WEBVTT

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Let's welcome the next speaker, it's Fintan, who's going to talk about radical, local

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first code collaboration.

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Let's welcome him.

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Even better.

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Yeah, it's my first time to pause them.

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Thanks for sticking around this schedule.

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It's so stacked, like it's crazy.

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Thanks Nico for organizing everyone else.

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Yeah, it's amazing.

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I'm Fintan, I work on radical as a maintainer.

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I'm like here about local first digital sovereignty, functional programming, and also

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like during handstands and calisthenics.

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I've been working on radical for six years, just over six years now.

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So I'll take you through some of this.

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But first, I'd like to say happy Saint Bridges Day, because I'm Irish.

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Yeah, a great day for fertility, first day of spring, up women.

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So before I get into radical, I have to say that I got into open source software

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by working on open source projects on GitHub.

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GitHub is the home for open source.

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Bush lately, it feels like it's a shaky ground or a shaky foundation that we're building on,

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because Microsoft acquired it.

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Microsoft is a UF owned entity, and that has implications.

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I'm lucky enough to be based in London now, Bush.

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In Ireland, and I've never been bound off GitHub, but all there has been due to their

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geolocation.

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Not only that, the CEO of GitHub stepped down recently, and GitHub is under the arm of the

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AI division in GitHub, or in Microsoft.

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And they've trained their co-pilot AI on our free and open source software.

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So what can we do about it?

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Well, GitHub is already decentralized.

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This is amazing.

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And Bush, radical, does is adds a decentralized network layer on top of that, as well as

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bundling the more code collaboration or like the social artifacts inside of GitHub and

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disperses this through the decentralized network.

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So my colleague Lawrence is in the decentralized internet and privacy room.

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He would have talked by now on the whole decentralized element of radical.

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So watch the recording of that, but I'll get into more of the code collaboration and local

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first end of things.

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You might remember this phase from earlier.

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Briefly Alex worked on radical.

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I was sorry to see him go, but it's okay.

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He's better off there.

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But he pioneered what we call collaborative objects or cobs.

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And these are local first CRDTs that were bundling in GitHub.

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So how radical is kind of laid out is we use or abuse Git name spaces.

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Every peer has their own name space.

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So the simplified version here is got Alice, Bob, and Eve.

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And they have their own set of references.

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And references just point to commits.

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And so in this case, we can jump to the idea of them having a reference to a particular issue.

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If we then combine those references, we can create the commit graph.

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And we get this graph of an issue where we can start off with a title in the description.

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Alice might make one comment, Bob might make another comment in parallel.

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Eve labels the issue and so on and so forth until it gets closed.

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So the commits contain operations and operations have actions in them.

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But then what we need then is to be able to walk this graph.

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We do it in a like topological sort with some type breaking and produce some more consumable JSON.

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So this is what our like CLIs or web interfaces use to present issues or patches.

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One problem with that evaluation function is that one way to do it is through native rust through our library.

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And in other ways through the CLIs or through like user owned binaries.

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So this gives access to like file system, IO, anything can be like executed.

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So this is one problem I'd like you to keep in consideration for a later slide.

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Another problem is that all the existing hubs are mostly defined by us at the moment.

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So we have issues, we have patches, we have this idea of an identity for repository that's also a Cobb.

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And we have the job Cobb which is for like CI, CD kind of stuff.

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But as far as we know the others is the empty session.

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So in the future we'd like to make this a bit easier.

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I might just do a quick show of my terminal to give you an idea of what that looks like.

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So here I'm in the heartwood repository with this is where we write the radical protocol.

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And if I run rad issue, I can list out the issues.

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And if I do rad issue show.

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We can see the text, the author, some labels, it's status.

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We've got the same for patches.

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Something interesting about patches in radical is that they're immutable.

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So each revision is a mutable change based on the last one, which is a nice feature because we can interchange revisions easily.

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And rollbacked or like choose ones like previous ones that might have been a better implementation, but someone experimented with the revision.

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Let me go back.

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So something I've been thinking about for the future is maybe using WebAssembly for these Cobbs.

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The idea is kind of like a plug-in system.

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So WebAssembly kind of gives you the a little bit more security.

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One idea in WebAssembly is like this idea of fuel.

