Richard Moot: It’s kind of funky, because I think most people think of it as separate companies. And I think they were kind of operated functionally that way… But as far as I’ve understood this, it’s all Block. And each one of these other things are brands that are part of Block. But I joined before we became block, so it’s I still have this thing burned in my brain that I work for Square … Recently that’s changed a little bit, so I work on all Block products, doing developer relations now.

So yeah the relationship is each one of these divisions kind of focused on a different audience in the economy. Square is focused on businesses, and trying to run small businesses, midsize businesses… We even have some enterprises. And then cash is all about consumers; trying to give financial tools to people who are “Hey, I want to go invest in Bitcoin”, or “I want to go buy stocks”, or “I want to send money to my barber.” It really helps essentially act as a consumer banking product. And so that’s kind of where there’s a little bit of – getting both sides of the counter is kind of what we talk about.

And then we have our other brands, Tidal with streaming… And that’s kind of focused on artists, and we’re trying to figure out what ways can we enhance artists… Because they kind of operate their own business. And then we’ve got some of the more out there things, like Spiral doing Bitcoin grants, and open source Bitcoin, trying to really transform Bitcoin into the digital currency of the internet. And so yeah.

Joran Dirk Greef: It did, yeah. That was great, you know? And there’s national projects, three different countries, whether it’s for the whole national transportation system, or the central bank digital currency, or another central bank exchange… TigerBeetle is going into the current production version of that gate switch now, as we speak. But I think, just to go back, Jerod, to the DST - it’s a lot like formal methods. The difference is that formal methods check the design of a protocol, so that you know that the protocol could possibly work. It’s formally proven that it could work. But for me, always the challenge was, “Well, how do I know that I’ve just –” Because I’m not a – I always feel like I’m getting slower every day. How do I know that I coded this correctly? I know the protocol’s correct.

Nader Dabit: Yeah, so at AWS - and really, within the Web community - for the past few years we were doing some really great stuff around improving the developer experience, improving the user experience… When you’re in the area that I was in, like JAMstack, and also mobile development, we seemed to be solving kind of the same problems over and over and over. We had WordPress as the CMS like 10-15 years ago, whatever… The big rage at the time was like JAMstack and CMSes. So I felt like we’re basically rebuilding a CMS over and over and over, and that was one of the really hot things that I felt like was cool, but it wasn’t revolutionary, and it wasn’t that huge of a deal.

We were doing fun stuff, and cool stuff, but it wasn’t anything that was brand new… Whereas I felt like some of this stuff in the Web3 space that I’ll talk about in just a moment was kind of brand new… But yeah, I was just getting tired of seeing, and even crating myself, like “Oh, here’s how you create a blog using this stack.” We’ve created like millions of blog posts about how to create a blog. There’s thousands of ways to do it. It just wasn’t that interesting to me. So I would say that’s kind of the feeling that I was having around some of the stuff we were doing.

Databases are cool, but we were just rebuilding the same types of databases over and over, and… You know, people really have to go into details to even understand the differences between this new SQL database versus the other dozen SQL databases that were already out there. And I think when I started looking into Web3 and crypto, I started seeing that there were a multitude of different, interesting problems that some of them were in the process of being solved, some of them were theoretical and they haven’t been solved yet… And some of them kind of have been solved, and they’re iterating on new, improved ways of making that technology better.

But really, the captivating thing I think is around how digital currency and how tokenomics work, and how they can incentivize ways of collaboration, and also enable people to make money in places in the world maybe that they had seen a lot of less opportunity in the past… And the types of applications that people were building were kind of interesting…

[12:10] I would say a really great example of something that is concrete, that people can go and kind of look at and see the possible future repercussions of, that is happening almost as we speak, is this game called Axie Infinity. This is a game that is putting into practice a lot of the Web3 ideas… And Axie Infinity is a game that is revolutionary in a few different ways.

Before I talk about Axie, let me talk about Fortnite. I have a couple of kids, and one of their favorite games is Fortnite. Fortnite was really also kind of revolutionary. They gave the game away for free, and it was kind of like the first, I would say, big hit video game, like on Nintendo, or one of those platforms that people were able to get for free, that blew up and made a lot of money. So how did they make the money? Well, they enabled digital currency. They enabled also skins, which were clothing, and stuff like that.

So those two things were huge… And I spend now a couple hundred dollars a year on Fortnite for my kids, where in the past we would have paid like $80 for a game, and you never would have paid again. That was like the old way. The new way is like, you’re paying every month or every year money for your kids to play these games, because they–

Adam Stacoviak: That’s where the awareness needs to be then. Because here I am, sitting here and thinking – not so much just about us in particular, because I get it, but I’m thinking about all the people who don’t, that don’t even take that first step to get the confidence, because they’re like “Well, I’m stuck in BAT” or whatever. That’s the awareness that needs to drive it home; it’s like, “You’re not stuck in this currency that you’re totally unaware of.”

