Simon Willison: This is the deep ethical tragedy of this stuff, is that these models were trained on art by artists, and none of them gave permission for this, and none of them got a license fee… Whether that’s legal or not is, I think, a completely separate conversation from whether it’s ethical or not. Because fundamentally, some of these artists will be losing work to this. You’re already seeing cases where people are publishing email newsletters with illustrations that they generated with AI art. And did they have the budget to commission illustration from artists? Most of the time no; sometimes they did, though, and that’s lost commissions that were already starting to happen.

Jerod Santo: Well, Nick, that Obsidian affiliate fee you have going is really gonna work out nicely…

Peter Venkman: 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No job is too big, no fee is too big.

Adam Stacoviak: That code is still available though, you just can’t use it without a license, right? If you’re using that, it’s because you’re paying Sourcegraph some sort of fee, that doesn’t break any legal infringements. So the source is still available, you can still read that source…

Kurt Mackey: There was a distinct change there, because it was when we went from just doing Mongo to doing all the databases, basically. It did teach me – so part of the reason this company is named Fly is it’s not associated to… Someone told me at one point to pick an empty vessel for a name; like, something that’s a name that you can then fill up. Changelog is actually a pretty good example of this. You could do a lot, if you ever decided to pivot away from podcast. Changelog is a very good, useful name that you can do– I literally name a company Empty Vessel Inc. at one point, because I didn’t know what I was gonna do exactly yet… But yes, the MongoHQ name was helpful and it worked, but we changed the name on purpose to do other databases.

The funny story there is MongoDB at the time, the company that creates the Mongo database, versus MongoHQ, that was hosting this company’s database, and at one point making more money than MongoDB off of it, which was not always the best political situation… MongoDB at one point came to us and was like “Look, we’re not letting people use Mongo in their names anymore. All these companies that are Mongo-something, we’re gonna ask you to change the name.” Or pay us a fee to license the name was maybe what they were after… I think they wanted to get us on a big partner program that would have funneled a lot of our revenue to them. And it wasn’t like a direct threat, but the little bit of a threat there was “Or you can’t use the name of your company anymore. We’ll be after you for that.”

Adam Stacoviak: We should have, yeah. We didn’t have that relationship quite so ingrained with Breakmaster then, but yeah, we could have done and we should have done that, for sure. But Sponsored though - what is it that drew you to this space? I know you kind of lean on the angle of the non-profit and the 30% given from the placement fee, but why solve the problem of helping marketers engage with, in your words, “highly-engaged technical audiences”? That’s super-niche.

Mat Ryer: Shouted at, yeah… [laughs] That’s what we’ll do, we’ll shout at your meetup, for a small fee. Okay, if you want that though, do Twitter, @GoTimeFM, and we’ll shout them out.

[04:13] Okay, let’s meet our guests. We’re welcoming back Katie Hockman. Katie is a software engineer on the Go security team, focusing on fuzzing, and was previously the tech lead for the Module Mirror and Checksum Database. Welcome back, Katie.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah. And I think in most cases - every case for us, at least, in our example of usage of Open Collective or other platforms - we would wanna pay for the fee, for them to not have to incur it, so that all the money we wanna give them–

Ryan Dahl: Everybody’s trying to figure out open source companies and how to do this properly… And one model of doing this is the open core model, where your open source software would be free, but then you’d kind of have an enterprise edition that you add on some extra nice features, and you would charge for that.

You can also get into some licensing trickery, where maybe you make your software AGPL-licensed, and kind of allow people to run this locally, or kind of in non-commercial applications for free… But once you get into the commercial realm of things, you are then asked to pay a fee.

I think for Deno - this is a programming system that we’re asking people to program against. We’re asking a lot of our users, we’re asking them to invest a lot in the system… And I personally would be very, very uncomfortable with programming using the base layer of my – you know, Deno sits below all of your other software; I would feel very uncomfortable if there was some weird payment hook at that layer of the system. It would prevent me from ever even trying out the software, in fact… And I think that’s the case with Deno. If we tried to make Deno itself commercial, and people are looking at Python, and Node, and Ruby as alternatives, I think many would choose the solutions to this problem that do not have a payment hook in it.

