Good evening and welcome to Downstream Navarra Media's interview series about all things politics, culture and political culture. Tonight I will be joined by Julia Jakes who is a longtime friend of Navarra Media and author of Trans A Memoir and tonight we will be talking about her new book Variations which I really must abuse my position as host and say it's great you should go out and you should get it and you should recommend it to all your friends as well Julia welcome. Hi thanks for having me and your your nails match the cover of the book I don't know if you've done the other hand pink but um I mean I don't actually have pink nail polish and it also doesn't suit me so I only get like you only get like one half of the trans flag you know the bit that suits my coloring um thank you so much for joining us and thank you at home for joining us as well if you are new to our content here on Navarra Media hit subscribe you can get a lot more from us that way and do let us know your thoughts in the comments below. This collection of short stories variations has just come out and personally I think it's really great it's really tender it's just this really beautiful immersive experience and it takes the reader on a journey from mid 19th century up to the present day through letters and diary entries and fragments from screenplays and blog posts in order to weave stories of trans experiences through snapshots of British cultural life and it just does the amazing work of breathing so much life and humanity into police records and all this kind of you know archival flotsam and jetsam um and takes on this journey from Victorian theaters to the British punk scene um Belfast, Cardiff, Liverpool, London, Manchester and there is just so much in here for literally anyone who is interested in our cultural history so just a really basic question Julia how did you come to write this like where did the idea start? Yeah that's uh that's a really interesting question a beautiful summary of the book thank you um I mean I wrote a lot of short fiction in my teens and early 20s and increasingly found myself putting trans characters into those stories at that time I knew I was trans I hadn't started transitioning yet I didn't really quite know what my gender identity was and writing was a way of exploring it and as a 2021 year old I wrote a couple of short stories with trans characters at their center one was about a young male to female cross dresser who decides they want to make themselves a work of art and so goes to a fairly old-style drag bar dressed as um a Russian film star from the early 20th century called Alan Nazimov and the other was a short story called The Invented Pass of Marina which had two narratives on the left and right sides of the page and the left side was a fairly banal uh dinner parties or bourgeois dinner party conversation like the ones I often have with my family where Marina is just being asked about her family and her background and where she went to school and all of this and it's basically because she's trying not to be read as transsexual she's trying to pass is um giving this back story that she's had to make up and the whole encounter is really really stressful um so from there I sort of it made me realize that actually all the queer authors I've been reading sort of Jean Genet, Jean Cocteau, William Burroughs um they didn't really have an awful lot of space for trans characters although there were some cross dresses in their writing and through my 20s I discovered these South American uh gay male authors like Severo Sardoy and Kopi who did make a bit more space for trans characters and cross dresses and and so forth and this may be realized that a literature like a trans literature probably was possible and I wanted to have a go at helping to create it. I had a go at writing these stories between 2005 and 2007 and at that time I didn't really have the life experience to create plausible trans non-binary characters but also the theoretical uh and sort of intellectual and political background that I needed didn't really exist I mean there were some uh transgender studies or trans theory in the US people like Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg, Sandy Stone, Susan Stryker but I hadn't really found my way to a lot of that yet and there was still quite a lot of work being done in the 2000s and early 2010s around so trans and non-binary theory and organizing and representation and literature um so I came back to this project in 2015 having written my transgender journey series for The Guardian to set up blog posts detailing the um NHS uh as they called it gender reassignment process and then trans and memoir which came out in 2015 which was an expansion on that column and uh Ash you said at the start I was a long time friend of the show and of course I first met you when we did a Navara show uh on trans and memoir in 2015. Yeah and it's because I wanted to get you to talk about football mostly I remember like getting you on the radio and I was like you think we're here to talk about gender and you know trans issues but I want you to talk to me about football Julia. Well well there was a lovely football conversation in that show um a really great football conversation that show I remember but um maybe today is it's not the best time for football discourse but um too soon too soon. There is actually one reference to a to an actual individual football player in variations and special prize for the first person who writes in and names that football but um yeah I mean after 2015 uh I I really wanted to go back to this short story project it was sort of still so something I really wanted to do and that was when I really hit on the idea of giving this this idea of just a set of short stories about the variety of trans lives lifestyles politics history hit on the idea of using it to kind of cover a history of trans people in Britain from the Victorian period to the present I've read Susan Stryker's book Transgender History which came out in 2008 and Stryker posits the development of trans identities and culture and politics starting off with the um industrial revolution this allowed people to break the sort of feudal bonds with their families and local communities move to the city and have a bit more anonymity um so that happens in the 19th century really um and in Victorian London there are a number of cases of male to female cross-dressers being arrested by the police and put on trial and that the first story a night of the theater in variations covers that then there is a process of legislation there's a very high profile trial of the cross-dressers Ernest or Stella Bolton and Frederick or Fanny Park in 1871 and they're put on trial for six days um and basically the trial collapses when the court realizes they haven't really got anything on the books that they can charge them with the judge is summing up basically says look we'd love to do you for this but we haven't got anything so we're going to have to let you go but we really should look into doing something about this uh and obviously 14 years later you get the criminal law amendment act which makes gross indecency between two um adult men public or private consenting or not um punishable with two years imprisonment with hard labor which of course what does for Oscar Wilde and the second story is called a woman of no importance and that's set around the Oscar Wilde trial obviously from there you get the development of sexology to um counter this stigmatization and criminalization uh and through sexology and that's explored in the third story and through the development of sexology you get things like the creation of these labels transsexual and transvestite and then these other identity categories and then the kind of politics and culture that forms around them so that a lot of the rest of the book is is sort of obliquely exploring that I mean it kind of seems to me that one of the things that the book tracks is this kind of consolidation of language around a notion of identity body and self-hood as opposed to behaviors which are considered deviant or dangerous or degenerate in some way um one of the things I guess I really wanted to ask is why for exploring that process of languaging developing and then also languaging emerging in a kind of self-ownership so it's not just what is the label that is attached to trans and gender non-conforming people but what are the labels that people generate for themselves um why was fiction the best way for you to explore that because I'm always interested particularly for writers like you as well why didn't you write a history book why didn't you write a piece of non-fiction yeah that's that's a really interesting question thank you and one that obviously gave a lot of thought to in this project I did actually try to write a non-fiction trans history of Britain um about 10 years ago and I saw stuff looking at the Victorian period uh there's there's a sort of post-modern approach to history that says that you can't transpose labels onto people who preceded them um and if you look at any kind of queer history there's often quite a lot of double think around that concept I'm a big fan for example of Hugh Lemme and Ben Miller's podcast Bad Gays where you know they endlessly kind of qualify anyone who predated the late 19th century idea of the homosexual by saying look you can't transpose these concepts onto people who preceded them but come on and this post-modern approach often sort of intersects with plain old-fashioned prejudice that just says look you know you people have no past you shouldn't really exist in the present and any attempt to say well look here are proto trans individuals tends to be kind of torn down but I thought fiction might be more interesting and more productive partly because it's an interesting way of edging around that particular problem and doing something quite playful and exciting and fun with it which was you know using my own subjectivity and experience of trans living and that of the you know many many trans and non-binary people that my life and my work has brought me into contact with over the last sort of 10 or 15 years and just seeing okay well these these male to female cross-dressers in 1840s London that I've read about um if I do this as fiction I don't have to lay with them as anything I can just get inside their heads and say well you know what would it have been like to walk the street and being trying to pass and knowing how high the stakes are just for going to the theatre as a woman for one night um so that was one thing to do but also it felt to me that actually a lot of this history is already out there um and you know we are still waiting for somebody to corollate into a a book hopefully a definitive non non-fiction history of trans and non-binary people in Britain uh Christine Burns edited a volume called Trans Britain a few years ago which is a multi-authored uh collection and I guess that's another problem with the non-fiction history at this point is that if someone were to write a non-fiction trans history of Britain you know who is writing that I mean yes I'm a trans woman but like you know I'm fairly middle class um you know I'm I'm white and all the rest of it I already have a media platform I haven't noticed I would be writing that from uh from a position of relative privilege and certainly within the community um so I mean that was that was an issue and I think maybe at this point multi-authored non-history uh non-fiction volumes are um are a better choice but it also sort of struck me like there's very very little um fiction by trans and non-binary people about trans and non-binary people and vanishingly little in Britain there's um Ross Kaveny's uh book Tiny Pieces of Skull um and still not an awful lot else so it struck me as you know interesting to try and write something that could maybe provide a sort of a bit of a springboard for for British trans fiction uh but also I've done my memoir and I've done all this journalism and short fiction is really where my heart is um it's the thing I enjoy writing the most uh when you take away any consideration about you know making money from writing and trying to earn a living uh this is