it became clear is that they all agreed with us, that we need a better version of SQLite. I mean, it will be fantastic if we have something like SQLite, but that does this, and this. All our original vision. But the fork just wasn’t differentiated enough. It just wasn’t ambitious enough. It just wasn’t bold enough to get people to come and contribute.

Furthermore, it is actually very hard to do, because one of the things you did mention - the SQLite test suit is fully proprietary. So once you start making changes that are very deep into the core, you start hitting a bunch of issues. And some of them – it’s just like yourself saying “I know that the best way to solve this problem is this, but I’m going to solve it in this other way, which is almost as good, but not great, but it’s less risky.” So you start having this on your mind. So the fork never really unshackles you fully to go pursue this, which is why when we announced the rewrite, what we saw, again, was something I’ve never seen before. We got 8,000 GitHub stars in a week, essentially. We had what I consider to be for the first time in the history of computer science a Hacker News comment section that was mostly positive, with just a couple, I think maybe one or two comments only that were trying to denigrate us. But the rest very supportive. We had this fantastic, inspiring story of this individual who is in prison at the moment, and he was one of the first people in the United States to be granted access to the internet in prison. He can access Discord, but not X, by the way; that maybe say something about it. But he is now the fourth top contributor to the Limbo project…

Ashley Jeffs: You don’t have to do that in the UK. The grass is just always green. That’s just for you guys… We love our clay. We love our clay mounds in our gardens.

Yeah, I was going to say, the concerning thing for me is when you see people who - they’re not happy with the current situation, and they’re kind of like pushing on regardless… I don’t want to tell people just stop. Like, somebody’s got an open source project, but they’re burnt out, and they don’t enjoy doing it anymore, but they feel like they have to. It’s really difficult to just tell them like “You should stop what you’re doing, and do something else.” But I think that there’s a lot of exploitation, not by design, but just by accident, that happens.

[01:39:59.10] I mean, it’s the same with any other company. It doesn’t have to be open source. It could be somebody gruellingly working on their startup company, and it’s just not working out. There’s all these other scenarios. But I think the difference is that when somebody’s making open source and they’re putting themselves out there, they’ve got this project, it gets a bit of attention and then they feel like they’re kind of obligated to keep working on it… There’s no one there protecting them from not seeing that you’re being exploited, basically. These people are never gonna pay you for what you’re doing. They’re never gonna compensate you for it, and they will just keep taking, more and more and more, if they can. Not all of your users; some of them are like nice people and they just can’t afford, or you don’t have like a good revenue stream or something, for other reasons… But there’s a lot of people out there doing a lot of work. I mean, I was one of them. Before Benthos, all my open source projects were – to some extent, I just worked on them for fun. But then eventually you get attention and then you kind of feel like “Oh, I have to do this pull request. I have to fix this issue. I have to do this release.” And you’re never gonna get compensated for it. You’re never actually gonna get thanked for doing a lot of that work.

So if you don’t enjoy it, then ideally, you need to be protected, to some extent. And I think open source is very risky, because there’s absolutely nothing between you and the people that are just gonna keep taking, taking, taking. And they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know that they’re doing that to you. They’re just using your thing. They think they’re doing you a favor by using your thing and interacting with you. But for a lot of these people, they’re giving you their life. They’re giving you their time, and their energy, and they don’t necessarily have anybody in the chain saying “Oh, well, it’s done now. Time’s up. This hasn’t become a massive success.” Or “We’ve done enough here. We’ve solved the problem. Let’s just walk away now and be happy with what we’ve made.” Because it’s just you and the internet. Like, there’s no filter. There’s no gap. There’s no one else. There’s no daddy.

Chris James: So imagine you start a new project with a half a dozen developers, and the first thing you do is you write 10 Go interfaces describing the lumps of code that you think you’re going to need to solve this problem. And then you divide them up between everyone, and say, “Go implement those interfaces, and we’ll stick everything together in a few weeks time.” You’d probably rightly question my judgment with this approach, because surely this is premature abstraction. How do I know that the design is correct? How do we know these interfaces are what we need? And is it not risky for us to work so independently at first? Are we not going to integration hell? And yet, there are loads of teams out there who will start a project with microservices. And that is just like what I’ve just described, but it’s even worse, because there’s a distributed system on top of all of these assumptions that you’re making.

