Rabbitholeathon

I reached the waitlist for rabbitholeathon but am semi-proud of my application, so here it is. I think I was pretty close.

Name

Sachin Iyer

Email

https://sachiniyer.com/contact

Discord Username

ripe_mango (or matrix - @sachiniyer:matrix.org)

Where do you live

San Francisco, California, USA

Link to Twitter/X

No twitter but lemmy - @ripe_banana@lemmy.world and mastodon - @ripe_mango@mastodon.social

Have you applied to rabbitholeathon before

No

Share some things you’ve made

• https://blog.sachiniyer.com
• https://sachiniyer.com
• https://sachiniyer.com/projects - Pretty much all of my personal/technical projects

Some ideas that I am working on/thinking about:

• Federated Wireguard key management with Headscale
• Privacy Reviews of Music Tech - à la mozilla’s privacynotincluded
• Lemmy (federated reddit) community graph - connections between subs/servers

Tell us about some rabbitholes

I will just focus on one, which is my obsession with Aaron Swartz. I think I was semi-afraid of having opinions and speaking out about politics or advocacy. Was it because of insecurity, impostor syndrome, or worries of rejection by those around me? I'm not sure. Do those feelings persist to the present? Maybe.

However, Aaron Swartz was (and is) an amazing proxy for many of the ideals I hold near and dear. His beliefs on freedom of information, democratizing technology, privacy rights, and governmental transparency correspond almost exactly with what I believe in.

In his honor, and in line with the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, I created a JSTOR proxy in my freshman year with a small network exploit and a set of Raspberry Pis. It has since (probably for the best) gone down. I also created a openly contributable archive of textbooks necessary to get through all of our engineering classes. Orders of magnitude more time that semester were spent on ways to fulfill the ideals of open access than on actual schoolwork.

In the past few months, I have "gone down the rabbit hole" and read all his previous blog posts, gone through all the still live links in his pinboard, and listened to a bunch of his old talks. There are so many more things I learned…

thread 'main' panicked at 'word limit reached', q8.rs:23:49`

On person-problem fit.

I believe I have good alignment with some strong principles. By alignment I mean the difference between my values and the way I live. I also have a good understanding of technology. This puts me in a great position to build software that furthers my values. However, another position, albeit less explored, is to write about and research my technological beliefs.

Some of my core technological principles are:

• “Free Software; Free Society” - RMS (I idolize the message, not the person)
• Privacy is a Human Right - as described in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• “Information wants to be free” - Stewart Brand

I am also in the center the venn diagram of three circles:

• Read many of the writings of late ’90s and 2000s internet advocates
• Part of the new generation of software engineers (influenced by FAANG and ML)
• A desire to further my thoughts in internet advocacy

Although somewhat uncomfortable, I think I have all the necessary tools and knowledge to start crafting positions and arguments in favor of my beliefs.

Share a list of recommendations

Books (all available via https://annas-archive.org):

• Lawrence Lessig
  • Free Culture
  • Code and other laws of cyberspace
  • The Boy Who Could Change the World (actually the writings of Aaron Swartz)
• RMS
  • RMS Essays - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf
• Paul Goldstein
  • Copyright’s highway: from Gutenberg to the celestial jukebox
• Cory Doctorow (his science fiction is great too)
  • Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free
• Ted Chiang
  • Everything is so good…rng is the only way to choose
• There is more, but will avoid long lists of book recs (in the spirit of Ezra Klein)

To choose just one - something by Lawrence Lessig

Blogs/Websites:

All available with rss

• https://pluralistic.net/
• https://craphound.com/
• https://stratechery.com/ - need to create a free account
• https://gregorygundersen.com/
• https://annas-blog.org/
• https://scottaaronson.blog/ and https://scottaaronson.com/
• https://thesephist.com/
• https://boz.com/
• https://simonwillison.net/
• https://www.antipope.org
• https://durmonski.com
• https://mcfunley.com/
• https://nutcroft.com/
• https://www.404media.co/
• https://jeremykun.com/
• https://seb.jambor.dev/
• https://overengineer.dev/
• https://www.lesswrong.com/
• https://choward1491.github.io/
• https://benjojo.co.uk/
• https://waxy.org/
• https://ploum.net
• https://fietkau.blog/
• https://www.joelonsoftware.com
• https://itsg.host/
• https://jplattel.nl/
• https://lessig.tumblr.com/
• https://fediversereport.com

To choose just one - https://scottaaronson.blog/

Music:

Warning: I grew up playing jazz, and seriously considered doing it for a living (Roughly in order of musician’s age)

• John Coltrane
• Michael Brecker
• Ahmad Jamal
• McCoy Tyner
• Thelonious Monk
• Chet Baker
• Johnny Hodges
• Wayne Shorter
• Lee Morgan
• Tommy Flanagan
• Pharoah Sanders
• Jackie McLean
• Joe Pass
• Dexter Gordon
• Jaco Pastorius
• Joshua Redman
• Chick Corea
• Kenny Garrett
• Pat Matheny
• Sons of Kemet
• Marshall Gilkes
• Larnell Lewis
• Michael Mayo
• Aaron Parks
• Eric Harland
• Kendrick Scott
• Robert Glasper
• Greg Spero
• Braxton Cook
• Telemakus
• Athletic Progression
• Nate Smith
• Ruby Rushton
• Elena Pinderhughes
• Alfa Mist
• Javiar Santiago
• Avishai Cohen
• Linda May Han Oh
• Brian Blade
• Chris Dave
• Makaya McCraven
• Immanuel Wilkins
• Kassa Overall
• Walter Smith III

this is too long, I could do this forever, but I need to stop. If there is just one choice - John Coltrane

What do you plan on exploring

I usually gravitate to technological problems with clear engineering-based solutions. However, if I come to rabbitholeathon, I would like to push myself. Instead, I would want to read/write about modern federation.

Here are some things I might try to do:

• Aim to write my own declaration about the necessity of federation and decentralized control in social media networks. It may include reasoning about why centralized, proprietary social network are dangerous and unethical, as well as why federated networks are the natural solution to uphold fundamental human rights.
• Try to understand the fundamental motives for federation. Why would we like spreading out our information everywhere? Why did the internet start federated? Does society actually care about federation?
• I find that the people closest to a technology are often the best to find flaws in that technology (see Gary Klein’s Premortem). I think it would be productive to actually try to find the major flaws in federation, and why it could fail.

Anything else we should know

Dietary Restrictions - I am vegan (another one of those belief alignment things)