Daniel Whitenack: Alright, sounds good. I’ll take the website this time around. This one is Yitu. Again, not sure on the pronunciation. Hopefully some of our listeners maybe correct us on some of these things that I’m sure we’re getting wrong. So I actually like their website quite a bit; it’s much more appealing design-wise to me than the previous ones I was looking at, so great job there Yitu.

It seems like a very similarly Google Brainy/researchy type website. They say that they’re developing technologies that are driving change in the world. Those include proprietary, full-stack technology, in-depth explorations into fundamental AI technologies, including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language comprehension and human-machine interactions.

They talk about being champions in the Face Recognition Vendor Test, which is apparently a gold standard for global industrial applications. They talk about management technologies, hundred-million scale data traffic, unlocking multi-industry scenarios for intelligent cities, and having world-class technology talent.

So there’s definitely sort of “We’re exploring all the AI things” feel, plus that very clear call-out that they are the best in the world at facial recognition. There’s no hiding that. These are the best.

Brett Gaylor: [laughs] Yeah, I make creative non-fiction work on the internet, about the internet, using the internet. It’s a three-part trifecta there. I made some feature documentaries; one of them was about remix culture… It’s called “RiP!: A Remix Manifesto.” That was in the early oughts - around ’06, ’07, ’08 we were seeing the internet become a place with an emerging folk culture of people taking media and remixing it, downloading it to their computer, and that full process was really creating a lot of anxiety in the traditional legacy media, but also pointing a way towards a more participatory culture of the internet… So I made a documentary about that period of time.

It was a really hopeful time for those of us who were involved in the internet’s early days; it felt like this really democratic moment, where anybody who wanted to participate in the culture around them was suddenly able to do that much more easily, and to be able to find a good global audience all around the world.

David Khourshid: Mm-hm. So that’s where we get into the actor models. So that’s sort of like the second half of XState, which again, people think it’s a big learning curve, but it’s actually a lot simpler than you might think. So with the actor model, instead of having just this one giant state chart determining, or even ad-hoc machines, like just figuring out the logic for different components, you have this actor model where you have individual actors where – you can think of them as class instances, or just things that you could send messages to… And the behavior of each actor is guided by a state machine. So an actor can send a message to another actor…

For example, you could consider, if you’re listening for mouse move events on a DOM element, that’s an actor. So when you’re setting up an event listener and checking for those mouse moves, you would send those events probably to something else. So that would be another actor. That actor might be in charge of coordinating all these movements… You know, if it’s a drag-drop actor, or something like that. That’s another conceptual shift, at least in frontend development - thinking of everything in your app as just little entities talking to each other… And it’s also something that’s very different than, for example, Redux, where Redux it’s like “Okay, everything is in this one global store”, and if you don’t have things that fit in this global store, good luck. Find somewhere else to put them. They can’t live in Redux.

XState takes a different approach. It doesn’t matter if it’s local or global, you can set up that actor hierarchy however you want and access it wherever you want.

Zac Smith: I think I’d love to cover in a few minutes – so yeah, I’d love to talk about the future of it all… Because that’s been a super-fun ride for me. So dot-dot-dot, fast-forward… We’re at Equinix. 2021 happens, like “Oh, my God”, right? And global pandemic, yadda-yadda, the internet continues to grow, everybody’s using Roblox, Zoom is everywhere etc. Okay, cool. I think there’s two awesome things that have happened; number one - this is in our industry - even big companies who were (I’m gonna say) on the fence related to remote culture and all that stuff, remote work, they’re totally fine now. All that is good; the world is flat, as you’ve mentioned earlier. That’s really interesting, because it’s causing a whole bunch of cultural things that I think – like, software developers in particular are really good at this, which is asynchronous communication. You’ve got a lot of tools around asynchronous; you’ve got mailing lists, you’ve got GitHub, you’ve got issues, you’ve got chat when you need it through Slack, or Discord, or IRC, or whatever… You have a bunch of different communication modalities, and you kind of know how to use them, because it’s ingrained in the work that you, called like “I will issue a pull request, and then somebody will review it. We won’t have to have a Zoom meeting for you to review my pull request. You will do it, and it is fine, because you get notified, and then do it after dinner, and it’s all good.”