[00:07:48.27] So whatever mistakes you’ve made in your design are so much harder to fix than if it was just in a single codebase. And my unpopular opinion - maybe it’s not unpopular, I don’t know, but I believe in the vast majority of cases rather than starting a project by drawing on a whiteboard 100 microservices, just start with a monolith. Start with like one codebase. Because if you make mistakes in your assumptions, it’s so much easier to fix within a single codebase than if you’ve just scattered it into a million services. And if you can write a good monolith, then you’ll be able to break it out into separate distributed services when you actually need to distribute this work.

And I guess my second unpopular opinion on top of it, which is kind of the same, is if you can’t write a good monolith, you’re going to write a dreadful microservices architecture.

Elham Tabassi: It certainly makes sense. I’ll try to answer the way I understood this. So AI systems are not inherently bad or risky, and it’s often the context that determines if a negative impact will occur, and also what are the risks. An example that I usually use is that if I use face recognition to unlock my phone, versus face recognition in the airport that now our faces are a boarding pass to get on the plane, or face recognition in the context of the law enforcement, it’s the same technology, but in the different context there is different risks and different levels of the assurances that we want to have for the systems to work in a trustworthy manner.

[00:28:30.07] So what we have been trying to do as part of our work in approaching trust and trustworthy AI - the first one was to unpack the concept. Try to get into the characteristics that make a system trustworthy. That helps to answer the question of what to measure. If I want to know if it’s trustworthy or not, what are the measurements I need to do? So I listed the seven characteristics, from valid and reliable, safe, secure, et cetera. So that gives a more of a systemic approach and structural approach to what are the dimensions, what are the characteristics that together can make a system trustworthy.

And by the way, AI-RMF talk about this, that not each of them by itself make a system trustworthy. You can have a system that is very secure, but not valid or accurate. So that’s not going to be trustworthy. And a system that’s a hundred percent accurate, but not secure - it’s also not trustworthy. So that gives it, again, a more structured approach on what to measure.

Then the next step is how to measure methods and metrics for the measurement. Those types of measurement gives information about limits and capabilities of the systems, the type of the risks that can occur, the magnitude of the impact if those risks occur. And then based on this information, then we can come up with mitigations and management of the risks.

So AI-RMF, its recommendations is really categorized in the four functions of govern, map, measure, and manage. The govern is giving recommendations on procedures and processes, roles and responsibilities that we want to have in our organizations to do effective risk management. So what is the accountability line? What are the roles and responsibilities involved?

The map functions provides recommendations on understanding the context of the use. Going back to the examples of the face recognition - understanding the environment in which the AI systems are operating there, understanding the community that can be impacted by that, identify the risks in this particular context, understanding the laws, regulations, and policy that are effective in this context of use…

The measure functions provides recommendations on the how to measure. So for all of the risks identified in the map measure, it provides quantitative or qualitative recommendations on how to measure them, how to take into account the trade-off between all of those trustworthiness characteristics… And all of this information is being used during the managing the risk part, that the recommendations can go from safeguards and mitigations that can put in place to mitigate risk, to - sometimes we cannot just mitigate risks, and the risks should either be accepted or transferred, or the system is too risky that it should not be developed or deployed. So that is the process in AI RML.