this is the type of writing I I like the most and have always wanted to do um we've got a comment from Sylla Fane in the chat who says Juliet's book Trans a Memoir was great and really insightful we'll be reading her new book she should definitely read her new book um and just just following on I guess this discussion of you know or why fiction one of the things I guess I wanted to ask you was do you consider this a work of historical fiction or better yet historical fictions because when I was reading it I kept thinking about that quality that Frederick Jameson identifies um which is that realism comes from sensory perceptions which are more about rooting the work in a kind of bodily physical emotive reality rather than simply appearing appealing to the intellect and going I've got all my dates exactly right so I was just wondering if that was something in terms of getting inside people's heads and and writing that kind of emotional bodily life that was maybe because you were thinking well that's the kind of historical fiction I want to do it's interesting I mean you if you're going to write fiction you need to create a world and you need to have strong feelings about the world that you create and you know the two different things I needed to have strong feelings about were trans and non-binary people in Britain um you know through through the ages but also each historical period that I wrote about and each historical period that I do write about is a period that I find incredibly interesting and all of them are maybe periods in which I would have liked to have sampled adult life and seen what it was like so there's two stories in the 19th century set in the 1840s and the 1890s there's a story set in the interwar period that's mostly the late 1920s that spans into the 30s and then there's a story set in 1939 and then after that there's a story in the 1950s and then every decade up to the 2010s so in all of them you know I have spent a lot of time being interested in and consuming you know some of the cultural product so British literature film were appropriate being interested in things like pop music and football going back you know through all of the post-war period and and further an interest in political history as well and of course I was really trying to make sure that I brought historical accuracy to bear in terms of the political and cultural context in which all of the characters are operating which did mean knowing quite a lot about political history more widely in cultural history and and not just the sort of lgb and particularly t history of the time but yeah of course it was really important to actually inhabit those characters and to think with each of them well look what would have been legally and socially possible for them as trans people where over time there was greater freedom what were the pitfalls of that what were the contradictions they were trying to work within you know what what are the forces shaping shaping their trans lives basically and trying to bring some empathy to that's always kind of thinking well how would I have responded to this how would other trans people I know have responded to this I mean it seemed to me that like one of the things that I thought was a kind of common thread where like there were so many moments where characters were looking for permission to transgress and so it was a way of reading other people's behaviors for those signals of is this a safe place for me to transgress according to what's legally and socially permissible and looking for those signals from people in a way which is kind of a silent recognition and I was wondering if maybe you could talk me through that because it struck me as being both very watchful but gentle and empathetic rather than kind of paranoid and surveilling that that mode of watching I mean that process you're talking about yeah I think that's that's true I think a lot of these stories are about people struggling to keep control of their own narratives and whether their stories are being basically taken away from them by the media or by sexologists or by the law it's it's yeah that's that's definitely a running theme I mean it might be interesting to talk about that with regards to one specific story which is one of my favorites which is is called a woman of no importance actually talk about it with two because there's there's two that I think are particularly interesting how you want you know I'm just mindful of time in a woman of no importance this is the story of a 20 something kind of writer who moves from Manchester to London partly because they want to immerse themselves in this literary culture around Oscar Wilde and the yellow book which was a sort of decadent literary publication actually Wilde really hated but published in London in the 1890s and illustrated by Robert Beardsley and others and so once to immerse themselves in that literary circle would also discover this kind of queer underworld in London that they can be a part of and maybe explore a kind of cross dressing culture and this is sort of narrated by an outsider someone who knew Arthur Parr and writes the events 20 years later and you know recounts them in a way that sort of says look I always knew that Parr had the sort of insatiable desire to to cross dress and to do so reasonably openly and that this was always going to lead to disaster and the narrator is how talking you through that that process so so there's something about taking the point of view away from the character and having it observed from the outside by somebody who is trying to write against the kind of gross and decency laws and also against obscenity laws in publication and then the the fifth story is called Dancing with the Devil and that's set in the 1950s and it's written as a chapter from an inventive memoir by a transsexual model an actor called Laura Miller who is based to some extent on people like April Ashley and Roberta Cahill kind of some of the first public transsexual women in Britain and in that case she is trying to build a career in modeling and film she has you know slept with some people who obviously know that she's transsexual but the media have gotten onto this and they're trying to out her and then in the story she and her boyfriend who is a trans man again based on some real life historical figures are both trying to find a way to stop her and indeed them both being outed so in both cases yeah you have you have people being watched and trying to deal with with being watched and I think in a lot of the stories yes the characters are trying to deal with the sort of cisgender gaze and the sort of hostility of that and in some ways they're trying to hide from it in some ways they're sort of embracing it or trying to turn it to their advantage but towards the end of the collection I think the last two stories in particular are set in the 21st century one in Brighton and one in Belfast and in both cases they feature characters who are trying to work within a sort of trans and non-binary community in both cases communities they sort of created themselves to some extent because they've had to but seeing seeing what happens to them differently when they they're not having to kind of presume that all the people they're talking to are not just not trans but are actively hostile to them and I think something quite interesting happens there as well. We've got another comment Max Holloway in the chat says variations arrived yesterday and I can't wait to get started well you know that way too long just soon this interview is done crack it open mate you're gonna love it just just moving the conversation forward a little bit we've put in the thumbnail of the show fighting transphobia with art and I wanted to sort of get your sense on where the culture is at right now however it however you wanted to find culture because that's obviously huge because on the one hand there is obviously this huge shift in terms of the visibility of trans and non-binary identities people representing those identities in the arts and in popular culture and and sure like some of the ways in which this can be done and like a kind of you know Netflix special can be a bit clunky and a bit cringe but but it's happening it's culture trying to make a gesture of recognition and then you've got this reactionary backlash which to me seems most vociferous where it emerges from you know the self-appointed liberal center so I was wondering if you could just talk me through a bit your observations of that divide between I guess almost popular culture political culture you know new generation you know gatekeepers of liberal opinion that kind of thing yeah well I mean I tried to explore this through the final story of the book which is called tipping point and it's all about a blogger in Belfast reacting to Time magazine's famous tipping point article of May 2014 the one with Laverne Cox on the cover and the title The Transgender Tipping Point arguing that this sort of trans civil rights movement at least in the US had reached a sort of level of visibility and organization which meant it could no longer be kind of ignored or stopped and it was going to be an important force in US and indeed global politics of course in a lot of mainstream media and mainstream politics that tipping point was sort of taken as a challenge and I think there's a sort of liberal conception of history that sort of says that freedoms gradually unfold and once they've they've rolled out it's they can't really be properly rolled back and then a more radical conception of history that talks about having to fight the same battles over and over again and it's very striking that since that tipping point things for trans and non-binary people worldwide have often seem to get worse rather than better in terms of political representation and political media so in Britain you've seen a real transphobic turn in centrist media and I would actually I would differentiate between centrism and liberalism you know centrism is there's a lot more authoritarian I think and a lot more generationally situated within the over 45s in this country I think sort of 45 to 60 age bracket which is where pretty much all of the most vociferous anti trans commentators in this country is their age group I think we don't need to sit here naming them we'd be here all night but I you know so in Britain there has been this sort of real media pushed back against trans visibility and trans rights at an assistance that all conversations take place on the worst possible terms so both you know any public conversation that trans people are invited into will have to be about the validity of our identities and we just ask to endlessly argue about that rather than trying to advocate our sort of social and political needs or indeed advocate the culture that we're creating and this is you know fed into someone like Liz Truss floating possibly quite regressive legislation about trans identities and which public spaces were allowed to enter into and so forth obviously you've seen the Trump administration in the US and you know four years of really trying to create a hostile environment for trans people there as possible and in a lot of American states you know Republican bills to ban trans people from bathrooms and so forth the Bolsonaro regime in Brazil very anti-LGBT generally Victor Orban's regime in Hungary like retroactive stripping gender recognition from people in Romania banning gender studies from universities anti-LGBT climate in Poland for example so and there are other examples as well so there has been this real kind of backlash against trans visibility but also yes I mean you know if you look at something like Netflix for all the problems with you know sort of corporate corporatization of LGBT culture and sort of rainbow capitalism and all the rest of it you know is offering a sort of globally accessible and you know sometimes pretty good and you know interesting and inventive and informative range of programming documentary and you know feature and tv series narratives about trans and non-binary lives and you know this is this is why I'm I'm not completely pessimistic about this stuff I mean just to wrap up on that I was at the the the trans rights demo in London