Well, a big portion of work right now is going through that transition, without the same institutional tooling and whatever, such as like “How do we share the context of information when we’re not in the same building all the time?” So I see that happening. I think it’s a fascinating time, a fascinating opportunity, and I’m certainly enjoying my role at Equinix, helping to kind of invent new ways in a bigger company… Like, 13,000 people is a lot of people to share context with… And so how to go through and be with that kind of global – we are a global company, so dealing with that… But from a product standpoint, the other big thing that happened is every single one of our enterprise customers - we have around 11,000 enterprise customers - has put the gas pedal on digital transformation. And digital transformation to me was always such a buzzword. I was like, “Oh, whatever. That’s just consulting speak.” But actually, I think it’s pretty true.

Brian Ketelsen: VS Code is pretty awesome. Those are the only two that I use - Vim and VS Code - these days, because VS Code is so light and fast. If I ever feel like I need a GUI - and I do, because I’m not really good at the global Search and Replace stuff, even though Erik tells me to use AG, and whatever… I still don’t know how to do it all, so I just open up VS Code and do a global Search and Replace and I’m much happier.

Another bit of news that crossed my desk - Zerolog, an allocation-free JSON logging package. Allocation-free logging is always exciting, because you don’t want your logs to slow down your program more than the programming is slowing down your program. At this point, we’re really close to the concept of having mux wars in the logging world.

This one has some nice benchmarks and shows no allocations for almost every operation that it does, and it looks really fast and really lightweight, so I’m looking forward to testing that one out. It looks interesting. Do you guys have any news or anything interesting stumble across this week?

Daniel Ehrenberg: So you want to hold it in a global variable, but if you do async/await, then it doesn’t get restored on the await, because some other thread might come in and need it for something else. So this was raised as a really important issue within Winter CG. Winter CG is this new group that is working on standardizing JavaScript for all web intercompatible runtimes - that’s where Winter comes from - especially in servers. So in servers, this comes up really frequently. It’s really important for logging, and for distributed tracing to have access to this kind of storage. They have a way to do so right now in V8 with promise hooks, but that is slow, it’s unstable, and it’s not available in browsers. And unstable in the sense that V8 has it now, but it’s just a V8-specific thing. It’s not a standard thing. So it could go away in the future via their deprecation process, if they decide.

So the solution is to make a new thing, async context, which is specifically for storing these variables, that have this property, where they work in callbacks, across await and such. And this was an effort that was jointly done between TC39 and WinterCG. In WinterCG we have the different server runtimes gathered, so that we can discuss the needs together, and then in TC39 we develop the actual standard based off of it. So WinterCG doesn’t directly publish its own standards, but it’s a place to discover and to develop descriptions of shared needs between different server environments, so then we could figure out how that should affect standards.

Part of WinterCG is defining a minimum common API, a common environment for all things. So you might call this WinterCG-compliant. Actually, some people might already be claiming to be WinterCG-compliant, but we have not defined what this means yet. So it’s a little early. Actually, we’re working on opening up a new TC in ECMA. Maybe it’ll be TC55. Or you could call it WinterTC…

Daniel Whitenack: Yes, until we started talking about this a couple of years ago. But yes, a cap nonprofit where the profit would be capped at 100 times any investment, which according to the numbers that you just told me about investment, would be a significant profit regardless… But a capped nonprofit. And according to OpenAI at the time, and I think what they’ve said, this really had to do with attracting talent and attracting investment at the levels that they would need to achieve this progress towards artificial general intelligence that would benefit humanity.

Now, there’s two kind of key pieces here. The OpenAI Inc, which is the nonprofit - so it’s very confusing, and maybe slightly annoying to have to refer to these differently… But OpenAI Inc, the nonprofit, and we mentioned a second ago, Microsoft investing in OpenAI Global LLC, which is the capped for-profit…

[00:13:57.19] And what’s interesting is that, essentially, this created a scenario where the board, which had full control of the capped for-profit company, as a nonprofit, couldn’t have a board member that would have some sort of financial stake in the for-profit company… Which - all of that seems kind of convoluted, but let me say it again. So the board that’s controlling the OpenAI entities could not have members on it that would have financial stakes in the capped for-profit OpenAI Global LLC… Which means that Microsoft, for example, as a huge investor in OpenAI Global LLC, did not hold a board seat on OpenAI Inc. Which will play on to kind of the timeline that we’ll talk about here in a second, of what’s happened over the past couple of weeks.

