All right, I don't see anybody straggling in. So I'm Josh McKenzie, for those of you that don't know me. I'm the one that writes way too many emails in the dev list that are usually way too long. Currently, PMC Chair, Committer, February will be 10 years on Cassandra. Let's just, it's a long time. Went from zero children to two children in that timeframe. So it's a good time, it's good to grow. I'm gonna be talking about the state of the community and a variety of different metrics that I pulled out from both the Git repo and looking at a lot of different things in terms of engagement, in terms of, for folks that are connecting with the project, what does it look like for them? And how are we all doing? Like what's our history look like together? There's a TLDR, which is that the state of things is good. I like to think of this as, you know, the quotation here is, it resonates with me. I was just joking with some folks like last week about training a model to spot the amount of gray and white in our hair and beards to kind of get an idea where we're all heading. But there's the question of whether you get better with age or whether you become brittle. And I was actually thinking about this last night.    This is great. I'm like, dude, no, you need to go get stitches. So that's the whole like, as you get older, you got to be careful, right? You got to be delicate with what you do and with the risks you take. And you got to be smart about it. And I think all that actually applies to our project and how we work with things, but you can't atrophy, obviously, as we all know. So the Apache way is community over code. So we're going to talk about the community first and then we're going to talk about code second. You're all very literate. So you can see what's up there, but we're going to kind of funnel our scope in terms of whether we're, you know, talking about the big picture, the small picture and kind of have a flow to it, hopefully. So for the community itself, this is the lifeblood of an open source project. And you all know that and we can all say that and that's like the great little, we put it on a mug. But the reality is like, unless we have robust diversity across a bunch of different stakeholders, we're at real, real risk, right? Like something can change, all it takes is a change in the market, a change in the company, a change in one space. If you got a single point of failure, your project's going to be dead in the water. So that is a thing that we crucially have to avoid. And that's kind of the backbone of a lot of the philosophy on the Apache side is how do we make sure we have a lot of different, you know, egalitarian, meritocratic, balanced contribution from people? So let's talk about it. All right, so you need contributions by year. This is a breakdown from our illustrious repo, Removing Merge Commits. I don't like them, but that's fine. We can all talk about that later. There's a pattern that we see here that you're gonna see again and again, which is an uptick through 2016, a downward trend, and then a climbing back up. And there was a broader thing happening in the Apache Foundation and a lot of the projects through this timeframe, where in many ways the projects, the participants, vendors, the foundation, we're all kind of trying to figure out how do we all play nice? How do we all work together? How do we make sure that folks that are being funded to work full-time on a project aren't completely skewing it or there's too much concentration in one place, et cetera? And so there was something of a kind of broad, I would say correction in 2015, 2016, across far more than just the Cassandra project where a lot of us had some things to learn in terms of how we were structured. So what we do see is the trend going on from probably about 2019 onward, where we are at a healthy place steadily climbing upward. And if you look at our commits, which is a terrible metric because TCM just merged and it was one commit with 88,000 lines. So anyway, we all know this is a terrible metric, but if you look at enough terrible metrics together, maybe you'll find a fit line that you can tell a story about. But basically we see the same kind of trend where the velocity of the commits coming into the project, there was a back off, but then we're climbing back up. Now, we'll talk about this when we get to the releases. There's also the 4.0 timeframe that took place in here that we will discuss in the effect that had. So another one I thought was interesting was per email address. How many times are people committing? I'm guilty of having, I think, three email addresses in the history before I settled on the Jay McKinsey and Apache.org one. So there's that kind of an issue that would pollute the data. But there's a question of do we have individuals that are pushing a huge number of commits? And I always joke about Dave Brogius. Those of you that don't know, he would just ninja tons of spell corrections and comment fixes in there. So I always showed up with all these commits and we're like, Dave's never talking anybody, what's going on here? But we have a cleaner code base for it. There really doesn't seem to be a big change in terms of for each individual that's actually working on the project, on average, how many commits are they actually putting into the system? This is an interesting one. I wonder what it means or what it entails. Like Cassandra is not the most accessible code base in the world. So if somebody coming along and on average we say most contributors have like four or five different commits, what does that mean? I just don't know if there's four or five big commits or they four or five small ones.  I don't know. But we can chart the whole, how many contributors do we have? And on average, how many commits is each contributor pulling in? And as it turns out, like we're actually fairly steady. So the number of people that are participating in the project is growing and the amount people are engaging seems to be staying relatively steady. I take that as a sign of health, but also there's an opportunity to grow here. There's an opportunity to encourage folks. There's also an opportunity to look at all the tickets that are stuck waiting for review that all of us have and figure out how we unstick them and stop the rebase hell. So conversation-wise on Devat, looking since about 2020, how much are we talking? I probably should have removed myself from this graph because I'm sure I've skewed the thing. My role in many ways is often, like if I hear something from three different people, from three different places, I'm like, okay, this has got to be a pattern. Let's all talk about it. Let's all chat about it on the mailing list and then we'll end up where we end up. But we've been getting more and more engaged over the last few years as a project, communicating with each other and kind of hashing out. Like I know bringing the CPs onto the DevList had a big impact on this as well, where we're actually talking about what we wanna build before we just build it and drop it on each other, which is a plus. So that's a good sign. The user at mailing list has been getting quieter and quieter over time. This is an interesting one. I wondered about this. I talk about it a little bit more in some of the subsequent slides, but one of the things that has set Apache projects apart to me is that holding to the whole, if it didn't happen on the mailing list, it didn't happen mentality. And I get it, right? Like if somebody has a conversation in a slack thread, not everybody sees that. And there's an accessibility problem. There's a archival problem. There's a, you know, if it didn't happen on the mailing list, like there's no way to know everybody in the ecosystem had a chance to actually engage. That's not as true for the user list. Like a lot of governance and voting and discussions of that sort aren't taking place in this domain. So the question for me would be, are the users not feeling served by the user list or are they congregating somewhere else? Not that I'm bearing the lead there. The Cassandra channel on ASF Slack, and I sampled these numbers a few months ago, pretty healthy. It's got some decent velocity on it, just short of 2,000 people then. And then when you look at Planet Cassandra, I had Patrick actually eliminate all the idle accounts from there. We had not quite an order of magnitude more people on the Planet Cassandra Discord server than the Cassandra Slack. Now a spot check of these two systems showed about the same level of conversation. So there's that whole argument of, well, getting onto the Apache Slack, you gotta actually get invited and there's a challenge there and people bounce off that. But the people that end up going through all that may be more motivated to actually engage. Either way, for all of us that are working on the project, we are well served to engage with our users wherever they are, whether that be Planet Cassandra or the ASF Slack and help them as we can. One of the things that's been very enlightening and humbling for me is working with users and hearing their feedback about code that I've written. And I'm sure all of us have had that same sensation where you're like, well, why would anybody ever use it this way? And it turns out most of them do and you were wrong. So anyway, my bid here would be if you're not on the Planet Cassandra Discord server actually get on there. If you're not on the ASF Slack channels for sure get on there, please. And let's just make sure that when users come forward with questions, if there isn't an obvious place in documentation to point them to, there's something we can learn from that. If there is an obvious place, we should help them navigate towards that. Like we need to kind of work on these on-ramps for our users just over and over. This has been our white whale for years. So a vanity metric. A lot of people love DB Engine rankings. This is why column stores Cassandra Steady. Like we've got a niche, we've got a place that we excel better than anybody else. There's trade-offs that come with a primarily Paxos-based Dynamo-based system. But the things that we do well, we do like nobody else, right? Like the availability characteristics, the scalability characteristics are pretty rock solid. Like that need is not going anywhere. And I've been making this argument for, I don't know, probably five or six years now. There's kind of a race between how much dataset sizes are growing and how databases are accommodating that growth. And a lot of people start budding up against architectural problems when you get into really big multi-terabyte, petabyte dataset sizes. And we're just, I mean, we're just moving to more and more and more data. This entire conference, there's half of it.  