I just think back to the Seth Meyers skit… Cryptocurrency was around the $20,000 mark for Bitcoin, holiday timeframe, maybe around the new year, and they did a skit on it… To me it was hilarious, but that’s what the mainstream people think, and when you try to get past a hurdle of like, okay, here, technological people like Jerod and I and our listeners have accepted Brave to some degree, or are willing to try Brave to some degree… We’re the ones you get easier and earlier, whereas the mainstreamers will be like “I still don’t get it, I’m not trying it.” The awareness needs to be around that stigma of like “You’re stuck” to “Hey, it’s just a conduit, so that we can have a digital currency on the internet that transfers easy and you can easily do it.” So your explanation, Jerod, should be written down and put on loop, so to speak.

Adam Stacoviak: Let me understand this correctly then… These seem like two different models, or two different thoughts, but not two different models, where you have, let’s say, Nike for example… You used them in your analogy… Of sponsoring, let’s say, some of the results. It could be they’re sponsoring the photo. I’m not sure who the money actually goes to, if it’s just you, or the photographer, or whomever, but that’s where the money comes into this system. And say I go and tag a bunch of photos as just somebody who loves to tag, and because you have this cryptocurrency blockchain-based model where I’m getting tokens or some sort of digital currency because, hey, I’ve put some effort into tagging 10 photos a day, because maybe I earn five bucks a month – just something, just whatever; I don’t know what the money actually is, but is that the model then?

[36:02] So you have sponsored things from brands, which makes sense because that’s how images work, and Instagram has proven that model being very valuable, and then the money gets spread around by either creators or contributions into this economy, and they get paid through blockchain-enabled cryptocurrencies.

Preethi Kasireddy: [34:23] Yeah, I wouldn’t completely turn off tokens as a valuable application; I think tokens are incredibly valuable depending on how they’re being used. I’m not sure if people are familiar with Ethereum, but Ethereum is a blockchain just like Bitcoin, and one of the things Ethereum makes it super easy to do – you can do this on Bitcoin too, but Ethereum makes it super easy to create basically alternate currencies, which are what you’re referring to as tokens… I think there’s a lot of actually interesting use cases for these tokens, which I’m pretty excited by.

For example, there’s applications that – one example is there’s the Brave browser, which you might have heard of, which Brendan Eich is working on (Brendan Eich was the creator of JavaScript), and they’re going to be using a token in their browser to align the incentives of the end user versus the content publishers versus the browser itself, in the sense that unlike Google Chrome, where they take the user data and they sort of sell it to the publishers, and publishers are allowed to monetize on that data and kind of suck eyeballs and attention, but the users don’t get really paid for the attention, what Brave is doing is using a token system to align the incentive so that users still give their attention to these publishers, but they get paid for it with these tokens.

Similarly, the user can also choose to pay the content publishers for their quality work if they want to, and then the browser also takes some cut of that. In that sense, tokens can be used to align incentives within an application in a really interesting way that was just never possible before.

It’s like all these applications can now have this digital currency that aligns incentives in a certain way in a completely secure, open, trustless manner… Which I think is very interesting.

If we’re talking non-token stuff, basically one thing that I’ve found really interesting recently is I think about a company that’s trying to bring basically real-world real estate assets onto the blockchain. Again, the blockchain is just a ledger, so they would basically maintain these assets on the blockchain and allow users to transact on the blockchain to trade these different assets, or buy and sell various portions of these assets, and so forth.

I think that’s pretty interesting, if you can just have the entire world’s real estate on the blockchain, and it’s completely open and you don’t need to log into these proprietary real estate systems to figure out how much a certain property costs or how much it costs to [unintelligible 00:37:10.03] and bid it, and so forth.

Daniel Whitenack: Yeah, exactly. So maybe just stepping back a little bit, could you describe more generally your current thought process around digital humans at NTT, and their place and value in your work?

Rasmus Porsager: But I have one real-world example. At my current job we do digital signage and background music, so we have a lot of hardware units throughout the world… And there’s around 6,000 online, which before I did Postgres was running on an 8-core, 8-gigabyte Vserver, and now it’s running on a 2-core, 2-gigabyte Vserver. And it’s just – it’s idling at 15%, when they reconnect all of them at the same time…

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.