last summer about a year ago when when Liz Truss or whoever it was had leaked these proposals to the Times and you know I got this demo I actually started crying because I just you know my friend said how do you think this is going to go and I said well look they've got the Conservative Party on their side you know the Labour Party equivocating on this issue quite a lot you know all of the mainstream media and we've just got asked we've just got these like few hundred people who've come to Parliament Square and are just you know desperately trying to stop this horrendous piece of legislation going through and it didn't go through you know I mean we did I don't think I'd say we won that but we didn't lose either so you know I kind of feel over time you know the the uses of this this cultural representation will be you know along with actually people just meeting real life trans and non-binary individuals the uses of this representation will be to build empathy for people and of course to help people to come out I mean the things that helped me to understand myself as a teenager in the ages of section 28 was kind of watching films and seeking out memoirs and and these kind of like these these queer writers I mentioned earlier so I think culture is is hugely powerful in that way in ways that aren't always necessarily obvious or easy to quantify but hugely important I mean I want to kind of get deeper into questions of representation in just a bit but I suppose one of the things I want to ask is when you have I think a shift within culture that's happening faster than the shift within politics or even you've got a kind of regressive backwards movement in politics do you think that kind of explains the kind of you know death scream of you know centrism which is this awful sense that maybe young people will be doing things differently the ways in which they always have done but you know might go actually you are no longer the arbiter of what a reasonable amount of freedom is that's going to be taken out of your hands yeah I mean I think you know obviously a lot of British politics over the last kind of five to ten years can be explained generationally and you know the frustration of younger people economically that you know they're going to be a lot worse off than than their parents were and they're going to be saddled with you know huge student like debt from tuition fees or it's going to be impossible for them to ever own a house or hold down a steady career or anything but also yeah coupled with I think yeah like a different set of values you know growing up you know whereas I grew up with something like section 28 that behind the quote unquote promotion of homosexuality in in schools and public libraries and so forth you know anyone under the age of sort of 30 now wouldn't really remember a world without social media or barely let alone without the internet so you know I think there is just a very different conversation that's been taking place amongst like millennials and people younger than that and yeah I mean a lot of centrism is about cultural gatekeeping and I think you know a lot of centrism like I said it's very much amongst the sort of 45 to 60 age bracket and people who can't let go of their youth and just sort of can't conceive of the fact that they are not at the cutting edge of politics or culture anymore and just won't admit it let alone you know move aside you know maybe things have moved on since Moby do you know what I mean just let it go yeah I mean people yeah you know it's hard to imagine people getting outraged about someone putting all of their songs in an advert now I mean no one cares about that anymore but but but yeah I mean you know the inability of this country to really move beyond the 1990s has has been has been kind of infuriating yeah I mean we'll see I mean surely that has to happen sooner or later but who knows when I don't know enough for guardians anything to do with it I mean I want to talk maybe and kind of start quibbling with with notions of recognition because it seems to me that of course you have these explosive movements be it Black Lives Matter or the kind of increased visibility of demands for trans rights but a lot of the time these demands can get pulled through the kind of master frame of wanting to be seen and see yourself reflected in mainstream culture and so I was thinking about this this kind of emphasis on recognition and how this question of who is recognized and acknowledges become so potent in recent years because it plays out in all kinds of different ways you know on the one hand you know marginalized people saying I want to see myself in mainstream culture this mainstream culture which I consume so much of right you have this huge expansion of pop culture over the last few decades as well and it's that demand to wants to see yourself in it but then there's also the flip side of that which is the kind of trans exclusionary moral panic around you know women being erased from gender neutral language and kind of you know framing the demand for trans exclusion in the language of feminism and and women's rights and so I suppose I wanted to just sort of ask do you perceive a kind of flip side or a dangerous second edge to this kind of status that's allocated to recognition and acknowledgement yeah I mean trans and non-binary theorists have for decades now been talking about visibility as a very double-edged thing you know recognition can be quite dangerous being invisible can be safer and you know with with recognition comes you know just a wider range of people knowing who you are and so how to attack you and whether they want to attack you it's definitely definitely a very very double-edged double-edged sword as as it were and it's something you know I have quite an awkward relationship with I mean you know you sort of mentioned some of the terms on which visibility is offered and that's another thing to think about often the terms on which trans people are offered mainstream visibility are very unfavorable you know whether it's you know back in the 90s you know chat shows like Jerry Springer or or now the fun fights on programs on mainstream television or you know radio they're not they're not so different really for a lot of trans people and non-binary people doing anything creative there's often this question of you know am I going to aim this work at outsiders that cisgender people or broadly at kind of trans and non-binary people and in my work I've tried to kind of short circuit that question a bit and try to find ways of talking to both at the same time and perhaps particularly aiming at like trans people who are not yet hugely politically engaged with sort of trans and non-binary movements and maybe finding a way to sort of bring them in but also being perhaps critical of those movements where where necessary it's a really really complicated question I don't think there's any one correct tactic I think it's it's good that there are some people who can go on kind of mainstream television and explain explain you know the complexities of and nuances of trans and non-binary living in a way that connects with kind of big mainstream audiences and you know I hope it's it's you know I think it's good that there are people writing non-fiction books that are engaging directly with those anti-trans arguments that you're talking about and obviously my tactic is to kind of in this case is to write fiction to try and kind of write around those issues to some extent and also yeah like I said earlier to to try and to try and bring the struggle to a to a new domain which is which is literary fiction I mean look I've got to say I'm really glad that you chose literary fiction because I'm one of those people I do all my best historical learning from fiction and that's just always been the case for me so how did I learn about you know the Wars of the Roses I read Shakespeare how did I learn about slavery I read Beloved how do I learn about the French Revolution or the reign of Henry VIII I read Hilary Mantel it's because it connects with me on that human sensory emotive level which means that details stick and if any of you out there are the same you should get in this fucking book because the details they stuck um thank you so much for talking to me this evening Juliet thank you for your time and thank you for this work it was really enjoyable to read it's always a pleasure Ash and if you have enjoyed this interview give the video a like don't be stingy and make sure you subscribe for more you've been watching downstream on the Vara Media good night


Bemidji State University and Northwest Technical College are celebrating Black History Month with brand new book corners in their libraries. For the entire month, books featuring Black History will be highlighted in both the A.C. Clark Library at BSU and the Student Success Center at NTC. The books switch out every Tuesday and Thursday so students on each campus will get a chance to see a wide selection. The corners are also featured a whiteboard which encourages discussion topics. They can look at the books, check out the books and then leave their insights and thoughts on the whiteboard at the book corner. So it typically just provides a platform for students, faculty and staff to exchange their ideas and opinions for Black History Months inspiring by the books recommended. Now BSU and NTC plan to keep their book corners going through March but they plan to swap it out with titles for Women's History Month next month instead. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Okay, guys. Hello. I'll try to be fast. Hopefully everyone can hear me, see my screen, otherwise manifest something. Okay, cool. So I'll start by giving a quick intro to the project. Probably you've heard it if you were there at the last demo, but maybe you've heard it. So basically Project Pikachu, the aim of this project is to check point the state of the Filecoin blockchain into the Bitcoin blockchain. We want to do this periodically and the motivation for doing this is that proof of work gives security guarantees that blockchains such as Filecoin or blockchains such as proof of stake do not give. So basically they are two main components in our protocol that does this checkpointing. The first one is the distributed key generation. So what we want to have is to have all of the Filecoin miners create an aggregated key and then basically this will be the key that they will use to sign checkpoints onto the Bitcoin blockchain. And so basically the second step of the algorithm once this key is created is the sign. So they do this aggregated key. They use threshold signatures so only a threshold of them needs to be honest in order for the checkpoint to happen. And then they will be like signing spotting these checkpoints. And then the idea is that if we use the data that is inside the checkpoint, we can use some storage system for example like BFS or Filecoin in order to retrieve some information about the Filecoin blockchain. So that's kind of like the very, very high level description of the protocol. So next, next let me tell you what's for those of you who were at the last demo. If you remember at the last demo because we are still in a proof of concept slash testing mode. We were using Minio instead of using a decentralized storage provider. Again it was mostly for testing purposes but the good news is that for this demo we have removed this and instead we are using a Filecoin KVS. And when I say Filecoin we are for again for testing we are not using the actual Filecoin blockchain. We are using Udiko which is a fork of Lotus and basically is kind of like a tested ground for the Filecoin blockchain. In addition to this in the last demo we were using one distributed key generation that came from the frost paper and since then we have changed our distributed key generation and we've kind of like upgraded it and now we can tolerate failure. In the previous demo we had like if there was one malicious participant the DKG would like abort and would not complete. Now the DKG will complete even with the malicious participants and basically I'm going to show you that in today's demo. So let's get to it. I'm going to start by launching