Jacob Hoffman-Andrews: So if you downloaded Netscape in the ‘90s, you had this awful experience where it’s like, “Do you wanna download the safe Netscape with all the strong cryptography in it, or do you wanna download the unsafe Netscape with the bad crypto algorithms in it? And if you wanna download the safe one, you have to really be sure you’re in the U.S. and you’re allowed to do this.” This created obviously a ton of uncertainty and doubt in the software community, of whether they were legally safe to implement crypto algorithms, and if they did, would that limit their market? So it really held back implementation for a long time. It also meant that a lot of protocols like SSL built in these non-secure fallbacks, so you could negotiate a really weak cipher suite with SSL, because you might have to if you were talking to a web server that wasn’t allowed to use the strong crypto.

Nick Sweeting: Cool. Yeah, ArchiveBox actually was a suggestion from a community member, Filippo Valsorda, who has been a long time supporter and an interesting crypto guy.

Adam Stacoviak: These projects are not many businesses, what you’re saying. You don’t think that these open source projects should transcend from communities to many businesses that aren’t really businesses. Not necessarily disagreeing with that either, by the way. So the trend line, I think, for capitalism right now is it’s becoming more and more pervasive. Fractal. And there are better tools and representations of value - one of which is crypto, by the way - that will allow people to participate in capitalism more easily, in a more fractional way in the future. You can come up with some buzzword for all that. I don’t know what that would be. I do not think philanthropy, donations, chipping something into a hat is sustainable. Nope. That is not sustainable, because it is not a system that creates more inputs relative to the outputs. It’s not.

[01:42:17.21] So your example - the way I would describe your example is this person is respected by a community, they raised their hand, and the community responded and said “Look, you asked for this. We’re going to chip in. There’s what you asked for.” Great. That is not sustainable, though. It’s like a one-off activity. How many more times could that individual make such a request? I mean, I guess it would depend on the value of what they’ve done before… Things are going to get, I think, pretty weird in the future as these AI systems can produce very valuable technologies… And so how do you actually sustain the notion of value, and then connect a currency to that? I think that we’re careening - not gradually, we are careening towards a world of completely repricing and reshaping the way value is represented, both in terms of basic standard goods and services in the economy, like bananas and bread, to digital products, and also the price of advertising, which is like the predominant business model of the internet still today.

So I try to remain humble about – like, I have no freaking clue how these things are going to get solved… But I deeply believe capitalism is a very sustainable thing. And you want to create a continuous stream of revenue and income, and have your cost structure and your spend be less than that. To me, that’s called sustainability. There are many other – I’m just like a business person, sort of, so I kind of use the business example… There’s many other examples that you can use… Like in physics, and systems that have inputs and outputs; the same principle applies. To me, that’s how I think about sustainability.

Feross Aboukhadijeh: I totally agree with what you’re saying, Jerod. I feel like the whole crypto space has been a little disappointing. There was like all this really cool decentralization work happening before the ICO craze started; there was – I’m gonna shout out some of my friends here, but I feel like the Dat Project, Mathias Buus, Chris and Kelby, and Paul Frazee, and all the people building that… The Secure Scuttlebutt project, with Dominic Tarr, and a whole cool community there… And then I’ll throw WebTorrent in there, too; I thought it was pretty cool.

So basically, there was all this stuff that was actually working, right? It worked, it actually did what it said it was supposed to do, it worked. It had almost no – or literally no financial backing behind it, and yet, we shipped stuff that worked. And then this whole crypto thing kind of took the air out of the room, and everybody started throwing money at it, and for several years I kept wondering “Okay, when is this stuff gonna actually start to work, and do what it says it’s supposed to do?” And it took a really long time for that to start materializing.