Brian Behlendorf: The chaos in there potentially could have been a lot less. Now, that’s an idealist speaking, so we have to be careful about that. For consumers it might not look that much different; this is still largely a backend story, but where I think it plays out is – so the idea of Bitcoin wallets really made real for people, like the fact that this is actually a currency - imagine that concept now applied to your health records, or to your land title and car title and other important documents that today you print out, or you probably don’t even have in digital form… They might just be pieces of paper you keep in a filing cabinet, which you hope you remember to grab with you when a forced fire is coming for your house…

Mikeal Rogers: This also happens to your currency in your pocket. There’s inflation, there’s currency exchanges, and how valuable your currency is when compared to other currencies… I’ve run into this a lot, because I have a stack of money from other countries, so that when I land in those countries, I can spend it… And this has not been a very good last five years to be holding currency not in dollars, so that kind of sucked.

Anyway, so for blockchains there’s this whole side of things that’s like currency speculation, and it’s a lot of ostensibly gambling, like fun gambling, a lot of money flowing into it, and gambling on these exponential increases in the value of these digital coins. But the underlying technology can solve a lot of problems outside of just currency exchange, and outside of just things that we need a currency to do.

There’s an element of transparency and provability without a centralized owner that is really important for a bunch of use cases. What Brave is going after with this basic attention token is essentially the ad market. If you’ve ever read a bunch about the advertising market, especially online, there’s a huge amount of fraud, a huge amount of fake clicks… There’s everything from click farms to people just generating crazy wild numbers for what has and has not happened on different services and what not.
If you wanna try to solve that, you need something that is provable and has a lot of these elements of transparency and provability baked in… So what they’re looking at is this basic attention token. This is a provable way to show that you spent some attention on something. That could be used to prove that you saw an advertisement or saw some content… Or what they’re probably betting on a little bit more than that is you can prove that people spend time on a site, and then you can inject capital and money into where you spend your attention, and that can be doled out as micropayments to those sites.

[12:19] If you’ve used the Brave browser, they already have this feature baked in where you can do these micropayments. You can say “Look, I don’t wanna deal with advertisements on website, I hate all that kind of stuff, but I do wanna support content creators, so I’m gonna pour $20/month into wherever I spend my time.” What happens is that Brave tracks that in a way that is anonymized and protects your privacy, but it also allows them to dole out some of that to all these different places where you’re spending your time.

Alex Moore: Right. Okay, so the Digital Markets Act is a new piece of legislation whose aim is - there are some particularly massive companies operating in the EU, who run platforms where they have enormous market power. So these are the gatekeepers. Now, at the moment there’s only six of them. You have to be unbelievably big to be considered a gatekeeper. Currently, they are Google, Apple, Meta, ByteDance, who own TikTok, Microsoft, and Amazon. So they’re the six.

Nadia Odunayo: [54:04] I don’t know in terms of – oh, sorry… Something I didn’t mention - when I did my customer interviews with the book club hosts, I asked money questions, to say “What do you spend money on? Are there any membership fees? Do you pay for the tool that you currently use?” And basically, there’s nothing there. That’s not to say that there won’t be something in the future, but I think that I’m trying to focus on kind of what you said, which is giving people a digital space to host their book club, which is an all-in-one solution.

For example, I’m so excited for the – when I did my research round… Normally, I mentioned how I speak to very specific groups of people, but this time on Instagram and Twitter I asked for anyone who wants a book club, and I asked them to tell me “Is it remote or in-person? How regularly do you meet? Is there a theme or not?” And then I said to Abi, “Can you go through and choose ten people who are as different as possible?” So I want small, remotes, large, in-person… And I wanted to start there, because I said to myself, it might not be possible, but if based on these interviews, and interviewing wildly disparate styles of book club groups, if I can build a feature that helps all of these, then that would be awesome.

So I have developed a feature set that will cater to whether it’s an in-person, whether it’s a hybrid, whether it’s virtual, in that you’re going to basically be able to invite people, you’re going to be able to have StoryGraph help suggest books for the poll, to have the community vote on what shall we read next… But also, the host can just choose if that’s how they currently do it. You’re going to be able to have an agenda where you can add photos from the meeting; you’re going to be able to add links, and everyone’s rating will show up, and all that kind of stuff. Then that will be fed into having this journal, this digital journal that has the history of all your meetings, what was said, the photos, whatever. So it’s like a digital journal. You’ll also have a leaderboard for your club, where it’s like “Oh, these are the top ten books that we’ve ever read.” So even if someone joins, they can go back and say “Oh, this is what this club likes. Let me go and read these in the times when I’m not reading the book club pics.” You know, just so that you have that history as well. And we want to look into actually being able to host the meetings on the app for the digital ones as well. So basically just having this one space. So we are really looking at trying to create a space where people feel like “Ah, finally, my book club has a home on StoryGraph.”