everything. So again we are using Udiko so this is the kind of like playground for Filecoin. So what I'm going to do first is I'm going to add the initial miners. So here what's going to happen is that these miners basically again as in the previous demo we use like fake power. We don't use like real real storage. So we are so we are just simulating like miners and the first step of the protocol that they do is that they do the distributed key generation and then they have their keys and now that they have their keys they can check and they're going to do that every 25 blocks. So here we have one one checkpoint that has just happened. So let's and we're going to soon have another one. So let's wait for this in a few seconds. Okay so now that's another checkpoint. So now what we're going to do is that we are going to add another node and as I have hinted to you we are going to add another node that is malicious. So okay so first we let this node sink with the rest of the player and now again we are going to do as we did before we're just going to like add the fake power of our malicious miner. So now here you see that basically you see that complaint here. So what this shows is that the miners they have spotted that Don was malicious. So they have sent each other complaining like wait this guy is doing something wrong. We don't want to keep going with him. So we are just going to finish the protocol on our own and basically that's what they do. And so here you see that they just like continue signing but however Don will not be included in the rest of the checkpoints. So let's wait for another checkpoint. Here we go and here we see that Don didn't didn't do anything because he's not part of the new set of mine. Okay so now again what we're going to do is we're going to go and check the checkpoints on the on the Bitcoin testnet network so we can see we can see what's happening. Okay so here let's me let's copy so that's basically the transaction idea of the of the checkpoints that Don has retrieved when he joined the protocol. So I'm going to go on the Bitcoin testnet explorer. I'm going to put this CID in and then basically we see like the checkpoint transaction and from here what we can do is we can just follow the chain of transaction and see like every checkpoint that has happened they are linked like this way. So that's pretty cool we can just like follow the state of the fine-point chain using Bitcoin and we see that all the transactions are unconfirmed because we've just made them right and here we arrive to the end and now you know what let me look more closely at the at the transaction and here we see that we have some data so like the checkpoint and this data can be used to retrieve information about the fine-point chain and here you can see you can see here that unlike last time where we were using Minio, now we are using a KVS that is like integrated with fine-point so we can see that here Don when he joined he could get the data from the KVS basically using this. So that's it for me. I don't think we have time for a question but feel free to ask them on Slack on our consensus lab channel or in the chat here on this day. Let me share my screen. All right everyone can hear me right? I guess you can see my screen. Let's try and go fast. So today what I want to show you is what we call Eudico Garden that in the end is just a bunch of scripts so we have Eudico what what Sarah just showed where we've been working with it locally we've been implementing in it hierarchical consensus but as we are moving into production or we are trying to put hierarchical consensus into production we needed to try things in a real environment. So that's how Eudico Garden came up where what we have here is just a bunch of scripts we that with Terraform I mean the requirements are Terraform and AWS CLI so it's quite limited right now and a bunch more you are able to deploy an Eudico network with fine-point consensus as a route. So the here in this with me you'll see all of the scripts that will help you deploy your Eudico network and your Eudico Garden in case you're you want to play with it you have like a deploy script that will run a set like it will spawn a network with a number of genesis miners in the rootnet then you can add new miners these miners are not like these are full nodes not miners if you want to mine like you can onboard new power we will add a script soon for that also and like the reason why we wanted this is that up till now and like actually Sarah has just shown a demo we were using like dummy consensus algorithms in the rootnet and if as we are moving into again my introduction and trying to deploy this into fine-coin we wanted to know how like all of our processes and all our our hierarchical consensus framework was affected by having as low consensus as as fine-coin in the rootnet. So we've been running a network for actually I think this one I started this morning and when I want to show you now is like how we have this this network running with fine-coin expected consensus in the rootnet and how we can have different subnets and we are going to spawn a new subnet with tendering which is also a new thing that we recently that Dennis recently implemented which is support for tendering consensus in subnets so the first thing that I'm going to do is here start let me see if works yeah I'm good I'm I just started a tendering cluster that I'm going to use for consensus and I'm going to go to so I have like this session attached where like if we see so you'll see here that I already have a bunch of subnets because we'll be implying like all day with it each with different states each with different five coins like SQL in supply in there in their subnet and what we're going to do is to add a new subnet that we're going to call for instance tendermint with a tendermint consensus this may be a bit so the tendermint consensus is number two and the parent we want to do it from the root so from the fine-coin consensus as you'll see like this is a bit slow because um so we what we're doing here is we are deploying an actor that will represent all of the logic for the subnet and governing policies for the subnet and in order to check the the right ID and like the actor has been deployed we wait for at least five epochs of finality so that's why until like we don't see five epochs from the fine-coin consensus we like this process won't change but in the meantime like I can show you I can start interacting with one of the subnets that I have over here so um I let me see I have here um so this is a proof of our subnets that I just deployed and what we're gonna do is we're gonna spawn a subnet in a subnet to see that how fast it is once you use a faster consensus and to to make a case of what we need why we need cracker consensus once we have our retarget computation so um we're gonna do the same in this case we're gonna add a proof of word consensus but instead of using the root chain as a parent we're gonna use this t0 1 1 0 and you'll see that while in the left we are still waiting in the right it should be spawned in no time so you see that we we have deployed the actor that is gonna govern the subnet and now what we're gonna do is we're gonna join this subnet uh so that we can start mining it so this also should be quite fast okay now we have like the tendermin the actor that will govern the tendermin from the rootnet we have it over here and we're gonna start like we're gonna do the same first join it and then uh and then start mining so that you see a subnet mining some uh like with tendermin all right so here in the right sorry I'm I'm driving you crazy but like it I mean this is gonna take a lot of time so that way I can like paralyze the demo um so here in here in the right like you see that we created the the subnet the new subnet so now if we list the subnets but instead of so here you see the list of subnets from the root right if we list the subnets from the the the sub subnet from which we in the child subnet from which we created you see that uh it's not subnet API you see that we created this new subnet and that we have some state here we could even like send some funds to the subnet and interact with it even if it's a sub subnet we could also check like how our checkpoint to show you that this has been running for a while I can show you that here we are periodically yeah so we I need the the comment from the left to finish in order to show you this but I wanted to show you like the list of checkpoints that we have committed so far for these for this network we could also check the the list of checkpoints for any other network which probably I'm not syncing with them but yeah all right so now we added the new subnet and we're going to start mining some for the we're going to start mining some tendering and uh so we started you see here TM consensus this is these are the logs of the of the so you'll see here like TM consensus preferable consensus like all of the mining of the other logs from the mining of my subnet I'm finally like before I leave I want to show you how I sent some five coins to these tendermy subnet in this case again it's it's slow because we're going through fighting consensus it would be way faster if we had some other consensus that's why like we do child subnets from the subnets that we have so that we can go faster and so wait subnet api our subnet was called seven and here like eventually here you'll see the 10 five coins that I just sent from the root chain from to the subnet and yeah but in order to leave some room for the rest of the of the demos I'm going to stop here if someone is interested in using a duke garden of having access to this environment that we have currently running feel free to drop me a message and I can give you access to one of these notes thank you very much so hello Romani I think it's my turn now thanks for the previous demos so uh for those who don't know me yet I think there's quite some of you I'm Matei I'm from consensus lab and I'm working on a consensus algorithm that is fast and scalable for being deployed in the subnets that Alfonso was just showing so let me share my screen I hope you see everything so I will be talking about mere bft which is scalable consensus implementation for everyone not just for the subnets hopefully and uh since this is a project that most of you haven't seen yet I will first spend a few minutes on introducing it say what it is how it works and how it can be used and then I show a little demo of how it can actually be used for for an application so mere bft is a framework for implementing distributed protocols that that has a focus on consensus protocol but ideally uh should be able to implement any kind of uh distributed protocols or let's say a wide a wide variety of consensus protocols it is available at uh on github and it is part of the consensus lab widely project the which is the project about scalable consensus and you can look at more details about the project also in the link actually I will post in the chat when I find the chat window here is the chat I will post the link to this presentation so you can look at the presentation and click on the links okay just a little uh just a little heads up the name mere bft and the location github might be updated in the very near future so stay tuned for that don't focus on the naming for now all right so how does uh the implementation of the framework work basically a distributed protocol uh always has some nodes that interact and they send each other messages and uh they collaborate to perform some some task in common so the basic abstraction is the node and every machine that is running the protocol instantiates one node like this and the the implementation is as modular as possible so the node basically just provides an internal mechanism for different modules of the node to communicate with each other with each other and uh for each performed to its task so there is in there is some application module there's a module that actually contains the protocol logic there is a module that takes care of the network communication like sending actual messages on the network there is a module that stores the payloads of the requests that are being agreed upon in the