FLOSS Weekly 745, Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Doc Searls (00:00:00):
This is Floss Weekly. I'm Doc Searls, and this week Dan Lynch and I talk with Dave Taht. Dave is the king of buffer bloat and has done so much to make the internet work faster and better for everywhere. Billions of people benefit from his work, all open source, all for the most part, not paid for, but he does great work. But the interesting thing this time, 'cause he's been on before, is that we go into music and we go into starlink and we go into a whole lot of stuff. And it's conferencing and forms of conference with open source conferencing that I hadn't heard of before that are supposed to be really good. But the main thing is music is a focus this time. And that's something in common with last week actually. It's gonna be really good. And that is coming up next.
Leo Laporte (00:00:49):
Podcasts you love
Speaker 3 (00:00:51):
From people you trust. This is twit.
Doc Searls (00:00:57):
This is Floss Weekly, episode 745, recorded Wednesday, August 16th, 2023, the Buffer Bloke. This episode of Floss Weekly is brought to you by discourse. The online home for your community discourse makes it easy to have meaningful conversations and collaborate anytime anywhere. Visit discourse.org/twit to get one month free on all self-serve plans.
Leo Laporte (00:01:29):
Listeners of this program, get an ad free version if they're members of Club twit. $7 a month gives you ad free versions of all of our shows Plus membership in the club. Twit Discord, a great clubhouse for twit listeners. And finally, the twit plus feed with shows like Stacey's Book Club, the Untitled Linux Show, the GIZ Fizz and more. Go to twit tv slash club twit and thanks for your support.
Doc Searls (00:01:56):
Good, whenever it is, wherever you are. I am Doc Searls, and this is Floss Weekly this week, joined by Dan Lynch himself in his lair in Liverpool.
Dan Lynch (00:02:08):
I like that. You quite alay. I do like that. That's very
Doc Searls (00:02:10):
Cool. Yeah. And actually Simon calls his place a layer, I think. Does
Dan Lynch (00:02:13):
He as well. Okay. Yeah, there you go. I'm still in the stealing Simon's Thunder. Yeah, it's great to be back. Thanks Doc.
Doc Searls (00:02:21):
Yeah. The, the last we had had you on, I think you were the guest. I was. And yeah. And I, I, I've been in the part just to promote another podcast. Think I mentioned it at mm-hmm. <Affirmative> 500, the, the history of rock music and 500 songs. But like, run episodes 1 0 5 to 1 0 7 or something. It's all about Liverpool and Okay. Just The Beatles, Jerry and The Pacemakers and the Searchers and a bunch of others. And I didn't know that, like, doubling up guitars and forcing the Beatles to go 12 string mm-hmm. <Affirmative> was a searcher's thing.
Dan Lynch (00:02:58):
Yeah. So they
Doc Searls (00:02:59):
Were more singers who never got along and still don not get along and
Dan Lynch (00:03:03):
Fighting. Did it cover the eighties stuff Like Frankie goes to Hollywood. 'cause That had a huge
Doc Searls (00:03:06):
Impact on, it's not up there yet. It's you know, he, he forecasts a lot of this. It's gonna take him 10 years to do the whole thing.
Dan Lynch (00:03:12):
Oh, wow. Okay. Because it's gonna need a bit of time.
Doc Searls (00:03:14):
It's like 5,000 songs in a way, you know, but it's mm-hmm. <Affirmative> deeply Interesting. Good. A good show. So d Dave Tatt is our guest today. He's a re he's a repeat performer himself, <laugh>. And, and you said you've done some studying, is anything that stands out for you before We
Dan Lynch (00:03:34):
Lots of stuff. Obviously, we, we talked a bit about the whole music angle. So I, we we're gonna get into some of that, I think. Which would be really interesting. I've actually got old school notes here. I wrote notes. Oh, really? Written. But then I almost left them downstairs. <Laugh> and I, I realized the folly of the folly of non-digital notes when I was like, oh no, they're downstairs. So I had to run down and get them. But yeah, I, I look forward to talking about open W r t I know it kind of relates. And as I was looking through my picking stuff up in the studio and putting stuff back together, I found this, remember these guys?
Doc Searls (00:04:07):
Oh my gosh. Oh, that's your 50,
Dan Lynch (00:04:10):
Yeah. W r t 54 G. Oh, well, perfect. The reason we have open W l t I found this, it's, it's a bit dusty
Doc Searls (00:04:17):
<Laugh>. It's a bit dusty,
Dan Lynch (00:04:19):
But I'd love to see if this thing still works. I may even do some with that. Yeah. So, yeah, it'd be good to talk about some of that sort of stuff as well. So
Doc Searls (00:04:25):
I bought excellent with me. T I still have one of those in a closet too. Maybe wanted, Dave gave me, I'm not sure
Dan Lynch (00:04:31):
Every geek should have one. At least one
Doc Searls (00:04:32):
<Laugh>. And so, so let me introduce our guest who's a, he's been, I think he's been here like three or four times by now. Dave Tat I'll just read off the Wikipedia 'cause it's great. An American network engineer, musician lecturer, a asteroid explorer, <laugh> internet activist chief Executive Officer, sir Tech Libra or whatever it says under his thing for those watching later in the moment. Co-Founded the Buffer Bull Libra QoS. Okay. Libra QoSs. And I began the buffer buffer blowers thing with Jim Geddes runs the sir WT and make wifi fast sub-projects, referees, the buffer bloat related mailing lists and related research activities. He also has a great starlink list which I'm on as well. And has done things that are good for the internet and have benefited billions of people mostly without remuneration <laugh>. So, which is why he, he, he lives on a boat <laugh> with a very, very large keyboard. I see. And so it's off to one side. So how you doing, Dave?
Dave Taht (00:05:48):
It's really great to see you, doc. And <laugh>. Thanks for having me on the show. Once again.
Doc Searls (00:05:55):
So, so, so Dan, why don't you just jump in with, with your queued up things, maybe even starting with that that that modem. That hotspot. Yeah. Well, I mean now cold hotspot.
Dan Lynch (00:06:09):
Yeah. Now called hotspot. I mean, I, I, I was intrigued to see that this has got the latest 2.4 gigahertz technology, apparently. Of course,
Doc Searls (00:06:16):
<Laugh>. I
Dan Lynch (00:06:17):
Remember that in the front. So I look forward to seeing how good that is. <Laugh>, we'll see how that goes. Yeah. Yeah. So open, w r t that was a big thing for me. I was, yeah, I was having a look at at some of Dave's blog today and some of the interesting stuff on there. So much stuff to talk about. Obviously buffer bloat is the thing that a lot of people will associate, I would think with you. But just for the benefit of people who maybe aren't as clued up on it, what do you mean when you say buffer bloat? And how did you, how did the project aim to deal with that?