[01:00:11.01] We are pursuing a different funding/revenue model. As I said, we think this software is pretty useful, and we think it’s useful in different commercial applications. I haven’t mentioned it yet, but Deno - you download it as this one executable, but it’s actually a collection of software, and we’ve been pretty careful in breaking this up into different bits that we can recombine in different ways… So we have a product that we’ve been working on for the last six months or so that is a different runtime. It is called Deno Deploy, and it has a very similar API to Deno, a very web browsery API. It’s a JavaScript runtime, but it doesn’t run on your computer, it runs in the cloud. You can think of it as a dynamic CDN if you want to… So we have processes running in 22 locations around the world, and we have an Anycast IP, and you can provision a domain name on our system. When you go to access your domain name, it resolves to this Anycast IP, and that gets routed to the nearest data center. So if you’re in Tokyo, it gets served locally in Tokyo.

And rather than a CDN which responds with static content, this invokes a JavaScript hook. It is a serverless system, so think AWS Lambda, or Cloudflare workers… So it’s a system for responding to requests dynamically. The best way to describe it is it’s a web server, a multi-tenant web server with V8 built into it. It is completely a separate system, and this thing AWS cannot – this is not open source; this is proprietary code.

Mikeal Rogers: Yeah. So the Ethereum VM lets you do some cool stuff. And there’s a specification for how these non-fungible tokens work, and what some of the metadata says. But one thing that you really need to keep in mind is that the reference that you put into the NFT that’s minted on chain is a reference to a metadata file. It’s not the hash of the content necessarily, it’s metadata about that and then the hash to the thing. So if you alter that metadata a little bit, you get a new hash, and it effectively looks like an NFT.

So the enforcement of uniqueness is not really happening at the chain level, it’s happening at like a reputational level on top of the chain. This is all in a public database somewhere, and I as the artist notice that “Oh, there’s a bunch of forgeries in my thing out there”, we will have an open reputation system where they can say “Here are all the forgeries.” And now everybody who’s building applications around it will note that the forgeries are not the real thing. But that’s not enforced on chain.

[44:08] What can be enforced on chain though is if people transfer this asset for money, if they say “I’m selling it to you for this amount of Ethereum”, then percentages of that fee, of that cost can go to different wallets that were preconfigured into that.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah. This has been my desire for a very long time. A buddy of mine – I’m like, I’m not a woodsman, I’m not a very good woodworker; I don’t have the tools, I don’t wanna [unintelligible 00:30:44.12] I’d love it if there was something nearby that had all the necessary tooling, so I can go, when I wanted to; maybe it’s similar to a gym membership, where I pay a monthly fee or some sort of membership fee or something like that, and I have access to this club or this place… Because it takes money to make these things go around, right? But I have access to space and tooling that I may desire to have and own in my own home, but just don’t have the space for it. And in this case, if you have these kind of things all over the place, then rather than Jerod’s question to you and you say “Forget about it”, it’s more like “Just go down to your local open source –” What did you call it, open source manufacturing…?

Gleb Bahmutov: That’s how Cypress started. Imagine a developer, Brian Mann, who is an absolutely incredible professional… He was doing podcasts, and he was doing a book about Backbone and Rails development. And when you do a book, or a series of workshops, you get to the part where you have to explain how to do testing. So he looked around, and there was nothing easy enough to explain and not have people like “Huh? What?” So like every good developer, he decides to write his own tool for himself, so that he can test the things that he’s explaining.

At that time Electron became popular, so there were some nifty technical tricks he could do to actually take the Electron browser, load the site that he wants to test, and then be able to control it in a framework-independent way.

So then he thinks “Well, this is a great tool. Can I make a living working on it?” Which is a very, very hard problem to solve. So he approaches companies, saying “Hey, I have this great tool. If you pay me a license fee, then you can use the tool to write your end-to-end tests. It’s so much better than anything you’re currently doing.” And most of the companies tell him wholeheartedly “No.” And you know why - because if a startup approaches you and says “Hey, invest time using our private tool to do something that’s an integral part of your pipeline”, what happens if that startup goes away, or just folds, or raises the price 10x? Well, you already invested so much time; you either pay 10x or you abandon all that effort and the knowledge and all of the things.