Adam Stacoviak: So that was mostly a joke, but a good reason to tie that in. So back to Fly and Chris and some of the things they’re putting out there… So I’m going to read a tweet that Chris McCord put out, I think it was yesterday. It was 28th… Is that right? No, two days ago. He says, “I’m blowing my own mind deploying Elixir apps across the world on Fly and seeing them cluster together. PubSub’s just arrived in Sydney and Amsterdam. A couple minutes later, I can have another instance in Hong Kong. And it all works, somehow. This deserves a little screencast.”

Now I don’t even know what the heck he’s talking about necessarily, but that kind of attraction, that kind of real-time, raw, just being excited about their own platform, and then the words, it all works “somehow”… That to me is like – I know Chris is pretty sharp. We’ve had him on the podcast a couple of times where we’ve shared the Elixir and the Phoenix story. We’ve obviously been drinking the Kool-Aid for many years, but we’re not going to change. We’ve got some Ruby roots, but we’re not going to suddenly just be like, ‘Okay, done with Elixir, done with Phoenix” and bail. We’re in it to win it.

But this is what drives me. They are super-curious about making Elixir, and in particular Phoenix, very fast, very distributed across the world, putting apps close to their users. That’s what attracts us to their platform. And so I can just share one little note… Behind the scenes, we are in talks about what it could take to technically put our platform on Fly. We do have the support and buy-in from the top-down. It’s still in the works, it’s not a done deal yet…

But going back to Founders Talk - I’ve had Kurt on Founders Talk, we talk about, essentially, his entire journey as a founder. I’m a big fan of his… And so he’s always been a straight-shooter with me, always been easy to work with, so I’m just excited about what that might turn into.

So as it turns into this sort of look at multi-anything, I’m excited to put Fly into the mix, because they’re great people. They obviously care about Elixir, we care about Elixir, and I’m just so excited about where that might come from too, as well as their desires for Postgres and global distributed and all that good stuff. So… Pumped.

Adam Stacoviak: You had to run with it. I like that. It’s like an accidental blessing, really… Especially if you’re at the top of Hacker News. I think Firebase has a lot of praise over the years in terms of its platform and what it can do… Obviously, their tagline on their website says that it’s loved by app development teams, from startups to global enterprises. So that’s a good spectrum, and you wanna capitalize on that as well.

Daniel Whitenack: Awesome. Yeah, and there’s a bunch of resources… Maybe you don’t have a hackathon near you, or something like that; if you’re looking for a project to get started with or you feel like you’ve built up some skills and wanna try them out, there’s a bunch of ways to do that remotely as well. Of course, you can try out different competitions and stuff, but there’s also things like DataKind… If you’re not familiar with that, that’s a way to volunteer on real projects related to social good - things like poverty and global warming and public health…

There’s a lot of ways to get involved, and if you’re interested and need some help in finding some of those opportunities, make sure and pop over to our community; we have a Slack channel, and you can find that at changelog.com/community. There’s a practical AI channel in that Slack, and we’d be happy to talk through some of those things… Or if you have interesting news coming your way, keep us up to date with what you’re finding interesting and we’ll look forward to hearing from you.

Danese Cooper: Exactly. Before the internet, we didn’t have good enough communications to do global projects. That was baked into open source, that assumption that somebody was always awake.

Brian Leroux: Yeah. I’m Brian, I’ve been around here for a while now; I’ve been responsible for all kinds of bad websites, since the 90’s and some good ones, too… I’m really passionate about this space and the topic, especially things like accessibility, and the web as a whole… This is Global Accessibility Day, so it’s a good day to talk about rendering. I’m the CEO of Begin.com, I guess I should plug that… It’s an elegant platform for building full-stack web apps, so you should check that out if you’re into that… And yeah, that’s me.