Gergely Orosz: Because there was a fast-forward for a while, where the whole world was locked down, and digital became a lot more important… But I think a good example that I think of, and I have a bit of insight into, is this company Hopin. Hopin is this video events company; so they do digital events. And they were founded in 2019, so a year before the pandemic. They raised I think like a few million dollars of funding, and then the pandemic started, and right as the pandemic started, they raised a bigger funding, to scale the scene, because it seemed okay; like, digital events will now be a thing, because there’s a lockdown… And they saw huge demand in both 2020 and 2021 for their solution.

I actually organized – you could organize online conferences with their tool. And I actually helped organize a digital conference, I think it was the fall of 2020, or something like that… Because it was lockdown, I didn’t have anything to do, and I was like “Let me do this.” And we looked at vendors, and we chose Hopin in the end; I think we paid like a couple thousand for their license, or whatnot… They had this licensing. And we ran the event, and it was a success, and people liked it… But what I noticed is – and then the company kept raising more money, and at some point they were valued at 7.8 billion, or something; I think that was the peak, as I recall. And this was like two years into the founding of the company.

And then what happened is – well, first of all, just from my personal perspective… I’m not gonna represent all their users, but I just really got burned of digital events. Like, I went to a couple of these digital-only conferences, and after a while I just started hating it. I was doing Zooms all day, every day… So I just didn’t want to go there. And as soon as the world started to open up, I’ve just been to my first proper conference. I love the normal conference format, and I would not – okay, maybe I would jump on to watch a video online, but I don’t think it’s really important.

And then with this company, Hopin, they saw their growth just first stall… And the thing that might save the company is they actually bought a bunch of different companies. They bought StreamYard, which is a streaming company, and they bought a few other video streaming companies… And what I’ve heard from people who work there is their events revenue, their flagship thing is just going down, because it’s really hard to sell right now. People just don’t need a digital-only solution anymore.

And my point is, they’re a bit of an outlier, but they’re a typical pandemic company, where it seemed the whole world would change, a lot of money went into there, and if the whole world would have changed and we would now be doing a digital-only conference, it would make sense, because they would probably be market leaders… But the world has gone back, and I think we’re seeing this backswing a lot of times.

I’ve seen a chart about e commerce adoption, where it spiked, and it did look like it’s jumping up ahead by 5 years or 10 years, but then it came back, and now we’re just on that normal growth. So this growth is back to where it was before, which means that everyone who expected that in 2022 or 2023 you’re gonna have similar growth as 2021 just over-hired, and now they’re all correcting, because – well, because also, don’t forget, there’s a second part here, which is not just the COVID is shrinking, but the interest rates are up, which means it’s a lot more expensive to borrow any sort of money, which a lot of tech companies had been doing… So they can’t borrow money, so they need to rein in their costs if they’re not profitable.

[14:29] And those are just a few things. We’re not going to be able to figure out exactly what’s happening, but the pandemic was – it’s just so strange, because for the rest of the world… Take an industry like hotels, or hospitality, right? You’re kind of working in a hotel, or managing a hotel… The pandemic was terrible, right? You got shut down, you had no revenue, you were trying to survive. For tech, it was the opposite. It was amazing, and it was great that time, because we had more jobs, more money… There were people quitting, because they – people had a lot of options, and it was a great time to be in tech. Now it’s the opposite. If you work in hospitality, things are great. More and more people are traveling; it’s going up. You’re gonna get more – hopefully, you’re gonna be earning more, getting more tips, whatnot. And now in tech it’s the opposite. It’s just not great if you’re in tech.

I mean, it’s not great to see the news… This is impacting people. There’s a question of how many people are really impacted in the sense of not just being laid off, but not finding a job. And I think that’s where we’re gonna see a long tail effect, or like a double down. People who are software engineers, experienced engineers who are being laid off at well-known companies - I think it’s hard. I don’t want to trivialize this. But they will have options to work somewhere. It might not be as great though as their current company in terms of maybe culture, or compensation, or both. But they will have options.

The problem is that all of this will trickle down. We’re now seeing thousands of really competent software engineers being on the market, so startups are really happy, these banks are really happy… I have some friends at Uber, former friends, who… I used to work – one of my first jobs was at JP Morgan, in London, an investment bank… And at the time, I really liked that job, because it was one of my early jobs, and it was a great place to be… But when I got my next job at Skype, I just realized JPMorgan was totally not a tech company. And I was so happy to finally work at a tech company, and I said i would never go back to a place like JPMorgan.

Uber also had a really good engineering culture, in the sense that it was one of the best places I worked at… And now I have some friends and colleagues who work at JPMorgan; and I talk with them and I say, “Dude, why did you kind of take a step down?” And he told me “So here’s the thing… Two things. First of all, it’s just really, really stable. They have super-profits. I get all my compensation in cash. None of that stock going up and down, and mostly down. Second of all, they actually want to create a tech culture, and finally, they can hire the people into this; they have a lot of these greenfield projects where it’s full of – they have ex-Facebook, ex-Google, ex-whatever people, and it’s actually pretty good.”

