Hi! Yes, Spritely started Hoot to get Spritely's programs, built on top of Spritely Goblins, to a wider audience. And the network protocol we use / co-designed is OCapN, which is indeed in the family of CapTP languages: https://ocapn.org/
The good news is there are four fairly mature implementations (two Scheme implementations across Guile and Racket, a Dart implementation, a Javascript implementation) and one upcoming one (a Zig implementation). We have a whole specification and test suite and even an implementation guide!
The experience Jessica Tallon and I had with doing standardization work on ActivityPub led us to decide to take a different path when starting the group for OCapN: instead of bringing the topic of what we wanted to achieve to a standards group, we decided to start a "pre-standards group" which, effectively, works pretty much exactly like a standards group but does all the heavy lifting of making sure we have a decent spec, interoperability, a test suite, etc before bringing to a formal standards group (or really moving outside of "stealth mode": we haven't advertised OCapN too much to make sure we had a design that was fairly solid between a few core implementations before trying to push for wider adoption, which can quickly ossify a spec since making changes past that point requires getting the whole ecosystem to change). We've mostly achieved that now, and there's an open debate about whether, should we really bring this to a formal standards group at all?
Regardless, OCapN is pretty awesome, and we'll probably revamp the website and etc pretty soon to make it clearer that it's ready for more projects to start implementing!
This reverse engineering effort is important between you and me, in this exchange right here. It is a battle that can never be won, but the fight of it is how we make progress in most things.
The point is not primarily the court. The court is an example of someplace where we have accountability, but we build accountability mechanisms as foundational to most of our computing.
Tracebacks, debuggers, logging, etc. We put enormous resources into not only the bad case, but the potential that a bad case could occur. When something goes wrong, we want to know why, and we want to make sure that something bad like that doesn't happen again.
> At some point Sussman expressed how he thought AI was on the wrong track. He explained that he thought most AI directions were not interesting to him, because they were about building up a solid AI foundation, then the AI system runs as a sort of black box. "I'm not interested in that. I want software that's accountable." Accountable? "Yes, I want something that can express its symbolic reasoning. I want to it to tell me why it did the thing it did, what it thought was going to happen, and then what happened instead." He then said something that took me a long time to process, and at first I mistook for being very science-fiction'y, along the lines of, "If an AI driven car drives off the side of the road, I want to know why it did that. I could take the software developer to court, but I would much rather take the AI to court."
Years later, I found out that Sussman's student Leilani Gilpin wrote a dissertation which explored exactly this topic. Her dissertation, "Anomaly Detection Through Explanations", explores a neural network talking to a propagator model to build a system that explains behavior. https://people.ucsc.edu/~lgilpin/publication/dissertation/
There has been followup work in this direction, but more important than the particular direction of computation to me in this comment is that we recognize that it is perfectly reasonable to hold AI corporations to account. After all, they are making many assertions about systems that otherwise cannot be held accountable, so the best thing we can do in their stead is hold them accountable.
But a much better path would be to not use systems which fail to have these properties, and expand work on systems which do.
Hi! I actually have, and have been using as my main device, an MNT Pocket Reform, and at one point was using an MNT Reform.
MNT's devices are honestly kinda incredible. I can't recommend them for everyone yet, though that will change soon. Both of them are a kind of "laptop of theseus"; you can open and change and repair them, and honestly I have. Both device's guts are dramatically different than where they started, but changes happened piecemeal.
The Pocket Reform is an incredibly cute device. I can't pull it out anywhere without people fawning over it. Not even just hackers! It's an open hardware cyberdeck you can use as your main device. What's not to love?
The MNT Reform Next will be closer to what many people want out of a laptop. It'll still be chonkier than a normal laptop. But again, these things are incredibly upgradeable and hackable.
Now for the caveats: for most people, I would wait until the MNT Quasar module comes out. The reason being is that while the current "best" module, the RK3588, is honestly pretty good with the 32gb version, it lacks one critical thing for most people and one other critical thing for me in particular. The first thing it lacks is support for suspend. Honestly, it does make working with a tiny computer like this a bit less appealing than the Pocket Reform's form factor could be, since what you really want to do is just be putting it to sleep and taking it out everywhere. The other thing is that Blender doesn't really run on the rk3588 either. You can kind of get a patched version working based on Lucie's patches, and I did, but it doesn't support the Eevee renderer, which is a must-have for me personally.
But the MNT Quasar board will be apparently fixing both of those above issues, and yes, at that point this will be a device that I can recommend generally. And I'll also note that I got the very first MNT Reform when it came out, and holy moly the state of the hardware now vs when it originally launched half a decade ago... it's hugely far between, but the amazing thing is that to get it up to the current state, I didn't need to throw things away, I could just open and tinker with things bit by bit.
In many ways, the MNT Pocket Reform reminds me of the book the main character has in the solarpunk book A Psalm for the Wild Built; a computer that is issued to you at the age of 16 and that which you carry with you for life. You can upgrade and repair it easily, but you don't need to throw it away.
So yeah, it's not for everyone. But if the idea of supporting repairable, upgradeable open hardware made by a lovely bunch of queers in Berlin sounds great? That you can hack on, that has a neat little community, that will be a conversation point amongst fellow hackers for its quirkiness? It's appealing to some, but not all.
> DenchClaw finds your Chrome Profile and copies it fully into its own, so you won’t have to log in into all your websites again. DenchClaw sees what you see, does what you do. It’s an everything app, that sits locally on your mac.
Wow that sounds great. Hey don't worry these things never blackmail anyone. Let it know if you're gonna turn it off, I bet it'll make some REAL interesting choices based on your browsing history
Wow, sorry, but given how incredibly insecure all the "claw" agent type things are right now, does this really sound wise at all?
It sees everything you do, really? What's it gonna do with that data? You don't know.
Put all your customer data in there, all your customer relationships. It's fine, it couldn't leak all that information, it couldn't screw up any sensitive business details I'm sure. This is gonna go great.
Sorry AFK everybody I'm gonna go get myself a VibeMBA.
Anyway, good luck, I'm really looking forward to the user stories in a few weeks! I'm sure this won't go badly at all.
The good news is there are four fairly mature implementations (two Scheme implementations across Guile and Racket, a Dart implementation, a Javascript implementation) and one upcoming one (a Zig implementation). We have a whole specification and test suite and even an implementation guide!
The experience Jessica Tallon and I had with doing standardization work on ActivityPub led us to decide to take a different path when starting the group for OCapN: instead of bringing the topic of what we wanted to achieve to a standards group, we decided to start a "pre-standards group" which, effectively, works pretty much exactly like a standards group but does all the heavy lifting of making sure we have a decent spec, interoperability, a test suite, etc before bringing to a formal standards group (or really moving outside of "stealth mode": we haven't advertised OCapN too much to make sure we had a design that was fairly solid between a few core implementations before trying to push for wider adoption, which can quickly ossify a spec since making changes past that point requires getting the whole ecosystem to change). We've mostly achieved that now, and there's an open debate about whether, should we really bring this to a formal standards group at all?
Regardless, OCapN is pretty awesome, and we'll probably revamp the website and etc pretty soon to make it clearer that it's ready for more projects to start implementing!