Peter Bourgon: Right. And I hope it’s uncontroversial to say, this is a design choice that was made in pre v1 of the language, that there would be this global registry and package db, and this would be basically the way to use it. And I hope it’s uncontroversial to say that this pattern has not stood the test of time. This is not a good pattern. So to use the global registry and package db you have to do it this way, and that’s true, and it’s too bad. But if you’re writing your own package, do not copy this pattern. This is not the way to do things.

Evan Prodromou: Yeah, yeah. I think that’s one of the things that are really going to have to change, is that ability to do that onboarding… And it’s not like Twitter started off with great onboarding, right? It took a long time for them to figure it out, and figure out how it works, and figure out what people were coming for and doing.

[46:00] If you are an old enough Twitter user, you remember the time when you would see people’s first tweets, and it was like “How does this work? What am I supposed to type here?” The onboarding experience for Mastodon still needs some work, because it needs that kind of affinity, where it’s like “I want to land in a community that is going to be right for me.” There are some people coming up with some really good ideas about how that works. Like, finding out more about you, we can kind of say what are the communities that you can go to. Because it’s not one-size-fits-all.

There’s also some folks who are like “Hey, maybe the best thing is going to a default, well-maintained server that’s got everybody that’s like 100% noobs, and it’s just like a nice place, that’s well taken care of, and you just kind of chill there for a little while, until you figure out where you’re supposed to be”, right? Which is another option. I think that onboarding process is going to be a little while.

I think there’s a couple of other things that you were talking about. One thing is like being able to find your people. So like being able to find who you’re connected to on other social networks, find your mom, find your work colleagues… It takes a lot of work right now. The best kind of mechanism today - and it might be disappearing actually, as I speak - is like using other social networks, social graphs, like the Twitter graphs, so bootstrapping off those. So Fedifinder, Debirdify, Movetodon have been this great mechanism for like getting people from Twitter onto Mastodon, and it’s really helped out really well… But they depend on that Twitter API, so they may be disappearing soon. But I think being able to do that kind of people search, and say, “Where is Adam on the Fediverse? Oh, here he is, changelog.social” is really important and we need to like work on that better.

The other thing is like seeing that global conversation, right? So if I want to see who’s talking about East Palestine, Ohio, or talking about what’s going on in Ukraine, or whatever, it’s good to be able to follow the global conversation, and not just my local conversation.

Luis Villa: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And by the way, you specifically called out New York, and Natalie said in the pre-chat that she wanted to ask about the EU… We as open source programmers, and open source developers of various sorts, tend to make an assumption that we can write a license that applies across the entire world. And in most law, that’s like a completely laughable idea. It’s somewhere between laughable and actively considered harmful. And so we’re sort of lucky, in some ways, that the core concept of copyright, which is what applies to that actual written thing, distinct from the ideas, is actually a global standard. A treaty called the Berne Convention; that’s 1908, maybe, or 1903.

So copyright has been standardized across the entire world for 100 years, which makes it a good platform for lawyers to build a global system on. If you’re talking about databases, no global platform, no global legal platform… So writing a database license is responsible for a lot of these gray hairs; again, sorry, podcast listeners. You should watch it live next time. And similarly, with AI, we don’t know how some of this is going to play out. We can offer guesses, and frankly, very interesting guesses. This is a very fun theoretical game, but we don’t know how it’s gonna play out in court.

And by the way, Kris, I think the other meta thing that’s really interesting for programmers… I often like to remind developers that writing a contract is like writing code and then not executing it, at all. And you’re just sort of reading it, and like, we all agree more or less on what the output should be, but until it’s actually been executed, which happens through a court… Right? A court says, “This is what the thing is”, then we don’t actually know what the outcome is.

So everything that I say here is going to be based on like a handful of things. Part of the challenge in Oracle v. Google is that we’d all been operating under these assumptions about what copyright law was, but there had been no litigation over whether or not an API could be copyrightable since the ‘80s. So the closest analogy we had was Lotus 123 dropdown menus. And it turns out things have changed a lot since then. But because it hadn’t been executed by a court, we really didn’t know how this was going to turn out. And so that makes predictions – this is why lawyers’ favorite phrase is “It depends.”