Dave Taht (00:06:48):
You know, I'm, I'm looking forward today to talking more about music because that's where my story began, you know? Okay. all I wanted to do in 1991 was to plug my guitar into a wall. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and play with my drummer across town, because he would never make a gig. And <laugh> and the technology required to do that more or less existed in 1991. But we seem to be, keep going backwards until recently and in part because of the buffer blood problem. And what that basically was and is and remains, is that we have a very variable data rate that has x amount of buffering in it, which is usually far too much for interactivity. So even if you and I were to try to play together, and we were in the same state today it probably wouldn't work very well in part to the buffer blood problem. I've written so extensively about it that I would really encourage people to hit Wikipedia for it. The issue is, is that the issue is solved. We fixed it in 2012, and she's just taken 12 bloody years to start seeing it roll out in quantity. The ar the average person there's a bunch of fixes. R F C 82 90 Cuno and stuff. Is that big enough for you? Yeah,
Dan Lynch (00:08:07):
<Laugh>. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I, I read that that the, the stuff was incorporated back into, was upstream back into the open W R t project in like 2014. You, you guys finished what you were doing. So we're talking nearly 10 years ago now. How come we still aren't? Is it, is there a problem with ISPs or, or what's going on? How come we're not seeing this promoted to, you know, end users as such?
Dave Taht (00:08:30):
Yeah, that's a really good question. So I started in doing embedded Linux in 1998 before it was really a thing. And at the time we cared a lot about keeping up with kernels. 'cause We had to, and we cared a lot about keeping software up to date because we had to, and I, and figured that the cycle time from a new kernel release to something that shipped would be a couple years. As the stuff has got more and more mature the cycle time from a new floss kernel to where it gets deployed, it seems to be extending out to five to seven years. And we of course have a billions and billions installed base open. W r T is doing a beautiful job of keeping up with developments in the kernel. And everybody attracts that well, has had this stuff for 10 years.
(00:09:18):
But, you know, just the other day I was talking to someone that had a seven year old version of open w r T that they wanted to add a couple features to. And at some point, you know, I judge anybody, anybody on this show still run Windows seven 'cause it's probably the case at some point. You have to upgrade the whole operating system the, the one, the warts you have there. I don't think that runs a modern open. W r two that was supportive for over 12 years was modern kernel releases. Mm-Hmm. And somehow we need to encourage the industry to upgrade their operating systems on a more regular basis than they do.
Doc Searls (00:10:01):
So, so, so Dave, real quick. So you, you are talking to us over starlink, which is a fun fact and <laugh> and so is, should starlink be doing something it's not doing yet? Are they up to this? I kind of have no answer I needed from you. Well,
Dave Taht (00:10:18):
I, we had a wonderful show regarding starlink about two years ago where they had the buffer blood problem. And they still do. However they are making progress and by and large, they're doing better than the five G industry and the cable industry. But it's still, they're still running five to seven years behind where open w r T is. And it, you know, it's, it's an amazing service, guys. I use it on the boat. It's, it can be used on anywhere. It's, it's, it's fantastic that I can have this conversation to you live via satellite and have it mostly work most of the time and, and have a decent frame rate, you know, <laugh>. Mm-Hmm.
Dan Lynch (00:10:57):
Yeah. It, it is very impressive. I was, I was gonna ask you about starlink actually, but Doug's kind of Doug's kind of beating me to it though. Which is, which is No, no problem. <Laugh>. so you mentioned, well, let's talk about music then. 'cause That's the kind of elephant in the room a little bit, isn't it? Yes. You had the bass there. Yeah, you mentioned, we, we, you mentioned in your email, we were talking about the whole idea of remote, kind of jamming, recording, all that sort of stuff with people. Yeah. You mentioned Jack Tripp which is a, a really interesting project. Have you used it much? What do you think of it?
Dave Taht (00:11:29):
This is another one of those cases where I worked on something so long ago, I worked on in Jack Tripp and Artery in the, into the two thousands. And it is taken this long for the technology to become accessible to me mere mortals. So I honestly, because I'm talking to you live via satellite, have not actually had a chance to use Jak Tripp since it came out. It started being developed during Covid for very reason. And it's based on code that's a decade old and it, I'm told it just works. Far play is another one. They're not open source. But they've done a really good job of making it possible for two or more musicians to collaborate. So I strongly encourage any musicians on the call to give both of those things a shot and and see how much further we can go with it. It's lonely being, I mean, how often do you get a chance to play with somebody else, Dan?
Dan Lynch (00:12:22):
It's a good question. Not much lately. Not much lately. No.
Dave Taht (00:12:25):
Yeah. You know, you know how boring it is to play bass by myself. Yeah.
Dan Lynch (00:12:29):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Yeah.
Dave Taht (00:12:31):
<Laugh>. Yeah. So
Dan Lynch (00:12:33):
There's only so many bass solos you can really do, isn't it <laugh>? Before, before people start getting, yeah. Yeah, I, I know what you mean. I mean, I, I only had a little, I've only had a little go with, with Jack Tripp, but I, I want to, I want to give it a go. Would it, would it work over something like starlink or is the the buffering too much or the latency too high?
Dave Taht (00:12:53):
The jitter and latency are far too high. And this had a really, this is one of those things like where people's standards for how the internet should function are, are kind of too low. You know? When you have a cd, how many glitches, how many scratches per song can you tolerate on a regular basis?
Dan Lynch (00:13:14):
On a playlist you mean, or,
Dave Taht (00:13:15):
Yeah. If you have a song and it has a scratch in it, how,
Dan Lynch (00:13:18):
Oh, I see. How many,
Dave Taht (00:13:19):
Yeah. Yeah. Can you tolerate, would you throw out, stop playing the song because it had a scratch in it? One error?
Dan Lynch (00:13:26):
Yeah. Possibly. Possibly. It depends. It depends. The errors could be deliberate. If it's Grandmaster Flash or something, then I wouldn't be worried <laugh> if it was scratch. That's a different kind of scratching.
Dave Taht (00:13:36):
Yeah. As, as a musician and as a person, you know, that one scratch, that one error in the song just jars me. So I won't wanna aim for perfection. And when you're making music with someone and any level of interruption really gets under my skin there's a song, there's a story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, where he talks about smart people getting artificially dumbed down by things blasting in their ear periodically. And I just feel all the distractions, you know, when you wanna get that perfect focus, that perfect concert, every note, note for note, for two hours long, utterly immersive you know, a single false note or scratch is tremendously distracting. And so our standards for the internet are not anywhere near as high. We're used to the frame rate going to how we're used to the voice, going to how, when we're trying to make quality music, it helps to have a good fiber connection today. And to be trying to play across town and to not have any other traffic traversing the link.