And then now, if you kind of look at “Okay, what has all this accomplished?” I mean, there’s definitely real stuff happening, and I don’t want to be totally cynical about it… There’s definitely good people doing real computer science, and like making new stuff. But overall, I kind of just feel like the whole thing is so self-referential. If you ask people “Okay, what does your project do? What does this company do? What does this product do?”, it’s always like “Oh, well it connects this chain to this other chain.” And then it’s like “Okay, cool, that seems useful”, but then you go and ask those two chains, “Okay, what do you guys do?” and then it’s like “Well, we connect this thing to this other thing.” And it’s like, at what point does it terminate with actually doing something useful, right? It’s just a little bit too self-referential and too circular, and there’s only a couple of use cases that I can think of that are actually real.

I don’t know, it’s just – my hope for this whole thing is that it ends up actually doing useful things for real people at some point. That’s the real letdown for me so far.

Tim Stiles: I really love them. Oh, by the way, anyone listening out there, if you haven’t been to Gitpod’s Discord, go. They’re super-friendly. Just show them your work, with whatever you’re doing. They’re super-excited, supportive and ask a lot of questions. They’re really, really nice.

But when I got started, Go is like test-first; all the things you need… Like example tests are actually a great thing, where Python or a lot of other languages – like, maybe there’s a library for it, but in Go it’s just standard. Whenever I write an example test, it runs every time I’ve run my tests, and it’s an example that never does doc rot. The problem with doc rot, with a lot of scientific software is big, because people will write these huge things, the documentation, then they’ll change the API like two versions down, and then they won’t change the documentation.

And so I think the fact that Go has all these opinions, which if you’re like a – I guess you would call it like a gray beard or white beard software engineer… Like, maybe you have different opinions, but if you’re just starting out and you don’t really know where you’re going DevOps-wise, Go’s defaults are beautiful; they work. And yeah, you may struggle with generics, which Go has obviously been working on, which I think scientists will have a little bit hard time going into typed languages… They don’t have that much of a hard time. But the thing that when I was originally considering writing Poly, I was looking at what could be compiled to a binary, because I thought it was gonna be more of a command line tool. Eventually, I was like “Wait, this doesn’t make any sense as a command line tool.” But originally, I thought it was gonna be more of a command line tool… So I was like “What compiles to a binary, what’s easy to learn, what’s fast, and what has like a good DevOps ecosystem?” And it pretty much came down to like Rust was a little faster, but Go won on everything else. And that’s kind of what I needed.

I don’t know if you’ve ever done like string manipulation in Rust, but it’s hard. It’s not something you want to teach the people coming from Python. And maybe there’s a good reason for that, but I did not personally enjoy it. So when I was testing those two, it came down to Go winning on almost everything. And I think it’s also just a great step from what would be considered these scripting languages, where the syntax is easy enough, the concepts are still there. I mean, yeah, you can get into concurrency and all this other stuff, but coming from R and Python, you have to learn that anyways. You’re not learning multi-threaded stuff, and what most scientists use for languages, which are – usually, most scientists are using Python, R, MATLAB and Giulia, which - actually, Giulia does have multi-threading, a lot of modern features. But Go just has a bigger breadth, and a bigger DevOps community, and a better community of people that use it, which actually makes it really easy to find odd functions that I need.

One of my contributors convinced me that we need to use [unintelligible 00:37:33.08] is the default, and so Go’s crypto library doesn’t have that yet, so some guy wrote a working implementation and we just used that. Lua didn’t have that, so my friend who wanted to implement it in Lua had to go and write BLAKE3 three by hand. He’s like, “I don’t understand this. It’s all a bunch of math and single-little letter variables.” I was like, “So now do you realize why I make you write all your variables as whole words?” He’s like –

Amal Hussein: Yeah, this one’s a really hot topic, and coincidentally, I was having a conversation with some friends last night about this topic of like monetization on the internet, and how we really need to figure out a way to do this cleanly, through standards, because we cannot leave our content creators in the hands of companies like Google, that are just very – they have a very different, specific set of incentives, right? So this story is from Brave, it’s from the Brave Browser team. For those of you who are like “Brave, the browser?”, let me just give you a quick summary. So Brave is a browser that’s been around for a few years now. It’s been my primary browser on my personal machine, on my phone… It means some of my experiences on the web are not great as a result of it, because Brave is intentionally very privacy-focused, and they aggressively block trackers, and all that jazz.