[24:21] So trying to convince someone as a startup “Hey, use my tool, and adopt it” is super-difficult. Especially with competition from other open source tools like Selenium, which are not going anywhere. So then, when I got there, after using the tool in private beta for a year, we’ve decided to actually do something else. We decided “Okay, we’re gonna open source the whole test runner. No limitations, no light version versus full pro version - no. The whole thing. Do you wanna run your tests? You have a tool. Fork it, keep an archive around… If we fold, no problem; the documentation and everything is there.” You can keep writing your tests, keep running them for as long as the universe is alive, until we all dissipate in a black hole.

So that was nice. Then adoption shot up. Because the tool is objectively a good solution to the testing problem.

José Valim: I can never charge something like that, because I also don’t control domains, right? The benefits of a monopoly, let’s say… So we are still considering that, and I really want to find something that feels like – for both parties, they feel comfortable. People would always say “Oh my God, they are really going after me.” I want to find something that’s going to work for everybody, so that’s going to depend a lot.

I personally don’t think – I’ve not started Bytepack because I want to make it a big company, because I want to maybe get VC and then sell it later… That’s not the reason. I’m doing this to sell my own product; that’s the most important goal. So I’m not worried about creating Bytepack to try to make as much money as possible from people that are using the platform. i just want it to be fair. I want it to be something where I feel like “Hey, this is working for me. I’m not losing money over these”, for example. We can maintain the team, continue improving the platform, without being something where we are bleeding out the people that are selling or buying from the platform. And that’s going to depend, what works best - if it’s a flat fee, or a percentage. It’s still to be defined.

Segun Adebayo: Let’s start with the things that I think went really well for me. To be honest, I didn’t expect Chakra UI to get the traction that it’s getting right now. One of the things I did not mention was that the concept of Chakra UI started from a product I was working on… And literally, I had a component library for that product itself. So after learning, I literally went to build a component library myself, and then just give it over back to my friend to help me put it together, and just wire up the states, and things like that.

After doing that, I literally saw that – before we started the project, when I was struggling, it literally took us three months just to convert design to code… But then after I built the component library and I gave it to him, I think it took us about three or four days to literally rebuild the entire thing again with the component library.

[36:04] I was really excited about that, and I thought “If this could literally help my friend…” And I could literally see him get excited; his face is all lit up. I mean, if this is the experience of my friend, what if I could literally take this same experience and just ship it out to other people, to just use for free?

To be honest, I literally struggled with the concept of free, just like ship it for other people to use… But I just thought it’s more of like the way it works in general. To get more from life, I feel like you just have to give more. Don’t expect to not give and then get a lot. It’s mostly just like a general law I think I’ve learned. So I thought “Maybe if I could literally just give value to other people out there, somehow I know the value will definitely come back to me.”

So that’s one of the pros of having an open source project, because you get to touch so many people out there. One thing I know that is really common is there are lots of people, there are lots of developers out there who don’t have the privilege that I’ve had, or anyone else has had; people who work in companies that don’t pay them so well. And yet, we know that this project takes some time to do. And I just felt like really “What can I do to help this kind of people to be able to ship the apps and really do their work and feel comfortable about it?” That was one of the benefits for me as well… I get to impact people the way I want to, in general.

The other thing is you get to find bugs. Not by yourself; other people get to find bugs in your application and they help you build them and fix them. That’s one of the pros. So even if you are building a project and you feel like – there might be some use cases you never thought about, or some things you never saw, but if other people use it, they’ll definitely find it faster than you will. So getting other people to contribute, to help, to fix typos - that’s a whole lot, to be honest. Even to help arrange your code, and make it better… Things like that generally help.

It feels more like a community is building on top of your idea, rather than only you, a one-man team, trying to make it all work and fee like So that’s one of the benefits.