Dan Lynch (00:14:49):
Yeah. That, that, that makes sense. Did you I'm, I'm, I'm thinking of like, because we're talking about starlink and playing with people remotely. Do you remember I think it may have even been about 10 years ago now. Chris Hadfield, when he was on the international Space Station Yeah. Did a, a song with bare naked ladies, and they were in, I don't know, NASA somewhere, and he was on the International Space Station, and somehow they made that work. And I remember at the time thinking, if they can do that, why can I still 10 years later not play effectively with somebody down the road when he's in another, he's in space. So, yeah,
Dave Taht (00:15:23):
It would be great if, if this, if that technology had made it to, to, to Earth. He obviously did a great version of Space Oddity as well. Mm. really inspiring stuff to see the guitar in space going, you know, yeah. Rotating and free fall and <laugh> stuff. So yeah, it is, we actually, one of the very first demonstrations of inter, inter of satellite technology in the 1960s is that they put on a 24 hour round the world concert mm-hmm. <Affirmative> that ended with John Lennon tune, I think. I'd have to go looking that up. And it worked. So we had the technology for musicians to collaborate worldwide if we just focused on consistent latency and less dropouts, that musician can cope with consistent latency, but not with someone wandering in and out, except it's a special effect. Mm-Hmm.
Dan Lynch (00:16:20):
Mm-Hmm. You mentioned about Jack Tripp kind of coming out of the Covid Pandemic a little bit. And do you think that boosted the demand or the, the development in this area? 'cause For a while, none of us could go anywhere. We were all separated. We all wanted to play remotely. Do you think that gave it a shot in the arm? And not to make a pun,
Dave Taht (00:16:40):
Just <laugh>? I certainly did. And again, I would point you at the far play guys more. Jack Tripp is nowhere the Far Play folk were first. Mm-Hmm. they also ripped out a lot more latency. And you look at some of the interviews of the work that they did in bringing together some really first class jazz musicians in particular in this environment, and look at the guy smiling, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, there is just something about being a musician that you, you can't just play for yourself. You have to play with each other. And for an audience in order for the, in order for the, the, the, it's like one plus one plus one equals infinity when it comes to making good music. Mm-Hmm. So,
Dan Lynch (00:17:22):
Yeah, definitely. It's, it's all about collaboration and bouncing ideas off of the, well, I mean, yeah. In keeping with free software, open source, that's what the whole thing is. We're all bouncing ideas off each other and
Dave Taht (00:17:34):
Collaborating. That's a great analogy. I, I feel, I feel strongly that music and, and open source, source people go together like butter and, and bread. It just the natural aspects of, of making something bigger than yourself in coping with your flaws. Like, for example, I'm actually a pretty terrible bass player. I'm primarily a piano player. A piano doesn't fit on my boat. <Laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. but I, so I'm trying to pick up the bass and mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, it's so wonderful to have a more better musician, take a few minutes out and show me a riff, you know? Mm-Hmm. and so that's how you make that sound. And one, use a Pink Floyd reference. It wasn't until I actually stood backstage at a Floyd concert that I understood that a certain sound being made by one of the songs was actually the combination of electric piano and the bass on two different, slightly different notes. I'd, I always wondered deeply what that was. And it wasn't until I actually saw what they did that I understood how that really interesting tone was made. So there's, you know, there's so much learning that can be done by us getting back together more. I love the post, the post covid environment's been pretty good. I've been busking a little bit just to Oh, cool. Talk to people. It's really cool. People will come up and talk to you. It's <laugh>
Doc Searls (00:18:57):
In Half Moon Bay or where?
Dave Taht (00:19:00):
Yeah, I'm, I'm currently doing it right in front of the restaurant here. I made four bucks last weekend, <laugh>
Doc Searls (00:19:08):
In Half Moon Bay. Am I right that that's where you are? I mean, the last I saw you was in Santa Barbara, so I don't know.
Dave Taht (00:19:12):
Yeah, me, me, the boat, and I are the boat and I are stuck in Half Moon Bay, presently <laugh>. Oh, it's a really good, it's a really good musical town. It's a horribly foggy this time of year, but no, it's fun. I'm just curious, Dan, do you get out and busk? How, how, what's, how are you expressing yourself musically?
Dan Lynch (00:19:31):
There's a open mic night nearby, which is cool in a, an art center near us. So I go there quite often when I can which is cool. I'm not in currently in a band, unfortunately. I was, but then all the Covid stuff again, that kind of made that difficult. And maybe I should have been looking at Jack Tripp more, or one of these things at the time. I dunno. So yeah, I tend to do that kind of stuff. But it's really cool. And, and there's, they do music lessons as well at the art center. So I try and help out a bit if I can, if I know how to do something.
Dave Taht (00:20:06):
I know, I know a lot of people that offered music lessons over Zoom, and they were all pretty universally frustrated by the native latency of Zoom. And I pointed everyone I could at the far play and, and Jack Tripp projects to to make teaching music better. Mm-Hmm. Mm-hmm.
Dan Lynch (00:20:24):
So, I mean, so you, you mentioned Zoom. 'cause Obviously we're, we're talking on Zoom right now, of course. Yeah. we, you mentioned in your email about the whole this controversy at the moment about Zoom and AI and all that kind of stuff.
Dave Taht (00:20:37):
Oh, boy.
Dan Lynch (00:20:39):
<Laugh>, yeah. I know I've taken a swerve there on subjects, but yeah, you had some thoughts or anything you wanted to say about that, potentially. I mean, up to you.
Dave Taht (00:20:48):
Well, what do you guys already know about that whole controversy? It's, it's fairly recent.
Dan Lynch (00:20:54):
It is recent. Yeah. So I did do some looking up today, 'cause I knew there was some, I heard about the ai. So the change of the user agreement, user license agreement terms and conditions to allow training of ai to, to use your, you know, voice and text and so on, presumably video, I don't know, to train an ai. And the agreement now, you, if you sign it gives a, gives your agreement to that was what, what happened what they were changing. And then there was a big out outcry about it. People were saying, what if I don't want my conversations, private conversations to be recorded or analyzed by some computer somewhere? Well, I don't know. I at the moment, I'm not sure what, what, so when I read is if the, the operator of the call agrees to that, everybody on the call is, is agree, your only option is to not be on the call if you are not the manager of the call.
Dave Taht (00:21:56):
Yeah, it's really makes me Twitch. This is a, where I would have a, a flight to floss, in particular. I do not. So I, I've worked occasionally on a wonderful video conferencing open source video conferencing system called gaylene gaylene.org. And you get your own server, you get your own copy of the code, and you can do whatever you want as the owner of the machine and of the code that your participants agree to. But here we have a third party saying, oh, by the way, we're going to sniff, we're going to snoop on your private conversation, teach an AI about stuff, and tough if you don't use it. So I would so love to see a massive flight back to video conferencing servers that give some guarantee of privacy. You know, I I, it's a virtual room I that I am sharing with your entire audience.