So I don't see this really going anywhere or changing anytime soon. So yeah, we're in a decently healthy spot in terms of the place where we exist and the places that we serve. Now the introduction of, and we'll talk about it a little bit later, Accord, multi-partition atomicity, the introduction to vector search, we're starting to kind of elbow out of our niche a little bit. But we'll look at those vanity metrics when the time comes. So ecosystem-wise, we've had quite a lot of change this year in terms of how we as a project are kind of positioned and how we relate to different sub-projects. We didn't really have any rules to work with sub-projects before. We didn't really know, like, okay, how do we vote on things? How do we release things? If somebody's working on something, like the driver, for instance, like who would be committers? How would we bring them in? We didn't really have a map for that. So in the last year, we've actually ratified some rules to know here's how we bring new projects on, here's the number of PMC members that have to represent those projects, here's how you become committers on them, here's the social contract. And since that time, I've come to realize there's a bunch of Apache projects that deal with this exact same thing and already have prior art in this space. And there's just this constant turning of the wheel of the old timers with the wisdom that say, well, here's what you'll run into and here's the problems and here's how you should do it. And we're like, hey, we just rediscovered fire. This is great, guys. So it's heartening to see that what we're doing is it rhymes with what a lot of the other Apache projects are doing. And there's a tension between bringing on these sub-projects and not becoming a foundation or an umbrella yourself. I don't think we're at any risk of that, right? Like, nobody's gonna run the Cassandra sidecar without Cassandra? That's just not, that's not a thing you do. So this has been really good to see. We've had a lot of committers come in recently on these side projects. Since I originally pulled this presentation together for Town Hall, the driver donations came through. And that's a huge amount of code, of work, of history.  Yeah, and it's gonna be interesting to see how this evolves and where we go now that we've got an easier on-rant for folks who are like, hey, I worked on ThingX. You know, I've talked about there's a planet Cassandra website and there's a question of, okay, why isn't this under the foundation? Why isn't this a sub-project? And immediately the response from the folks that are maintaining that was like, that would be awesome, please, I need more help maintaining it. So we kind of need to start thinking about beyond just the core database itself, how do we grow our ecosystem? How do we grow this umbrella and have more people underneath it that are part of this ecosystem that contribute to docs, that contribute to the website, all these other things. It's getting a lot better, for sure. Integration-wise, we've got a bunch of integrations. These are some of the more robust, well-known, mature ones, but you can find stuff all over the place. There's a boatload of different integrations out in the wild for Cassandra. So just had that in here so you can. All right, so the committee itself. As of 2023, we have 73 committers in the project and 36 PMC members. The, to me at least, it's surprising how many PMC members are active out of that 36. And I say active from like, we do a roll call periodically, so we know, okay, when we vote, what does a majority even mean? Like how many of us are following the mailing list? How many of us are staying involved? And it's a good number. So there's a lot of folks that care a lot about this project and that have stayed connected. Some of us have floated away from the project briefly or for longer times and then ended up coming back in to the ecosystem and just kind of can't get away. And it's heartening to see that what we're doing is keeping people engaged and it's keeping them caring and, you know, fighting a good fight. So community-wise, I think we're doing pretty well. We're doing better than we have in the past in terms of bringing on new people and in terms of encouraging, connecting. And part of the, I guess, question to me, proof is in the pudding, like what does that lead to in terms of outcomes? If your community is healthy and strong, then what? Well, it turns out the thing we build, we build it. It's amazing how that stuff all works together. Fun fact, when I was digging into all this stuff in the presentation, there's letters between Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage where she's like, you need to stop trying to correct my math. Like, let's focus on like what I'm saying, not you trying to nitpick me. It turns out she was right and he was wrong, which I found delightful because that reminds me of our mailing list. But, well, all right, so release is wise. This is a fun one. I like this one. There's Mount 4.0 in the middle. So this is a chart of how long it took us between the previous major to the next major release. And one of these things is not like the other. So as many of you may know, for those of you that don't, you'll get a little history lesson here. Cassandra first started out as basically a schema-less thrift-based database. And the storage engine was not really a storage engine. It was kind of like YOLO, do whatever you want. And it turns out a lot of people had a really hard time with a proliferation of effectively schemas and structures and like micro storage. I mean, the storage engine was its own thing, Erin. It had its own code, I see her face. But, you know what I mean? Like thrift didn't have strong opinion. You could do whatever you want. And a lot of people found it got out of control really quickly and they had a really hard time figuring out, okay, what is in here? How do I pull stuff back out? How do I introspect? This was actually before my time. So long time ago. But that's baked into the bones of the system, or at least it was. And we moved from thrift to CQL, but there was kind of this kluge-painful translation process that took place. And then the storage engine we moved from kind of a thrift-first structure logically to a CQL-first structure logically. And that's where we kind of discovered a lot of dragons and demons and skeletons and all the things that come along with doing a major change in flight, right? Like that's the reassemble the engine as you're going on the highway at 100 miles an hour. What we ended up doing for that three out of four O period was investing a huge amount of energy and resources into testing the system and sussing out what's going on with the storage engine, where are the edge cases? Where are things falling apart that should not be? How do we get to the point to where we have the confidence in this system that we had prior but now the confidence is actually backed by empirical evidence as opposed to hubris? So that's where we went there. Part of that theory was go slow to go fast. And this is a thing that if you're following the dev list and participating, as many of us are, there's a tension with every discussion we have about do we hold to a release every 12 months or do we release when we have specific features or specific functionality we know that are gonna be hugely impacting to our users? There's zero right answer. And this is something that I often say it took my wife Melissa about 10 years to drill into me. Nothing's black and white. Like there's zero right answers. It's all in the middle and like compromise and like disappointing gray space and like great things. I want a clear answer that I'm like, oh, there's the right one. Let's go. That's not how it works. So each time we come up to a release, much like we did with 50, much like we looked at with transactional cluster metadata and Accord, there's this unknowable question of, we had a big gap with 4.0. How much does the world care? How much do our users care? Would they wanna wait six months or another 12 months for a release that had features? Or do they look at it and say, ah, you guys did all right with 4.0 and 4.1 or with 4.1 rather, before one is one release and before that it was like four years. So I don't know. I don't know what the answer is and none of us do. So we've gone back and forth and we've kind of tried to figure out the right compromise for this. And in practice, this is where we reached the point where we said, look, if we cut 5.0 right now and then these features are available in early 2024, we can cut a 5.1 and it's not that big of a deal. It's not the end of the world. The pain comes in with certifying releases. So certifying Cassandra is a big, big lift for places that are running a non-trivial amount of infrastructure. And for folks that are looking at the ecosystem, they're gonna have to make this decision about do we validate and certify 5.0 or do we wait because we know we're gonna be needing the features that are in 5.1 and build based on that. Again, no right answers. So this is something that the release cycle of our database has really kind of baked in and shows this tension and this struggle that we've had kind of collectively as a group. If we look at number of JIRA Resolve per year, again, this is just like the TCM commit where not all JIRAs are the same. But interesting metric, same pattern, spike up, drop down, growing back up. Everything looks like it's healthy. Looks like we're bouncing back. Looks like we're recovering. The new feature JIRAs, I put this one in here because I was curious about whether or not from a new feature perspective we're starting to bounce forward. We are. We have a lot of stuff coming in. There's a lot of things happening in the Cassandra world. It's interesting how that happens. All right, so numbers don't tell the whole story either. 4.0 to 4.1 was a pretty modest change. And there's a bunch of changes in guardrails and denialist thing. And I promise I didn't just put those two because I worked on them. I really was looking at 4.1 and I'm like, what did we do in 4.1 in that year? There's a lot of stuff in there but in terms of new feature tickets inside the system, there really wasn't that much. Whereas 5.0, we've got a ton of stuff that came in, right? We've got the CIDR filtering, we've got the tri-base data structures that Brandemere put in there. SAI, a little thing that we've talked about in Vector Search, UCS, the Unified Compaction Strategy, MTLS. 5.0 is a pretty freaking huge release in its own right independent of the revolutionary monolithic elephants in the room that are us going away from gossip and moving to a new novel state-of-the-art Paxos implementation. So it's kind of like we went from famine to feast in terms of the features in Cassandra. And that pendulum swing, we're incentivized I think right now to make sure that we are careful about what we do, that we are deliberate about validating the correctness of these features, about making sure that the characteristics and the properties that the database proposes that it has, we actually adhere to. Kind of an important detail when you're the backbone of a huge amount of the world's infrastructure. So the transactional cluster metadata in Accord I have here as fast follows for 5.0. That was the whole debate of do we just push 5.0 until they're ready or not? When do we do this? There's that kind of float that we need to figure out. And honestly, it's been a decade and this is the same tension we face with every release. Which is, but we're so close to this thing should we wait for it and we have no idea and we don't know what the right answer is. So the CEP process, we used to have this structure where oftentimes you would get kind of a bomb dropped on you where like