There are some cons as well. One of the cons is literally the fact that when you have an open source project, if you don’t tend to manage your time properly, it can literally consume you, it can literally consume your time. There are people opening issues every single day… Like, “Hey, this button is not working. I don’t like the way it looks.” Some issues can literally trip you off, because – I mean, I’ve done a lot of work on this library, and then you’re coming here just to say this button doesn’t look good? Like, come on, man. What the heck.

But at the end of the day, I just try to go back to the reason why I made it. Sometimes just going back to the reason why helps you let off these emotions and just recenter myself, and just know that if this person is complaining, it means they have a genuine reason why… And maybe I can just be kind enough to really understand why they think it’s an issue. I might not even know what the issue is, so let’s just be kind and get all this feedback.

It’s kind of a con, because there are people who don’t exactly value the work you’ve done, and that’s a reality as well in open source projects… And there are people who approach you as though they hired you to build the library. But at the end of the day, I think it’s all about human interaction. If you just treat everyone as a normal human – I mean, not everyone exactly is normal, but if you just assume that everyone is a normal human and interact with them as such, you won’t have so much problems. But if you try to react based on emotions, then I feel like sometimes open source projects can lead you down a wrong path of anger, annoyance and self-defeat, and you just want to close the project and just go back to your normal life in general.

Harry Stevens: Yeah, definitely. These are decisions that happen over my paygrade, but we have removed the paywall for a lot of Coronavirus content, in an effort to – you know, this is vital information, and we want our readers to be able to see it without having to pay… Also, it’s a way to expose the Washington Post’s great journalism to a wider audience, which is gonna be good for the business.

But yeah, I think broadly speaking, with regard to paywall, one of the things that’s happening right now is that there’s a lot more traffic to news sites in general… Because people are at home, and also because people are freaking out and want information.

[48:10] But a lot of news sites are not able to take advantage of the increase in traffic, because even though they’re getting more traffic, advertisers don’t have as much money as they used to to buy ads. So if you’re a news site that’s 100% advertiser supported, the increase in traffic isn’t really doing that much for you. But for news sites that have been able to successfully move over to a subscriber-based model, like the Post, and the Times, where you’re actually asking your readers to pay some kind of fee to access your content, then they are able to take advantage of the increase in traffic.

So again, not a businessman. This is just kind of like me and my random thoughts, but I really like the idea of a subscriber-supported news organization, rather than advertiser-supported news organization… Because it aligns the goals of your reporters with the interests of your readers. It’s like, you’re collecting news and you’re reporting on news for the people who are reading it, and they’re telling you that they like it by paying for it… Rather than “I’m just gonna make some clickbaity things to get the most random eyeballs, so that it pleases the advertiser.” I think this Coronavirus situation is really further exposing the difference between those two models.

Jerod Santo: Yeah, and just buy something… It’s a royalty, or you pay a license fee…

Quincy Larson: Yeah, it’s one for the history books. But anyway, WeWork – as of October, when I made this announcement, it was a few hours after Meetup had announced that they were enacting this new policy, that they were going to charge everybody a $2 RSVP fee whenever they RSVP-ed for an event.

Now, freeCodeCamp [unintelligible 01:18:33.24] has 40(ish) meetups on Meetup. Most of our study groups are organized on Facebook, because it’s free, but some meetups will pay the $20/month to have a meetup page, which I think is ridiculous that it costs that much money… But it does, and people are willing to pay for it. So we quickly did some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and based on the number of events we had, it would have cost us like $20,000 extra every year… Not just to us, but to the entire community in aggregate, if they were all paying this $2 RSVP.

Chris Benson: I have a quick follow-up question about that before we dive fully into the questions. I’ve done freelancing in terms of being a programmer in the past, but never freelancing in this particular industry… And I was just curious - you mentioned paying by the project; do you do a fixed fee for a project, or do people pay you by the hour, in more of a traditional freelance way?

Adam Stacoviak: What’s interesting is that you are sort of placing a bet, so to speak, on the future of software, and then software developer salaries. I mean, sure, we know where software is going, but there’s been bubbles in the past; I’m sure there’s probably some fee on your side, but you’re placing a huge bet on the future of software. Obviously, that’s the truth, right?

