Christopher Allen

The 2024 annual report from @BlockchainComns is here! It highlights our work toward an open, secure, and compassionate digital infrastructure, emphasizing interoperability and self-sovereign wallet standards through key projects: dCBOR, FROST, and Gordian Envelope. 🧵… [1/11]

@raw_works Thanks for your detailed reply -- I am investigating further. I have a high-quality 90's era orthogonal persistence server that I'm reviving as to do some prototypes against: github.com/eOSContinuum/e…

this is a rich topic and something i have indeed been struggling with, although maybe i haven't been thinking about it in the same framing that you have. i am not sure i have any answers, but i have some ideas of where to look, and who is working on what. in terms of RLM implementations, ax from @dosco is currently the most "agent native" of them all. it has some of the interface elements you are suggestion, although not necessarily the substrate. maybe i have to take that back and say ypi github.com/rawwerks/ypi is most literally the most "agent native" because it is pi calling pi, but i don't think it goes all the way towards what you are suggesting. in terms of "orthogonal persistence", i would take a look at the recent "project think" from @threepointone and the rest of the cloudflare agent sdk team. i think this is the closest shipped thing i can think of to your eOS ideas. durable object sharding is pretty neato and @KentonVarda is ahead of his time. @GeoffreyHuntley has an interesting "declarative reproducibility" approach with NixOS in his "loom" project...the system can essentially re-provision itself anew while it updates. fwiw - github.com/openprose/unix… from @irl_danB is potentially the most philosophically opposite of eOS last but not least, in terms of the outer-harness substrate, i think that openai's symphony github.com/openai/symphony addresses many of the eOS primitives on your list this is more of a constellation than an answer, but hopefully at least one of these is useful to you! (p.s. - my favorite thing about the current pace of ai is that no one actually has any idea what they are doing and we are all figuring this out together!)

@raw_works I’m curious if you’ve thought about the mismatch in architecture of current harnesses vs the statelessness of LLM. With RLMs, wouldn’t it be better to use a harness architecture that optimizes for state? See eOSContinuum.com for some early thoughts if orthogonal persistence approaches might be better with RLMs?

This is a serious problem. We need our wallets to be robust in adversarial environments. Join the Gordian Wallet to explore identify best practices.

@dross_bolt @ParallaxPact We are learning more on the risks without self-sovereignty. SSI is 10 years old this week, help us update it for the next decade:

@ParallaxPact How are you thinking about the regulatory risk around self-sovereign identity though? Seems like governments might not love losing control of that data.

Most people still think Web3 is just about buying JPEGs. But the real shift? We're moving from platforms that own your data to protocols where you own your identity, assets, and relationships. The internet is being rebuilt from scratch.

@Web3crypt0 Self-Sovereign Identity is 10 years old this week. We have learned a lot, but we have much more to do:

6/6 — CTA The internet was built without a native identity layer. SSI fixes that. Healthcare, finance, government, DeFi — every sector needs it. Your identity shouldn't be someone else's product. Take it back. #SSI #Web3 #OwnYourData #DecentralizedIdentity

Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI): 1/6 Big Tech owns your identity. Google. Facebook. Your bank. They rent it back to you. SSI changes everything — giving YOU full control of your digital identity. Here's how 👇 #SSI #Web3 #DecentralizedIdentity #Privacy

@ChristopherA Spent 6 months trying to launch a practical version of SSI at a large fintech, and failed. Huge supporter of your work, but found it extremely hard to change identity practices in finance. Hope we become self-sovereign one day

SSI has consumed most of my waking hours over the past few years, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I had the privilege to write my PhD at @TU_Muenchen on the topic, focusing on SSI in a b2b setting. SSI is great because it is self-guaranteeing its promises, and organizations need digital sovereignty just as much as people do. Now, I continue my work building digital supply chain software with SSI at heart. It has also made it impossible for me to unsee the crazy asymmetry of information/power around internet identity. Never looking at a social login the same way.

@NINS_2024 x.com/christophera/s…

Digi Yatra Foundation and Data Security Council of India study highlights the importance of self-sovereign identity for scalable, secure digital ecosystems rviv.ly/ZG89Cf

Has the concept of self-sovereignty affected your career or life? Tell me your story!