as a community, you'd be going along and then all of a sudden the Jiro would open and somebody'd be like, hey, here's this .patch file. And it's like 47,000 lines of code and it does this thing and everybody's like, wait, what? Hold on now, I am uncomfortable with this. In the early days of the project, that worked fine but as more and more people like adopted it and the stakes got higher and higher, more and more you're like, well, hold on, like my whole job is based on Cassandra doing well. And if this destabilizes my workplace, I'm gonna have a bad time. So how do we move away from all of these surprises and also move away from people doing things in isolation, people duplicating each other's work, people having four or five different sidecars existing all across your ecosystem that nobody's talked about. The CEPs have actually, I think, proven themselves. They're accelerating, people are engaging with them. We've seen names that we have not seen before. We've seen new contributors coming forward and proposing CEPs for things. That to me is the real mark of health, right? If it's somebody that has been, you know, putting tens of thousands of lines of code into the database over the last decade, it is not surprising to see a CEP from them. But if it's a new name where they're like, here's a thing that I really have an itch to scratch and I wanna work on this and I understand it, that says something different to me. And we're seeing that. So I consider that a good sign. I've gotta give like at least two, there we go, two clicks. So CI, my personal, emotional and psychological burden. The CI in our system is complex and it is growing and it moves in one direction, it just gets bigger. Nobody ever trims it down, nobody removes things from it. And this is something that I have a personal belief is becoming more and more of a burden that we're all carrying and slowing down our work. Now, all that being said, we're making an immense amount of progress. Mac has done a ton of really, really incredible work on this space to try to get us to where we have a like turnkey, repeatable CI system that anybody can run. I've been working in this space as well myself to try to move us towards a declarative structure where anybody that wants to build something out, they can just kind of socket together the puzzle pieces and just run it. Back in 2021, we introduced this thing called Butler, which lets us look and say like over time for a given test suite. How does it look? Is it flaky? Does it feel consistently? What do we look like for each branch? We got a single pane of glass where we can look at all of our different branches and basically say, are we trending in the right direction? Are we trending in a bad way? The build lead role we introduced in 2022, we've had kind of mixed success with that. For the first, probably six months or so, it was definitely very focused. We have a person signed up, we're doing it. Then there was a bit of a lull and now it kind of feels like there's multiple people in the community that are kind of carrying this burden. So that makes me a little uncomfortable just because I want them to be happy doing things, not necessarily feeling obligated. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. I wanna make sure that we find a sustainable way for us to continue to kind of tie A to B in terms of if we have regressions, if we have failures, are we triaging them? Do we know that they're taking place? Are we figuring out whether the actual product defects and how are we closing that loop? So the repeatable CI is in progress. There's a JIRA you guys can take a look at if you're so disposed. And we've moved the CI scripts in tree. This is something I think is a lesson we've all learned over the course of the last few years. Things that are not in tree with Cassandra may as well not exist for a lot of people on the project because you're like, I'm not really sure where to go. I'm not sure how this links up to that. I don't know what pulls it down. So I'm just gonna keep doing my thing and hope that me not knowing that is gonna be a big problem. So I think we're gonna move away from that. I think we're gonna, we're not gonna like monorepo the massive, I don't know if it's Google that has that, but anyway, our ecosystem is not big enough that this is gonna kill us. But I do think it's gonna be good for us to get a lot more stuff like Harry, for instance, into the tree proper. So all of us, it's like right next door, it's in your IDE, you stumble across it when you're looking up symbols. You know all the ways we enjoy discovering things in our system. So if our community is doing well and it is gradually and gently growing, if the code is going all right and we're getting back into a release cycle, another question is, are we behind the rest of the world? As a database, are features just making up room for things other people have already done or are they unique and novel? So as it turns out, we have a lot of novel stuff like that's the spoiler. I'm gonna keep clicking my button. Is it worth it to have the clicker if it doesn't always work? All right, so TCM, I'm obviously not gonna go into deep technical detail, but Gossip has been an albatross for us for years. And it isn't necessarily Gossip's fault or anybody's fault, it's just the whole like, at the time it was the right choice and it worked well and it has worked well for years and there's better ways to do it, right? Like the trade-offs that come with that implementation in that system have proven to be untenable, unmaintainable trade-offs for us all. So TCM really moves us towards a much better posture when it comes to our ability to, like as Alex said during his talk, move towards a much more elastic system, move towards being able to be much more deliberate about what is housed where, why we put it there, on what scale we actually do that addressability and at what times. Whereas we're not there right now, obviously. The, at the end of the day, like what people care about, bootstrapping more than one note at a time. Some people actually wanna do that, turns out. Expanding and shrinking, anybody that's run a cluster and has done a shrink, you know what I'm talking about. There's some pain there. Like there's a lot that you gotta babysit. There's a lot of hand-holding you gotta do and Gossip plays its part. You know, if you're on on-call shift, it's probably like at least a 50-50 roll of the dice if something bubbles up if it's Gossip related. Like it's, yeah, yeah, it's fun. So TCM, like just that piece of it, super exciting. SAI, secondary indexes for a long time have been the thing where when someone's like, what should I do with it? The answer is disable it. And people are like, wait a minute, what? It's the same thing, like what should I do with the triggers in Cassandra? Don't use them, right? So that we have a lot of things that are in there because they were useful at a point for a use case, but unless you've got a lot of people turning the crank over the years, they don't get the TLC over time. Secondary indexes aren't really that. It's more of like this architecture only goes so far and it's not as far as anybody needs it to go. So SAI fixes a lot of those issues. The, to me, one of the most telling things is kind of right here, the graph of size on disk of indices. For those of you that were around for the launch of materialized views, for all the railing about whether or not the data was correct and whether we've orphaned data and how we rebuild it and the fact that we just couldn't answer a lot of those questions, the real killer was users would add materialized views and not realize it was gonna exhaust the disk space and it started killing nodes and they had no way to know. So disk space utilization that's under user purview with no way to predict it, like that's just a recipe for pain. So SAI is very nice to your disks. This matters and it's good performance and we need indexing and all the other things it does. Like all that stuff is super, super important too. But at least for looking at some of our previous struggles as a system when you're working with data at scale, like you can back yourself into a corner when you have terabytes and terabytes or petabytes of data where you're saying crap, I got an ETL within the own system because of what has happened and how it has transformed over time. So I think SAI is in a really, really good place and functionally like the amount of different indexing that it adds is really, really nice. It's really good. So ANN vector search, for those of you that know anything about the ML space and JNAI, a big piece of what people are looking at doing is how do we move away from just trusting what these models have baked in and instead have it feed me back information that is relevant to my interests, right? Like if I take my own dataset for my business or if you take your own code base and you wanna know where things are, you don't wanna just ask like the sum of all human knowledge they have baked into this cloud, you wanna ask it for your use case and that's kind of the whole point. So the disk ANN algorithm that we're using in Cassandra and ANN search is fast as it turns out. And at least as far as I know, there isn't really anybody that has a credible story about a horizontally scalable, elastic, always available data store that can hold as many vectors as you wanna throw at it. So that puts Cassandra in a fairly unique place at a time when there is more than a little bit of interest in a certain space. This builds on top of SAI and this, at least in my opinion, fits pretty well with our architecture. It's not the kind of thing where we're like, are we just adding something because it's the, it's in vogue, that's not what this is shaped like, right? Like vectorized data is useful and has been useful and there's an immense amount of interest right now. But even if that interest wanes, which most people don't think it will, this is still a valuable thing to have in Cassandra worth maintaining and state-of-the-art. So accord, I am not going to do a disservice by trying to get deep into the explanation on the technical side because this is one of those where it's like, you read the white paper and you're like, I understand some of those words, this is great. It is, there's a lineage in Cassandra, there's a tying of our wagon where we've hitched ourselves with Paxos, where we basically say, look, there's raft, it's out there, it's a great algorithm, but that's not the algorithm for us. Here we play Paxos. And then you look at the lineage of Paxos as it's evolved over time, as it's gone through E-Paxos, which Blake was playing with years and years ago and much like his refactor out the static singletons or it is like, Blake, your patch is very large and very exciting and I'm scared of it. So this has been kind of his white whale in the crank he's been turning for many, many years. Accord is a novel extension beyond where kind of the state of the art and published research was and moves us towards a place where we can effectively have one round trip on strongly consistent activity on our database across the whole system, right? And so that's kind of an unheard of like opening up of multi-partition flexibility. And for those of you that have