So I think the world is changing a little bit, and people are realizing that pre-IPO companies, or even any form of companies that give you stock - it has a massive risk. So traditional wisdom the past 10 years was if you are a publicly-traded company, you get like half of your compensation, if you’re a senior engineer or staff engineer, half of your composition in base salary, and the other half in equity, and that’s great, because equity will always go up. Well, equity for some companies has collapsed by let’s say 70% or 80%. And I talked with people who on paper they were earning $500,000 in Silicon Valley, and now it just went down to like 350k or 300k. And they’re saying “What should I do? Should I interview somewhere else? But now there’s fewer jobs… Or should I just stick it out?” There’s no good answer. But the point is, now you’re really seeing those banks - one of the reasons that people are going to these banks is they might pay, let’s say, for a similar skill, maybe they pay 350k or 400k, or less, or more; it doesn’t really matter. But it’s fixed. It just doesn’t move. And the people who I know who have families, and they just want stability, they’re like “You know what - it’s a good trade-off. It’s a rocky time, I’m gonna sit it out here.”

[18:09] And you know what - it’s kind of nice, because now those companies can hire people who would have never considered working there. So we might see the industry transform a little bit from the unsexy companies becoming a bit more sexy, and the sexy companies… Let’s give an example - Coinbase. Coinbase was such a hot company to go on and work for a year ago. They’re doing crypto, and if you’re into that - I’m not that much into it, but again, they’re doing something really interesting in that space, trying to give new financial instruments… And they were paying really, really good. Like, they were giving ridiculous stock packages to people who were accepting it. And now the company is not doing that great, the space is kind of – it’s unclear what the future will be, and their stock is not doing that great… So that company, or some of these hot startups have just gone from being one of the best places to work at, to “Oh, it’s a risky place.” We’ll see if they’ll be able to grow. And I’m not just talking about Coinbase, I’m just talking about the hot companies in 2021.

Taylor Dolezal: Yes. So when I got started, my first week was just before HashiConf for them. It was obviously a digital event, and so most of the team wasn’t able to kind of jump in and help out… But understandably so, right? They were getting ready for a conference… One of my colleagues was MC-ing, and so I got a lot of time to read. So immediately – also a very strong document written culture there. So being able to look at RFCs, and see some of the initial ones from 2014 that Mitchell and Armon had worked on… Incredible to get the experience, to be able to read that and go deep… And again, understand those motivations. See what’s going on, like what’s in your head as you’re designing this, developing this. A document does so much. It’s like a picture of the Grand Canyon or another natural wonder. You get a sense of it. It’s not the full thing, it’s not like being there, but you kind of get to see those motivations, which is really cool.

And then I remember hearing like “Oh yeah, have you heard about the secret projects we’re working on?” I’m like, “Wait, what?” “Yeah, we’re gonna be releasing two new products coming up here in the next couple of months. One is Boundary, one is Waypoint. And the Waypoint one is focused on Kubernetes, and kind of that Heroku PaaS workflow in the cloud.” I’m like, “Ah, this is awesome.”

So getting that, and then just having it be incredibly accessible to go and work with that team, and talk with them, like “Hey, I’ve contributed to Kubernetes. I really want to get involved in this, and would love to speak with you all.” So I met really, really talented, really wonderful people on that team, and just immediately got to work with them, pair that with TerraForm, do some really fun and cool demos… Again, you know, memes involved; they may or may not have involved Obi Wan and “Hello there!”, you know, that [laughs] And updating images so that gifs can actually be in motion… Really, really fun stuff. But I think that was kind of the immediate joys as far as working on that team.

[30:09] The Developer Relations team is just incredibly empathetic as well. Some of those people – I just haven’t had as profound work relationships with people before going to HashiCorp too, because these people, you know, being in the community space, they also have to understand the highs, the lows, the social nuances, understand product, understand media training… You can’t just rattle things off, you have to think about things sometimes. What might make sense to you might not make sense to others, and just all of those things as well. So in developing out those skills, I really liked working with those people, and I still keep in touch with them regularly. They’re all fantastic, both current people there and alumni. Just absolutely wonderful to work with.

Kathleen Siminyu: Yeah. Okay, so my current role is machine learning fellow at Mozilla, and I’m working particularly on Common Voice, and particularly in Kiswahili. So I’m supporting work to build a Kiswahili dataset on Common Voice… And this is starting literally from the collection of sentences. But I should step back and say that it’s starting from community building, again, like you highlight. So we want Kiswahili speakers to care about this work; we are working to communicate to them that the existence of this dataset is something that is of benefit to them, because it’s intended to be a digital public good, and we’re working to build ties with organizations that are already working in Kiswahili.