Break: [00:31:47.15]

John Nunemaker: So what’s funny is I was feeling that, and then once everybody who was coming in came in and I knew all the amounts and stuff, it won’t be the biggest risk, technically. Like, technically, Box Out would have been, because I gave them straight cash at a pretty good evaluation, and that was definitely… Now that was also when I had the most cash, and so it was maybe an easier decision. This feels riskier. But amount-wise, it’s not as risky. Technically, my part was mostly the collateral and the organization, and the deal structure… And the stuff that like, if I hadn’t done that, then it wouldn’t have happened… So that was my part. And then each of the other three people that are in it, Garrett, Chris and Steve - they all are putting capital in, either this year or next year, based on the terms we’ve worked out, and stuff like that. And that will get the finance amount basically like lower than what Box Out was for me. And again, for me, what I brought to the table was the collateral. So I have a lien on my house now. I use my house because I learned that you can get 80% for your house. Like, my house is paid off, fortunately, so you can get up to 80% of the value of your house, whatever it appraises for; snap your fingers and the bank will give you a loan for that, a commercial loan. Land, like farmland - I have some of that. I was going to do that at first, they’re like “We’ll only give 50% to 60% of that.” I was like “Well, that might not work.”

So it’s kind of interesting to see what banks will do based on the assets that they’re really comfortable in dealing with… Because they will not do it for software. So if you want to do it just based on the software, and then basically you have to personally guarantee it; you don’t have to put up any collateral, but you have to personally guarantee it, which is the same thing, kind of… And then also, you have to do like an SBA loan. An SBA loan is like a ton of extra paperwork, and it’s like 11% interest rate. So it’s like super-high interest rates; prime plus two or something like that is what I was told. I just did a commercial loan with collateral. My house is collateral. And I ended up with below six and a half percent. So like half the interest rate for me.

Additionally, an SBA loan you typically have to pay off in 5 to 10 years. So your payments, they go way up. Whereas again, my collateral - they’re like “What do you want to do? Like 15 years?” I’m like “Yeah, that sounds good.” I’ll do a 15-year, I’ll lower the payment at the beginning, and then as we grow, or as we stay the same, and whatever it is that happens, I will just apply more to the payment to pay it off early. But it gives me flexibility, because basically, I can snap my fingers, I can get some cashflow to run the app, and then the only risk is a lot of things go wrong. The market goes down like 70%, so any stock that I have is worth nothing… And all my cash is at zero because of inflation… And everyone stops podcasting, or goes and uses free things… I can’t count the number of scenarios that would have to go wrong for this to be like a really bad decision. And so from that standpoint, if all that stuff goes wrong, no matter what I’m doing, I’m probably going to be in a little bit of – all of us are gonna be in a rough spot. If all these industries collapse, we’ve got bigger problems. So I was like “I’m just going to, for once in my life, take a little bit of a bet.” But I would say overall it’s not as big of a gamble as Box Out from a purely money standpoint, because technically, I haven’t gambled anything. I’ve only gambled like possibly having to pay it off early, myself personally. And that wouldn’t be fun. Or having to do that when the asset goes to zero, something like that. So it’s like “Well, I really made a pretty big mistake, and the other guys made smaller mistakes.” But I don’t think that will happen.

[48:06] So I feel pretty confident that, again, worst-case scenario is this just keeps slowly going down over the course of like six, seven, eight years, it gives us the money back and we wasted our time. Like, that’s the worst case scenario. And that’s such a negative outlook on life. I’m like, I’m not going to wake up in the morning to do that. I’m going to wake up in the morning to see what I can do, you know? Again, meandering, that’s going to be the theme of this, but…

Kevin Ball: Yeah. I love that there – there seems to be more of a trend towards folks doing this. I think we’ve talked before about IndieVC as a model as well, where - it’s Bryce Roberts’ this thing, where he’s trying to support small amounts of fundraising… It’s essentially kind of trying to fill the role that – if you were starting a traditional company, like a bakery or something, you could go to a bank and get a loan for your startup capital, and then you’re able to pay that off over time, and there’s not an expectation that you’re gonna go super-rocket ship to pay things off. That approach is not available for new product development, because it’s too unpredictable, too hard to model, banks don’t understand it, all these other things.