James Hodson: That’s a great place to start. Now, I think obviously one episode for AI for Good is probably not sufficient to cover everything, but I guess we’ll see how far we can get.

The organization itself started in 2015, so we’re not a particularly old organization… But it started with a lot of the machine learning and AI research behind it. It started specifically out of a set of workshops at Stanford University in 2014, where we were trying to think what the big challenges would be over the next 10, 15 years, that as AI researchers we should be dedicating our time towards.

This set of workshops was attended by many of the big names in artificial intelligence that you would recognize, and one of the mandates that really came out of everybody there is that we need to get more of the research community and more of the practitioner community thinking about how they can use their skills, and the methodologies that are now becoming so widespread in other business areas, for social challenges. We don’t exactly lack social challenges, at the moment, where we could be applying these technologies.

Now, for my personal perspective, I’ve been working in artificial intelligence for about 15 years. I actually started, similarly, in machine translation. I was working on low resource languages and on machine translation for the European Parliament. This was at the German National Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, back in 2008-2009. I also spent some time in industry proper. I was managing the AI research lab at Bloomberg for some time, in New York, which allowed also to explore some aspects of attempting to use the technology for social impact. Obviously, as you can imagine, in an industry setting that’s not the primary goal always, but as you know, the Bloomberg Foundation and many projects in the oceans and climate and other areas that Michael Bloomberg in particular feels very strongly about… So there was certainly some precursor to the organization that started out of ideas with the Bloomberg Foundation, and with various projects that we did in collaboration with Academia back then.

The turning point in 2015 was really this set of workshops, and the realization that the types of technology that we’re developing today can have an enormous impact on these social challenges. But the question that remained was which social challenges should we really be attacking first, which ones are the most important, where can AI have an impact… And the fortuitous answer that we came to was that the United Nations had already done this work for us. The United Nations built the Sustainable Development Goals, which is a set of 17 goals, 16 that are thematic and one that involves building infrastructure that is strategic across the entire set… And they cover problems like removing poverty, and ensuring that everybody has access to clean water, and ensuring that everybody has enough food to eat, and ensuring that we don’t damage the environment on our planet to the point where it’s unlivable… All things that if we don’t think about them long and hard very quickly and take big steps, are going to make certainly some people’s lives much worse than they could be, and ultimately make our entire planet harder to live on… Whether that’s through geopolitical actions, or through the actions of individuals on the environmental health of the planet.

[08:29] So that’s where we began, and what we tried to do as an organization is to be a community builder, first and foremost. So we pool together the research community, we bring volunteers and AI practitioners on board who want to help us, and we host workshops, host conferences, but we also do build infrastructure. We are actually trying to get involved in the field, in the projects, and understand how artificial intelligence can be pushed into those challenge areas, as well as giving researchers and other individuals who are interested the incentives and the mechanisms by which they can contribute.

One thing to note that I think is quite important about us is we’re a public charity, which is an important distinction from many of the other players in this space. And we’re membership-driven, which means that we rely mostly, for our funding, on individuals who want to become members of our organization, and who pay a yearly membership fee for that participation.

We don’t exclude anybody, of course, but we do try to build a strong membership community of supporters and donors, who will support us year after year after year. In lieu of that, for this particular conversation, I was able to secure with our operational team that any listeners who are interested in becoming members of our organization can do so with a 50% from our normal membership rate.

Gina Helfrich: Right. So that’s definitely a part of it. We wanna make sure that we keep those different funding streams fairly balanced though, so that it never feels like “Oh, this PyData is make or break.” In the old days that was true, but now no longer, thankfully.

As the fiscal sponsor of the projects funding that comes to them through NumFOCUS is also a means of funding the organization. There’s something called an admin fee, which is basically like a small percentage of that money that goes to pay for the overhead of running the fiscal sponsorship program. You can think of it like if a company wanted to come in and give some money to a specific project, like Conda-forge, for example, then NumFOCUS as the legal entity of Conda-forge would accept that money, put it in your marked accounts for Conda-forge, and then a small percentage of those funds would go over into the NumFOCUS general fund, to pay for all the things that keeps us as a non-profit up and running.