Amal Hussein: So taking the global lens, clearly, Web3 is potentially a good catalyst for kind of democratizing access, and all those other things you were saying… So that’s really exciting. Can you share some of the things that you’re excited about with Web3? And I’d love to also hear some of the downsides too, because it’s not all glory and good.

John-David Dalton: So I need to add an example for common usage - what you would normally do is inside your package you have an index.js. Your index.js can be basically two lines long. The first line is to require the standard ESM loader, the second line is to then require your ESM code; usually module.exports=require your whatever.mjs and then .default, so that’s it’ After that, all of your ESM code should just work.
What we do is we tie into Node module compiling and loading mechanism, and we can then parse the code, transpile it on the fly, cache it and then load it. But the thing is because we’re dealing with such a small subset of the language, we can do this in microseconds, so not even milliseconds - superfast. It’s cached, so it’s only done once for the lifetime of the unchanged file, which means that most of the time it will be comparable to CommonJS loads… And that’s how we do it. It’s a quick, speedy transpile. Then I selectively wrap the loader.

What we’ve been able to do is most of the time whenever you have a loader that you’re overriding, it’s a global change, but that would be not good, because you would have modules that all of a sudden start working that did not opt into it… So I’ve done a lot of work to ensure that only packages that are using the standard ESM loader get the behavior.
I’ve also done it in a way to where you can support versions of the ESM loader. So one package could be using version 1, one package could be using version 2, and they’re not gonna conflict or stomp on each other.

Mark Bates: Admittedly, they did cut a few corners… No C extensions and no global interpreter lock, which is actually a good thing.

Jerod Santo: Another good pillar of many applications… Number seven, “Avoid global variables, configs or singletons.” Now, this was yelled at me very loud by my university professors, and I didn’t really know why, but they’re like “Globals are evil. Globals are evil.” And I was like “Okay, I won’t use them.” And here we are, years and years and years later, and y’all are saying, “Don’t use globals, or avoid them.” Why, why, why, why, why? They’re so handy. They’re so useful. They’re so easy. Who wants to take that one?

Tejas Kumar: That’s a good question. I think as of now, your global app Suspense, so the whole app doesn’t render. So I think there’s like a root-level catch block, so to speak… Meaning until every suspense boundary fetches and is ready, nothing flushes to the screen. You just get a blank screen.

Daniel Whitenack: Gotcha. And that’s due to obviously what Global Water Challenge is trying to address, just the old systems, and systems that aren’t being maintained, and that sort of thing?

Aaron Schlesinger: Yeah, this is one of the benefits of a pure function. If your callback is pure, and internally you’re running all those same callbacks parallel, then it’s all good, because the callback isn’t gonna rely on some global state that’s gonna be race condition-y, and it’s not gonna be calling some outside network service, and all that cool stuff… And you can just spin up a ton of goroutines and pipe the values back in after each of those functions is done running.

Jessica Sachs: The good thing about the Vue community is that they’re very global. And then I also have friends in the West Coast… So open source has given me a lot of time zones to make friends.

Jerod Santo: Oh my, I just had an idea. Maybe we can repurpose all those “yo momma so fat” jokes for large language models and they’ll still be funny without hurting anybody’s momma’s feelings. Hey ChatGPT, write me 3 funny “yo LLM so large” jokes pronto:

1. Yo LLM so fat, it needs a search engine just to find its own information.

   Not bad…

2. Yo LLM so fat, it can’t even fit in the cloud; it needs its own weather system.

   Not good…

3. Yo LLM so fat, it’s the reason for global warming.

   That’s just depressing.

Gerhard Lazu: That’s right. One thing that maybe we haven’t done as a good job to convey this is that your service is global. So when you’re saying VPC connect, you don’t mean just in one region or in one zone; you mean across the whole world. So how many pops do you have worldwide, where Citadel runs?