Traditionally, that gap has been filled by venture capital, but the venture capital model is really biased around these rocket ships. “How do I get to the Moon?” They push for everything to go that far, they want to put more money to work, all these different things. And so there’s an opening for something in the middle, that is able to take a little bit more of a risky stance, and maybe is run by people who understand software and product development a little bit more, but don’t expect you to go to the Moon, they expect you to build a profitable business, maybe in midsize niche, and payback maybe not at 10x multiples, but like 2x multiples, or payback with profits, or things like that. There’s a huge open space there, and I think we’re seeing a little bit of re-interest in that now. I just hope that it captures the imagination of more founders as well, because I think there is still the VC press conference of being a startup founder to the Moon is the sexy thing to do…

Gina Häußge: So it should be obvious that it’s pretty much impossible to test every possible printer, firmware, plugin, operation system, starting state of software situation. So what I do before I actually roll out the full release is there goes a long, long phase of release candidates. And OctoPrint has a release branch system built in, so if you feel fine with testing stuff that is not necessarily fully stable yet, then you can just switch over to another release branch, and then you will get release candidates whenever I push those out. And they actually get the same procedure that I do for every single release, and I will go quickly over it later as well.

But the idea behind that is that if I have something like 1,000-2,000 people out there testing a release candidate and putting it through several years of print duration over the course of the release candidate phase, and then I can be pretty sure that a lot of these combinations that I would never be able to test have been tested. And yeah, it usually takes something like three to four release candidates until no more bugs come in… And at that point, then I declare this stable.

And of course, after I’ve pushed out a stable release – so the current stable version is 1.10, but we are now already at one point 1.10.1. So there are bug fix releases that I also push out. Those do not go through a full release candidate phase, again, but they only get bug fixes and maybe small minor improvements of existing functionality. They do not get new features, they do not get big changes… They obviously also get security fixes, stuff like that, but I try to really limit what goes in there… And if it feels too risky, then it goes into the next stable release that will actually get the full release candidate phase again.

And what I do for every single release is – so OctoPrint can basically run anywhere where you can run Python. But most people run it on a Raspberry Pi, so that is also what I concentrate on for testing. And there is this dedicated image that someone else is maintaining, Guy Sheffer, for OctoPrint, which is called OctoPi. And a lot of people confuse the image with the software and the software with the image, which also causes a lot of complications in support… But anyhow, so OctoPi is the most common environment that OctoPrint will be installed on out there.

So what I have here is I built myself a little test rig that has three Raspberry Pi threes, which is the current basic option that I suggest… So get the three, because that basically is the best thing that you can get, the lowest supported version. And if you want something with more power, then of course you can get something else, but the three is like the base version that I look at.

[01:34:05.07] So I have three Raspberry Pi threes there, and all of these have a little card adapter in there that can be switched through USB, either to act as a mass storage device through a host, on the one end, or as an SD card on the other hand. So that is slotted into the SD card slot of each of the Raspberry Pi’s, and all of these then go into a USB hub to a fourth Raspberry Pi, a Raspberry Pi 4, actually, which I call the flash host. And that thing also has control over the little powered USB hub, through which I power the three Raspberry Pi’s. And now I can individually power them on and off, and I can also individually unmount and mount their SD cards, and flash them, without having to physically release the SD card, and push it into a flashing stick… That is what I did until 2020, and it was driving me nuts.

Daniel Whitenack: [00:38:19.22] No, you’re good. Yeah. So what have you seen in terms of things that – did anything surprise you in terms of things that might have been judged risky, that maybe a good number of people are even exploring right now, that they could face regulation?

Robert Ross: And that’s going to be a tough moment. We’re going to have to kind of start thinking about that. I’m starting to hear more and more about people don’t want to use third party libraries for common things, just because of the risk. For example, attacking a JavaScript npm package that’s widely used, that does a pretty simple thing. Candidly, it’s less risky to just do it yourself sometimes. And that’s a calculus that companies are going to have to start thinking about.

Jerod Santo: And then you have the best couple hours of – like, the most risky, but also the most memorable couple hours of your recent life, right? Like, that was very exciting for you.