consensus protocol and there are some other modules that uh are not really that important for this explanation now and uh once you instantiate a module you have three functions that you can run on it it's that you can call one function is run which starts all the machinery and the processing that is uh this is necessary for the for the nodes to function there is the submit request function so for a for a consensus protocol when somebody wants to when a client wants to submit a request for ordering for for agreeing upon they need to call the submit request function and insert a request in the in the node and the status function is just for debugging purposes we don't need to know too much about the node now the node itself is just basically implementing a slightly fancier event loop that is getting all the events produced by by the modules storing them in a buffer and then processing them and distributing uh those events to the modules where they should go each module then processes whatever events uh it needs to process potentially creating more events and so on and so on so this is just an event okay so this is the very high level architecture of it now uh how do we use that so this is an excerpt from the code how how MIR BST can be actually used to to implement a distributed application and to offload as much as possible from from the programmer such that the programmer can just implement the application or the protocol they need without worrying about too much more so let me show you a few lines of the code now so if we want to implement a simple chat application where everybody running a node can will participate in in a in a in a group where they can exchange messages we need to implement the logic of the chat application and this is a very simple one we have a chat application here and the only state the chat application has is an array of messages that that is totally ordered from from each participant and it needs also the reference to the request store which is a request or module so it can actually access the payloads of the messages that that are being sent around and so if you want to implement an application if you want a distributed application with MIR BST you need to create you need to create an object that implements an interface that consists of only three functions apply which receives a batch of requests and whatever the requests are they just get applied to the state so in this concrete case we just cycle through all the requests in the batch and what we do we create a chat message we print it is a client so and so send message so and so and the message is just the request data and we append it to the list of messages that that the application has and then in order to be able to restart and catch up with the state we need to the application needs to be able to create a snapshot which is simply serializing all the state in an array of bytes and it needs to be able to restore its state from such an array of bytes which is not that important for now all right uh so how do we actually do it as we saw as we saw here we have a node that has several modules and this is exactly how it looks what it looks like in the code so first we create some modules like the networking module which the library the mirrored library has sub packages that that actually provides some implementations of of those modules so we have a grpc-based network transport module we have a request store for now we just use a volatile volatile request store also provided by the implementation itself and we need to also tell the node which distributed protocol it actually should be executed so which protocol logic there is in this case we use the only protocol that is being implemented it's not even yet implemented it's it's quite stubby but it already can be used for for the demo purpose so it's ISS it's a total order broadcast protocol it's a consensus protocol and we create some configuration for it and we create a protocol also using a library function because the ISS package is provided also by the library and then we assemble the node the same way that as was shown on the slide we create a new node we give it its own id we give it some configuration parameters and we say which modules it should be using it will be using the net module the request or the protocol module that we just created and we just tell it what application should be therefore processing the agreed upon request the crypto module as you can see it also needs a crypto module we only have a dummy crypto module implementation step but this will change soon hopeful and then then we we create some we create some other boilerplate code for actually passing the requests to the to the implementation and we read we read messages from the command line and we submit the requests to the to the node so how does it work i already prepared for a deployment of four nodes and basically we just run the chat demo application here which is the main file i was just showing it executes the main file they were just showing one is with it one is with id zero one is with id one id two id three so i let me start all of them so they all initialize they connect to each other and i put i say i press enter once more on client two that's why everybody already sees that client two sent an empty message but so basically when i type in some message some low message i i press enter what happens is that it creates a request for the for the total or the broadcast system it submits it to the to the node the node agrees on receiving that request and all of these deliver the request to the chat application which which prints it on the screen now and given the implementation of the protocol all these will will be in total order so if i really quickly if i really quickly typed something in different windows like i would have to be very fast manually it's not possible then everybody would receive the messages in the same order because they're totally free now this is a demo application but the the same principle applies to the consensus protocol implemented in the subnet and that's the the goal for the for the next months to actually make this part of the subnet consensus protocol so that's it for the first demo of this thank you very much and i leave the floor for the next demo let me share my screen cool so i basically want to announce a new project which has reached milestone one and is ready for production news so this is called the advice decentralized protocol compiler and i'm going to post the link in a little bit so this is meant to be universal language for specifying protocols and by this i mean that it's universal in the sense that it is both agnostic to the programming language in which different implementations use the protocols as well as it is independent of the way the protocol is serialized on the wire so it should be able to support any serialization so that includes all the ipod technology that we typically use all the serializations that ipod supports but also any other protocols like protocol buffers flat buffers legacy protocols like bit torrent and exotic protocols whatever so the big point here is that the language is meant to have a a very simple and flexible type system that can describe any pre-existing and future protocols and is also meant to enable writing protocols that are very easily extensible with maintaining forward and backward compatibility so very briefly from the front page of the project you will find all the documentation linked in the first piece of information is the roadmap for the project we have completed milestone one the roadmap captures essentially quite a lot of the scope that we plan to cover the i will talk a little bit more about the first milestone in a second so the first milestone essentially is establishing the core type system which is an extension over type systems that you typically see in protocol compilers like the ipod schema compiler or protocol buffers it is an it has a few more types because it is meant to be complete in the sense that it can really describe any protocol that exists or that you might want to write in the future so it is able to co-generate client servers and coders and decoders for anything you define in the type system and in particular it supports defining services and methods and it is completely type safe so it can generate services that you define so services you can think of it as very much like in protocol buffer compiler it can generate go code for clients and servers and the generated code is completely static so no reflection and is zero allocation for the most part and soon it will be entirely hopefully zero allocation so very very performant code this is what you so everything is very modular so the networking stacks that are generated for instance for services can be you can plug in different backends currently we have a back end which uses duck json over htp because this was what we needed for the first client of this project which is the delegated routing protocol for ipfs and hydra but if you scroll you know when later on when you have time if you scroll down the milestones you will see some of the future scope of the project so there will be lots of features that people find necessary so transformations between different protocols which is a generalization of the familiar ipod schema representations as well as features that are expected to be needed in the filecoin actors space like passing lambdas across network boundaries so an example application is one blockchain wants to give a callback so a smart contract wants to provide a callback to a client and we aim to be able to sort of describe lambdas over a different sort of chain so different chains might describe lambdas in a different way and all of this should work quite seamlessly in the language in a uniform way and you can sort of read about the big picture as you kind of like go through this roadmap document I will briefly show you the type system that we currently have and just kind of highlight how it's different from ipod schema or protocol compiler schema so you will find the standard types that you you generally expect so primitives as well as classes like any or or the nothing type so composite types like links links is of course like a special protocol lab type that doesn't exist in other type systems so these are content links but least map structures there are some new additions which are necessary for sort of forward-looking features so we have a singleton type an inductive type and a union type which are I'm not going to go into details now you can read in the documentation but these are very very powerful types some of them is inspired from the modern type systems coming from languages like julian rust and of course there are functional types service types and methods so the documents that are linked in describe how to use them what their semantics are how they are represented on the wire in the repo you can find a full example of how to define a service this example is defining like sort of an early version of the delegated routing protocol so it's a real example slightly simplified so it's digestible at the moment the compiler doesn't have syntax parsing so you would have to define your schemas using basically by defining the AST of your type definitions in go soon we're going to have syntax parsing this this is sort of not essential it's just a matter of time and so this is just roughly what it looks like to define a complete service and a little bit of go code that basically tells the compiler to generate go code for this service and you can also find in the repo when you run these codes you can you you end up with the generated code which you can also view in the repo it's it's pretty large mostly because it's fully static and quite performant that's it for me and i'm going to just send you a link in the chat in case you want to read more and feel free to reach out if you want to use it you have questions there is a channel in discord in the ipfs sort of realm called adult vice protocol compiler so you can ask questions there or submit issues in the github repo cool thank you all right uh next step is me i'm gonna try and go pretty quickly because i would like to see martin's demo more than i want to see my demo