One of the founders of Brave is Brendan Eich, who is the person who also created JavaScript, ECMAScript. And love Brendan, hate Brendan, it doesn’t matter. I’m just stating he’s one of the people involved with this project. He’s been a little controversial in our community lately… And Brendan – I was excited about this project, I still am, but there’s a crypto elements to this, which I have just always ignored… But there is something called the BAT, Basic Attention Token, and so the idea is your attention is time, and we could potentially show you ads in a private way, and you can earn and get BAT credits, and whatever else. I don’t really do anything with that personally, so I can’t speak to that… But for me, it’s just the best browser in terms of limiting your tracking footprint.

[13:53] And so what Brave came out with is this a bit like – they’re letting you now, just through the browser, opt out of those annoying cookie banners, right? …which are getting like infinitely more complex, right? Because it just went from Accept or Not Accept, to now it’s Accept or See the Options, that will bring a confusing menu that’s worded –

Adam Stacoviak: Obviously, we left out Spiral from the deeper conversation. We touched on the open source nature of it, the Bitcoin wallet, the hardware to mine, all that stuff… But it began at Square Crypto. And obviously, I did some research in terms of where it began, for this, and you had said “What’s the biggest thing we could do for the Bitcoin community?” and one of your co-partners, Mike, had said “Hire five open source developers and just let them do fun stuff.” Can you talk about the inception of Square Crypto and how that’s evolved in Spiral and what you’re doing there?

Amal Hussein: Yeah, good example, a welcome tangent… I think a good case study too, for some of these ideas, and also just being able to share and reuse wealth in some ways… But bring this conversation back to the What a little bit. First of all, I just wanna say really quickly, I 100% agree with you - web developers, we are reinventing the wheel in different ways, and it is a point of huge frustration for me… But that’s a topic for another show; we’ll have to do that another time.

But to kind of bring this conversation back - so you are really a person who is very prominent in the educator community, and you are really big on teaching, and sharing your knowledge… And it’s so funny - a fish swims, a bird flies, Nader teaches, Nader gets into this crypto space, Nader is new to this space, and the first thing Nader does is write a full guide on full-stack Ethereum development, and it goes crazy viral. So can you tell us about that? What that was like, and what inspired you to do that, and then what’s life been like after…

Patrick Ecker: [48:07] Yeah, yeah, sure. And companies like TinyMCE - they are building a rich-text editor platform with ReScript, and for that it’s also fantastic. These really complex domains - this is where ReScript shines.

On the team, we’ve got, as I said, Hongbo Zhang, who is now also working for Facebook, Cristiano Calcagno, who is one of the cleverest scientists I know. He has been working on the Infer project, if you know that, for code analysis and static analysis of all kinds of languages. He has huge knowledge about analyzing code, which is great for us, because we have a lot of dead code elimination analysis going on right now for ReScript, because it’s fully typed. Super-nice to analyze.

We’ve got Cheng Lou, who has a huge vision on products, and designs, and lean, clean interfaces. I love that as well. Maxim Valcke, who is our master brain on the syntax level. He has been investing so much time into writing a syntax parser that is efficient and small. It’s super-fantastic work. And myself, of course, for working on the documentation; I’ve been doing this within the ReScript Association, as you already mentioned. The ReScript Association was founded with the goal to support the community and support a language with financial infrastructure, so people can send donations to it who are relying on the technology. So if you are a company who wants the language to succeed, the best way to invest money is to invest it in the association. They’re reallocating the money for developing the documentation, growing the editor tooling, working on core essential libraries, finding other projects, organizing conferences… We had like two conferences already - ReasonConf 2018 and 2019, and also a Reason conference in the U.S, which will most likely of course be rebranded to ReScriptConf.

