i got so inspired by reading diaspora this year that i instantly started working on some polisware. cipherclerk operational: https://github.com/emberian/dregg
topical to the conversation, it is fully formally verified in lean (with some UC security reductions done in isabelle). also did this in HOL4 inspired by some work i did with ramana kumar in 2016, on reflective self-verifying self-modifying systems: https://github.com/emberian/svenvs
thinking about how to communicate it in a clear way. “the control knobs of what actually makes us different from one another” — you don’t expect one of your kids to be quadripedal. otoh this doesn’t really capture the precise notion either.
and soon from space? radio engineering breakdown of starlink radar capabilities, it’s a pretty impressive bird if you were designing it only for that: https://youtu.be/jbp3kdJZ1_A
there’s youtubers that have videos about doing this in a home wetlab. very achievable. some amateur soil biologists using this to try and sample microdiversity as the planet… humanifies.
i think of them as tiers of expertise— need to master the basics of structure and form before the robot has the learned representations to competently model user interactions with more fluid instantiations (by downprojecting into the overlearned fixed-semantics)
this is a pretty bad vfs. there are pure “cap manifest” approaches that don’t pull in decades of cruft semantics. don’t build systems that aren’t objectstore native in 2025 (since this work was initiated in december).
aodv works great and is “actual mesh.” the ‘overlays’ scale in practice and are topology agnostic, the hierarchical bgp mesh underneath isn’t altering the message or memory complexity, we can talk about them as algorithms. there are 10ks node meshes in the real world that use batman, geography-contrained hub and spoke, etc. guifi has 37k nodes in its heterogenous mesh with a batman fork, freifunk (originator of batman) around 40k.
edit to add: what is observed in practice is that gossip protocols can’t coordinate peers without centralizing. this is natural, and an artifact of the logarithmics in the routing protocols. the appropriate thing to do is model routing as a revocable proof system, and information theory explains the centralizing dynamics (problem I worked on 2018-2019) https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1478 proves the global lower bound is linear (in route updates, when applied to routing, naively quadratic if distributed), and the trick routing protocols add to the game is locality, which yields the logarithmic advantage that when multiplied across the entire network is substantially subquadratic.
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