Swarm Cooperatives is the first of six Big Picture Days at Limewharf Annex Culture Lab. As befits a swarm-themed event, we’re pulling things together very fast (you won’t believe when we actually get access to the space!) but that’s all part of the fun. We hope you’ll be able to come! Sign up for a free [...]
Read more →Swarm Cooperatives are temporary social structures we create to solve problems, explore new ideas, and make the most of opportunities. You can think of Swarm Coops as “constructive flash mobs.” Common examples include unconferences, bar camps, hackathons, crisis mapping, and free schools. The Evolution of Swarm Coops is a one day workshop at The Limewharf Annex [...]
Read more →I did a talk today on hexayurts and the wider sustainability picture at Electromagnetic Wave – a hacker conference in London. I was a bit off base (bronchitis? anyway, I felt pretty rough) but the talk turned out well. Your browser does not support the video tag. PDF of slides and .ogg video (100mb or [...]
Read more →So I had a good long think about it on twitter this morning, and I want to try and simplify the story into a few paragraphs. 1> Computer power is an ever-more-abundant resource. As a result, the data center is doomed for a variety of reasons. Yet even in such times, the temporary efficiency of [...]
Read more →((long series of tweets – you want to read this in reverse order, if at all – I’m keeping it for later)) Vinay Gupta @leashless 11h We can simply work-and-buy our way back out of this mess. It’s worked on the Desktop w. Linux, it can work on the network. Next round!!! Expand Reply Delete [...]
Read more →Here’s my prediction: space in data centers is going to become almost free. A convergence of trends is going to crash the price, and business model, of many Cloud providers in the next two years. Those trends are four. 1> Smart dotcoms are rewriting their backends in fast, compiled languages like golang. One example went [...]
Read more →* although there was this one time A few people have noticed my biographical similarity with Satoshi Nakamoto – British person with American English tendencies and ties to Ireland. There are three reasons why I cannot be Satoshi Nakamoto. My coding skills are not up to it. I haven’t written C/C++ since the mid-1990s My [...]
Read more →Draft of an introduction to an energy policy doc. Could use some feedback – comments welcomed! ==== Nothing stands still. The continued addition of complexity to the basic systems of our society has run for hundreds of years, mainly on fossil fuels. The continued injection of energy into our societies has produced a boom in [...]
Read more →Paul Hughes writes about the possibilities for radical decentralization in a high tech world. This comes up in a thread with some discussion of Hakim Bey. Let us proceed. ===== Let me answer those points at a practical level, and then at a more philosophical one. 1) As I note in the piece, Hakim Bey has [...]
Read more →Three lightly edited excerpts from a conversation about bitcoin with some Californians. ===== I actually worked for the NSA. I did a genocide-resistant biometric ID project for them. http://guptaoption.com/cheapid/ (note that it is fully public and in the public domain – those are the only conditions I work for spookland under.) What we know, for sure, [...]
Read more →A quick summary. Data centers are inherently centralized, and bloody expensive. Once you have all that data in one place, doing large scale monitoring is very easy. Sutherland’s Wheel predicts that centralization and decentralization take turns as “progress.” We are turning forwards to decentralization again: bitcoin, bittorrent and so on. The People’s Cloud is the [...]
Read more →Simple concept (!) I wanted to give a URL to. One thousand or more nodes in a mesh or other network Each node has: One terabyte or more of disk One gigabyte or more of ram On gigahertz or more of processor Nodes are scattered through a contiguous geography like a city Conceptually, Petascale Urban [...]
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