worked on Cassandra for a long time, maybe you're like me, where your first thought is, oh no, how are people gonna use this at scale in a way we never expected that will be very painful and blow up when they have like terabytes of data and they managed to make everything collide. So we're gonna have to figure out like what's the right way to get this to scale? What's the right way to set up guardrails? We have all these things in place and we'll learn as we go and work with our users. As far as we can tell from our testing and from the proof of the algorithm itself, this is very, very good as it turns out. Structurally, there's a few insights with Accord that make it novel, make it unique and make it smart enough to basically for multiple things that are in flight, figure out what collides, what doesn't, what is it safe to do and what do I have to wait for to do? And I'm just gonna leave it at that kind of high level hand waving woo. But the reality is there is an immense amount of work that has gone into this. There's an immense amount of proof work in terms of a single threaded simulator that confirms and makes sure that the order things are executing actually holds to and adheres to the different commitments and the invariance of the algorithm itself from the proof that we're doing. And if you look historically at all the work that's gone into Cassandra in the past, a CEP with a mathematical proof of an algorithm is not exactly our status quo approach to the things that we do. So it's been really, really cool and really, really good to see how this has worked out and how it continues to evolve. So with all that said, what do we take away from, for those of us that have hitched our wagon to Cassandra or that love to contribute or thinking of building out things on top of it or whatever your posture and your position and relationship may be, users are moving around. They're gathering in different places and we need to meet them where they are, wherever that may be. And I was joking a little earlier today how it's like in the ML space, it's like emojis everywhere. Like every read me you look at is like a wall of emojis and I'm like, well, I guess this is what they're doing now. Like I'm good with it. Let's meet them where they are. So I don't expect Cassandra to be covered with emojis. No, we can be wrong. But again, like the, where are the users gathering? How do we connect with them where they are? How do we, in the space of enlightened self-interest learn from that so we can better make our software serve their needs? We really should do that. Turns out working together is a good thing. Who would have thought? The models that we're using for collaboration on the project are actually being noticed outside of our project. So the Cassandra Catalyst program is something that a bunch of other projects are kind of looking at and trying to figure out, hey, this might actually be something we want to do. The way that we're working with sub-projects and governance is part of that broader discussion of other projects who have sub-projects and they're saying, well, how do we do this? Well, here's the way the Cassandra team is doing it. And that seems like it's gone pretty well. And it's great to have Mick on the project who knows a lot of these folks and can kind of grease a lot of the skids behind the scenes to kind of talk through like what our thinking is and what we're doing. There's an immense amount of work with other projects that happens behind the scenes so we can all kind of learn together and figure out as the industry changes, as these different governance regimes and political regimes change, where do we fit in with that and how do we make sure our project remains relevant? But yeah, collaboration works. Yeah, it turns out testing is useful. Testing is worth it. The shift towards property-based testing and fuzz-based testing has had a massive impact in our confidence with the system. And there's, I think, definitely a lot more work to be done. There's a lot that we need to figure out in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio with what we currently have as our corpus of tests because we don't want to contribute to burning down the earth by running thousands of machines every time we validate one commit, which is kind of our current MO and my axe to grind. But yeah, we're actually in a really good spot. There's nothing I look at and say I am deeply worried. Here's the thing we need to focus on and I think we're doing all right. So that is what I have for you about the state of the Dev community and the project. Does anybody have any questions? No questions. I'm hearing that I am too long-winded and we don't get questions. So thank you everybody. Appreciate you coming out and appreciate everything you do.


We'll judge you by the company you keep, the Presidency warns South-West agitators and will give Jonathan a chance to contest in 2023 if he joins the APC, says the ruling party. This is Press Politics and I am Mary Ann Cronin. Eurobernation agitators have been threatened by the federal government, this was in reaction to a protest held by the Nigerian-Indigenous Nationalities Alliance for Self-Determination Nines and Umbrella Buddy for Self-Determination groups in the country at the United Nations headquarters in New York, in the United States. Members of the Self-Determination groups representing the Europe, South-East, South-West and the Middle Belt were seen displaying placards with different inscriptions and chanted anti-oppression songs. They were also seen chanting, we want the Eurobernation now, declare independent Biafra now, and some of the protesters held Eurobernation and iPod flags. The Presidency, however, faltered the Eurobernation agitators for keeping association with the prescribed Indigenous people of Biafra, iPod. In a statement, the senior special assistant to the President on media and publicity Garba Shehu, the federal government also threatened to judge the Eurobernation agitators by the company they keep, saying that no one will take them seriously. What's running us to discuss this is Obinna Chukri, he's a legal practitioner, we also have Baba Shola Adegui, he's a political analyst, and Ni Baba Adegui is an international journalist. Thank you very much gentlemen for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right. I'm going to start with you Baba Shola. It's interesting that the Presidency is saying this again. The Presidency has said over and over again about these agitators, that nobody will take them seriously, and now they're reiterating that they will judge them by the company they keep. What exactly do you think the federal government is referring to? When I heard, we will judge you by the company you keep, it sounded as a threat, a way of blackmailing a group of people agitating for self, what you call, rule, what you get. So when I heard that, I went for that to see why, and I heard that because the Nigerian government has declared iPod as a terrorist organization. So for the Yoruba Nation of agitators to be in alliance with the iPod, then they will also regard us as the Yoruba Nation of agitators as terrorists, and that is exactly what I discovered. And the first question I asked myself, that's going to be a United Nations General Assembly today, everybody was aware before today, anybody can go there and agitate. Coming together against governments or agitating for self-determination, I don't see anything wrong in doing that. But the first question is, is iPod a terrorist organization? But it has been declared a terrorist organization by the government in Nigeria, so they do see them as a threat to the government. So are they really wrong in saying that you're associating with people, they term as terrorists, means that you might just be judged in the same light? Well, from their own hand, yes, they have the right to declare them as a terrorist organization, as an Yoruba organization for aligning with them. But the truth is, when we are talking of terrorist organization, where iPod is not, all, every one of them, both iPod and Yoruba Nation agitators, have the same interest. And what is that, what is that, it is the self-determination. It is about having their own nations. So if you are now saying, because of that, you want to raise your hammer on the Yoruba agitators, then definitely you are not being reasonable in what agitation is all about. It is all about wanting these governments to refuse to realize these things. When people are agitating, listen to them, invite them. How many of these people, as this government actually invited, for maybe a report to even hear them out? There is agitation from the left side. Now it is Middle East. Sorry, Middle Belt. Now it's Middle Belt. Before you know it, maybe some other part. Then it means that the government in control of this nation is not really getting it. It is not about declaring some people, attacking a group of people. No, it is not all about trying to blackmail. Are you saying that the government is speaking and choosing who they want to attend to or those they want to hear out? Well, for me, the government is only interested in those they want to hear out. If not... What are these people? If, well, there are people that are talking about the interests of government, the pro-government, the people that will make the government happy. Those are the people this government is actually interested in. Once the government discovers that you are anti-government or you are a critic or say something that does not go down well with them, they see you on the opposite side of the... something of the ring. So if this government is doing this, definitely, you can also see what happened with the media. When the media houses started disclosing a lot of things happening, we know how the NBC sent mail to have one of them to stop what you call... broadcasting some things in respect of the government. How they stop the media houses from using social media, it is all about them. Interesting. Let me come to you, Barsalbina. You are a lawyer and it's interesting because a lot of people ask, is it unlawful to ask for secession within a country and entity like Nigeria? Is it illegal to ask for self-determination? And for the case of iPop, they have been, of course, that's what we said, been prescribed as a terrorist group. So why should the government be criticized for saying that they should not be associated with... rather, that the European nation and the middle-belt groups should not be associating with iPop? Okay. First, thank you for having me. The question as to whether or not self-determination is unlawful, I think it's very clear. The law, the Nigerian law, even international law, supports self-determination. Let's look at it from this angle. It's like a man who has married a wife, maybe more wives. And one of the wives wakes up one morning and says, I'm tired, I do not want to marry again. The law has provided the way or the leeway through which such a marriage can be dissolved. And the law says, you have to go through the court or through either through the high court or through the customary court in order to dissolve the marriage. This thing applies to a country where you will have a dominance or ethnic nationalities in a particular country who