waxwing's avatar
waxwing 2 months ago
Had a fun time in Oslo for the Olso Freedom Forum conference last week. Thanks to @gladstein et al for inviting me. Really well organized event. There were a *lot* of Bitcoiners there (and nostr-ers of course).. I spent most of my time nerding out with people about Bitcoin stuff so didn't pay as much attention (though, a little) to the political talks/reports. Obviously AI is "the new hotness" and it feels like, to develop a theme I occasionally opine about, the real story for me is access to compute: it's defining what power is, more and more, in the new world. I'm probably one of many many people that are spending a lot of time worrying in the background about how communication channels are getting more and more corrupted by the new vector of power which is access to datacenters. I stated here, years ago, that I thought open source software is going to win in this field, but to this day I am doubtful about whether the power asymmetry of data center access is resolvable. Perhaps the answer is in compute power distribution, as it was/is for Bitcoin mining.

Replies (5)

waxwing's avatar
waxwing 2 months ago
I know, sorry. It does on other clients, must be cached randomly in the ether somewhere ๐Ÿ˜
Five's avatar
Five 2 months ago
I am convinced that in order to hedge the dependence on data centers we need specialized communities incentivized to run infra for their members. For git servers, nostr relays and blossom media I see this sufficiently solved now that I built BudaBit.org. There exists a fallback path to individual infra of course but the right order is not service provider -> individual, but community infra -> individuals, with community leaders using cloud providers and well maintained self hosted fallbacks. Communities can form a resilient network that mostly makes platforms and cloud providers redundant commodities, especially with nostr discovery.
waxwing's avatar
waxwing 2 months ago
I think i might disagree in some details. But yeah trying to distribute the power, somehow.
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