uh all right so let's start uh yeah here's what i did uh i loaded a file over an ipfs gateway right cool everyone we can do this um so that's good uh but what makes this different than other loading files over gateways uh for those of you who are not fluent in multi base and and uh multi formats uh this guy over here indicates that we are using a format called b encode or bencode uh and what we're doing is loading a bit torn info hash so this is the way in which bit torrent refers to files uh and we are able to load it over a gateway um and uh in order to do this so we're sort of doing doing the ipld thing ipld data model for interoperable protocols we would like to have a single way of describing how it is that you build different how you work with different hash link data structures so you can sort of work with them together bit torn is a hash link data structure so we should be able to do that um this is what an info hash looks like again we had support for the codec here it is interpreted as dag json it's got you know a length a piece length they use spaces god knows why they use spaces uh and then this which is a set of hashes a set of shawan hashes for various pieces which are the little file chunks that make up our koala friend here um in order to do this so we have the codec which is this part which goes in here but then we also have to say hey this isn't a unixfs file this is a bit torrent file uh and we did that by passing in a selector along with our parameter here an ipld selector which you can read more about on the ipld website uh we can use our handy tooling to see what the selector looks like and here's the selector represented as dag json it just says i would like you to please interpret this thing as a bit torrent file and then match and grab it for me so that's what we did um mostly just started by looking at the bit torrent spec here's their encoding format it's that simple here's their data format it's also pretty simple just go and then go implement it in in some code the encoder and decoder just use existing b encoding libraries and the fact that they all kind of turn it to json maps uh and then just reflect and turn it into ipld things the uh adl which is the logic that lets me say this is a take this graph and represent it as a file please uh has some boilerplate but but mostly is just sit there and follow the algorithm how many pieces are there how big are they let me take the keys and break them up into pieces then load them for me and that's it um all right a couple things so what do we have we have an adl plugin in go ipfs that allows us to plug in adl like any adls right now we can only do codecs implemented a b encode codec an adl for bit torrent files and this is sort of interesting a patch for the gateway that will allow for rendering any ipld node that presents as a file um that code it's basically i run run the selector and if the thing i get out at the end of the day is bytes you know what bytes seems like a file let's just render it as a file um maybe slightly controversial to do it the way that was done but get this moving all right cool so how do you how do we merge this thing how do you make this thing actually usable uh we need another magic csv file in addition to the ones we already have to track the names of new adls uh like this one so people know what they are when they want to go implement them uh there is we need selectors to be implemented in gateways what i did is sort of a uh a first stab at this but um probably two releases from now and go up with us we'll have more of this we need to plumb custom ipld link systems through everywhere instead of using the default one so we can handle adls and uh people need to make sure i i did the thing right i probably read the bit torrent spec right but there's bit torrent v1 and v2 and i may have missed an edge case so reviews welcome well what do we need to make this like great like this seems okay i can load any bit torrent file means i can also make a bit torrent client that serves data over both bit swap and the bit torrent transfer protocol and basically makes the data available to both networks and then you can make a little bit torrent client that makes data pullable over i kick us gateways um but in order to make this really great we wouldn't like to be able to handle transferring large blocks this is most bit torrent clients are the same you know respect the same sort of boundaries that we do but if they send blocks that are too big we won't we won't be able to handle them there's a proposal for that also it would be nice if we could use like wasm to describe the codecs and adls so we didn't have to re-implement these in every language uh i i don't know who's going to go implement this thing in javascript um but probably won't be me uh so maybe just write it once and we can run it in more places uh there's actually a uh bencode codec in wasm that i wrote that still works there's an adl that is mostly there but the panda the koala render is a little funny at the moment so uh i started programming rust on sunday so anyone who knows any rust uh help appreciate it and thank you more demos later cool next up is me there we go so um i'm going to present what i've been hacking on for the last couple of weeks um it's called web transport web transport is a new protocol developed by the itf in the w3c um conceptually it's basically like web sockets but over quick so it gives you all the nice uh all the nice advantages uh the quick has stream multiplexing at the transport layer so the head of line blocking it gives you a faster handshake because it gives you better hole punching success rates it gives you an advanced loss recovery and congestion control and all the reasons why we love why we love quick but this is not the reason i'm i'm excited about web transport actually the reason i'm excited about web transport is because it allows us to do things that web sockets didn't allow us to do and the reason for this is that the browser handles um web transport different from web sockets uh in web sockets the browser always wanted to see um a real tls certificate so a tls certificate that was signed by um by a certificate authority for example let's encrypt and this also works in web transport but there's another option it's called the server certificate hashes uh and basically what it does it's uh you can you can tell the browser um accept a certificate that has a certain hash and then the browser performs the tls handshake look at the certificate and if the hash of the certificate matches it will accept that one um so this is great for for lippie2p because we were never able to to get uh tls certificates for all of our for all of our lippie2p nodes um but shipping around the hash that's totally something we can do so i started uh programming um i have this web transport go library now um still a work in progress uh it builds on our quick stack uh on quick go um and it can do basic things now and i'm going to show you now um so let's um let's just start up the server and one thing to keep in mind here i will now go to um go to example.com which is mapped to localhost the reason is um that chrome for some reason refuses to do quick connections to localhost so you have to map it internally to some kind of domain name and then you can establish a quick connection um so we are just going to use the web developer tools and first we'll try to um establish a connect on this is very small and let me yes okay um um try to establish a web transport connection to example.com slash web transport which is the server here at localhost so what happens um we get a quick protocol error because the the certificate is unknown now we can um this is because we we just used the url we didn't pass in the hash uh anywhere um so now let's use the hash of the certificate here um so now we're telling the browser this this hash is okay and um pass in the server certificate hashes uh option um tell it that the algorithm is a char256 and the value is uh what we just entered here by the way i just wish that somebody came up with a solution to have a self-describing hash function somebody should really do that so now we have a uh we have a web transport connection uh it works um let's go one step further and actually use that connection so we can open a stream on this connection and then um send something let's say we send a hello world and there we go so this works now um this is pretty cool i'm pretty excited about this um if you think that this could be useful for your project uh that you would want to use this please please get in touch i'm happy to go if you want yep yep okay so i'm going to start from uh going way back in december when i talked about uh optimistic provide uh which is addressing a problem that there is in uh ipfs that the the dhc provide process is very slow so you can see here the delay that it take the the latency that we have that we see when we try to provide something so simplistically this means when we someone wants to publish something to the dhc uh this takes quite a long time because we need to find the right peers the peers that are going to be more most easily uh findable later on uh so what we also find out found out through some measurements is that okay it takes so long to go and find the appropriate peers and finalize the process but at the same time we figured out that actually if you go back and check after all this time the 10 or 50 or 100 seconds that it took um you know to find those 20 which is the right number uh peers that the provider record should go to we actually have found those within the first second and then the process was just hanging and trying to find even uh even closer peers so um yeah and this is the figure that shows that it's mostly less than 0.5 seconds but it could go up to a second or a second or two so we thought okay there must be a way to try and find those peers uh and finalize the process much faster uh so that's why it's called uh the well some of the proposed solutions are called optimistic provide and there were two approaches that were proposed one is called uh the estimator-based approach and i'm not going to go into that today the other one was the double query approach um so what we do there is that uh instead of going and finding um you know asking around which is the closest peer to the one that i want to uh to find according to the CID of the content i want to publish in the network um and trying to get as close as close as possible um let's try to ask two guys at the same time uh and that was actually the third idea and the thinking behind there behind that was that you know when we independently ask two completely relevant peers um you know what is the closer peer that you know or for the CID when we start getting common answers from peers that are coming back to us then we'll probably have you know uh the those nodes that are common between both queries are probably uh the ones that are getting that are the closest ones because you know we are converging to that hash space so we went on and the update here is that we implemented that and we have some very initial results which i wanted to share with you today and it seems that unfortunately the results are not very accurate so it's not necessarily a positive result that i'm presenting here today it's just a progress update and what we plan to do next so if you go and check what happens when you go and ask peers uh one by one like the single query approach you see that you go um in this graph the x-axis is the normalized x-hole distance which very simplistically means what is the distance between where i want to reach and um what i have actually which peers i have actually found to store the record and this obviously is very small is like 0.01 so it means that this process is very very slow but very efficient at the same time because it goes as close as possible now going and checking the double query approach we see that it's not bringing very accurate results so that 0.0 something 0.02 that we've we're seeing with a single query approach now it can go up to 10 and 20 and 30 percent so it's it's still it's completing faster and we can see that more than 60 percent of peers are finding indeed you know those final peers very quickly but these does not these does not continue for the entire process for all of the provide operations that we have tested with so what does this lead us to think it leads us to think that we need to perhaps play around with this uh and have perhaps not two queries but maybe even do three queries and try to see what is the intersection of answers that we're getting and if you know if we can converge faster when three separate queries bring us back the correct results it means that we need to also investigate other approaches such as the estimator approach that yeah I didn't talk about it today but I'm going to talk about it in a future session yeah and also ideas that you might have so if you know if you can think of something that you know an estimation approach which is going to give back results much faster we're more than happy to receive feedback and more ideas you can find here I can share those slides there's the proposal the discussion and the project page where we post updates and everything so yeah that's me thank you very much and yeah thanks for listening and Yanis your screen was frozen the entire time so we didn't see the graphs could you really yeah so you should have said I'm sorry people said in the chat but I guess like nobody wanted to interrupt oh could you say could you send yeah the links to the graphs and and links to them so sorry that's fine and and the implementation links just so we can look at the methodology yeah yeah absolutely absolutely um what is the place the best place to send that nowadays um well I'm even putting the chat I guess perhaps um yeah IP steward discord also yeah exactly exactly I'll post it there I'll post it there