So in the past 2,5 years we also collaborated with research institutes and companies, we collaborated with Ahrefs, which I already mentioned, with the Tezos cryptocurrency - they’re also really invested in this, because they want their crypto wallet apps to be stable, and they chose ReScript for their web frontends, and stuff like that. Or subsidiaries of Tezos, of course. Tezos is a huge project.

So this is how we try to set a foundation for the language on the community side, on the open source side, but also we have a strong commitment on the business side with the core team, who is working at Facebook, and all other companies that depend on it.

Perry Mitchell: Yeah, I definitely prefer the process. Like you said, I’m a web developer, so for me it makes a lot of sense. We kind of started this whole project as like a JavaScript project. It was the JavaScript password manager… Kind of like really embracing the community there, so everything is built with JavaScript, bar the mobile application’s crypto stuff, because we actually released the first version of the mobile app with the Crypto Browserify library, so basically the Node.js compiled crypto libraries, which were gigantic… And they were terribly slow on mobile, didn’t work very well, crashed on a lot of devices… So we basically rewrote those in native Objective-C and Java, and built a bridge across to the app to use those.

That was a great thing, because the speed increased, and the size of the app went down. But that’s also a huge pain to maintain. Every time we find something we wanna add in terms of crypto support, we have to do the JavaScript modifications - a lot of painful testing on the React Native - and then we have to do the native code in Objective-C and Java, and obviously do tests for that as well, so… It’s a huge development process when we have to manage those native builds.

Mikeal Rogers: Alright, so the project of the week is Blake2b-WASM. I’m not gonna spell this out, I think that you’re just gonna need to check the show notes if you want a link. This is Mathias Buus, one of my favorite programmers in the Node and JavaScript community. BLAKE2 is a fast secure hashing algorithm, and this is used in Sodium encryption and a bunch of other encryption libraries.

When they first started talking about WebAssembly, one of the things that they kept talking about was “We’ll be able to do these incredibly fast and efficient algorithms.” This is actually a pretty discrete algorithm that we need for a bunch of different crypto. Mathias has actually written this in C++‘s native module in Node.js. He’s written it in pure JavaScript, so that it will work in the browser today, and now he’s actually implemented it in WebAssembly. He’s got benchmarks comparing the three of them, and also if you dig into how this library is being used, you can see how to poll in a WebAssembly library if your browser supports it today, and still have plenty of fallbacks, and stuff like that. So what do y’all think of this?

Mikeal Rogers: A huge of amount of growth in, the kind of growth that we see in other places. I’ve spent a lot of time actually figuring out what we could do here and what our current barriers are. One barrier which I think is a problem and it needs to get resolved, but it’s not the number one problem, but it is a problem - JavaScript standards have not given us some of the tools that we need at the language level to do some of this.
This is kind of hilarious - now that Brandon has a company that’s doing Crypto in the browser, he is shifting some of his focus… Because he does a bunch of standards work as well, and there are some new 64-bit stuff and some new math stuff coming out that Brandon is pushing forward into TC39; also, the Node Foundation in partnership with the JS Foundation - the JS Foundation is a member of TC39, the JavaScript standards body, they’ve started to send me to those meetings.

There’s one right now that obviously I couldn’t be at, but I went to the last one that they did and resolved a lot of the module stuff, a lot of the concerns that we’ve had about how do we integrate these module systems; we were able to work that out. And I’ll continue to go, to start to try to resolve some of those problems.

Another thing we have to think of is should we try to reach a system like R and Python have, or should we try to go about this in the way that has brought us a lot of other successes? If you look at the early days of Node, we weren’t able to bind to a lot of low-level C libraries, and because we weren’t able to do that, we ended up building a lot of our own competencies in those areas, and building out things that would have been a native layer, like just binding the C, for something like Redis where we got a native Node.js as a client, that’s actually in a lot of workloads faster than the C library. So there’s a lot of value there.