(00:22:50):
But I, a lot of times I don't wanna do that. I just want, you know, I have a whole lot of really great private conversations with Len Kleinrock and Matt Mathis, for example. We're not ready to publish. We are making serious progress on a unified Q theory. And we don't want anyone to know. I mean, we have to deal with patents and stuff like that. So any level of information leakage from an otherwise secure system. No, I, I, I don't, I'm gonna go run Galene anybody on this show that caress about their personal privacy going forward. The biggest provider in the world has said that they're going to be snooping on your calls. No. Go. Oh, go get your own <laugh>.
Doc Searls (00:23:35):
Okay. I, I, I need to say that there's some recent news that they've backed off on that and are explaining it differently. It's not, it's not a finished controversy, but there's more to go into there. So we'll get back to that after I let everybody know that this episode of Floss Weekly is brought to you by discourse. The online home for your community for over a decade, discourse has made it their mission to make the internet a better place for online communities by harnessing the power of discussion. Real-Time chat and AI discourse makes it easy to have meaningful conversations and collaborate with your community anytime and anywhere. Would you like to create a community visit discourse.org/twit to get one month free on all self-served plans? Trusted by some of the largest companies in the world, discourse is open source and powers more than 20,000 online communities.
(00:24:28):
Whether you're just starting out or wanted to take your community to the next level, there's a plan for you. A basic plan for a private invite only community, a standard plan if you want unlimited members and a public presence, a business plan for active customer support communities. Jonathan bva, developer advocacy lead at Twitch says, discourse is the most amazing thing we've ever used. We have never experienced software so reliable, ever. One of the biggest advantages to creating your own community with discourse is that you own your data. You will always have access to all your conversation, history and discourse will never sell your data to advertisers. Discourse gives you everything you need in one place. Make discourse the online home for your community. Visit discourse.org/twit to get one month free on all self-serve plans. That's discourse.org/twit. Okay. <laugh>.
(00:25:35):
So, so I, I wanna be careful because the, the story about Zoom is an ongoing one. Historically, by the way, a few years ago, I think it was early Pandemic. I'm locating it by when, when it was in time, and I'm looking through all the too many tabs I have open here. But I, I suddenly were getting 25,000 visits because I really busted them hard for their privacy policy. Which basically, and it was really the one, it applied to their website, which by the way, had almost nothing on it because it was all promotional. It was a lot. I mean, nobody went there for anything but a brochure basically. But on that, they had pretty much the proforma privacy policy that all lawyers trying to, to obey the letter of the G D P R while utterly messing with its spirit, <laugh> and Euphemizing here.
(00:26:36):
And, and they backtracked a lot on that. And apparently, and I had a long conversation with their c e Eric won who seem like Yuan, I think is who seems like a really nice guy. And, you know, sounded sincere about wanting to protect the privacy of its users and said that what they did in, when you're using Zoom is very different than what they did with their website. They're gonna fix the website. And I don't remember how that all came out, except they did change some things. And they did change that privacy policy to something less onerous, if not non onerous. I don't remember. In this case, they're saying, I believe, and I can't find the open tab where they say it, it's an Axio story that, that they, by default, they are not training AI on conversations that are happening over Zoom.
(00:27:27):
And so I just invite listeners to go look that up, because I don't have a link to it. And if we can find one, we'll put it in the show notes. But there is, I don't, I don't think they're being idle sitting there, but it's a tough one. I mean, right now, I don't know to what extent they're keeping up with the Joneses on this, or just as so many companies are doing, so many everything are doing, just relying on AI for everything they possibly can. That's it. I, I see we have it up on screen now for those watching. So I, I, so maybe where we could go with it is this Dave and, and Dan too. In a world where more and more we are depending on AI to do our understanding, for us to comprehend our lives.
(00:28:21):
Last week, I think we, we were talking about music as a matter of fact on that show. And and, and, and that guest Damian Reel talked about how AI's been used, and he uses AI in in in law and, and legal profession. All for good, I would say. But I would love to apply AI to everything in this room. And, you know I, I show every, the spines of all those books and tell me what's in them and who, you know, maybe cross cross reference with all my receipts and see where, who I paid for what, there's so many ways I can improve my life or have my life improved if I had my own ai. I think every company wants to improve what they do. But how can they, how, how much of this is keeping up with the Joneses? How much of it is actually needing this stuff, and how much is getting way out, getting the cart way out in front of the horses and, and the world going to hell? And I'm just, so, take that any, any direction you want.
Dave Taht (00:29:27):
So you're asking me, or
Doc Searls (00:29:29):
I'm asking you both, but you're the, you're the guest. You go first.
Dave Taht (00:29:32):
Okay. <laugh>, it really makes my, my blood boil. Honestly, I lemme give you an example. Someone asked Chat p t four about me, which is really cool, and it summarized my accomplishments from multiple places, which is pretty good. And then towards the end said, unfortunately Dave Todd died into 2020 <laugh> leaving behind a substantial body of work. It actually wrote that. So it's when it falls into fantasy, and we are depending on this to, to, I don't know, manage our cars or our lives or our accountants, or by the way, if you combine these two chemicals, they won't kill you. You know, it needs to be truthful and it needs to be trained on data that is truthful. And honestly, if you're trolling the web for the last 14 years, you aren't going to find that if I could find an AI that was, that was trained on, for example, the entire output of s hub, you know, all the scientific papers of the world, and then had made to reject 20% that are completely wrong, and maybe, I don't know, 1980s Usenet and maybe a ton of other really great books that we know to be truthful then I would have a lot more confidence that we were going to move forward.
(00:30:47):
But right now it seems to be this fall, that particular aspect of it just makes my blood. Boy, you can't trust it. It's, it, I, it's <laugh>. So that's the first part. I love that it allows you to, it has improved my writing. I have a unique style that it improves it has improved the coding in Libre QoSs project. It requires adult supervision. So in moving back to the Zoom controversy, though, I wanted to make the stress on the floss side is that it's very hard to trust the third parties. And I would like us very much in the video conferencing world to reach, get back control of our conferencing tools, and it'll allow us as the actual owner to have faith and trust that we aren't sharing information with parties we don't want to. And and train our own bloody models. You know, I, I don't want Siri, for example. I'd like my own personal assistant, you know, virtual name, say Athena, something like that, who I can trust with my secrets and and help navigate a very difficult and complicated world for me. Maybe we'll get closer to that point with enough pushback.
Doc Searls (00:32:05):
So, so one reason it's I, I, wait, Siri is I think really, really dumb <laugh> is that it's actually not much trained on our data and is detached from any back backend, or at least they say it is. But, but I think I, I mean, I, I, this is my supposition, but I think it's, I think it's true that the problem with chat G P T and for that matter barred and I suppose llama as well I don't know how is trained Bart is trained the same way, is that it's looking at the entire internet since 1995. And, and, you know, there's so much that's wrong in there and it's, and it's making stuff up. I mean, I've been amazed at how I'm glad they got got you wrong, except for the part where you died. <Laugh> coming
Dave Taht (00:33:01):
To you from beyond the grave <laugh>,
Doc Searls (00:33:02):
I, I know it's like, yeah, rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated, right? <Laugh> <laugh> or his I, I think it was William Kopper said you know, this to a newspaper that reported his death. He says he reported by Death, death, I will, I will cancel my subscription <laugh>. But you know, I'm, I'm wondering, well, two things. First is, what is your your conferencing open source conferencing system or, or approach of preference is a jitsi or one of the others? And we've had them on here before. And, and what, I mean, have you played with Lam or any of the one, any of the open source ais that I know LAA is a special case because it's, it's coming from Facebook and it does have some restrictions. It's not a wide open license, but you could do a lot with it. And so I'm wondering if on both those fronts, conferencing and ai, if you have any preferences.