may want to self-determine or may want to have a separate nation. I do not think that there is anything wrong in even tribes in Nigeria saying that they want a separate nation. It is expected when you have a country that has more than 500 or more ethnic groups, according to some of the books that I read, there is bound to be altercation. There is bound to be disagreement. People will disagree even to the point that they will say that I do not want to belong to that particular nation. It is not something that one will not expect in a union of many nations or union of many people. But the problem there is the way federal government is handling it. I think federal government is looking at it from the angle that we are government. These people are against government. No, they are not against government. All that federal government needed to have done or needs to do is to their Nigerians, whether it's from the Southwest, whether it's from the Middle West, whether it's from the Southeast. All these geopolitical zones are the makeup of Nigeria. So anytime you have something like that, the even thing to do would have been to set up a commission. I was even surprised that Nigeria does not have an agency that deals with some of these quotas, that deals with disagreements. A nation like Nigeria that has so many tribal groups and all that needs to have a full agency that should be looking into some of these things. We have the constitution. Nigerian constitution tries to solve that problem by one. It's certainly the constitution allowing for federal character. So that there will not be a dominance of one particular ethnic group in their face of government. How has government been able to implement federal character? There is a commission. But how has Nigerian government been able to ensure that the federal character commission does the work? And in that constitution, I think in that section 16 or so, I empower the government to redistribute to it after a certain period of time. Because we all anticipated that after a certain period of time, some few people that may be close to government or close to governments or have a relationship with people that are empowered, they may have enough to promote government pattern that we have so much right that government needs to come in to redistribute right. The constitution also says the way should not be concentrated in the hands of a few. But government, Nigerian government, not the really perceived, is present government. So sensitive regions have failed Nigerians. And that have given rise to the agitations for all the agitations from some of the ethnic groups in Nigeria. The truth remains that to self-determine, it is an add-on that the law allows. And again, looking at it from the point, even when the iPods started, all that they were asking is referendum. It's still a process of law. Referendum is for the law to fight that whenever a particular group wants an autonomy, that particular group will go through with GIAs to help them with the referendum, which will show whether or not they support it. All right, let me go to Babadi. You're, of course, an international journalist. And just as you all know, the United Nations is going to have the General Assembly and our Presidents is going to be in attendance. And there are lots of things that have happened in the country that has given the world our attention of sorts. We had the answers in 2020, and the whole world was looking at Nigeria. And now we're dealing with banditry. The US Senate has withheld sales of some of the equipments that we need to fight terrorism, pointing fingers to human rights abuses. But I'm going somewhere. There has to be a reason why we're having all of these non-state actors creeping up from different parts of the country. Now, AIPAP has been there for a long time. We all know this. But now we're seeing more and more agitations from different parts of the country. So let's talk about the reason why these non-state actors keep increasing in their number and why we're going to keep having these protests outside the United Nations from today up until tomorrow and maybe in the days after. Well, I have been happy to hear you. But with that, I think that we have a poor connection from you. So we'll try again. Maybe we'll just get you on the telephone. But I'm going to come back to you, Bawashala, because we're unable to get Bawadi. Let's talk about the reason why we're having these agitations, which we're having a Sunday ball. And Namdee Khan has been around for a long time, even under the Jonathan administration. We had Radio Biafra, a rogue radio station. And now we're seeing the middle bells for him. We're seeing a lot more people creeping up and having a say. Let's talk about the underlying reasons as to why we're here. Well, the main reason why we are here is because of the necrotism. Yeah, whereby the government is more interested in one part of Hillary and in one part of the nation than the others. If you look at the ministers, if you look at the people, heads of paracelters, agency, those in ministry or holding one position or the other, you will discover that they have been occupied by, majorly, people from a particular tribe. So when, for example, the iPod, iPod virtually started because they felt that they had not been recognized in Nigeria. So they wanted a situation whereby they'd be recognized, whereby, okay, if you are not interested in it, let us go with it. So that is the... But then again, iPod started on the... It gained more prominence under the Jonathan administration and administration headed by a governor from the South-South. So is this really a Bahá'í administration problem? It is not a Bahá'í administration problem. If you are to look at that from the 1960s, I think the people from the Southeast actually had only one president, or one president that actually came from that Southeast. For the past 1960s, up to this now, we are talking of about 15 years or 61 years now. Now, for good 61 years, a particular part of the nation has ruled. And just once, and any time we are talking about who is going to be president, we don't discover that this has not been considered for the position of that president or any of those high positions. So they felt that they are not welcomed. But I don't know, better ways, because I was going to ask that question to Baris Achiku. Is it not about the way that we're going about it that is making the federal government respond? Let's not forget, the reason why we had the Twitter saga is first and foremost, Mr. President's tweet. And the fact that people reported that tweet and saying it was sensitive, it was triggering, et cetera, et cetera. Now we don't have Twitter in Nigeria. But we were asking for the president to speak on issues of insecurity and the president spoke. It didn't go down well with a lot of people. They felt targeted. Yes, that's a different conversation. But how are we going about it? The way we're going about it, the conversations that we're having, the push and the shove, is it being done violently? Could that also be the reason why government is responding the way they're responding? Well, for any good government, for any good government, there must be an interest of the needs of the people. You need to find out why people are protesting, or making a request. It is a matter of their calling for your attention. And once they don't get that attention, they move to the next step. And that is the problem, not only with this government. Just like I told you, we know about the marsup that was in assistance before this hype up came in. I think this hype up came in a way, I think, towards the end of Johnathan's government. If I can remember, it was the end of Johnathan's government. So they came in such a way that to pass a message to the government. But the government is only a need to that. And before you know it, they started spreading, increasing in numbers. And before you know what was happening, they already have the strength. But in Nigeria and outside Nigeria, a good government would have invited someone, the leaders of Hypo, sit down, let's talk. But we are found ourselves in a situation, at least as a nation, whereby once we have a leader in the government, such leader is not interested in the reason. What he's interested in is to keep such group, to keep them mute, to ensure they are not speaking out their mind. Because they see every protest, every agitation as anti-government. And this, of course, is not so. Baisachiko, can you come in here? Because, like I said, I wanted to ask you that question initially. How were we going about it?  Before he was arrested, while he was in Nigeria and arraigned in courts, and before he jumped bail, we saw what happened. We saw what happened in his hometown. Now, let me also take your mind to what happened in the Boho residence, which is still a matter that's in courts. So we might not necessarily discuss that. Could it be something in the way that they are enunciating their demands? Or could it be something in the way that they're grouping, I don't know, recruiting people to be part of their groups or their agitation? I'm trying to understand why the government would first and foremost prescribe iPop. And then now, as saying to the Yoruba nation, we might just judge you by the company that you keep, meaning that in no time we might just group you with those terrorists and probably be termed as terrorists also in the nearest future. But let us look at the manner in which they're going about these agitations. Okay, let me begin by saying that time. Yes, if we look at the manner in which all the pattern of the tactics are done or being used by the agitators, we may find some few areas where I think I would say that they shouldn't have done that way. Let's also look at the federal government or let's look at government, because the social contract simply endows the power that the citizens endow their power to government. Then government in town will now at best act like a father. I would say that federal government did not also do well in some ways, because if people are agitating at the beginning of this agitation, most people wouldn't have gotten to that. The beginning, most of the issues that they raised, I think maybe too quick they were able to convince so many people to have sympathy for them or to join them. There have been issues of inequality in the system or some of the policies of government that they felt may not have favored a particular ethnic group. I think at that point the federal government or government had at least intervened and had a dialogue with them or set up a committee or a commission or whatever that may reach out to them and see how some of their challenges or some of the issues that they may be attended to, I think they are human beings. If you check, as at that point, I can tell you that the interest of those agitators at that point wasn't to recognize Nigeria. It was to find to see whether or not federal government will look into the problem and again try to solve the problem. We had a bigger challenge sometime in the past under the Yeraduwa administration when the NIDA data was also a goal making so many demands. That government was able to, in fact the then vice president also had to go to the creek and he met