Jerod Santo: Yeah. No, I love that style. And I definitely wanted to just expose our audience to that idea. Now, that being said, that particular conference talk or talk style is just one way that you can be entertaining and risky, and try to be memorable. That’s one way of doing it that I’ve seen to be very successful. And obviously, Benn, you appreciate that as well.

There’s also other ways you can go. Kelsey Hightower, who has been on the show a few times and is keynoter for all kinds of things, he goes no slides, no anything. The guy’s up there just talking. And he can get an audience engaged, and stay with him throughout 45 minutes to an hour just based on the storytelling. So there’s other ways of doing it.

[01:02:19.20] And the things that he does - sometimes live demos - are considered risky. Most people wouldn’t even have the guts to try this stuff. And I think that the overarching thought that I appreciated from that particular post is like “Take the chance. Take the risk.” Because anybody can be like average or slightly above average, and you’ll get the pat on the back or whatever, and you’ll feel good about yourself, but you don’t have very many opportunities to capture people and do something that everyone’s going to remember. And so maybe step out on the ledge a little bit and see what happens.

Gina Häußge: [00:15:51.11] So it should be obvious that it’s pretty much impossible to test every possible printer, firmware, plugin, operation system, starting state of software situation. So what I do before I actually roll out the full release is there goes a long, long phase of release candidates. And OctoPrint has a release branch system built in, so if you feel fine with testing stuff that is not necessarily fully stable yet, then you can just switch over to another release branch, and then you will get release candidates whenever I push those out. And they actually get the same procedure that I do for every single release, and I will go quickly over it later as well.

But the idea behind that is that if I have something like 1,000-2,000 people out there testing a release candidate and putting it through several years of print duration over the course of the release candidate phase, and then I can be pretty sure that a lot of these combinations that I would never be able to test have been tested. And yeah, it usually takes something like three to four release candidates until no more bugs come in… And at that point, then I declare this stable.

And of course, after I’ve pushed out a stable release – so the current stable version is 1.10, but we are now already at one point 1.10.1. So there are bug fix releases that I also push out. Those do not go through a full release candidate phase, again, but they only get bug fixes and maybe small minor improvements of existing functionality. They do not get new features, they do not get big changes… They obviously also get security fixes, stuff like that, but I try to really limit what goes in there… And if it feels too risky, then it goes into the next stable release that will actually get the full release candidate phase again.

And what I do for every single release is – so OctoPrint can basically run anywhere where you can run Python. But most people run it on a Raspberry Pi, so that is also what I concentrate on for testing. And there is this dedicated image that someone else is maintaining, Guy Sheffer, for OctoPrint, which is called OctoPi. And a lot of people confuse the image with the software and the software with the image, which also causes a lot of complications in support… But anyhow, so OctoPi is the most common environment that OctoPrint will be installed on out there.

So what I have here is I built myself a little test rig that has three Raspberry Pi threes, which is the current basic option that I suggest… So get the three, because that basically is the best thing that you can get, the lowest supported version. And if you want something with more power, then of course you can get something else, but the three is like the base version that I look at.

So I have three Raspberry Pi threes there, and all of these have a little card adapter in there that can be switched through USB, either to act as a mass storage device through a host, on the one end, or as an SD card on the other hand. So that is slotted into the SD card slot of each of the Raspberry Pi’s, and all of these then go into a USB hub to a fourth Raspberry Pi, a Raspberry Pi 4, actually, which I call the flash host. And that thing also has control over the little powered USB hub, through which I power the three Raspberry Pi’s. And now I can individually power them on and off, and I can also individually unmount and mount their SD cards, and flash them, without having to physically release the SD card, and push it into a flashing stick… That is what I did until 2020, and it was driving me nuts.

Alex Kretzschmar: Yeah. USB connectivity has always been a bit of a risky business.

Ron Evans: [01:23:42.04] And you’re like “No, it can’t be a documentary from the future”, but I’m afraid it is. So yeah, don’t tell your boss about you’re not feeling good, because it’s too risky. This is what I think is on a lot of people’s minds. And I can’t tell them “That’s not true. Don’t worry”, because I think circumstances have shown that maybe isn’t necessarily true.