[47:52] Those things that keep us up and running are also the things that provide the benefits of the fiscal sponsorship program. To give a concrete example, those admin fees would go into a NumFOCUS budget to pay the salary of our finance manager, who spends all day every day doing finances for the projects. So it’s all of a piece.

Then last and by no means least, individual donors. You had mentioned a list of names of people who have supported NumFOCUS. We definitely have hundreds of individuals who have very generously made a donation to the organization, mostly because we just get messages that say how much they love the tools.

One of the things I personally feel perplexed and sad about is that I – I’m recently confident that there are millions of people who use NumFOCUS tools all around the world, and know that they are using the tool, so it’s not like a process on their laptop that’s running in the background. They have pip installed Matplotlib, or whatever; they know they’re using the tool, but they have not yet donated back to support that tooling. If you wanna use the Microsoft Office Suite, you have to pay for it; but if you wanna use the scientific Python ecosystem, it’s open source, so you can just find different ways to install it without paying for it… Which is great, and enables a whole lot of things, but what I would hope is that for the people who have the means, they would donate back. You can think of it as like paying for that open source license that you have, just to provide some support to the folks who need it… Because I think the ratio between those few hundred people who donate to NumFOCUS versus the millions of people who use our tools is not really where I would want it to be.

We have a couple of membership programs. You can be a sustaining member of NumFOCUS, where you basically have a recurring donation set up, and it’s up to you how much you want that to be. People do $5/month, people do $500/year, it’s just whatever you want. And we have a little over 200 sustaining members now. That was probably by and large within the past two years that those folks have come on.

Then we also have this idea of a supporting member. If you make a donation of any size to NumFOCUS one time in the calendar year, then you’re a supporting member, and we usually have a couple hundred of those. Those donors are incredibly important, not only for the money that they give, which typically gets put into the small grant funding for the projects, but also just sort of as a representation that the community has the back of the people who are maintaining these projects. So to me, the more that we see the growth of our individual donors, the more that’s gonna be a sign that things are moving in the right direction for NumFOCUS.

Adam Stacoviak: 300, okay. Thanks for correcting my math there… What you’re saying, if I understand you correctly, is if there was a way for you to be paid, a fee that makes sense, a fair fee to continue to be a security measure, a maintainer even, if that’s necessary, to improve - most of these are mature and stable and don’t need to be changed much - you would stay on board as an on-the-hook person to provide maintenance and security.

Jerod Santo: Can you give us your affiliate fee, so you get the sale…? [laughter]

Christopher Hiller: I have some pro tips… I use a Mac. If you use a Mac, maybe a thing you need to do is copy and/or paste text files (source files or what have you) in their entirety. I discovered not too long ago - maybe this is one of those things that everybody knows except me, but I discovered that there were actually a couple command line tools that come in Mac OS that help you do just this thing. They are pbpaste and pbcopy.

[52:16] Pbpaste outputs to a STDOUT. It takes whatever is in the clipboard, and it sends it to STDOUT so you can pipe it to whatever you wanna pipe it to. Maybe you wanna pipe that to a file, and so if you copy some source and then you go to your command line and you say pbpaste, and then you do a write – I don’t even know if that’s less than or greater than [laughs], but you’re piping to the right with the direction, and you say foo.js… It will paste the contents of your clipboard into a new file, foo.js.

I wrote a little tiny Zsh function called Paste, which does just this - it takes its first parameter and it says ‘pbpaste’, and it writes to this new file. So I say ‘paste foo.js’, it takes whatever is in my clipboard and throws it in a new file, foo.js.

Likewise, pbcopy - you can cat a file and then pipe it to pbcopy and that file’s content will end up in your clipboard. Again, I wrote a little function to help with that, so it just accepts its first parameter, and it cats it (this file) and it pipes it off to your clipboard, which is really cool.

Along the same lines, there’s another little thing called z, and people may or may not know about z; maybe we’ve talked about z before, I don’t know… But there’s this command line tool for your shell called z. Just search GitHub for z.