with them. Some of them were the youth chartered flight, chartered flight to bring some of them to Abuja and negotiate with them. Federal government was able to douse tension. In this one thing that we must know and I think government must take that into cognizance is that military or the use of force no longer solves problem, no longer solves problem in any part of the world, even in US, even in UK and all kinds of, in all the other countries, might or force no longer solves problem because at the end of the day, by the time you start using force, maybe somehow some of the security agencies may also be affected and so-called agitators may be affected. At the end of the day, the thing will snowball into something that everybody will not, the whole country will be running a task either or finding solution to solve the problem. Let's hope that it doesn't get to that point. Let's hope, but let's see if we can establish contact with Nii Babade again. Mr. Babade, can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you now. Great, let's talk about the emergence of Sondik Bohu and the Yoruba Nation. And let's not forget, Sondik Bohu as a person, of course, came out of the woodworks as a result of something that happened in the Southwest. Now we also have the Odwa People's Congress and now it's been called the Yoruba Nation and the Aare or Nakhankafo is also spearheading that and he's been very vocal about some of the things that has happened in the country. So looking at all of these agitations and pairing it, because look, all three regions are at the United Nations right now protesting and they're all protesting for one reason or the other. Some are asking that the president stepped down, some are saying they want secession, the others are saying help the country, I mean, they all have different, but there's one unifying voice, which is they're trying to be heard. Now let's talk about the Yoruba Nation. If the presidency is warning, he's putting out this warning to the Yoruba Nation, does this affect the agitations of the Yoruba Nation? And is it everyone that is from the Southwest that agrees with or welcomes the idea of the Yoruba Nation? Yes, yes, thank you. What Nigeria is witnessing right now is a government that is in 2016. How do we, I always talk about the most crazy, which is government of the people by the people and what the people, to be clean when it comes to the Nigeria issue. Because we, like here at Yoruba, right? Because it's so, it's so crazy who and it's so... I think we lost him again. Unfortunately, the connection is really bad and we're unable to hear him, so we're just going to leave it at that. But I think he was trying to make a point that what we're experiencing now is that the whole country is trying to be heard at the same time and insecurity is obviously the order of the day. So now that the president is at the United Nations, I mean, we've seen people protest in London when the president is going for his medical checkups, we see people protesting, he doesn't really change anything. So before we wrap up this conversation because we're almost out of time, do we see the government shifting grounds anytime soon? But this message that has been put out because the government is citing the fact that in the Southeast, there have been governments installations that have been targeted, INEC offices have been burned down, police officers have been, police stations have been burned down. A lot of havoc has been wrecked. And let's not also forget about the sit-at-home order, which has affected businesses, have affected people's means of livelihoods. And then there's an election coming up in November where some people have been told not to show up for the election. So looking at all of these things that the federal government is pointing to, they obviously seem like threats, but do we see the federal government shifting grounds anytime soon and bringing the people, like you said, to the table? This government, I know, I've not seen the government shifting ground.  Well, that's a heavy allegation to me. Who's the government killed? Well, government killed the people. How? The people that the government is ruling, that the government is ruling, a leading. As long as you are protesting, as we experienced in the end of 2020, as long as you are protesting against the government, the government can send soldiers there and the other dispatches there. And by the way, in the process, the soldiers will start using the ground, ammunition to kill just like what happened last day. So it has happened and it will happen. This government, I'm saying, this government I know of is not ready to shift as long as their own image is intact. As long as they are protecting the image of the government, they are less interested in anything. In fact, the agitation we are talking about, the truth is, the people who are agitated for Yoruba nations, they are not even in Nigeria. You get, that is why you see millions of them, thousands of them protesting or doing a lot of things. They are actually doing it as a disnation. And the reason why the government is happy about this thing is this. The Yoruba nation, before now, had the concrete set to the United Nations to give a speech during the General Assembly. But I want to believe that it became possible for them because the vice president of the United Nations, or is it vice president of the Deputy Secretary General, is in Nigeria, who opposed to be a full-time woman. You got my point. Definitely would not allow that to say to her. And you're just making this up because you obviously, she hasn't come out to say that she would stop that happening. That says, I say. These are all speculations. Yes, that's why I use our, would not have allowed that. You get, would not have allowed that to happen because he's representing the government, which is Nigerian, Nigerian government. So- Well, she's representing the United Nations. In the United Nations, definitely, as long as she's in Nigerian, the Nigerian blood will still be in her vein. Okay. In closing, Vice-Chicu, like I asked him, we see a lot of things happening in the country where, I mean, the country has a lot on its plate, including Mr. President. And we're dealing with insecurity. We're dealing with the deep dive of the economy. Our Naira is nothing to, I mean, compared to the dollar. I think as yesterday was 550. I mean, point to anything now, we really can't say that things are really going well for us, even though statistics has it that the number of people that have been abducted or killed lately has reduced. But then the elections are just around the corner and I've asked somebody this question before. Do we see government changing or moving, you know, in a direction that might want to appease the people, at least being that they would be wanting our votes in a few months? I think government will shift grants once they get, that's why programs like this I think should be encouraged so that government will also get ideas from people. I think government will shift grants. What is needed now is for the federal government to set up a truce commission or committee. Let that committee talk the geopolitical zones, especially the ones that are agitating. At least for the first time, let them itemize, even if it's a list of one to 10, let them itemize the reason behind the agitation, so the reasons behind the protest, then report of the truce commission or committee. Federal government can move on from there and see whether they can enlarge it to include the principal actors or the people that are championing these agitations. Then on the strength of that, I think that if federal government does that, then we can say that the government has shifted grants and that I can tell you, we may make progress. We may make progress because when you ignore people like that, you are telling them that they are insignificant and when you say people are insignificant, I think they will want to maybe throw in lawful means also show you that they are significant. Let the federal government reach out to middle beds, reach out to south-west, reach out to southeast, reach out to south-south, reach out to all the people, even the north-west and all that, reach out to them, let's have a discussion. This nation belongs to us, we have no other nation. I think if the government does that, we might be able to down station them. Finally, the rhetorics from the president's media people to me needs to change the way most of the comments that have been binded in the press are linked to them. I do not think that will engender, it will not engender unity. Even using the language that Euroban nation or whatever will be judged by the company, I come from statistics are well over 40, 50 million. You don't talk to people like that, let those rhetorics or the language or whatever that is coming from the handlers of Mr. President and all the other people, let them tone it down, let them not inflame this society the more. Nigeria has suffered so much within the past 34 years at the international level. Nigeria is like a parallel state. Nigeria is no longer recon-weight. Even in West Africa, how long shall we continue like this? They need to have a change of heart, stop talking the way they are talking, that will not help us. Okay, well, Nii Babade is an international journalist who has been a trigger, is a barrister at law and Babashala Adebi is a political analyst. Thank you very much gentlemen for being part of the conversation. We appreciate it. Thank you for that. All right, well, we'll take a short break and when we return, we will discuss the ruling ABC persuading former President Goodlock Jonathan to join its party. How true is it? We'll be right back. Ah.


maybe this rivalries back now I know some players are gonna be missing in this one including Chris sale we know that will Jay have pitch on Saturday we're gonna find that out as well but it begins this four-game series with CC sabbatia against the lefty Brian Johnson pitching in sales place CC can really do a nice job setting a tone for this series and getting the Yankees back on track I think that CC's job Bob we've given that stat so often about his numbers after Yankee losses going back to the beginning of the 2017 season we've given it so often that I don't remember what it was exactly but it's 12 and all or 13 and one or something like that the point is he's been terrific after Yankee losses and more than that as you said this is a mega monumental series for the Yankees they want to go up there send a little message to the Red Sox bite into that deficit CC is a guy who goes out there with a plan and an approach the Yankees usually know what they're getting from him and by the way the last time he faced the Red Sox a Yankee stadium about a month ago seven glistens


act of verbal behavior. Another thing to think of is formal similarity. Formal similarity. I hope we don't get charged for that jingle. Anyway, so formal similarity is when the sense mode matches the antecedent stimulus and the response. So for instance, if I go, hi Ryan. And I write down, Brad said hi. Or I say, hi Brad, on paper. On paper. Keyword on paper, that is not formal similarity. And if I go, formal similarity. And I say, formal similarity. There you go. Formal similarity.