Dave Taht (00:34:11):
Hmm. so I adopted Gleen early in the, by the way, you absolutely should have the author of gleen. And maybe also the author is Julius Kreek. And he's a, he speaks four languages. He's brilliant, he's entertaining, and you should definitely have him on your show. He wrote it like most FLA software and anger. And because Jitsi was so over complicated, and he said, ah, I can do this better. And then he started developing it, did it for his own courses, and it's been more and more adopted around the world. The PA library, it depends upon is, was one of the better congestion control algorithms in the world. And the Ion Library got adopted by Twitch. So through that wonderful seed crystal of what went into galene, we have a lower latency video conferencing system. It's all open source that a normal person can, ATA can build in about 10 minutes and, and deploy. Like, I could get it, you could, you know, I could get it running for you doc in your basement in 10 minutes, and you suddenly would be running your own code. There's a couple other open source conferencing systems besides tsi. There's another one I gotta say right now. I'm really just fond of ENE is and where it's going. What was your other question, doc? You had a second one.
Doc Searls (00:35:33):
Oh your preferred a, I mean, the, the video is one, but AI is the other one. Ai is there an AI you're using privately, I mean, on, on your own?
Dave Taht (00:35:43):
Yeah. So I do hope that the future is you have your own private ai and that it digests your data and just your data and has a good data set. So, no, I am, after brief, very sexy exploration and curiosity exploring this stuff. I had my Al Alvin Toffler mo moment. You read Future Shock you've heard, you've heard the term I'm sure, but remember future? Oh,
Doc Searls (00:36:08):
Yeah, sure, yeah, yeah. Written about him. Sadly gone. But yeah,
Dave Taht (00:36:13):
I, I, I got so fed up in, into this potential future that I just got on the next plane in Nicaragua and logged out, you know, <laugh>. I put my phone down, grabbed my guitar, sat on a beach, and I figured I would watch the singularity happen from a safe distance <laugh>. So, no. How about, I see you are using it yourself, Dan, are you using it? Is anybody in the chat using it?
Dan Lynch (00:36:38):
I, I, I haven't used it. No. I have used Jitsu quite a lot. We used to use we still use Jitsu. When we were doing during the pandemic, we had online only Linux user group meetings. And we did those with Jitsi. Cool. And yeah, it worked pretty well. But I, I didn't know about Galene, so I'm gonna look at that. 'cause Yeah, I, I, I, I do like Jitsi, it's great, but I'm wouldn't be averse to try and something else <laugh> if that's out there,
Dave Taht (00:37:05):
Right? If I get one more user of Galene through this call, it'd be great. It's go build, you know, it's one line. It's all pure go. You can, the biggest and longest period of time is actually getting a certificate to, to use for an official external use. And it's missing a Q needed feature. So it's open source. I hope more people lean into improve it.
Doc Searls (00:37:29):
Yeah, it's a, it is a gift for those listening. Which is most of you it's at G a l e n e.org, like it sounds Yeah. Gale.Org.
Dave Taht (00:37:36):
Yeah. Yeah, if I can strongly recommend you have Julius and Sean on one of your calls, you'll have a really entertaining
Doc Searls (00:37:43):
Conversation. If you have their emails send 'em to us and we'd love to have 'em on. That's great and great. And you know, since this is our 745th show, it's not entirely possible <laugh> that we haven't had 'em on. I mean, it's quite possible we've had 'em on in the
Dan Lynch (00:37:57):
Past. We need, we need our own AI trained on our own
Doc Searls (00:37:59):
<Crosstalk>. I know. We exactly. I wanna <laugh> that would so handy.
Dave Taht (00:38:04):
I, I, I strongly agree that mining our own personal experiences, mining our own email for stuff that we, we said, or people that we met, and finding new ways of, you know, I'm getting old. I used to be able to remember, you know, tens of thousands of email addresses. And these days I can't. And I'm very glad for auto complete, but even then, I can't remember who had the attribute of who I was looking for. So if I could somehow express that I need, I need a guy, I need a drummer, oh Lord, give me a drummer and then boom, have it come outta my email. Everyone that I knew that sort of might be a drummer, <laugh> <laugh>, the odds are
Doc Searls (00:38:44):
Any drumming on a table, I could give you that. Or a trash can. I could give you that.
Dave Taht (00:38:49):
Cool. I, I have a wonderful recording of Bruce Schneider, the cryptographer playing drums with us one night. It was a really beautiful and magical he's
Doc Searls (00:38:57):
Good, huh? He's a good drummer.
Dave Taht (00:38:59):
He's, he's really good. And the crowd that we had there that night was, was really rocking. I should put, I should put out an album. You know, Bruce Schneider exits cryptography, <laugh> or mm-hmm.
Doc Searls (00:39:11):
<Affirmative>. Well, I, I crypto
Dave Taht (00:39:13):
Those.
Doc Searls (00:39:13):
We have some questions queued up, especially on Dan's side, and we'll get to those after this. Okay. So Dan,
Dan Lynch (00:39:22):
Hmm. Yeah. thanks Doc. So yeah, we were talking, we've been talking a bit about running your own code and stuff, which is obviously a, a subject close to our heart on this show. And all, and privacy and all that kind of stuff. I was reading Dave, about your involvement with fighting the F C C over the right to run code run, third party code on routers and so on. And I wanted to ask you a bit about, and, and this is probably, I hope this isn't, you know, a traumatic subject for you, but why is it, do you think that they're so keen to stop us from running code other than what they've distributed? I mean,
Dave Taht (00:39:59):
You know, I, I, that was the biggest political thing I've ever done in my life. I lost a lot of sleep and organized hundreds of people to sign that letter and the publicity, and we knocked down the s e c that time of the shot. Hmm. I am mighty when roused like Annette <laugh>, my urge, however, to have a political battle like that ever again, you know, somebody younger can take it. So to try to circle back at the time, you know, it was, there was some really strong arguments regarding how secure things could be if, if only you, you know, if only you trusted in the manufacturer. And we've pointed out that, you know, the manufacturers are tending to ship seven and nine and 10 year old code nowadays, and the only manufacturers that are doing a good job here are, for example, Euro makes really great routes.