What is good good morning? I never know how to start these. I just feel like yelling just to figure.  Let's go and one minute That's after restfulness wakefulness. Whatever it's called bro. My priorities are on point What the hell's going on? Don't glide daily, baby. We're working on our passions We're working on our dreams and we're starting every day off with rocket fuel Which is this podcast where I yell at you and by the way speaking of podcasts. It's on every podcast platform We got iTunes. We got Google. We got what's the other one spot high five and Stitcher does anybody use stitcher it's for Android You know, I'm just putting it out there so everybody's got their subscribe on those if you want to those are like the fastest way to listen to This because I publish those first just because it's the easiest thing to upload and then YouTube as well if you're listening You could look the vice versa. Thank you for everything. Thank you fellow support It's been growing up and getting great feedback on the dunk life daily Formerly known as a still spinning podcast formerly known as something conversations formerly known as something I had 19 names names don't matter Welcome to dunk life with your host dunk life daily Daniel That's not my name, but it's somebody's and it doesn't matter because I'm just this person and I'm not a person. I'm energy, bro Let's get it. I haven't a lot of fun doing everything. I'm doing. I'm jumping really well I'm working on my verdict in that peak phase my boys coming to town this week Tomorrow I'm dunking to if you just saw my latest vlog. I was flying it was just even though It was just like a warm-up light type of day. I felt like I was attacking a 10-foot rim harder than ever It takes time I guess what I wanted one thing I wanted to mention today was the results a lot of times you see results and it's That's what I want this podcast to be a part of as well a part This is that's a part that I also want to display on this podcast is my process because as I was a creating content as I was dunking part of the problem or part of the Struggle was seeing people make have results and I was wondering what happened in between and it's really inspiring when you see The bridge that's why I started vlogging first of all was because I saw people Having the same questions that I had when I was dunking so I was like, oh, this is a perfect way I wanted to do well on YouTube. I liked making videos. I'm like, oh, maybe people want like a daily dunking Not just dunk life daily, but just more like workouts and then even further back is when I got inspired as well I was inspired to dunk because I saw people my height dunking, but then Andy Nicholson over the hill dunker Who I have so much love for I love that dude. He's still training he Showed his videos from week one to week 12 of dunking so you could see the very small progress So it really when you see something I love visuals like when you see something But then you're able to see the bridge connecting you from you to your goal Inspires you and makes you feel like it's a hundred percent possible instead of just seeing like a giant gap You're like, how am I gonna get over that gap? But meanwhile you just have to get started and start doing that gap and everybody's path is different So yeah, remember that everything takes time and when you see somebody that's Like dunk life daily if this is your first episode shout outs everybody That's new. I'm growing too on YouTube. It's super sick to see I love all the new questions if you have questions the questions I want to answer go in the comments on the YouTube video because I keep getting the same question over and over again As I'm sure you're aware so I try to answer those questions all you have but also the YouTube comments are the best so other people can see them So if you're seeing this this is the product of this podcast I've had for two years now at least So if it sounds Structured no if it sounds good if it looks good the quality the light the whatever it is everything took so much time even my own mindset of when it comes down to Producing verbiage is like I like I realized the morning is when I'm fired up It helps me set my day And then it gets it out of my head because I like to start the day off with this message Speaking of the message is a daily friggin email that you can subscribe to on my website That does all of this if you like the written form too I give a summary of the show so if you just want to click quick blurb as your little motivational thing in the morning I have that too point is is that I love doing this in the morning and I start to slowly um Craft a process that works for me And but then like you might not see it like somebody that just subscribed today only sees it right now and sees oh wow This guy's fucking nuts, and I'm like yeah, I built that up to show my nuts. Ness at in the best way possible so Stick to your process keep figuring out what you want to do and it's to me. It's worth it That's what it's all about. I don't know if it's a male thing I always think about that is that like progressing going nuts and trying to conquer the most you can part of it Yeah, but other people want to make progress to like females But you do what you you do what you want to do I was talking about yesterday about the passion like figure out what mountain you want to climb because Sometimes a passion looks cool, but it's just because it looks cool but figure out what's core to you and I wanted to talk more about that today and One way to do that. What was I about to say with that is I Forget the question I had but either way Keep working on what you want to do that passion comes through. Oh, I do remember. Let's go I'm so glad I remember it is that you can't compete with the passion So if you're choosing that mountain based on your passion and you want to climb that mountain You're starting and all these things holding you back You don't know where to start you don't know what the secret to jumping is you don't know How to get started? What's the best way to start a YouTube channel? Whatever it is Follow your passion and what you love to do because when things they say when things get tough the passion comes through But it's more than that it's like this is that this seems like a lot of work to some people I think it's like every morning. I'm producing this. I'm setting up this goddamn light I got to keep track of how much data is on my computer because I'm running out I got to get this up in time. I want to I want to do it every day I got to come with ideas. It seems like work But yesterday I was thinking what I want to talk about today and I was thinking you know what I Want to I love doing it so the like the challenge is a challenge I got it like my first I said I got to come up with something But I love the result so when I challenge and I I say challenge accepted and I come up with something and I do it And I nail it and I spit that fire like I'm doing right now It sounds like I'm about to drop some bars with no beat acapella I love it So if you're somebody that's trying to do a daily podcast that doesn't like talking But thinks it's lucrative and wants to make the most out of what they can do and feels like they're good at talking Whatever it is is that you're never going to exceed Someone who's doing it out of passion just because the person who's doing it out of passion Loves that challenge. So even if you're willing to work just as hard and you're matching them at every stage I just I think that the passionate person is doing it out of love and the other person's doing it out of Ego, whatever the hell it is. But it's they just think it's like a lucrative method for them to do whatever it is It's not pure love. So it's a harder emotion to work with and I think it takes a bigger toll on you plus You can keep going with passion and and you you never stop this one You're going to get burnt out because at some point you're going to be like, why am I doing this? And you're going to get burnt out. So I just think you cannot compete with passion. So whatever you're doing um Do with your passion because you're going to make the most out of it. You're going to have the most energy to do it and also um In the end, it'll be the most fulfilling. So I think that's Something that I really want to make sure you guys are doing is follow your passion Because then no one can compete with you and also you'll love it the most And yeah, try to compete with me on this boy. I got double videos now I got a vlog sometimes on two days, but I'm doing the dld daily, baby the dunk live daily daily So yeah, I love doing it And there are some things that I tried to do that are um That were mistakes that I wanted to do all the time and make it consistent And that's my biggest thing is that I love to do them But I got to figure out what works in my lifestyle and I'll probably be in other videos Working with things that are in your life. So anyway, can't compete with passion boy It's the best way to be I love doing it It fills me with so much energy and that's what I love to do But I got to remember other people have different perspectives and different things find what you want to do That's the message get it out there. I have a great day. What's today? Oh, what the frink is wednesday?  It's so much fun. All right Check out my latest vlog for that one Only one more thing to say I think and that is Tootaloo Right there Trying to make an intro ended up making an anthem