I'm Salma Dada reporting for CalTV Entertainment and this is a Taste of the Mission. I think that the Mission District has gone through generations of diversity and it continues to evolve with this wave of technology. So you own Taco Licious as well. How does your vision of Taco Licious and Chino differ and kind of where did both of those come from? You know, they actually have everything in common and nothing in common. They're both passion projects and they're both extensions of who I am as a person. I like things casual and easy and without any kind of pretentiousness and I like delicious food at the center of it. Does Chino have a signature dish or something that you particularly like for yourself I guess? Yeah, you know what? We started the entire restaurant based around Sha Long Bao soup dumplings and we were fortunate enough to find Leo Gan who's from Shanghai and he's in his late fifties and he's been making Sha Long Bao his entire life and we have him stationed over here and he makes great little dumplings for us and everything else kind of just filled itself in. We just have a love for Sha Long Bao for dumplings and noodles and cocktails and we didn't really see anybody putting them together so we thought it was something that we could do in this neighborhood and we were fortunate enough to find the building. What's your vision behind craftsman and wolves itself? The vision was to do a, I spent a lot of time in France and in Japan for pastry and I didn't think that that would actually just kind of translate here but also cooking at places like Quince in the Bay Area. I wanted to do something that was a representation of California and kind of a Northern California product and so that was primarily the vision as a patisserie that has a little bit more focal point on kind of a seasonality and spontaneity. Kind of speaking of delicious and intriguing, I kind of want to talk about the Rebel Within, one of the most Instagram food items in San Francisco. So can we just talk a little bit about that? Sure, so the Rebel Within inspired originally by a product in a butcher shop in France which was all the ends of the scrap meats kind of baked in the savory cake.  So it's definitely an introduction for people to kind of, oh we got to go here and get the egg thing and then kind of be like, whoa there's more than the egg thing. Can you disclose maybe another innovative thing that you might be brewing up in the kitchen? Actually yes, I guess I can. We've been currently working on croissant dough again that we cut thin and we wrap around a metal tube and then we bake that until it's really crispy and then we kind of, we've been stuffing it with like different fruits and different things and so that's something we're working on. It's kind of like a souped up cannoli maybe. Thank you so much for sitting down with me, I really appreciate it.


Good afternoon. Thank you very much for the invitation. I'm very glad to be here. I work essentially right on the other side of the channel in North Western France and specifically in Brittany. So it's a great pleasure for me to be here and exchange with my English class because I'm very interested in what happened here in your country. So I'm very glad and I hope it will be an occasion for future collaboration together. However, I don't really know what to present today because since 2013, I'm now in charge of excavation of a rock shelter, so it's not really on the topic, and I'm also in charge of a research program about rock shelters. Actually, we are in an opposite research clinic at the moment in Brittany because since the beginning of prehistoric research, we focused on openers sites and it's given a lot of openers sites. And now we are realizing that even if we don't have limestone context with big caves and large shelters like you have, we do have also small rock shelters which were occupied during prehistory. There are just small spaces on the boulder and these kinds of things. And so we are now focusing on this side in order to complete a picture of Palo Alto. So I think about it and I decided to present a site I excavated almost 10 years ago now and to see what these openers sites can bring as information for the very end of the late national in the Western Europe. So this site is named La Fosse. I won't trust it in French but it's not really used for a site. And it's an important site because it changes your mind about the technology. It brings us very important information about the technology of the last Palo Alto communities but it also contributed to our understanding of the Palo Alto economic system of these last Palo Alto communities. So the site is located in Miami which is a region between the Paris Basin and Brittany. And more specifically the site is located in a big Harubio plain in the largest meander of the river. And it was discovered by an avocational archaeologist between the river and the large quarry. And so we only excavated 120 meters square which is pretty small but the site is pretty big. But probably destroyed or at least recovered by the quarry. The quarry is right here. Everything here is a big quarry and the site is here. But the surveying we did and the testing we did at this period show that the site was much larger with an extension probably of three hectares with only GS1 of all the same transition materials. So we don't have bones in Brittany as the soil is too acidic. So we only work on lipix and the technological studio of the Leicester-Gesson waste and 40,000 alpha-pipes and so on show us very good similarities with the GS1 of the same transition sites. And that's a very interesting period as you probably know because there is a major change in lipid technology with the return of normalized bread production after a long period of progressive simplification of lipid technology during the phytonasaur or azalea for me it's kind of the same. After the end of the magnolium. And these big changes, this return of the blade production comes with several phenomenon like the return of two blades as a main objective of production contrary to the gazillion where blades for the projected points are the main objective of production. A more selective raw material use, a great diversification of predicted points and a very important normalization of tools. So we are right here at the very end of the GS1 and probably more at the beginning of the pre-boreal but we have this plateau which is complicated. So finding site for this period is not a scoop at all. End of the late-lash outside are very common in Northern France and here in England. This side are very particular in general with low proportion of retouch tubes, large concentrations of debitage waste, not really clear growing structure and this side are cold in Northern France but it wasn't and here long blade assemblages. In both case the main characteristic of this production is supposed to be the length of the blade as we saw yesterday. With this side we are trying to show you that the situation is going to be less clear if we try to think about a wider area and this length of the blade may not be even important. Hopefully you get what I say of my English tattoo. So for me with this research in Northern France, length is important but it's more an optional character and an optional character directly linked with the geological context linked with raw material availability. These blades are regular, they are normalized, they are straight in profile and my research also suggests this blade to be very flat in section. That means very large and thin with acute cutting edges and I think that the most important characteristic of this production is acute cutting edges. So this was initially recognized at La Force and in other sites in Northern France and we are now able to recognize this kind of pattern in South-West France with Michael Lee, and recently he was also recognized in a third place in Northern France after the revocation of the collection of this region by Michael Lee. I think this characteristic is pretty characteristic of this industry where a large area probably from Spain to northern Germany at least where you can find this particular flatness and straightness of the blade and so I'm thinking about a large technical place regrouping several traditions like the late Flavorian or the Aetian Red Volga or whatever and I think long blades sites or bellwesend sites I mean my definition of long blade and bellwesend sites are only functional frascais of these various traditions inside this large technical place. So the production of these flat blades implies a risky reference because if you want flat and straight blades you need to have surfaces with low lateral and longitudinal convexities that means very risky you can have a lot of accidents so all the production is oriented toward the attention of these blades and so they use soft stone armor, the progression of the production is very special the blades are only used to reinitiate the reduction and they use two opposite platforms with various rhythms. The importance of flat blades is also suggested as a user analysis of this material the entire assemblage was studied by a user analyst, Jeremy Jacquet and he showed that the blades were intensely used unretouched all these flat blades with acute cutting edges were used unretouched and it's a large part of the toolkit and retouched tools like scrapers or bearings were regularly recycling blades initially used unretouched so blades were firstly used unretouched and sometimes after recycled to scrapers and bearings so this strategy but also the maintenance strategy we identified in the site suggests a constant desire to take advantage of the acute cutting edges of the blade all this technology and user study go to the same way to see that the flat blades are very important objective of production all these groups so with these blades are also some blade nets blade nets which were used to produce projective points at that point they are mainly straight back points so-called long-sharp points very typical of the late-laborian tradition but we also have strapless blade by truncature is that one of the best results of that post because we found I think it's 50 strapless blade by truncature we knew that this kind of projective were present in late-laborian sites but for a long time people considered them to be intrusive from mesolithic or neolithic components with these very well-dressed sites with only one layer we are now sure that this projective point is typical of the late-laborian tradition and it is actually the first evidence of transverse overhead for pressure so with these typical late-laborian elements we also found several small penumpilative points and oblique truncated points at that post and these elements are very similar to the one known in the APRF project so it is very interesting to find on this site typical late-laborian influences but also in the arrethmonchance influences I will come back on this later but it's a very interesting point so the site is well preserved because of this context in the bottom of the lever with a floating seal in fine aluminum so we were able to recognize several drainage structures looking at the distribution of the elements and the identification of the clear wall effects we were able to identify at least two 5m large circular structures centered around the earth and we also were able to identify cleaning activities in these structures with a reject of the larger elements especially quartz on the wall of the structure I can talk hours about the site and with the distribution of each kind of tool but you can see very interesting patterns in the management of the artifacts inside the structures so these evidences as all the data from the technological study and useware study allowed to investigate on the status of the site the high density of artifacts, the large extension of the site the emphasis