So I realize that we have the tech capacity, but then we’re working into a space where people have been working for years to build language communities, and I’d like for us to be sensitive to that, and we’d like to be sensitive to that. So reaching out to the language boards, the universities that have linguistic literature departments, and such other communities, just to get input from them. And then this work begins at a course, collecting text. Common Voice is a project for building speech recognition, and we started with text because we can’t have audio without [unintelligible 00:30:58.08]

So building relationships with these organizations basically is also in our best interest, because then we can find avenues to get texts from them if they are existing, or build programs that can enable us to create text in the course of our work.

And then we’ve learned so far from linguists especially that there’s a lot of diversity in Kiswahili speakers. This is something that I innately knew as a Kiswahili speaker, because listening to someone speak, there’s a lot of nuance; I can potentially tell what part of the country they come from, if they’re Kenyan, I can potentially tell if they’re not Kenyan, or are Tanzanian, or are from the DRC. And then there’s an additional level of nuance that is apparent among people for whom Kiswahili is their mother tongue. And this is a distinction that I’ll say even I wasn’t aware of, because many of us in Kenya and in Tanzania learn Kiswahili because it’s a national language in the country, but then it’s actually someone’s mother tongue, and like many African languages, there are related dialects.

[32:06] So we are also learning a lot of the nuance, the fact that for people whom Kiswahili is their mother tongue, if they listen to someone speak, they know “Okay, you’re originally [unintelligible 00:32:15.00]” or “You’re from this particular part of the Coast”, and they sort of label all the rest of us as off-country Kiswahili speakers. Off-country is like away from the Coast, the East-African Coast, which is the home of Kiswahili.

So learning about all this nuance and recognizing that it would be great if we could capture t his diversity in the dataset - that’s also been an interesting journey. Working with the linguists… The way this work will – at least the engagement with the linguists, that’s currently shaping up as subsets of the datasets that are representative of the various dialects and variants of the language. So there’s also nuance depending on what other language, because… To try and explain further, in Nairobi for example - Nairobians rely heavily on English, and it becomes apparent in our Kiswahili speech… Because Kiswahili and it sounds like it’s a translation, as opposed to it sounding like speech that is naturally in Kiswahili… Versus someone from the DRC, now I imagine they would mix their Kiswahili with French, and that’s another level of distinction. And to people who are native Kiswahili speakers, to them we are all just off-country Kiswahili speakers.

So there’s layers, and it’s super-fascinating, but again, at this point we are really thinking about it in terms of subsets of the entire dataset, which can be used to first fine-tune to various contexts, so that if you’re building an application for the Coast, then we have datasets which make it easy for you to fine-tune to that context. Or if you’re building for Nairobians, or if you’re building for people in inland Tanzania, then there’s datasets that you can use to fine-tune… But then beyond that, to evaluate performance. Because at the end of the day, I tend to think that Kiswahili could do to other African languages what Western languages have done to all African languages, which is to be the focus of research and funding and development, and at the expense of others. Now Kiswahili is being spoken in parts of Southern Africa, and I think that’s amazing, that we are now pushing for potentially one language to be spoken across the African continent. But then I sort of worry that that may come at the expense of smaller languages, or other languages in general… Because now parents may start to think, “Hey, you should learn Kiswahili for upward career mobility.” But then that may make the mother tongue come in second place, or be ultimately forgotten.

But going back again to the work with the linguists, we also want evaluation datasets, which can mean that we ensure that there’s at least some minimum performance for all diverse speakers of Kiswahili. There’s also a very strong gender thread in all our work. We realize that women tend to be – well, I’ll start with the fact that speech recognition systems generally perform worse on women. And this can probably be attributed to an imbalance in whatever the original dataset is. Fewer women contribute to this dataset, and that could be for a multitude of factors. So we’re being very intentional about creating spaces for women to contribute to the dataset, because the challenges that they face may be unique. But beyond that, we would like for them to also be part of developing [unintelligible 00:35:48.08] distribution.

Andrew Beyer: I am Andrew Beyer. I’ve been here, at 1Password, almost five years. I actually come from a background – I’ve spent almost a decade in the United States Army, working on communication security, and some air and missile defense… And I’ve joined 1Password for two reasons. One was I had been using the app, I had been using 1Password for like 13-14 years now; I’ve kind of lost track at this point. So I really wanted to work at this company where I really did enjoy the product. It was super-useful to me when I was in the military. You know, you deploy overseas, you’d have to use some public computer, and you couldn’t install apps or anything, so I had my (I don’t know) iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4, or something, with the 1Password app running on it, and I would be able to get my password and actually use the internet.