1/12 I've been meaning to write a bit about @iang_fc 's book The Identity Cycle for a while now. For the impatient here's the oligitory My Little Pony infographic. For the Claude Notes summary read on 👎

The goal isn't to settle these questions. It's to make the principles worthy of the next ten years.

Ten years ago I asked for help refining ten principles. Today I'm asking again — this time, for sixteen. Push back. Sharpen. Tell me what I'm still missing. Talk with me at IIW, join the conversation in the W3C CCG, at RevisitingSSI.com, or at GDC in Geneva next September.

Do you use the term "self-sovereign"—for identity, for keys, for your wallet? If you do, it was ten years ago today I chose this term, using it to describe an inalienable right to control your own digital life. We've learned much in the last decade, so I'm offering an update.🧵…

Because I get asked a lot. Why we must fight Palantir, in brief. 1. Programmers working on the Internet have a moral responsibility to the entire world, not a single country. The Internet has been designed since its inception as a universal system for the sharing of knowledge without censorship. The Internet is not the property of any one government or nation. 2. The Internet enables mass surveillance at a scale unimaginable to the Gestapo and the Cheka. Far too many programmers have wasted their lives at building surveillance systems under the guise of Web advertising. Today, these web tracking systems are being used to monitor, control, and even kill humans by companies like Palantir that seek to combine state violence with corporate efficiency, and thus create a new form of technofascism. 3. Surveillance justified by external national security threats will be turned against citizens inside the nation-state. Mass surveillance was once the exclusive domain of the NSA, but today it has been privatized to corporations like Palantir that are unaccountable to any democratic process. What begins as fear of external foreign nation-states turns inwards to focus on immigrants, dissidents, and eventually to anyone that might challenge the status quo or try to exit an increasingly dysfunctional society. 4. Everyone is a target. The “enemy within” continually expands until it encompasses the entire population of a nation regardless of their status and beliefs, justifying evermore paranoid and totalizing surveillance. The line between policing and military operations blurs, with legal frameworks being replaced by technological violence operating with total impunity. 5. Surveillance can only be defeated by building software and hardware to defend ourselves. Meek calls for regulation or moralizing demands for human rights are useless in this era. Any rights must be enforced by the hard power of code. Code, not laws, can be used to uphold the right to privacy by making surveillance difficult, if not impossible, even by nation-state adversaries. 6. We are ruled by a senile gerontocracy. Unlike the generations that fought in the world wars, most of our current rulers are degenerate pedophiles who would sacrifice the well-being of the youth and the entire planet due to their infantile desire for wealth and power. Technology of surveillance and automated warfare reflects their increasingly desperate attempts to maintain archaic forms of domination. 7. The American Empire is unraveling. Once, the United States of America presided over a globe where it could enforce its rule via the status of the dollar as a global reserve currency and a network of equally global military bases, but new regional powers now directly challenge the United States as its empire dissolves in the face of internal economic stagnation, political corruption, and the inflation of the dollar. 8. In a real war, fantasies of total technological dominance always backfire. When a faceless drone kills a child’s father, that child will one day take revenge regardless of the cost, something forgotten by those raised in comfortable suburbs. Going beyond zero-sum games, one can only truly win a battle against a people by demonstrating your victory provides a better way of life, increased prosperity, and an inspiring philosophy. 9. Oddly enough, proponents of fully automated warfare support a universal draft. Deep-down, these keyboard warriors know that their technofascist fantasies are a paper tiger when up against determined opponents that engage in asymmetric warfare. They also know none of their children will fight in a war for their state but they would be happy to see other people’s children come home in body-bags. 10. The problem is not whether AI weapons will be built; we must hold responsible those who are building them. No matter which country is deploying automated killing machines, no one is absolved from the murder of civilians and the destruction of infrastructure due to the parlour-trick of shifting the blame to AI. 11. Atomic war is on the horizon. As various states descend into wars over increasingly scarce natural resources, the possibility of tactical nuclear strikes over Teheran, Kyiv, and other areas of conflict has returned to the historical stage. Increasingly geriatric and authoritarian rulers face less guardrails than before to deploying nuclear weapons, and may even be willing to sacrifice the survival of humanity to appease their own petty egos. 12. Our goal is a world of peace where every person can be empowered by the Internet. Modern war is the quintessential game of sending young people to the meat-grinder. Why die for the profit of corrupt rulers when one could build real wealth and power for yourself using the Internet? 