So what do we need to do? We need to find mutual support. You have to have peers that you can communicate these things to, and we have to build a vocabulary around it in order to, first of all, not tell the suits what’s going on… Because they’re gonna be like all freaked out. Like, “You’re trying to tell me my star player can’t play?” Like, “No, no, don’t worry. Don’t worry.” Like, they’re worried, because they don’t even know, is this a soccer ball? A football? Like, “Well, actually, that’s the same thing, sir, in this country.”

So this is a fundamental dichotomy between the creators, many of us who – we like to create. We’re going to create. We want to be of use. That’s our purpose for being. And yeah, we need to thrive and survive, but we’re not doing it for the sole purpose of exploitation. We’re doing it because we get satisfaction out of improving the human conditions. And we’re human, so we can be improved along the way, right? We’re not just a resource to be exploited… Just like “The brain machine, it’s [unintelligible 01:25:15.02] Oh, I’ll get some more brains.”

Verónica López: [unintelligible 00:47:45.06] blaming the users, and stop blaming the poor Kubernetes operator, the human operator. No, for example in Kubernetes - and we have been very open about this, so this is not a secret… But the tooling that we have behind every release is massive.

[48:03] We are a self-serving team. That means that we don’t only click buttons to release things. [laughs] We build the software behind our releases. That means - for example, the most recent and tough battle that we have been fighting is with the supply chain security stuff, that has not recently, but it has been a work in progress, that a year ago it started blocking our releases, because we wanted to sign - if you’re familiar with supply chain security and all these new terms, newish terms… It’s like signing, and promoting, and all these things. The container images are a promotor, and Kubernetes was built independently for that. [unintelligible 00:48:47.21] But obviously, we didn’t want to redo it from scratch, so we tried to build the supply chain security stuff on top, or using the existing logic of the promoter. So that meant that at some point we needed the image to be signed twice. And the signature process, that had nothing to do – it was orthogonal to the release process itself. But it was a requirement in a checklist. So if the signature didn’t work for whatever reason, or because it timed out, or whatever, then the entire release was blocked, because all the artifacts were already created. You couldn’t just click the button and try again. No, it’s like, all the artifacts and - I don’t know, from the hashes, to all those little things were already created. But the way that our tools work, they were like “This step is already done… So why are you asking me to run it again?” But it was stuck in the image signature part, and it could not move forward, because we asked it to be like that. Like, “Do not move forward if the image signature is not ready.” But we did it, so that it was a secure process, not like – not that it depended on it. So we decided to get rid temporarily of that part, because it was blocking us, and a release that would usually take, I don’t know, five hours, would suddenly take a full week, or three business days, let’s say… Between the coordination of different time zones and whatnot. And it ended up taking like a full week of work. So we were like “Okay, sorry. We have to get rid of this”, and manually do things like that.

So that is a very specific part, but there have been times where – I don’t know, where the cloud provider has a bug, or an outage, or whatever, and it’s like “Oh, sorry, we cannot run this.” This is not specific to Kubernetes, but in general, and I think that most people have dealt with this.

But then on the industry side, the most common thing for me, and where I have found a lot of fun is when people, including myself, as a team, or combo of teams, think that something is ready to be released, when it’s not. And it’s ready to be released in terms of like it passed all the tests, and it doesn’t seem to have any bugs, and it works on my computer – or it works on cluster. [laughs] That’s the new “It works on my computer”, “It works on my cluster, and it works in my series of clusters.” But then it’s like “Yes, but it won’t work with this type of user, because this type of user has something that you don’t have in your 2, 5, 7 clusters.” Because they’re way more complex than you are. And then it’s like “Oh, right.”

[51:59] So the blockage is not like an operational, or like a button, or an algorithm, or something blocking it. It’s more like a human factor saying “It will be risky to deploy this as it is, for this reason.” But you have to be very attuned to that system. It’s not like you can see it just because you’re a Kubernetes expert. It’s more – you have to have a bit of that, but it’s more about how well you know all the components of that system, to be able to say –