But I joined 1Password because I loved the product, and I was at the time looking for a remote job. I know now everybody just knows what remote work is like, but I wanted to do the digital nomad lifestyle, and I had gotten sick of not moving around in civilian life, so I was like, “Oh, I’ll join this company and I’ll be able to travel the world”, which didn’t quite pan out the way I wanted, but working at 1Password has been really awesome.

Currently, I am in charge of our browser experience engineering organization, so ultimately in charge of the browser extensions, everything about filling and saving on the web, so I get to run the teams that deal with all of the web developers out there who wanna make login forms and credit card forms differently, and then we’re starting to expand some of that reach into our web client as well, so how you use 1Password as a web client.

Andrew Beyer: I’m Andrew Beyer, I’ve been here a 1Password almost five years… I actually come from a background – I spent almost a decade in the United States Army, working on communication security, and some air and missile defense… And I joined 1Password for two reasons. One was I had been using the app; I’ve been using 1Password for like 13 years now, I think. 13-14 years. I kind of lost track at this point. So I really wanted to work at this company where I really did enjoy the product. It was super-useful to me when I was in the military - you know, you’re deployed overseas, you have to use some public computer, and I couldn’t install apps or anything, so I had my iPhone 3GS, or iPhone 4 or something, with the 1Password app running on it, and I would be able to get my password and actually use the internet.

But I joined 1Password because I loved the product, and I was at the time looking for a remote job. I know now everybody just knows what remote work is like, but I wanted to do the digital nomad lifestyle, and I had gotten sick of not moving around in civilian life, so I was like “Oh, I’ll join this company and I’ll be able to travel the world”, which didn’t quite pan out the way I wanted, but working at 1Password has been really awesome.

Currently, I am in charge of our browser experience engineering organization, so ultimately in charge of the browser extensions, everything about filling and saving on the web… So I get to run the teams that deal with all of the web developers out there who wanna make login forms and credit card forms differently… And then we’re starting to expand some of that reach into our web client as well, so how you use 1Password as a web client.

Ro Gupta: Sure. I’ll say this - for me, as a tool, as a means to an end as opposed to an end in terms of my career, it’s fascinating, as you noted; not only are we knee-deep in it in our current jobs, but I was exposed to it at a pretty impressionable time in my development… But for me, actually, I think what has been kind of hardwired into me in terms of from a very young age, and again, growing up, I was born in Calcutta, India. One of the most densest, chaotic urban settings you can imagine. I live in New York now, and we think that’s pretty dense and chaotic… It’s nothing like a developing country’s big city.

I think when you grow up in an environment like that – I mean, I’ve gotta think subconsciously… Well, not even subconsciously. I think even consciously - I realized this later in life when I was older and also spent some time in some developing countries, like in Africa for example, in Mozambique, with some NGO work I did - you really don’t take infrastructure, specifically mobility infrastructure for granted, because it is so much at the forefront of everyday life; you have to take into account to get somewhere much more than you would – there’s many cases where there isn’t even a real drivable road.

[07:59] So I think that probably had a big impact on me… And for me, when I say AI is a means to an end, for me the end has always – I think what’s always been interesting to me is… You know, I see road as sort of the circulatory system of the planet, the IRL version. It is just how things move around, how the nutrients get to us, whether it’s to our house from an Amazon delivery, or whatever… And I’ve seen also what happens when there are clots all over the place; it sucks, and it’s just bad for everything.

So I’m not gonna pretend like when I was four years old and I was moving from Calcutta to United States I almost had some epiphany, but I think that hardwiring got me very interested in the concept of basically packetizing roads, the way that our digital lives are and our internet is. So first, before you packetize, you’ve gotta digitize, and that’s exactly what we in our industry and Carmera is doing.

So I’ll kind of pause there, but I think – I’ve actually not really thought about it in that way until you’ve just asked me that, but… I mean, I sort of thought about it disparately like that, but I think – I’m gonna stick with that answer.

Vladimir Bok: Yeah, exactly. There’s different implementations how this can be done on a technical level, but broadly speaking, you’re absolutely right. It’s essentially training classification that isn’t only binary, as in real or fake, but it is one that is taking into account also the correct label. And what’s really great for the conditional GAN paradigm is that the additional information that the training process is conditioned on can be arbitrary. So it can be a description, or it can be a single label, or it can be a description.

There are also GAN models that can take in a set of tags, or even like overt description, and then produce an image that is matching the description. So you can, for instance, feed it a description saying “birds sitting on a branch”, and if properly trained and given sufficient data, then the generator would produce a fake image matching the description.

