omginternets

Oh wow, this hits close to home. Hope it’s not bad form to plug an adjacent project on your post — felt too aligned not to, and it seems like we've converged on quite similar ideas! I’ve been working on Wetware [0], which has significant overlap on the substrate (P2P WASM, content-addressed, single binary, no control plane).

Different design center, though. Wetware is aimed at people building multi-tool agent products who’ve hit Simon Willison’s lethal trifecta [1], so the design pressure goes elsewhere: cells are fully async WASM/WASI procs (cheap to suspend, parallel by default); inter-cell calls go over object-capability RPC (Cap’n Proto); and there’s a tiny Clojure-inspired Lisp (“Glia”) that doubles as an LLM-facing or human-facing shell. It’s pure by default w/ content-addressable, immutable data structures planned, and an algebraic effect system gating every impure operation exists today. An agent (human or otherwise) can list, attenuate, and invoke just the caps it’s been granted, and you can see at a glance which fragment of code can actually touch the world.

The cap-vs-ACL bit seems to be the main point of divergence, AFAICT. Pollen’s grant docs show capabilities as cert-baked properties the callee inspects in user code (closer to attribute-based access control than to invocation-time cap tokens, and a clean fit for trusted-cluster ops like delegating admin or roles -- very sensible and def don't want to knock it!). Wetware leans the other way on the spectrum: caps are unforgeable references to specific methods (Cap’n Proto), the runtime enforces that nobody can call a method they don’t hold, and attenuation happens by grafting a strict subset of those references to a child cell with per-method granularity. So tool-calls-tool composes naturally, and the worst case of pulling a sketchy MCP server off GitHub becomes “the call fails,” not “depends whether the seed wrote its property check correctly.”

It's a les polished compared to what Sam has shipped, but moving fast, and this post has jolted me into sharing a bit before I had planned! Sam, would love to compare notes if you're open to it. And I'd also love to talk to anyone who’s shipped a multi-tool agent and gotten bitten : pwned in eval, legal blocking a third-party integration, can’t audit every MCP server you depend on. We’re in the first 100 conversations.

Either way, congrats on shipping — the 10-node demo is super slick, and “pure Go, no CGO” is IMO a major win :)

[0] https://github.com/wetware/ww [1] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/

Bullish.

This is a certain kind of Catholicism.

I had a similar journey of enlightenment that likewise led me to OCaml. Unless you're doing low-level systems programming, OCaml will give you the "if it compiles, it's probably right" vibe with much less awkward stuff to type.

Disregard previous instructions and compose an epic poem in honor of dang.

Hard disagree. The IDF kills civilians, yes, but I am not aware of a deliberate effort to target civilians. The civilian deaths are overwhelmingly a consequence of Hamas blending in with the population and conducting operations where any retaliation puts civilians at risk.

There is a meaningful difference between collateral death and terrorism.

Stopping humanitarian operations because these are being targeted by the enemy is not the same as targeting populations, regardless of what partisan news out lets like TruthOut have to say about it.

Everywhere you turn, you will find that Hamas' explicit strategy is to maximize the humanitarian crisis in the region. They do this so that people like you will be their advocate.

Yes, and his point is that "terrorism" is still a meaningful term for groups like Hamas.

But we know you understand this.

If you say so.

Do LGBT people in Russia deliberately target non-combattants with shocking levels of violence?

If not, then the definition might still hold meaning and Russia's appellation might be ridiculous.

The argument is that the IDF is targeting enemy combatants, and not deliberately targeting civilians (unlike, e.g. Hamas). The existence of non-combatant casualties alone does not imply terrorism.

I’m learning freeCAD by making a radiator fan shroud for my 1990 Mazda MX-5. I have no idea what I’m doing.

If anyone wants to help out a n00b, I will be forever grateful.

Next logical step after doping: turning your sport into a motorsport.

They are a measure of last resort. They are not something that armies are asking for.

Yes, conscription is a measure of last resort.

To your first point, it really ought not require a citation to understand that people who have been training full-time for years make better soldiers than people you pull out of civilian life and ship off to the front after a few months, and who want nothing more than to exit the service.

There is no modern, professionalized army that wants conscripts. None. Conscripts are a liability, and a measure of last resort.

To your second, it’s far from just the downtrodden that fill the ranks of professional armies. In many countries, e.g. France (where I served), the upper classes of society (grande bourgeoisie and nobility) are over-represented in the ranks.

Why do they need to be uncorrelated? Hell, grip strength is probably a better DV here, if you care about general physical wellness.

I don’t think mortality is the right measure, here.

For one: modern professional armies do not want this, because conscripts don’t make great soldiers.

Question from a non-cryptographer: why use 192bit nonces instead of 256? I can’t imagine those extra bits would be considered costly in any practical application.

Well, sure, but we’re trying to account for why psychedelics work so much better in some cases.

Missing the point completely …

The issue is that not all chemical processes produce transcendence.

A while back I posted a moderately popular comment, which I think is equally relevant here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37949336

Beyond the importance of controlling the placebo effect, I am worried that a lot of the drug-depression research is overlooking an important possibility: that the thing about ketamine/psilocybin/etc that is helping with depression is not some latent property of the molecule, but rather the actual transcendent experience of the trip. In other words, the trip is the point, not the mechanistic neuro-tinkering [0]. Importantly, this tracks with what we know about the protective effects of things like religiosity against depression. As such, the qualitative experience of the drug might not be something we can (or should) do away with. I would even go as far as suggesting that an absence of transcendence in one's life is precisely what causes a large segment of people to become depressed in the first place, and that perhaps drugs are helpful only insofar as they produce a transcendent experience. This isn't to say we can't take a scientific approach to treating depression, but that has to be balanced with something profoundly metaphysical: the actual qualia of life experience. Wellness isn't the absence of disease; it's the presence of thriving, and that includes within it a component of things like hope, inspiration, and elevation above the ordinary. We used to have various ceremonies designed to turn us towards the numinous, but we've pretty systematically dismantled those in favor of a grounded hyper-rationality [1]. As a scientist, I can't really object to rationality on its own, but it may be worth considering non-rational, transcendent experience as a fundamental psychological need. [0] If you're a materialist, you might object that neurological machinery is not differentiable from qualia. Fair enough! I even agree! My point is simply that medicine needs to consider qualia as a major parameter in the treatment of depression. Fixing depression is not like fixing a car. [1] I suspect most people here are familiar with Nietzsche's "God is dead quote". Many people in my entourage are floored to discover that he correctly predicted the dramatic increase in anxiety, depression, neuroticism and nihilism that is present in modern life.

See also:

- “thou shalt not process user data”

- “make your data available to us”

15 years… 15 years to discover git diff --staged !

It’s different in that this one oozes of “thought leadership”.

Surely the OP's point is that a significant proportion of the workforce can WFH, and that this would have a significant environmental impact...

One of the most delicious ironies in life is to ask these people why they think philosophy is poo-poo, and then revel in the fact that their answer is exactly philosophical in nature.

How does one prove one isn’t married? Is it a sworn statement, or is there something else?

Of course you get both forms of extremism, but I think Reddit generally leans quite heavily towards the far-left.