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So the executable drains from the fuel reserves for each operation.

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So it can't run forever in a recursive loop ruining your system somehow.

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And another aspect is that it can't access IO.

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I think there are some like proposals for interfaces, what their capability based.

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So and then also these like binary executables could also be distributed through Git as well.

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Maybe hide in them inside Blobs and this makes them distributed through the network as well.

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That's more of an idea right now.

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We have an experimented with it.

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But if anyone is more familiar with like WebAssembly, please come talk to us.

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But that's it.

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That's kind of the run through of local first experience,

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but if you go to Radical, ICLE.xYZ, there's links to our Zulu,

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where we chat about the protocol itself.

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And yeah, come chat to us, come try out Radical.

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Let us know what's not working, what's working, and everything in between.

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Thank you.

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We're going to take questions.

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There is five minutes of a question for Fintan.

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Yes.

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So how is replication of potentially unwanted artifacts from third party?

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It's from third party peers.

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Like say spam issues or other content.

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Sure, yeah.

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That's a good question.

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Get that a lot.

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So part of it is just a kind of policy system.

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So when you notice a node that you don't like,

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you can rad block to add it to a block list and your node will start filtering out.

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It's pretty rudimentary right now,

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but we want to go that up into our richer ecosystem where people can build maybe more automated tools for detecting that.

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I'm just doing it for you or even exchange in block lists.

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Can you like retroactively get rid of stuff that's been like added that you don't want?

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There are ways to like, yeah, it comes to delish prides of cobs, but it's a little bit hard because it's a get graph.

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So those objects lie around and you'd have to do some more manual forensics for the giant being.

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Yeah, thanks.

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Good question.

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What were chances?

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Yeah.

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Thank you.

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So the question is about accessibility.

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Because I found this is pretty super cool.

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I really would like to be able to embark on it.

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Yeah.

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But I am a little bit worried about the accessibility considerations.

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So to give just one example, the script that you used to install.

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I was reading it during the talk.

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Yeah.

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Well, you used colors to mark errors.

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And the second example is like, you used zoolip to communicate.

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I'm not sure it's the most accessible way to communicate actually.

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So do you consider moving while taking accessibility considerations into account at all the levels of the project,

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including the communication means?

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And for instance, I assume that metrics would be more like it's a higher chance to be accessible right?

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Right.

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My nature.

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Yeah.

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I love that question.

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Thanks.

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And I appreciate that.

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Like, I, so to speak blind to these problems.

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Because I don't have accessibility issues.

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And we're a very small team.

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So it's something that I'd love to see.

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But I don't know where to start with that.

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And I didn't even realize that through the paths accessibility issues.

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Yeah.

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If you want to chat about it more, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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Yeah.

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Thanks for watching.

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And I mean, everything was on the slides.

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But the slides are not on the page of the conference.

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I'm kind of stuck.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Thank you.

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First of all, great talk.

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Thank you.

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And just a comment, but hopefully not an annoying one.

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And it's that I do have a assembly like a lot for my job.

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So you certainly pick my interest.

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If you want to talk about assembly sometime and need advice or anything.

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Yeah.

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Please.

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We should be to chat.

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It's, it's called that you're using it.

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Yeah.

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Do you ever get examples of source code getting lost?

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Because the page will go offline?

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No.

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Yes.

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Yeah.

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And we have the benefit of people hosting like super seed.

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So replicating the whole network.

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Which is a fantastic size of 50 gigabytes or so right now.

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Yeah.

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Next question.

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Yeah.

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Two actually.

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The one is,

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What is the scale?

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What is the amount of issues that you have imported into radical from an existing project?

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If that is something that has happened?

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Sure.

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And the other one is, if you say, have a, let's say, a primary or,

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Let's say, a official repository somewhere,

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Yeah.

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Can you decide who gets to send you stuff?

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Yes.

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Yes.

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I'm going to cheat and tell you to watch my colleagues talk recording.

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Because he's actually got some graphs for numbers.

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And then the second question is, again, yeah, there's like the policy system.

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So we actually host our own nodes.

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That is locked down to repositories that we care about only.

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And don't let the rest of the network come in.

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Yeah.

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Thanks.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.