John Spurlock: [00:39:56.27] Yeah, exactly. I try to keep the conversation very open, just kind of let it hang out there… Because if you think about it yourself - and you guys are very open with your download numbers - really, it comes down… It’s all of the internet entrepreneur, you kind of want to fake it till you make it; you kind of want to put out the presence of, “Oh, this show is bigger than you think.” And once you get the real numbers, then it’s like “Oh.” And it is negative if – let’s say your show numbers are public, and you’re doing great; there’s no problem there. But then your numbers start to trail off. And it’s one thing if it’s only the podcaster that knows this; maybe they get a little bit depressed, or they get energized to do a better job… But now it’s a little bit worse if that’s public, right? You can see that heading in bad directions, potentially. So it’s really just making that [unintelligible 00:40:40.10] But Twitter - everyone sees your follower count.

I feel like especially younger people, they’re much more open and authentic from the beginning, so I think that’s not as much of a problem. It’s really more of people that are still in that old mindset of “I want to project that I’m this global show”, whereas that may not reflect reality. But again, I think having everyone’s stats in the same pool makes it a little less – because as you say, there’s actually a lot of difference between hosts, which is really tough right now. Even if they have the same IAB certification, the certification is such that the major inputs to that function can be variable. So which IPs you use to do different things are not specified. So even though you paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for these certifications, you don’t get apples to apples comparisons out the other end. And so you move shows, and all of a sudden your show numbers move, and that can be – some people actually use that as a selling point; they say “Actually, your numbers will be higher on our list, because we do a worse job.”

Mutembesa: Thank you for having me over, Mutembesa here. So at the Artificial Intelligence Research Lab here in Makerere University this is an effort that – it’s pretty much a group actually, once you get to look a bit closely, because there’s members that have been through the pipeline, through the system, at the Makerere University here in Kampala; it started as a group of people doing their doctorates in the 2009-2010, about that period, and they were coming back from exchange programs that were with other universities abroad… So they returned to be able to use these computation techniques that they’ve learned to solve issues that were pertinent to the local community, largely Africa.

Some of the work that is majorly in there - there’s a lot of work in agriculture, because the focus had to be on issues that were of interest to the people, or of interest to the communities… So agriculture, health, looking at infrastructure, languages now… So some of these - for each maybe I’ll just highlight some of the works that have been done in there.

For agriculture, the lab or the group has had a strong contribution to data representation of, say, crop diseases and pests on a large scale, being able to crowdsource that from communities or farmers with mobile phones.

There’s also been work on automating mundane tasks that are being carried out by experts… So sort of using a lot of machine learning and AI to be able to do, say, disease recognition and identification, and classifying those diseases.

[08:12] There’s been some work that has been around being able to diagnose the plants non-invasively, using spectrometry light to be able to identify or classify the kinds of diseases that it matches with for some of the key crops. And when I say crops, the early efforts of the lab have been very focused on food security crops. Since about 2010, all the way down to about 2018, the lab has been focused on food security crops, but now we see a greater divergence to other important income developing crops, or crops that improve the nutrition… There’s been work on being able to use radio, because radio is still the biggest social media here in the global South, especially here in Africa… So to be able to use radio, which Joyce was lead. To be able to use radio, to map where crises are for different crops, or for different diseases, or for different pest infestations, or whatever topics that are around diseases.

And that’s just the highlight of the work that has been done. This is in monitoring and evaluation for crops. We’ve also had work around being able to use AI to make accessible credit scoring for historically unbanked small holder farmers, amongst many other things. So this is just the tip of the iceberg of some of the works that have been done in agriculture.

When we move over to health, some of the prominent work that we see has been around being able to produce artifacts that can then be attached to microscopes in healthcare centers. Why is this important? It’s because largely we have a ratio of 100-200 patients for every clinician or every lab tech… Whereas the gold standard is like 1-20. So you find that there is a need for being able to reduce the load on clinicians or on lab technicians.

Also, beyond that, once you are able to get that data, being able to use machine learning to identify which parasites on some of these microscopes you’re looking at, and then to be able to do a count. This would reduce the load and the 30 minutes procedures to about a two to five minute procedure. So it means that clinicians or the lab techs can work on more people effectively throughout the day within a reduced cost. We’ve done some work where we’re able to use machine learning to identify and do the counts within an ethical and responsible kind of way.