(00:40:59):
So does, you know, the, everything derive from open w r t, but the tail end of the market is shipping insecure, horrible crap. And this includes the kind of gear that ISPs tend to buy because it's slightly cheaper. So less than this mistaken attempt to stop us from innovating and stop us from having control over our own hardware we really, really, really need to see the kind of ethics you see in Android and in an iPhone in protecting the end user from their own devices. I would so love to see the F C C go the other direction in the F T C, you know, devices must be updated within 30 days of a C V E period where we pull your license to build that product, to build any products in the United States. That one idea, or we actually offered a level of consumer protection would, it would build back the American embedded software industry. It would probably save money because all the enormous exploits and, and theft you see going on because of all the holes would go away. And I would just hope that if we just recognize that there are our doorbells and our firewalls are the ways that the bad guys are getting in today and that the only way to do that is to ensure that stuff gets reliably updated and ideally is open source, so we can fix it, it gets more currency.
Dan Lynch (00:42:34):
Hmm. It's funny because it, it, you mentioned there that it, it, it, they should have the system where if there's a security flaw, then the manufacturer's responsible for responding to that. But funnily, it's the opposite argument that they seem to make towards us. They say, the reason we can't let you run, you know, open source software or an, an embedded firm as you could run anything and it's insecure and, and what about terrorism and all these other things that they throw at us when actually it's kind of the wrong way round <laugh>. It's, yes. It's, the reason we're getting hacked is because we're running 10 year old code, possibly.
Dave Taht (00:43:03):
Yeah. It's very real. Well, in that argument, was it, it didn't make a whole lot of sense except to, to naive people. Now, we, we put out, I still wish people would read it, you know, Vince SF and I, and everybody put out a list of five things in a saner, I forget what it's called now, I can give you the link, but we put out what we thought would be five best practices for the entire embedded industry to be made to follow, which indefinitely would increase the manufacturer's cost. But among other things, the user should actually be the one in charge of, of doing the updates. And they should have choice. Just like, for example, you have, Android has the couple stores available for it. You can have the G P L store but it should be the user's choice as to what they run and update and the manufacturer's responsibility to, to make sure at the very least, that the parts that they're responsible for do not have any ongoing security vulnera vulnerabilities. We're still not even close to that point. You know, we have smart light bulbs. I won't, I won't buy a smart light bulb. Most of I OT is a sewer in terms of security <laugh>, and it somehow we need to, to raise the bar and have the open source community participate in, in helping make civilization a safer and more secure place.
Dan Lynch (00:44:33):
Yeah. Excellent. Yeah, I, I totally agree. And, and keeping with the whole networking side of things and the technical side, is part of that challenge reaching these kind of iot devices, edge devices, updating them over the internet over the air or something, is that a connectivity issue? Or is you think that's a personal user responsibility? To some degree.
Dave Taht (00:44:50):
It's always cheaper to manufacture software once to treat it like a hardware component and never touch it again. And of course, if you have a, a non open source policy towards it and you lose the programmer that's, you know, the programmer is now living under a bridge, you can't update it anymore. Or you go out of business and difficult problems, I a, a national focus on, on this on building software in America would be really great. You know, I don't need to, it can be, this is something where I, I've been trying to, I have another proposal called an upgrade in place. We have a huge buy American thing happening here but it's like buying fiber physical fibers here and, and yet all of our software ma making and manufacturers mostly off overseas, we don't have any control over it.
(00:45:45):
If we could somehow move at least building the software to here and then applying standards for software build bill of materials, as well as CVEs and, and few needed features like for bot fixes, then we would have a chance to, to, to make real headway on securing the edges of our networks. And maybe we would have light bulbs, I'd Googling to buy <laugh> that were intelligent and AI that I could trust. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I hope that we raised the bar here. I otherwise, you know, I, I trust my phone pretty far. <Laugh>
Doc Searls (00:46:21):
<Laugh> as far as you can throw it. I, we have some questions queued up. I actually on the fiber topic and we'll get to that right after this. Okay. So Dave you have a, a piece up on your sir work notebook, one of your blogs titles sane uses for fiber. Now I'm asking this in a town that has fiber from a private provider that kinda stalled. And it didn't go very, it didn't go as far as it wa they wanted it as the city's doing it now, and that seems to be going somewhat slowly. Although there's a QR code, you can scan it from your driver's seat in the back, on the back of the buses. The city buses have a thing in the back. The QR code is <laugh> our
Dave Taht (00:47:10):
What? Fiber
Doc Searls (00:47:10):
And is for our fiber project <laugh>. So, so, and, and, but I'm, but I'm wondering, I think, I think people project on fiber. I mean, it's not just fiber, they, there are these terms, speed, capacity, latency is your big thing. But I mean, I, I, I, I think with speed, like a highway may be capable of supporting up to 500 miles an hour, but nobody's gonna do that. But I think that they, that few people have an actual sense of how a network works. So fiber seems almost like hey, this is ideal. I have infinite capacity. I'm not gonna have any worries once that happens. And I did have fiber only 25 megabits symmetrical from Verizon when I lived in Boston or near Boston. And it was the best I've had so far. I should say. I, you know, I'm talking to you on a, on a, I think that's that's a cable connection, but it's almost a, almost a gig down and maybe 20 up. But it seems,
Dave Taht (00:48:12):
You know, yeah, your connection's quite, quite good. I'm curious. I, you know, I am on starlake. I should have glitched a couple times over the course of this call. Have my, has my video quality been good? Frame rate and stuff? Has,
Doc Searls (00:48:23):
It's been good enough? I mean, do you, the good thing is that most people listen to audio, they're not looking at you at all. And so when you freeze every few moments is not a, I mean, you know, it's cool.
Dave Taht (00:48:33):
<Laugh>. Okay, so I'd like to set the stage backwards. So yes, fiber is better. Fiber is the best possible technology for distributing the internet that exists. Okay? It's also hilariously expensive. It is, we see it costing $8,000 or more per household, even in, in fairly dense areas. And you've seen it go a lot there. Running physical cables and maintaining them is really expensive. So the context of that blog piece, it's a very nuanced conversation. Okay. been having it for years. In the context of that blog piece, I didn't really extol what's been happening in the wireless world. We have tremendously wonderful wireless technology, five G's work, beginning to work better and better. And there's all kinds of other, I mean, even you know, even wifi in less dense areas is perfectly adequate. If well managed to provide all the service that most people need, you know, you very rarely need more than 50 megabits of, of performance. In fact, very rarely would need more than 25 unless you're Netflix, the house of multiple Netflix users. So I wondered very much for us to be focusing on reducing the latency. And best way I could use to describe is you're in a small, how, how big is Bloomington?
Doc Searls (00:49:51):
80,000, but then you had 44,000 students.