on the tool duration and the cleaning activities suggest a long occupation span of this site then the identification of diversified lip mapping skills also suggest diversified social group composition of those and finally the important lately production activities activities related to hunting, skin crafting and also crafting activities suggest very various type of activities on the site so we have a site with a long occupation span, diversified group and large spectrum of activities so we think it's a residential site when we look at raw material provisioning strategies we think that various type of raw material were introduced to the site as cores, shape cores, blanks or blanks and we are in Brittany, that means very far away from any flint outcrop as the closest point is probably 50 km away and so all these materials are coming from long distance sometimes more than 300 km and more interestingly I think from every direction from the north, from the south, from the east but also from the west, it's not on the map that we have some flints coming from this area very few that we have so I think that's very interesting because this result the fact that the site was occupied by a diversified group involved in various activities but also the fact that we have evidence of various traditions from the north and from the south is for me an evidence that although to propose the idea of a large aggregation site for this period, the very end of the upper valley so it's only a hypothesis, I mean I'm very, I don't really like to give this type of hypothesis but also that we have go to this way so that's a hypothesis but it fits pretty well with the Palaeoconautic model suggested by my research in western France but also by my colleagues in northern France and there is a basin of a big change in Palaeoconautic strategies after the I don't remember that, I mean after the Azzillian during this GS1 analysis and transition where we think to have an increase a great increase in task-oriented sites the best example of this task-oriented site are probably what we called the Bay-Wazen site what you call probably the long-legged assemblages that mean sites with only west-east of the detached penetration, no real great structure very few tools, only bruce-blades, you know something very special and so these sites were generally interpreted as a big workshop but the great improvement of the generalization of extensive user study sometimes the extensive study of the entire assemblages allowed to get a better picture of this small task-oriented site because we saw that even if we don't have a lot of pre-touch tools in these assemblages a lot of the blades are re-touch blades were used as tools a high proportion so there is no tools, but there is a lot of tools real tools we also realized that even if blades were exported from this site to other sites some other blades were imported to this site from the site so there is circulation of blades from one site to the other not only producer, but also resider of blades so these new elements change our picture change our view or understanding of the resin site and now we are used to consider them as skill sites used for primal treatment of the game and where people take advantage of the presence of good raw material to produce new knives for the next hunt so of course they produce a lot of known blades to make knives but it was probably in association with something else and probably to butcher it if this model is correct there is no reason for a lack of peruasian known blade site in other regions southern England and northern France if this model is correct we should find this type of site where we have good raw material and that's not totally the case for the moment anyway we found this site a few years ago in center west France where we had very rare with touch tools a lot of quests of digital of digital high proportion of core and all these cores are discards very early in the regression sequence probably because people produce large and known blades and they discard it so just wanted large blades to make knives so in this brand new steel in cores, studio steel in cores the site is a surface site so we have to be very careful with this data but maybe we have very south of the normal region maybe we have a site which could be instead of statues a peruasian or long blade site so the primary economic model we published a few years ago with my friend Jamie Jacqui tried to to sum up all this data and I'm too late to describe it in detail but this model is solely based on opener sites and I think it is a BS we need also to look at rock shutter I mean there is no rock shutter or opener site we need to combine our vision of type of sites and when you look in south-western France especially the site that is created by my friend Mathieu Ramele you see that the data we have in the rock shutters they didn't change our model we have residential site rock shutter and also task oriented site in rock shutters so the studio platforms breaks several important results some of them are directly linked with the fact it is an opener site because the good conservation the special organization for example using data about the site statues and start building a new public economic model for the last community opener sites clearly offer site with a potential high archeological resolution so in my opinion that's what's opener site I'm trusting anyway it is very important also in Paris to develop research on rock shutters even if they generally offer less good spatial resolution because they were frequently reoccupied on pre-stories they generally offer useful complex geography but beyond that they also represent the easiest way to study small sites and small sites are very important in my opinion to understand hunter-gatherers economical system because there exists whatever the mobility system is logistical, residential everything in between the problem with small sites is they have very low archeological resolution it's very hard to find them in syria and archeology or in survey so rock shutters are a good way to investigate the small sites because they are very easy to spot in the landscape so I'm in charge now of a research program called tech shutters with Pedro Marchand and the site we discovered in the framework of this program we excavated a few of them early azillian and mesolithic and all the sites we excavated in this context are always very task oriented sites like butchery site, hunting camp it's always very very task oriented so it's very important to focus also on this site to know these small sites which are complementary with this large opener site with a very high resolution so that would be my conclusion thank you very much


Hello, YouTube. This is a video right up for the challenge diversity for 30 points in the cryptography category of HATCON CTF 2018 So the challenge from here is so much diversity my mind boggles and we're given this text Which looks like it has a lot of numbers with supposedly a B preface saying an X preface saying a D preface saying an O preface saying for different kinds of Numbers or data just represented in different ways maybe base 2 or base 16 or base 10 etc. So binary hexadecimal decimal and octal So let's go ahead and just convert all these to what we would expect to see and then see if they actually translate into anything else So I'm gonna open up my terminal I'm just going to create a script here that I can work with them Go ahead and make a shebang line for Python and I'm gonna make a string for this Just call it s and we'll start to work So what I want to do is gonna go ahead and replace just kind of a quick and easy thing to remove all the spaces with a B the preface it to change them to a space zero B So it puts them in a form that Python can understand The only thing that we're gonna miss here is this very first binary value because there is no space Prefacing this so I'm just gonna put a zero there and that'll make things easier for us in the long run And we'll do the same thing with the hexadecimal values. We'll put a zero X and said Taking note of the space So we'll keep track of all those and that way Python will be able to handle them very easily same thing with octal and for decimal. It's a little bit different because binary, I'm sorry Python doesn't use a D to preface a decimal number. It just doesn't have anything to preface it It's just the regular number so if I wanted to I could print out s now and view it and we have all of these in a form that Python could Understand if we were to just slap this in a Python interpreter. Let's go ahead and actually make it an array So we can handle it pretty easily So I'm gonna change all the spaces to commas and I'm gonna go ahead and say s can equal start of a Brace here with the string added in and same thing with an ending string brace here So we've got all this now and Python gonna handle this very very easily if we let it eval this However, I don't want to just straight up eval because that's kind of bad What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna actually just get it from the PON module because they have a safe eval function You can check out in their documentation. So what I'm gonna do is it going to run Python Safe eval and that function comes from the PON module here And we actually want to use the expression so .expr and then we'll pass in s I'll go ahead and print this out looks like sublime text won't want to run it So I'll have it in my terminal here We just run Python 8 and you can see okay It has converted all of those different like bases whether or not it be binary decimal hex or octal into just straight decimal So what we can do now is do some handy list comprehension to go ahead and take the character values of all of these Let's use character of X for X in that string or that list there And we can go ahead and run this and now you can see we've got some English text coming together Well, let's go ahead and join these as a string and Now you should be able to see hey welcome to hack on 18 organize blah blah blah here is your flag I wish all the tasks were this easy dark code sweet So we could carve that out if we really wanted to let's do that just for nice practice I suppose write our own get flag script. We don't need to import the whole name space Let's just import re and then we'll say New s can equal that re dot find all With our flag format dark code Everything inside the curly braces and the current s to print that out We get a hit after we run in the terminal great Let's get the first element out of that and that is our flag go ahead and move this if we wanted to make that a power get flag script Mark it as executable Take that flag Create a static file with it just in case our script no longer works for whatever reason and we can mark that challenge as complete So simple and easy pretty cool. Just recognizing that it were just different kinds of bases denoting those numbers Quick shout out to all my supporters on patreon. Thank you guys so much I cannot say it enough one dollar a month or more on patreon will give you a special shout out Just like this at the end of every video five dollars or more on patreon will give you early access to everything They're released on YouTube before it goes live because I know in their court in bulk and let YouTube gradually release them slowly on a schedule If you did like this video, please do like comment and subscribe Join our discord server link the description. It is a cool community of CTF players programmers and hackers You should totally join it if you want to hang out with me and other awesome people We're gonna tackle I CTF when it's coming up next weekend I think Nighthawk CTF just got postponed, but there are some practice challenges. So jump on there and game with us Hey, I would love to see you guys on patreon and I would love to see you in the next video. See you soon