Gordon
@gordon.bsky.social
3.1K followers 980 following 2.3K posts
Everything around me was someone’s lifework.
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gordon.bsky.social
self-certifying data… over http
gordon.bsky.social
I see basically three levers for credible exit:
- Decentralized protocols
- Local-first data
- Licenses that guarantee data ownership

Two technical, one legal. I’m open to using whichever is easiest in a given domain. newsletter.squishy.computer/p/freedom-to...
Freedom to exit
Three ways to guarantee user-owned data
newsletter.squishy.computer
gordon.bsky.social
At Subconscious, we built a whole decentralized protocol to guarantee users owned their data... a heavy lift.

With CAL I think you could guarantee the same level of user sovereignty via legal, instead of technical means. Just CAL + plain old SaaS.
gordon.bsky.social
And CAL has a "Combined Work Exception" carve-out which you could use to create a plugin system that does not have the same viral licensing requirements as the core system, allowing for commercial/proprietary plugins. opensource.org/license/cal-....
Cryptographic Autonomy License
1. Purpose This License gives You unlimited permission to use and modify the software to which it applies (the “Work”), either as-is or in modified form, for Your private purposes,…
opensource.org
gordon.bsky.social
Getting bullish on the Cryptographic Autonomy License. It's similar to AGPL plus it also guarantees users access to their *data*.

opensource.org/license/cal-....
gordon.bsky.social
Everyone has their own path. I can respect the way of the command line.
gordon.bsky.social
There's also a story (myth?) that they survived an early round by maxing out every credit card they could get their hands on. Terrifying levels of hustle.
depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social
very random that they funded Airbnb with $40 boxes of political breakfast cereal back when it was AirBed & Breakfast because you literally slept on air mattresses
gordon.bsky.social
Oof ok so this is just an aqua appreciation thread now. Great IA, visually balanced, with a professional and inviting voice. So tasteful. This is a high bar to clear.
gordon.bsky.social
I mean aqua was also a little bit extra, but I love it. I'll probably feel the same way about this in a month.
gordon.bsky.social
the glass effect is a lil corny but the design system coherency pass is A+
gordon.bsky.social
I suspect we’ll see more AGPL (or underrated CAL) for not-commercial software produced by and for communities. For commercial open source, Fair Source.
gordon.bsky.social
Although I mostly see MCP as a clever tactical move by Anthropic because it concentrates power around the LLM and commoditizes the context provider. MCP = LLM owns and mediates the user relationship.
gordon.bsky.social
web : CompuServe :: ??? : OpenAI
gordon.bsky.social
And AGPL. A barbell.
gordon.bsky.social
the unreasonable effectiveness of gradient descent bsky.app/profile/adew...
s/the right/better/
That way we can hill climb our way through the problem space.
gordon.bsky.social
Metacognition and experience. Wisdom is learning to ask the right questions.
gordon.bsky.social
Learning to ask the right questions is a crazy high-leverage skill. Now even higher leverage.
gordon.bsky.social
Autocorrelation: symptom of system approaching critical point. pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers...
gordon.bsky.social
Feels like we keep trying to smuggle in a little woo by confusing our language.
gordon.bsky.social
“woOo but what’s an agent??” Agency is a feedback loop. A thermostat is an agent. Cybernetics solved this.

“but does it have a WORLD MODEL tho??” All feedback builds up some kind of model. All models are models of *some* world… the umwelt sensed through feedback.
gordon.bsky.social
Ok Wittgenstein was kind of cooking when he said all philosophical problems are just language problems.
gordon.bsky.social
coopetition + end-user controlled data = adversarial interoperability www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...
ronentk.me
IMO ATProto will really succeed if it can unlock a new coopetitive landscape
"competing entities work together toward a common goal or share resources while still maintaining competitive interests in other areas"

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coopeti...
Coopetition - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org