Dave Taht (00:49:54):
Okay, so you had a reach. Yeah. So you have a reach of the fiber plant to all the important places in the city. This is, they have really big demand. It's good. And then you have people living on the edges of town and maybe in the poorer parts that people have not run fiber to in part because the monthly costs will be higher than this leveraging cellular. So my hope was in that piece was to point people at get fiber, get fiber to the pole, offer open access. So any I s P can also offer some kind of wireless extension to it. And bang, we'll have better internet. And if we can apply better standards to the wireless piece, we won't actually need to run fiber to every building to, to make it happen, which makes the manufacturers of fiber a little unhappy, but it will end up being a lower and actually more resilient system.
(00:50:50):
When someone knocks down a pole or there's a power failure or lightning failure fiber will fail. The nice thing about cellular is that you might have two or three towers within reach of you, and you automatically fail over to one. So I would like to see a hybrid fiber, higher speed wireless future more than I would like to see fiber to everyone's home. And I have been pilled by the fiber fans by saying that fiber or bust. So I'm safely on my boat today. For those of you that don't think that you can have a quality wireless technology connection, you know, Libre qss project is reliably delivering 500 megabits 200 megabits, a hundred megabits or more, a lot of happy people who otherwise couldn't get fiber, and they've been waiting for decades.
Dan Lynch (00:51:41):
Yeah, that, that makes a lot, a lot of sense. One thing I wanted to ask about Dave, is to sit, so in the uk I, I'm in the uk obviously, we, we have a bit of a problem in that, like, one company effectively controls the entire phone network or the, in, you know, traditionally the old Copper network, which is now being brought to fiber is British Telecom, or bt, which was part of the government, and then it got privatized in the eighties, and now it's bt. And although other companies are supposed to be able to compete and use the exchanges and all the rest of it, in my experience, they don't really get a chance to use the exchanges properly. They, they don't get the proper access. They all have to use Openreach, which is a branch of bt, which is supposed to be a separate company, but it's a branch of bt. And so we have a problem here with lack of competition and so on. What's the situation like, wow. In the us
Dave Taht (00:52:31):
Can I come? I said, I, I, I had a friend of mine that just took a tour Britain doing buffer bloat testing, and absolutely everywhere he went, it was measured in seconds. So one of my first suggestions for your entire country is to please plug a decent open W r t router into your connection and, and, and fix the buffer bloat, and then you'll stop being so bloody unhappy. I have a whole bunch of virgin media people and the that have all put the cake algorithm in front of it, and they're happy as heck. And so go to your hotel, your coffee shop, and make them be better. And you'll stop being so unhappy with the, the dominant provider. Going to my country we have, you know, three big sets of monopolies. We have all the cable companies and then we have at t and, and then we have the itty bitty little wisps.
(00:53:28):
So we have coverage that way. I'm always firmly on the side of the little guy, the, the little wisp that the guys that are extending out the edge of the internet. And I hopes that with the enormous influx of government money from the bead programs which is $70 billion the federal government is giving to the states to build out the edge of the internet. And it doesn't wind up in the hands of all the big guys, but in the little guys that are trying to serve their small towns and communities and build community networks like, like, like Bloomington, I, I would love to see what's going on there, blossom and Flower. At the same time, it is everything. Internet is a complicated thing, and you gotta get talented people to, to help you run even a small operation. So the future to me has a heck of a lot more wireless technology in it.
(00:54:20):
And if we can make that work better it would be great. Is that more or less an answer? I'm very, I, I care a lot about expanding the internet all over the world. I've been working with some folk in Africa, and you'd think you are suffering, you know, four megabits is good there. Hmm. so I'm, it's all relative. I also, and while I'm going back in the post covid thing, you know, I honestly really loved going to coffee shops and talking with people while using the internet. I liked it when the internet was more of a social thing. You used to get dressed up to go out to go to a cyber cafe, to, to get play in a land party. I think that the, that running it to every home and giving it as a, I can't even call it an opiate at the masses at the internet to the home. I'd call it a, what would you call it? P c p for the masses, you know, <laugh>, it's designed to make people angry now and get outside, grab a guitar, check your email once in a while, get off, get off offline, enjoy the universe. It's,
Dan Lynch (00:55:35):
It's a good point You mentioned I, I, I should correct myself 'cause I said there's only one company and somebody in the chat mentioned as well, there is Virgin Media, which is a cable company in the uk. I don't live in a, a cable area, so that's why I forgot about it. But I, I, I, I was wrong that there's only one company, but there's not a lot of competition, or not as much as there should be. You mentioned like why wireless technology and the role that that has to play. I was really interested when four G was first becoming a thing. One of the big test beds was in Malawi, in Africa, I believe where they had fast, really fast for, well fast at the time, four G connections, and they were pushing technology there, which is really interesting. So do you think that that the future, you mentioned the whole fiber thing, of course, and that's a big goal, but do you think in the future a lot of us will be just using wireless
Dave Taht (00:56:26):
Stuff? Hmm. I think have you ever had Bob Franks on the show? He is the guy that coined the term ambient connectivity.
Doc Searls (00:56:34):
I wanted to have him on the show. I, I, and I don't want to insult him here <laugh>, he's less of an open source guy than we usually use have. But he is very friendly to it. But yeah well his, but I'd love to have him on. He's an interesting, he is a, he is a great guy and he's a friend as well. So
Dave Taht (00:56:54):
Yeah, his, his, his concepts of ambient con connectivity is, is something that we will ultimately get to. You'll be wireless. He connected to something pretty much all the time for whatever positive or negative things. I have a friend of mine, piano player, really good. This is a side note who is carries around little wifi detectors on his body because he's a bit of a tin hat in this regard, and he requires everybody around him and turn off their phones. And those detectors are incredibly sensitive. I would like it if more people were aware of how many, how much wireless was around on that. Anyway, that's kind of an aside. We'll have ambient connectivity everywhere and if we can find some ways of making the friction of switching between, for example, you know, Virgin Virgin Media and British Telecom and the local telephone operator, we've made a lot of progress in the cellular world of being able to switch transparently from wifi to to five G technologies.
(00:57:57):
Ah, that's what I wanted to get to. Okay. So the whole telco industry will tell you it was four G, it was four G and now it's five G. It's five G. And there's in the wisp world, starting with really good quality wifi gear. There are so many other technologies in five G that are almost in general superior to the five G approach. There's a company called Tarana in particular and there's a competitor or two of them that is making a non-line of site wireless work, past 200 megabits. So you just stick up an antenna and it pretty much goes anywhere. And we have the wireless technologies to cheaply and easily deploy a much more resilient internet, especially if we don't, if we stop listening to the, the big guys to tell us that five G will solve everything and look at the little smaller companies that are delivering stuff on different spectrum that is working really amazingly well.
Doc Searls (00:58:58):
So I, I wanted to some, some here might remember it's now 21 years ago. But I wrote about it and I, I was talking on, on little Private chat and Linux Journal in September of 2002. I was in the UK as I was often back then. And by the way, I consulted BT for six years, <laugh> and on on open source for what that was worth. But anyway, that was later. But the, there was this really great thing called War Chalking because in the earliest days of, of wifi and people having a, a constant connection to the net, they would share their wifi. There, there had a sense of security and, and I'm trying to, trying to remember, his name is bothering me. I can't, I'm trying to look it up. He invented this thing called War Chalking.