It basically looks at all your shell history, it looks where you’ve been, and if you say something like “z node” or something, it will find the last directory that you were in called Node and it will just pop you right back there. It’s a great way to navigate to frequently visited directories or working copies, and it’s really neat.

Another tool I use is called – and apparently there’s science behind this; I can’t say whether or not that’s true, but it’s brain.fm. It’s a service that you pay a nominal fee for and they give you a mobile app and a web app. The best way to maybe explain it is it’s generative music; there’s many different styles, but… There’s some science behind it that says “If you listen to this music, it’ll help you, for example, focus on a task, or it’ll help you relax because of various tones and tempos and frequencies in the music.”

I don’t know about that, but I wanted to try it, and so I did try it, and I found out that it’s really helpful when I’m trying to focus on coding, and it helps me get and stay into the flow.

I feel like if you do a lot of coding, maybe you recognize that sometimes you get into this flow state and I feel like the music generated by brain.fm may help you do that; maybe it won’t, maybe you’ll find it boring, but it’s supposed to be actually kind of – it’s not supposed to engage to engage with you. It’s supposed to be kind of in the background.

A lot of popular music, or even maybe you listen to – I don’t know, techno, or trance, or something with that beat… It kind of drives you forward to help, but maybe sometimes that type of music is a little too engaging, and the brain.fm music is like Techno Elevator music, or something… It’s really interesting; you just throw it on the background, forget about it… And it helps me focus. Check that out, it’s cool.

[56:31] The last thing - there is a thing called Astral. If you’re like me, you have a million GitHub stars and you may be like “What was that thing I was thinking of? How do I find it?” I don’t even know how to do that with GitHub… So there’s this app called Astral App. It’s astralapp.com. It’s just like an OAuth style GitHub app, and it helps you manage and view all your stars, and you can even tag your stars into categories, and it sorts stuff by language, and it’s really neat.

So if you are like me and have a lot of stars, check out Astral App, and that will help you manage them and find things. Those are my pro tips.

Pia Mancini: Yeah, and different fiscal sponsors – we call the fiscal sponsors host organizations… The different host organizations have also different fees. For example, an organization that can mainly provide their collectives with branding may charge a fee; an organization that provides their collective with training might charge another fee, because what they’re giving them has a lot more overhead. And it also depends on where they’re at.

Open collective has a 5% fee across the board, and then the host organizations that we create and manage have another 5% fee. But it really depends on your host organization.

Carmen Andoh: Very good point. Same thing with conferences; I’ve tweet-stormed about this before, but if they’re gonna give a diversity scholarship to a conference – I mean, I was pretty lucky I got an airfare and I got hotel, but I also had an income from working and I also had a husband to support me, to watch the kids, and I also could make my own per diem. But there have been people for whom attending any type of conference is a huge burden on them, and it’s also a non-possibility…

So thinking about these things when we give scholarships, in addition to a conference fee, in addition to airfare or travel, in addition to hotel or accommodations, are we thinking about these other things? Socio-economic - I think about that often, and that credit card plays right into that, Brian.

Tim Coulter: You kill your kitty. But in killing this kitty, you get a new token, you get a new (for lack of a better word) piece of digital art. And what you can do from there is trade them just like you would CryptoKitties, but you can also feed other people’s kitties to your zombie to create even more zombies… And this zombie apocalypse comes up.

Now, what we can do with that (with the Pouncing Dead) instead of making money, we can take that fee structure and give it to the Horde itself, so that whenever you sacrifice a kitty over to the Horde, that money gets paid out to you. We could actually create this really interactive – and in doing so… I mean, you guys reacted yourself, like “This is so cool!” We can create this really interactive system where people are interacting with CryptoKitties, they’re interacting with Crypto Zombies… It becomes a narrative that’s fun to talk about and fun to interact with.

