Life & Research Notes

Evidently some new secret stuff is in the works. Looks hot, yet also makes me wistful thinking about all the great stuff I could be learning with those guys if I was still there. For more, see Luis’s post, and screenshots (1, 2, 3) and videos (1, 2) on PLWire.

This thesis envisions the future of trust and social commitment in a highly connected society. Starting with a distributed, democratized labor force and economies of efficient niche production and consumption, we predict radical shifts in the meaning and methods of commitment and the institutions of trust. The central experiment of this thesis is Promiserver, a web-based service and toolset for creation of lightweight contracts—dubbed promises—that are written as code. The service decouples commitment logic from specific applications, providing a generalized tool and forum for dynamic creation, binding, and evaluation of promises. The goal of Promiserver is to facilitate new models of collaboration by offering a sensible, lightweight, and agile promise system as an alternative to traditionally heavy legal commitments.

Promiserver: Procedurally Executed, Socially Enforced Microcontracts
(100 pages, 12MB PDF)

I sit here staring at this one section of my thesis, and I roughly know what I want to communicate, but maintaining focus on that core idea seems to require every single brain cell, and most of them are sleeping, busy or not interested.

Is self-discipline one small part of your brain bullying the other parts?