Of course, our imagination can go wild, but I could see this having tremendous practical applications, especially in spaces like animation, where currently you need a lot of effort by human animators to create (let’s say) characters in a game, or characters in a Pixar movie… But with GANs you can greatly optimize this creative workflow by having the trained model essentially aiding the human animator.

Or if these techniques get advanced enough, you can imagine digital worlds - be it in VR or even in a regular PC game - which self-create. So it’s essentially going to be an infinite world, where characters get generated on the fly, new terrains get generated on the fly, and are going to be extremely believable without the need for input for a human animator or even programmer.

Mikeal Rogers: Yes, that’s the thing though - right now you have two options. You either load a hundred files, or you use a bundler. But if all of your dependencies were using these new standards, you would actually have quite a few options in between. You could actually use much more sophisticated loaders that did some bundling for you dynamically, that loaded a few packages together but not all of them, you can start to rely upon HTTP/2 and just say like “Oh yeah, we are gonna give you a 3m digital file and we’re gonna do it all at once”, so it would be the same as a bundle, for instance. Your options open up a lot wider once you say “We’re just not going to support all of the old syntax”, essentially.

The reason why I bring this is up is just it’s something to look at and think about, because it opens up a lot of possibilities that we don’t have with the npm plus bundler scenario, but adopting them would require us to basically drop almost all of the current npm registry, and reimplement a lot of things. A lot of this code would not be substantial code changes, but quite a few.

I’m still writing modules that have a require statement in them, so obviously I have not transitioned to that yet, being this tooling does not exist… But you can see something as coming up on the horizon that’s gonna change things pretty fundamentally.

Ron Evans: That is actually what we are doing, in several cases. One example is we’ve been working on adding MacOS support, in order to implement that in an agnostic way. But even a better example is the bare metal, where we need to be able to say “Oh, there’s no operating system primitives at all”, so we have to either implement them ourselves, or leave them unimplemented in some fashion.

We have a wiki page on the TinyGo repository, where we talk about the main challenges we have with how Go itself is currently implemented… And that’s one of them - this tight coupling between the runtime and the standard library. And there’s actually been some really good talks that were done – I was at one of them talking about design of Go 2.0… It was Ian Lance Taylor who did the talk, talking about the Go 2.0 transition. He’s actually done a few talks about this; I caught the first one at GopherPalooza, I believe, in San Francisco. That was a really cool conference that took place last year. But talking about how the runtime and the standard library are a little too coupled, and some proposals for decoupling that… That way, if you implement the runtime correctly, then ideally all the standard library would still continue to work.

So for TinyGo this is a real challenge technically, but we’re able to get around this by sort of reimplementing some of the primitives in ways that are logical, in the context of - you’re running on something that has very little memory.

There’s also some other important differences, which is how microcontrollers really work? Well on microcontrollers you have registers, and these registers are typically used for very low-level hardware-based communication. It could be turning on and off LEDs using the GPIO interfaces, or it could be communicating with other chips that are connected directly to the microcontroller, like the SPI interface in our little flash example, or the I2C interface, which is what’s used by a lot of sensors like digital compasses (magnetometers, more officially), accelerometers (which are motion detectors), thermometers… There’s a lot of different sensors that use this I2C interfaces.

[19:49] One of the most important things that we’ve been doing with TinyGo is creating drivers which provide standard interfaces - again, defined in Go - so that you can write some code that if it uses the same LIS3DH digital accelerometer that’s in the Circuit Playground Express board, that same code could be ported… You know, there’s a project that’s on Hacker News and a bunch of websites about a Homebrew smartwatch - I don’t know if you guys saw that today - that uses the same digital accelerometer. So we could potentially – I haven’t gotten that hardware and I haven’t looked that close, but if it’s one of the processors that TinyGo supports, we could theoretically run TinyGo on this watch, and then connect to the same sensor that it’s already got, without changing the code very much, if at all.

Tim Smith: [laughs] But I use iTunes nowadays for all of my media purchases. My movie collection is slowly moving to iTunes… Back in the day I used to buy a lot of Blu-rays that had a digital coupon, so that I could get it on iTunes. Then what I’ve done also is subscribe to Movies Anywhere, which used to be, I think, Disney Anywhere, which is something Adam said before… But basically, what it means is that you can hook up Amazon, you can hook up Google Play, you can hook up VUDU, you can hook up a few different stores that sell movies, and whichever store you buy it on, it gets backed up. You have it in one central place, which is what I wanted. If one day I decide iTunes is not for me anymore, I still have my movies in Movies Anywhere. I feel like that was a pretty secure decision. The only part is that there’s some movie studios that don’t currently support Movies Anywhere, and that can be a problem, depending on the movie that you want.

But yeah, anyway… I have more commentary on what Adam all said, but I’ll wait for later. [laughs]