Like I mentioned, this is just one thing that you can do. People are using the Ethereum blockchain to manage provenance of fish or products that get created and make sure that the authentic things finally make it to consumers… People are using it to check out oil production and make sure that we’re producing things right, blood diamonds don’t need to happen anymore, we can create applications like decentralized eBay… For instance, eBay is great in that it brings people together, but along with PayPal they take a 17,5% cut, which is outrageous; that doesn’t need to happen anymore. The value transfer can happen over Ethereum. So what we’re going to do is reduce what we call the amount of rent-seekers that are in our industry today, that are just kind of building an asset and then sitting on that asset, and instead put that value over to everybody else.

And part of this question was really hard for me to answer because there’s so many cool things that people can build, but a lot of this stuff we haven’t even thought of yet. The promise of Ethereum is there, we just need things like CryptoKitties and the Pouncing Dead to show us how cool this stuff is.

Dan Kohn: Yeah, but for a small startup with 50 people or less, it’s actually just $7,000. So it is designed to be a reasonable fee; we’re working hard not to be onerous for these folks.

Chris Beams: [01:41:54.10] That’s right. And you actually are kind of touching here on the power of basically programmable money. We can encode into the logic of BSQ itself certain semantics. For example - this isn’t the way that it’s designed right now, but it easily could be and it may turn to this as we actually roll this stuff out… It could be that the only people who have the right to vote are people who have newly-minted BSQ. When you issue a compensation request and it gets accepted, that’s the issuance of new BSQ, actually new BSQ coming to existence when you get a compensation request accepted, like voted in the affirmative.

That’s because, by the way, remember, BSQ is ultimately backed by Bitcoin; it’s this colored coin riding on top of Bitcoin. Well, what that means is that when you issue a compensation request saying “Hey, I want 10,000 BSQ for this work”, that means that you must actually spend the equivalent in Bitcoin of 10,000 BSQ. You have to actually issue a Bitcoin transaction for 1,000 Satoshis times 10,000 BSQ. It actually costs money for people to issue compensation requests.

The reason that we do that is 1) anti-spam, so that we don’t just have people throwing compensation requests at us because it’s free. People actually have to pay for it, which means they’re gonna wanna have a reasonable degree of certainty that this is gonna be accepted, which means that they have all the correct social incentives to be out there, talking to other people in the network and saying “Hey, do you think this is good work? What should I ask for it?” etc, because they don’t wanna waste that compensation request transaction fee.

Well, when they do that and their compensation request gets accepted, that Bitcoin that they spent on the compensation request becomes BSQ, gets colored as BSQ, by the logic in the BSQ validation processing software that we’ve built. So when I say newly issued, newly minted BSQ, what I actually mean there is somebody who just earned it. And because it’s a blockchain, we can see the movement of every coin, for all of time. We can know that the BSQ that that contributor earned has not moved anywhere; it hasn’t been transferred to anybody else, say. So we can know that’s the BSQ of somebody who just earned it. Maybe only those people should be able to vote. That’s just an example of what you can do.

There are constraints, right? Not anything is possible, but there’s a remarkable degree of creativity that’s happening, and it begins to become evident just how limiting our current monetary world is. You don’t have programmable money. Look at what we’ve done with being able to program the rest of the world. Here it comes, here comes programmable money.

Jerod Santo: [31:52] What’s interesting to me is you have multiple pressures on Feedbin as a business, and just to put it out there, Feedbin is $3/month subscription fee, so that’s the way Ben supports himself with it. You have free alternatives, like Feedly and others, where like you said, if you’re using it as a sync service and you have native apps on all your devices, you can’t actually do better than a free service, in many ways.

Then you have the dwindling use of RSS, which we’ve discussed, and the increasing use of social networks. Then you have the inability to explain it to people who may love RSS, if they could just get over that technical hurdle. So you have all these different struggles as an independent developer trying to support himself with a business, and in light of all that, you also open sourced it. So the very last thing you could think of, as reasons why I may not subscribe to Feedbin, is now you get the person who’s super technical and they love RSS and they think Feedbin is a superior experience, but they’re a hacker. So now they can say, “Oh, I can just run it on my own server. It’s here, open source.” That seems like your last holdout. So tell us about the decision to open source it, why you did that and how that’s going.