13. We should fight for the world we want, and build the tools needed by future generations. Pacifism would be suicidal in this period of global turbulence and resource wars, but real hard power lies in technology: Programmers should be creating technologies to live a free life and prosper in a hostile society of surveillance and control, and decentralization is the only way these technologies will survive against the inevitable repression. 14. The State will not help us. The state is a dying pre-Internet institution that increasingly resembles nothing but a Ponzi scheme fueled by taxes and debt. None of the youth alive today will likely inherit any benefits, such as welfare and health care. 15. Centralized and opaque algorithms are a danger to free speech. Propaganda is the flip-side of surveillance, as continual propaganda prevents anyone from even thinking of challenging the system. Social media monopolies promote propaganda to create a generalized idiocy while silencing those that would dare to criticize the reigning order before they can organize against it. 16. Building new forms of social organization with each other is vital to survival. The traditional mediascape of politics and entertainment exists to distract us from building networked solidarity and distributed autonomous organizations across borders. The hierarchical state is as relevant to us as the medieval church and kings were to the formation of the joint-stock corporation and the labour union. 17. Digital identity is the next step in their system of control. Within the next few years, access to the Internet–including in Europe and the United States–will require biometric national identity cards, using the flimsy excuse of “protecting children.” The real goal is to gatekeep free access to subversive political content and halt cross-border communication in order to prevent new forms of self-organization and resistance from emerging. 18. Only when one can be anonymous is one truly free. The freedom to express oneself without censorship and surveillance is a vital precondition for both the autonomous use of reason and the democratic evolution of society. Technology must enable the freedom to selectively reveal ourselves to the world–so that we can become who we want to be–by preserving the right to privacy over the Internet, including not just individual privacy but the right to transact and form contracts privately. 19. America created the first global surveillance state, but it will not be the last. Too many have forgotten or perhaps taken for granted the revelations of Wikileaks and Snowden. States across the world from China to Russia are creating even more powerful global surveillance systems and propaganda machines. Leveraging private defense contracts in countries across the world, Palantir seeks to make itself the operating system of a cross-border global secret state while it pushes its own farcical version of ethno-nationalism. 20. Culture wars are a psyop. It is ironic that “Epstein class” virtue-signals about traditional morality and the superiority of forms of ethno-nationalism, while trying to return to the rule of hereditary elites, even in the United States. Rather than reverse the gains of the Enlightenment, we take the side of our ancestors who fought a centuries-long battle for individual liberty, scientific progress, decentralized markets, bottom-up democracy and the emancipation of humanity from feudal monarchs and their make-believe mythologies. 21. New forms of technology can reshape the world. Technology is not just a tool, but the world we live in and an extension of our cognitive capabilities. The co-operation of humans with the collective intelligence embedded in AI could accelerate human progress and overcome planetary crises such as climate change and atomic war that threatens the survival of our species. 22. Live free or die trying. We must bear eternal vigilance in the struggle against fascism, and the battlefield is technology. There is no middle ground: Technologists must choose whether to work for the enslavement of humanity or to create new spaces for freedom. These are my personal beliefs, not those of @nym. Yet as a philosopher that founded a tech startup, I have a responsibility to respond to this manifesto of Palantir and it's so-called "philosopher-CEO" Alex Karp.

@garrytan I’ve decided to make skills explicitly edge-labeled graph nodes, and similar to how web pages are rendered on a push, a build script updates them in the appropriate agent’s dotfiles. See deepcontext.com/nodes/skills/g… — right now it just adds an alias, but my goal is two-way.

This is interesting. Anyone experimenting with this? So far anytime I have adjacent skills I just tell it to DRY itself up and turn it into a bigger skill with more parameters So far I found composing bigger skills with branching params is better

@timpastoor @iang_fc @iang & @timpastoor -- I've begun implementing this at deepcontext.com -- the goal is that this become a seed, you can fork it and it has minimal necessary for you add nodes, invite colllaborators, and feed nodes to other forks. Still a ways to go, but feels possible.

@iang_fc @ChristopherA Some thoughts. Hope it helps. pastebin.com/SANe2sfY