Welcome to George H. Smith's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute, narrated by James Foster. Thomas Hodgkin, Libertarian extraordinaire, Part 4. In my last essay I discussed some general features of Thomas Hodgkin's popular political economy, 1827. I will now explore this book in more detail. Despite some theoretical shortcomings, popular political economy contains a number of insightful discussions such as Hodgkin's defense of free market currency and banking. Perhaps most valuable is Hodgkin's discussion, which anticipates later insights by F. A. Hayek and other Austrian economists, of the role of prices in transmitting vital information in a free market. According to Hodgkin, variations and fluctuations in prices are crucial economic indicators that regulate consumption. For instance, if the price of bread did not rise when farmers anticipated a poor wheat crop, no persons would be admonished in time to lessen their consumption or seek for other food than wheat and bread, and before the next harvest famine might ensue. Conversely, if prices did not fall during an abundant crop, a good deal of bread would be wasted. Prices are therefore the index to the wants of society. They indicate to all men how they may employ their time and talents most profitably to themselves and most beneficially for the whole of society. In characterizing retailers and wholesalers as indispensable agents in adjusting the supply of commodities to the demand and to consumption, Hodgkin gave us one of the finest treatments of the market as a coordinating process to be found in the literature of nineteenth century economics. Hodgkin set up the problem of market coordination by noting two things in regard to agricultural products. First, some commodities take longer to produce than other commodities.   So how is it that a free market can provide a regular supply of food despite these dramatic differences in various agricultural commodities? Hodgkin wrote, But though the products of different species of labour are completed in unequal times and are of such unequal durability that some must be immediately sold and consumed while others can be kept from the market for months, the appetite of each labourer is renewed daily and must every day be satisfied. If we were aware of these natural laws influencing both us and the materials of our subsistence and if we at the same time knew that the great majority of the operations carried on in society were in the long run of equal utility, each being necessary to the completion of the others, and that civilized society probably could not exist and certainly could not flourish wanting any of them should we not think ourselves bound to take measures by which he whose useful task could not be completed and its produce brought to market for several months might be able to obtain his daily bread. As if anticipating later criticisms of central economic planning Hodgkin expressed mock surprise that our parliament men have not yet claimed to possess the near omniscience that would be needed to enable us to produce every commodity in the precise form and at the precise time it is wanted and have not taken measures to ensure all classes of labourers however long a time may be required for their products to reach the market, their necessary daily subsistence. No such overall knowledge of markets is possible nor is it needed. The ability of free markets to coordinate supply and demand grows up unperceived and uninfluenced by legislators. Indeed this crucial function is performed by retail and wholesale merchants who are motivated by nothing more than their own economic interests. Laborers know very well the utility of different commodities and they conjecture with tolerable accuracy the different periods in which a given quantity will be consumed. They buy therefore from the various classes of labourers or manufacturers their different products and share them out as is most suitable to the wants of all. They reconcile the apparent incongruity of nature and while labouring for themselves are useful to others. The important business of actually distributing the wealth of society in such proportions as individuals can buy it so that the daily wants of all classes even of those whose produce is not completed for months or years may be conveniently supplied is in fact performed by retail dealers. They take to their business, I am aware, with no such high object in view. They are led to it by an instinctive view of their own interest and they are just as unobserving of those great natural circumstances which give rise to their occupation and as ignorant of the great utility to society at large of that subdivision of labour they carry into practice as those individuals who pretend that nature regulates nothing and that but for their ordering wisdom society could not exist. According to Hodgkin in all cases when trade is voluntarily carried on we may be sure that it is beneficial to all parties. Voluntary exchanges permit each person to pursue his own interests according to his own judgments. Although retail dealers in their pursuit of profit are sometimes described as sucking the marrow out of the bones of the poor labourers this depiction is wholly inaccurate. Retailing is a species of labour and the retailer can profit only if he exercises the greatest economy in distributing commodities to consumers who want them. Retailers have a direct interest in performing their task well and strong motives for that watchfulness which is beneficial to the whole of society. Hodgkin concludes under the influence of self interest buying and selling only with a view to their own profit retail dealers distribute the whole wealth of society in the most economical manner possible. They find customers even for refuse. Popular political economy continues with a similar analysis of wholesale merchants who were widely condemned for hoarding grain and then selling it for high prices during times of famine. Although Hodgkin's defense is similar to that found in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations Hodgkin's stressed more than Smith did the role of wholesalers in coordinating economic activity. Space does not permit me to explore this aspect of Hodgkin's book so I leave it to readers to discover his brilliant treatment for themselves. Generally considered popular political economy is a sustained critique of the principle of population defended by the English clergyman Thomas R. Malthus 1766 to 1834 and this brings us to some economic arguments that though they may fail to captivate modern readers generated an enormous amount of interest and controversy in Hodgkin's day. Prior to what Hodgkin called the unhappy celebrity of Malthus's arguments economics had generally been viewed especially by Adam Smith as an optimistic enterprise, one that explained how no definite limits could be assigned to economic progress. After a theory of indefinite progress had been integrated by some Enlightenment philosophers especially the anarchist William Godwin into their futuristic utopian schemes Malthus responded in 1798 with a terse critique, an essay on the principle of population. Although Malthus modified his views in later editions of this book it was the first edition that generated most of the controversy. Malthus was widely regarded as having delivered the coup de gras to optimistic theories of progress. His refutation rested on the claim which was not original with him that population when unchecked increases in a geometrical ratio whereas the food supply increases only in an arithmetical ratio. The economic significance of this principle of population is that the constant tendency of a population to increase tends to subject the lower classes of the society to distress and to prevent any great permanent amelioration of their condition. The pressure of population growth relative to the food supply will impose severe limitations on economic progress. This means that there will always exist a significant number of workers who will never be able to acquire more than subsistence wages. It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Malthusianism on 19th century thought especially in Britain. It was partially owing to this influence that Thomas Carlisle dubbed economics the dismal science. When David Ricardo incorporated the principle of population into his own economic theory it became a part of Benthamite orthodoxy. According to Ricardo wages like all other contracts should be left to the fair and free competition of the market and should never be controlled by the interference of the legislature. This had been the view of Adam Smith as well but Ricardo injected a pessimistic note into the long term prospects for real wages that conflicted with Smith's account according to which the real wages of labor will tend to rise in a progressively expanding economy along with the accumulation of capital. In contrast Ricardo maintained that the natural price of labor is that price which is necessary to enable the laborers one with another to subsist and perpetuate their race without either increase or diminution. Ricardo did not deny that the market price of labor the price which is really paid for it will be determined by the market forces of supply and demand but he also maintained that however much the market price of labor may deviate from its natural price it has like commodities a tendency to conform to it. When early economists spoke of natural price they roughly meant what modern economists call the equilibrium price. One thing that differentiated Ricardo's account from Smith's is the fact that the former incorporated the Malthusian principle of population and it was this factor that imbued Ricardo's theory with pessimistic hue. Ricardo's approach falls somewhere between the pessimism of Malthus and the optimism of Smith. When according to Ricardo the market price of labor exceeds its natural price the condition of the laborer is flourishing and happy but the long-term tendency is for the market price to gravitate to the natural price because higher wages will motivate workers to have larger families and this by increasing the number of laborers will eventually bring about lower wages. This is only a tendency however in fact the market rate of wages may in an improving society for an indefinite period be constantly above the natural rate. Much of popular political economy is a sustained critique of Malthusianism and of its use by Ricardo especially in connection with this theory of rent. Rent Ricardo argued arises from natural differences of fertility among different units of land. As more land is cultivated to meet an increasing demand for food less productive land is brought under cultivation. Consequently each unit of agricultural labor will become less productive owing to the poorer quality of that land. This is essentially a theory of marginal productivity applied to agriculture. Thus as more labor is required to produce the same amount of food on less fertile land that could previously be produced on more fertile land the real price of agricultural products will increase relative to other goods. This Ricardo concluded is a major reason why the food supply will never keep pace with population growth and why wages will tend to fall to the level of subsistence. Hodgkin while not denying that we must have recourse to soils of less and less fertility nevertheless questioned the conclusions that Ricardo drew from his theory. For even Ricardo had conceded that various factors such as technological improvements will tend to mitigate the higher food prices generated by the diminished productivity of less fertile soil. Thus given that there are numberless circumstances which compensate for decreasing fertility Hodgkin could not understand how Ricardo could dogmatically conclude that these mitigating circumstances would not neutralize the effects of decreasing fertility in the long run. Once again Hodgkin appealed to the optimism of Adam Smith over the relative pessimism of Ricardo. Smith had argued that the prices of almost all commodities will decrease with economic progress owing to a greater division of labor and new technology. Hodgkin maintained that there is nothing unique about agricultural products that should exempt them from this general trend. He also called attention to the many innovations and machines that had appeared since Smith's day which diminished to an almost inconceivable degree the labor necessary to procure meat or make bread. Hence the opinion that the natural price of food lessens rather than increases in the progress of society seems borne out by facts because in the progress of society food is obtained by less and less labor. Technical arguments aside it is important to understand Hodgkin's basic approach. He believed that the progress of knowledge is the mainspring of economic progress. The advance of knowledge will generate labor saving inventions and technology innovations that we cannot possibly predict or foresee. It is therefore impermissible for economists to stipulate necessary limits to economic progress as if human creativity and innovation will never advance beyond their current state. Thank you for listening to Excursions. To learn more about libertarian philosophy and history visit www.libertarianism.org