Also in health we have work that was previously done around using mobile/cell phone tower data to track the mobility of people. This data was from a prominent telecom; again, ethically anonymized to be able to just provide a network of how people move, and then be able to use that as a feature for predicting the spatio-temporal patterns of diseases where the contributor is – you know, somebody gets infected here, travels to another place, gets beaten by another vector. So some of the diseases like malaria, where mobility is a contributing factor.

This is just an overview of some of the work in health. There’s definitely much more in infrastructure… Some of the early work that has come out of the lab has been being able to identify motorcycles, trucks within traffic using very local [unintelligible 00:12:03.17] sized devices to be able to identify and know “Okay, this road is probably jammed” and predict where traffic scenarios are going to be. Why is this important? It’s because there’s very limited resources around city management or township management here.

[12:23] So those are some of the early works. Of course, recently there’s been work that is using machine learning on Covid response, Covid data and response. That was started at the height of the pandemic last year.

There’s also been work around being able to connect farmers to markets using their small batten phones - not too sure if you know them - where a farmer and a willing buyer can send their requests to a central place and there a machine learning matching algorithm could be able to match who is the most potential buyer, and the most potential seller, based on the proximity of the price, geographical distance, to multiple other features. Of course, this gets better and better as you have more data coming in.

Also, maybe just one of the last that I would like to highlight is we have a project that is looking at the ethics, the fairness, accountability and transparency of some of these algorithms that we build… Because our policy or our mandate is so paper thin that even doing basic research within the global South you end up impacting lives of people. So our permeation of work is very paper-thin that we always end up working with communities directly… Which is one of the three ethos of the lab that I will talk about just after this.

So one of the things that we also have to look at is what are the ethical implications of working within these communities, sort of measuring our impact and what are the kinds of fairness questions that we have to ask.

Wrapping that up – there’s a couple of other projects, but wrapping that up, this is based in a three-step ethos for the lab, where the first is to be able to find a good local problem; that is the first ethos that we follow. That means a problem that matters, a problem that has democratic voice as being important. Then secondly, being able to match that problem to a good computational toolkit… Or once we have a problem, we try from a research point of view to see, “Does this match some technological or computational solution that is accessible to us?” Within AI, or within machine learning, or within the computing.

Then the last is to be able to tie the challenge, the technique to a local beneficiary. So pretty much every project that you will hear out of the lab, every once single project has a local community attached to it, or has some beneficiaries. If it’s health, there is a hospital that we are attached to. If it’s languages, there’s local radio stations that we’re attached to. If it’s agriculture, we’re attached to the national crop service, we’re attached to local farmer communities. If it’s in roads, we are attached to the city management. If it’s air quality monitoring, which is one of the works that has also been done at the lab by a gentleman called professor engineer it’s also attached to city management, to schools who have vulnerable communities.

Raul Jordan: Definitely. I think Preston and I consider ourselves pretty pragmatic engineers, so when we first started on this journey, we were just excited by this concept of having this global computation platform that anyone can use. It was like “Wow, it’s so cool, the things that this can enable for the world.” And of course, blockchain cryptocurrency has had quite a negative reputation on a lot of fronts, especially because there have been a lot of nefarious use cases for the technology. And you can say that about any sort of new technology.

Why we got excited about Ethereum is because Bitcoin was, of course, the first blockchain, the original blockchain, and it serves its use case as basically a store of value; basically, the predominant narrative is that Bitcoin is like this digital gold. But on Bitcoin, interestingly enough, you can’t really run code, or run these decentralized applications that are Turing-complete. You can’t write a custom piece of software that basically can do whatever you want. Ethereum is the first blockchain actually that allows for these decentralized applications, for basically decentralized computation of software; and to us, that was really cool.

Ethereum has the most network effect, has the most developers, the most people building on it; it’s not controlled by a single company or a single person. People say it has a soul… It’s basically community-owned, and that to us is really awesome. That’s kind of like why we got into it.

Tim Coulter: Yeah. Another one on that list who has been an active Truffle user for a long time and they’ve been using Truffle perfectly is Digix Global. They manage tracking and selling – or we’ll just say tokenizing actual gold, so you can sell it, and make those markets more fluid.