(00:59:46):
It was where people would carry a piece of chalk with them, and they would, when they found an open wifi hotspot, they would like <laugh>. They would, they would, they had a code for writing on the, you know, what, what was the name of this link? And of this hotspot on, on the ground, on the, on the chalk there. And there was a, a thing called consume.net. It was completely organic. It was just people in the, in London primarily who would mark where their hotspots were. And you had a map of London, you could zoom in on it, know where the hotspot was near you. It was really cool. And similar things happened in New York around that time. I had a long series of pieces in Linux Journal on that, that are worth revisiting because they, it wasn't kind of golden age of wifi. You could, you could have your laptop open in a in the back of a cab and find dozens at any moment in time of open hotspots you could get onto. And Nicholas Negroponte of the then of the the media center at m I t compared it to putting a flower box on your window. And and that wifi should be public in the same way as streetlights are public. And of course, they turned it into a security issue, and you can't do that. But but it was a,
Dave Taht (01:01:04):
Those were the good old days. They really were,
Doc Searls (01:01:07):
They were good old days, and they passed really fast <laugh>.
Dave Taht (01:01:11):
Well, I, I still, because I trust my software and my routers still run an open guest, SS s I d I'm, I'm sharing it with a boat next door. Oh, really? Yeah. There's no skin off. Yeah, there's no skin off my back to, to share where I radiate. And I would love to see that come back where we've had reasonable assurances that sharing wasn't going to hurt us. I mean, think of when, think of the sexual revolution before H I v Well, it's secured now. So yeah, you could have a a guest network and go share again.
Doc Searls (01:01:47):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dave Taht (01:01:48):
There's a, there's another, there's another group called Open wifi answered by the Tip Project which is also trying to federate your account. So you'll be able to, to log into one screen once and be able to share it with anyone else. That's Federating. Comcast kind of does that too, so maybe we can bring open the open wifi back.
Doc Searls (01:02:12):
So I, I, I just put this under word shocking is spelled like it is war then Chalking, it's in Wikipedia and the and Matt Jones is the guy who designed it. And it was so cool because I ran into him at a great pub pub called Garlic and Shots in soho in London, and it was a bunch of great people that were just, you know, in all around that in the UK at that time, long ago. Anyway, great stuff. We are pretty much at the end of the show, guys. So so Dave, is there anything we had you could, you wish we'd asked and we hadn't, and you wanna get to and can tell us really fast before we're out?
Dave Taht (01:02:54):
Could I do a quick little plug for an organization? Sure. Practiced as I love. So recently Libre, q o s which has got over 200,000 subscribers now. We're shooting from tens of millions. Got a small grant from NL net. And NL Net has been a wonderful supporter of free and open source for over 40 years. And their process for applying for anyone else doing floss is incredibly simple, and their procedure for approval is very quick. And I so wish more organizations followed their model. I've been deeply appreciative of their support for over 10 years, and anyone else in their show needs just a little nudge, a little help with their work in putting something in open source. Please give them a shot.
Doc Searls (01:03:39):
Thank you for that. And we'll put those both of those Libra Libra QoS and there, libre qss.io. And then on that do nl in the show notes. So
Dave Taht (01:03:54):
Thank you, your
Doc Searls (01:03:54):
Readers, your readers and clickers out there. So Dave, we always close with something you pro you've answered before, the so might be different now. What is your favorite text editor and scripting language?
Dave Taht (01:04:07):
Cool. I remember having two funny answers last time. <Laugh>, my, my answer has not changed much in that I still use emax. And I made it said, you can make everything fit emax. The very first way I used chat G p t is I spent hours and hours making it work in emax rather than using anything else. So I still do that. As for scripting language, I, I joked last time about it basically being c and it still really is. I don't, I don't, I, shell is my big thing. I, I just mostly shell. So thank you for asking those questions. Again, <laugh>, maybe
Doc Searls (01:04:47):
Mm-Hmm.
Dave Taht (01:04:48):
<Affirmative> <laugh>, maybe in a few years that'll change.
Doc Searls (01:04:51):
Yeah. And <laugh>, I'm reading more things on our back channels. I've had more windows open on this than I've had in any other show so far, <laugh> and I hope productively. So thanks so much for being on the show. Yes, we will have you back again, as we always do, apparently <laugh>,
Dave Taht (01:05:11):
I would love to keep coming back
Doc Searls (01:05:12):
Once that far enough happens in the meantime. And an hour is too short, so we'll make it happen. Thanks for being here. Thank you for having me again. So Dan, how was that for you, man?
Dan Lynch (01:05:24):
Oh, great. Yeah. it was really nice to talk to Dave. I mean, we could have talked for ages, of course, about so much stuff. I'm sure. So much of the stuff. And we had a little joke in our back channel here in the I R C and was saying because I'm British, I said router. I said, this was a router, <laugh>, and I know you Americans. Yeah, you Americans call it a router, so I apologize. I I
Doc Searls (01:05:44):
Shouldn't, don't apologize. You know, we <laugh>
Dan Lynch (01:05:46):
My colloquialism.
Doc Searls (01:05:47):
We don't keep things on schedule and it's fine. <Laugh>. Yeah.
Dan Lynch (01:05:50):
So, yeah. Yeah. So if you are wondering what I was talking about on the on the, the show as you were listening, I Yeah, that's what I meant.
Doc Searls (01:05:58):
Yeah.
Dan Lynch (01:06:00):
Love having you on. Let's call the whole thing off. Love having you
Doc Searls (01:06:03):
On.
Dan Lynch (01:06:04):
Mm-Hmm.
Doc Searls (01:06:06):
Yeah. So mm-hmm. <Laugh>,
Dan Lynch (01:06:11):
Definitely.
Doc Searls (01:06:13):
Okay, so <laugh> do you, you wanna plug anything, Dan quick before we get to next week?
Dan Lynch (01:06:20):
Not really. I mean, very quickly just go and check out we've talked about community and so on, and sharing with open source projects. Go and check out your local Linux user group if you have one or, or check out what's going on around there. And and you know, you can find these things online.
Doc Searls (01:06:38):
Lugs are good. Lugs are good. Live love in prospect. You can, you can be your lug nut at at yours, except they're all nuts in their own special ways. Yeah. so, so next week we have Claude Warren Jr. He's with ivan.io. And look that up if you want a I V E n.io. For some reason I'm clicking on it. It's not coming up at the second, but it will be, oh, it is coming up really big and I can't fully managed open source and it went away. So you do it yourself anyway, it's gonna be great. It'll be next week. And so until then, I'm Doc Searles. This is Floss Weekly. See you then.
Jonathan Bennett (01:07:15):
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