Mikola Lysenko, who’s here, he was a math PhD and got really involved in the Node.js community and started building different algorithms as just single modules. So you have this modular way of looking at things, which is not the way that we’ve done math and science computing before. There are these giant libraries in C or Fortran a lot of the time, that are huge and really unwieldy, and a lot of it is entirely unmaintained, but it’s the only place to get this particular algorithm.
So do we wanna enable a broader ecosystem of people building that kind of stuff out? I think we currently have the most compelling ecosystem for 3D computing, I think, all built for WebGL, obviously… But Mikola has a project called Regl, which is a phenomenal suite of toolchains for doing modularized 3D programming. He’s written a ton of different modules for all this stuff. A lot of it is built on a data structure called ndarray, which is an N-dimensional array, which is incredibly fast; it has gone through four years of optimizations now. There’s a Mincecraft in the browser called voxel.js that you can look at that’s built on a lot of this stuff. It’s actually built on earlier iterations of this stuff. So there’s a lot of good movement there.

I don’t think that we’re going to figure out a way to have a better Fortran binding layer, or cross-compile these Fortran libraries. R is mostly Fortran code. It’s a layer of bindings on top of a lot of very old Fortran code that SciPy also binds to and their libraries bind to. We’re not gonna get to a point where that is compelling. I think we’re gonna have a slower road to it, but we’re eventually gonna get to a better place where we have a more modular ecosystem of independent algorithms that can be plugged together really easily. I’m excited for the future of what this looks like, but it is gonna be a long road.

[43:58] I think lastly SciPy - R as well, but SciPy, I really look at… They did a ton of outreach and community building with the academic community to get them onto SciPy. Over the years, I’ve met a few of the people that have really pioneered that work. It’s hard community work, you’re working with a lot of older institutions, you’ve gotta have a real passion for it. But I would love to see us as an institution take on some of that. It’s one of the things that me and Tracy wanna try to get to at some point - building much deeper inroads with the academic community and building that up.

Python is not uniquely good at scientific computing; I mean, not a knock against Python, it’s just not better than any other particular language for that. They don’t have great bindings to all these old Fortran libraries, it’s relatively slow… They’ve just built a great community and a great support system for it. They’ve done a phenomenal job. They have great documentation, they have a lot of people that have written great blog posts about it, there’s a ton of knowledge about it, and there are just people out there doing the hard work, getting adoption. I think that’s the thing that we can strive for and we can actually make an impact with at an institutional level in the Node Foundation.

Rod Vagg: That’s just right, and that brings up an important point, which I haven’t touched on at all which is the importance of leadership. It’s nice to have this idea that you’re gonna have people show up, you’re gonna have this emergent property of leadership, it’s just gonna emerge out of the mass of people doing things. That’s a nice idea and sometimes it works, but very often you still need leadership, and that leadership may be in the form of people putting in more effort than others.

[01:02:01.17] That’s what happens early on in a project - you’ve either got one person or a few people who are passionate enough about making this thing work, that they are willing to put in that much time to get it there; rarely do you have a lot of people doing that. Usually, there is only a small group or only one person, so that’s what leadership looks like initially.

As the project evolves you need somebody or some people to serve in that role of facilitating the community, and that comes down to the fact that not everyone is a leader and we ought to be fine with that, that not everyone wants to be a leader and not everyone has those natural skills to be a leader, and when you accept that then you see that there is a place for individuals to step up and just start being the grease in the wheels. And that can play out in really interesting ways; it can play out just by the fact that somebody is stepping up. Very often, other people will be looking for that person, and they’ll be waiting for it, and they step up and they might start to assert things, and other people involved in the project might say “Phew, finally somebody is here to take that burden.” And we can disagree with them, “Great, at least we’ve got someone to disagree with now. We don’t just have this mess of people that are too timid to really assert thing”, so having somebody stand up and start asserting can be a really valuable thing and people look forward to it.

