My Website
I'm Phoenix! I'm an agency-maximizing consequentialist and a software engineer. I like peer-to-peer systems. More generally, I like attempts to hack a better world into existence by prefiguring robust, permissionless interconnectivity within the cracks of the present. I also like Minecraft, and I'm working on creating an open source reimplementation of Minecraft beta 1.0.2.

Not Minecraft Beta 1.0.2

Not Minecraft Beta 1.0.2 is a project to create a feature-complete open source reimplementation of the first version of Minecraft beta in Rust, complete with many optimizations and generalizations and very strong multiplayer engine that does several forms of client-side prediction.

image description: screenshot of minecraft-like game. it has a wavy field of
      grass blocks and a HUD. the hand model is currently a photograph of my IRL
      hand, LOL. I have built a smiley face out of glass blocks.

The multiplayer protocol is currently built on top of web-sockets, although there are plans to introduce and take advantage of the distinct features of QUIC as an alternate transport in the future, as well as to introduce a trust-on-first-use cryptographic identity system, as well as to take advantage of peer-to-peer hole-punching to reduce client-to-client player action latency where possible. Eventually, I have ideas on how to support sharding the world between multiple servers.

The graphics system is built over WebGPU and supports both 3D and 2D rendering, TrueType fonts, and in-place-patchable meshes. There is also a GUI sizing and layout layer built on top of the graphics layer which uses Rust's type system to statically check that the cause/effect flow direction of layout constraints is consistent between directly nested components, and which is actually able to operate with almost no dynamic dispatch or heap allocation, but rather by fusing all GUI logic at compile-time to a monad-like monomorphized blob.

Check it out so far!


Repnet

Repnet is a fundamentally different take on currency. Both dollar-style and bitcoin-style currencies see currency as tokens people own. For distributed systems theory reasons this means they both rely on the imposition of an objective view on economic ownership. This is a form of centralization, and produces problematic effects and centralized management. Repnet instead sees currency as relationships between people, like a graph of directed springs representing trust and promises, oscillating and breathing back and forth as economic activity occurs, through which automated chains of arbitrage can facilitate large-scale indirect reciprocity. This is more decentralized because it can more gracefully cope with partial disagreements, which is conducive to many nice properties.

image description: a directed graph of nodes, each labeled with a letter,
      and with each connection being an arrow pointing one way or the other with
      a decimal number over it. arrows extend beyond the borders of the image,
      suggesting that this is just one random patch of an indefinitely extending
      network

Repnet-powered markets sound great and I think it's plausible, novel, and helpful. However, for now, I'm trying to gradually bootstrap this into existence by applying it to existing peer-to-peer systems, to let people more reliably form mutualistic relationships between their computers as an alternative to centralized corporate infrastructure.

My strategy is currently as follows:

  1. Develop a minimum viable set of repnet software components in the form of a prioritizing reverse-proxy. This would let you slap this software in front of existing peer-to-peer software, like IPFS, and participating computers would automagically start trading network-time with each other.
  2. Keep maximizing agency
  3. ???
  4. Jupiter converted into fully sentient nanobot swarm

Join me!


Index

Blog posts and more!

6.9k words v0.3.1 pub sep/28/2024
1.8k words v1.0.0 pub feb/25/2022
(hub page) rev dec/31/2022
(hub page)

Contact

Email kahlo.phoenix@gmail.com
Fediverse https://hachyderm.io/@gretchenfrage
GitLab https://gitlab.com/gretchenfrage
GitHub https://github.com/gretchenfrage
You know if you think about it, email is the world's oldest most widely used federated social media network. That of course makes it a cautionary tale about how federation is not sufficient.