The other way that it can manifest is simply in the respect that people get over time, and that’s how leadership can evolve in these projects. It evolves in open source in general; you build up this capital of respect by your contributions and by what you know and what people know that you know, and you see that in complex projects like Node. Node has a lot of different areas that are all very distinct and there are different levels of expertise in different areas that are required to understand them and nobody – there’s zero people in the Node Core project, amongst that group of people, that understand it all and that are experts in it all. Everybody is an expert in one area or a few areas, and nobody is an expert in it all.

And the way this kind of leadership evolves in that setting is that people build up the respect and the technical capital from other people that they know this area and that they are somebody to be listened to. One of the most obvious ways this plays out at Node is when you think about Crypto; it’s a really hard area for people to get across, very few people really understand it enough. We have a few people that are really well respected in that area, and we will generally defer to them, and often for even the most trivial things; we’ll say we need sign off from these people, or they need to be involved in this discussion in order for it to move forward, and then when those people in that small group - or it might be just one person even - they start proposing changes in their little area of expertise, they almost get a free pass because everyone looks at them as the leader in that area.

So that plays out really interestingly when you’ve got a complex enough project, but it also plays out in smaller projects when you’ve got simply somebody who has got obvious depth of technical knowledge and understanding about a project; they are generally recognized and they get to play that leadership role, as well.

Shawn Wang: That is a short-term business model, yeah. I bet they have much more up their sleeves… I don’t actually know. But they did just hire their first developer advocate, which is interesting, because I think you’ll start to hear a lot more from them.

[58:12] Well, there’s two things I will offer for you. One, it’s a very common view or perception that AI is a centralizing force, right? Which is, Adam, what you’re talking about, which is, “Does this just mean that the big always get bigger?” Because the big have the scale and size and data advantage. And one of the more interesting blog posts - sorry, I can’t remember who I read this from - was that actually one of the lessons from this year is that it’s not necessarily true, because AI might be a more decentralized force, because it’s more amenable to open source… And crypto, instead of being decentralized, turned out to be more centralized than people thought.

So the two directions of centralized versus decentralized - the common perception is that AI is very centralized, and crypto very decentralized. The reality was that it’s actually the opposite, which is fascinating to me as a thesis. Like, is that the end game, that AI eventually gets more decentralized, because people want this so badly that there are enough researchers who go to NeurIPS to present their research papers and tweet out all this stuff, that diffuses these techniques all over the place? And we’re seeing that happen, helped in large probably by Stability AI. The proof that Stability as an independent, outsider company, like not a ton of connections in the AI field, did this humongous achievement I think is just a remarkable encouragement that anyone could do it… And that’s a really encouraging thing for those people who are not FAANG and trying to make some extra headroom in this world. So that’s one way to think about the future.

The second way to think about who monetizes and who makes the billion dollars on this… There’s a very influential post that I was introduced to recently from Union Square Ventures, called “The myth of the infrastructure phase”, which is directly tackling this concept that everyone says “When you have a gold rush, sell picks and shovels”, right? And it’s a very common thing, and presumably AI being the gold rush right now, you should sell picks and shovels, which is you should build AI infrastructure companies. But really, there are tons of AI infrastructure companies right now, they’re a dime a dozen; really, they’re all looking for use cases, and basically, the argument, the myth of the infrastructure phase is that technology swings back and forth between app constraint and infra constraint. And right now, we’re not infrastructure-constrained, we’re app-constrained. And really, it’s the builders of AI-enabled products like TikTok that know what to do with the AI infrastructure that can win.

So I’ll introduce those concepts to you… I don’t know what specifically that means. I’m looking out for opportunities like that myself. But I think it’s apps; I think it may not be infra, because it’s going to trend very, very hard towards commodity infrastructure provisioning, and I don’t really care where I get my A100s from… A100 being the predominant NVIDIA chip that is being used to train all these models… Which, by the way, costs $200,000 per chip, which is insane. Imagine a GPU costing that much.