there we go we're basically life not really life now I get it so Jonathan I
want to start with saying thanks two times three times actually so first of
all thanks for being insane enough to come here on you know like with very
little knowledge about what it is yeah it was a it was a challenging trip to
get here but it's been a very good trip yeah it took a couple landing attempts
and a couple days delay but that's that's how Madeira is it's a crazy
airport the second thanks goes to agreeing to do this go on the record to
talk FIPS and I'm gonna grill you about FIPS a little bit and about your
Sovereign Engineering experience and third of all thanks for building FIPS in the
first place it was very much needed I think yeah the response has been very
gratifying you know it's I mean I've been in the open source community for a very
long time but I had kind of forgotten what it was like you know when you produce
something and other people pick it up and start doing things on their own with
it that like you didn't tell them to go do yeah you know and you realize like wow you
know other people actually think this is worth investing in their own time and
energy into and so you know the response here at SEC has been incredible the demo
days so far you know the two weeks that we've had you know and the one that we have
tomorrow have been mostly FIPS oriented and you know I wasn't expecting that when
I did it but the the pent-up demand and the you know the need that FIPS fills with
this group has been pretty high what were you expecting when you built it why did you
build it in the first place well it was it was a challenge to solve which kind of
sounds funny but you know when I was at the Nostr event in Costa Rica Arjen you
know mentioned that hey here's a problem we we need to solve and here's kind of
the outlines of it and you know we want to have a way to have networking that
doesn't require permission from central authorities that doesn't have you know
the problems where someone can just like yank a domain name or whatever and I
thought well you know I think I know how to solve this but I'm not sure and so I
went away for like a month after after Costa Rica and I think Arjen thought that
like I had forgotten all about it and and I thought well I think I know how to do
this and it was just you know like an intense amount of thinking and design and
then programming you know to come out with it and you know he kept telling me
they're gonna love this and like yeah well you know that's good to hear I just
didn't know sort of the breadth of interest yeah and that you know you know
Cobrador told me that you know I I didn't think this would exist for 10 more
years you know and now I have it in my hands
yeah like you say there was a lot of pent-up demand and it kind of it's it's we went full circle
because and and it's what you you mentioned also a couple days ago
basically Cobrador by implementing Tollgate and and he has a weird way of
thinking about these things because he has a very weird background right it's
like how can you how can you make this work in like an Indian hippie commune of
2000 people and sell internet by the packet you know like that's yeah that's his
big mission basically
he may see it and and he he kind of got Arjen in the mix and then um Arjen and you had this
interaction and then you locked yourself in the in the cellar for a month like that's how all good
software projects are born right like that's how git came to be and so on and and then you came back
and and again like you actually joined for Sovereign Engineering which is amazing to to bring it to the
group and um to me what's interesting is that
FIPS kind of in some way turns networking
on its head and and now we are now we are back to the early days of networking
again sure yeah we're trying to figure out
you know how does the scale how you know what are the problems with it you
know how do you break it how how do you respond to bad actors trying to
sabotage it you know there's all these things that are just sort of swirling in the air
that the regular internet you know was dealing with 30 or 40 years ago
yeah and and that solution was mostly authority based right like oh yeah yeah
and and i think that's the challenge at hand how do we how do we solve the same problems it's still
the same problems but without reintroducing a central authority that can yeah i mean so from a purely
engineering point of view you know FIPS nodes you know are you know not to be too cliche but they're
they're completely peers with each other so there's no way to enforce anything except what you enforce
on your node so you have to set the software up in a way that if they all cooperate it works great
but if someone isn't cooperating by doing like the same protocol
the impact of it is limited to their you know the blast radius is limited to their small region
and that's kind of a difficult tension there are a lot of things in FIPS that would be a lot easier
from a technical point of view if there was a top-down yeah sure you know it's always easier you know
but that would just be you know yeah following the same path we we followed 30 years ago yeah yeah
what is the best demo you saw building on FIPS in the last two weeks what surprised you most well
so this this one's kind of funny um satsonsports designed a transport for FIPS and in FIPS the
transport is a way for two nodes to communicate it could be over the internet it could be directly
over ethernet or bluetooth or you know tor or over a serial connection you know the the node abstraction
is um independent independent of all those so so he actually built a transport that could talk over
Nostr nice so it was literally sending packets up to relays down from the relay to another node
as if it was an ip network and like you know his ping times were measured in seconds yeah but it worked
yeah and and that's you know wildly impractical and kind of crazy but but it just shows that FIPS
doesn't care about the underlying it it does and actually the thing that it proved out was that
with these long delays it just works still yeah you know like the everything works on the happy path
and you've got two milliseconds latency and all that um that um that you know if that's all you touch
then when you try to do something more strenuous it breaks yeah and you know his little demo was
something that uh was like a existence proof that the protocol was a little bit more robust yeah that's
awesome that's awesome what's still on the roadmap for you let's walk up there a little bit and then
then there's there's a nice bench where we can sure sure so what's still on the roadmap for you more
battle testing yeah well so in this round with FIPS you know it's like what i call a dancing bear
it's not that the dare the bear dances very well it said he can dance at all
and you know FIPS is working great you know we have 150 nodes connected right now on the on the test net
and which is quite amazing in and of itself like that's way way more than i would have guessed
yeah i was surprised to see the growth um but you know we're this was a way of learning what worked
and what didn't i had put uh quite a few features in this first release that i was i was not sure that
they were necessary you know things to do with like measuring protocol statistics and whatnot and so
now that you know i have a better sense of what you know where the load bearing parts of FIPS are
i'm going through not a rewrite but i'm going through a a next stage where you know the the
protocol negotiation between nodes doesn't just assume like it's you know fixed format and if you
want to change it it breaks everybody and all of that so i'm going through it like a redesign where
i can get rid of the pieces that don't uh that don't matter you know or and hardening some things
that needed hardening or like anticipating okay here's we know how things operate at 150 nodes
what do i need to put it into it to operate at 1500 or 15 000 nodes yeah yeah so that's
we're going to be coming out with a uh release maybe in a couple of weeks that's the first version of
that and you don't really you you won't really see any changes in features but it's kind of like the
the foundation is now solid yeah i see instead of being like
there and working but like rickety yeah in in terms of contributions what would be the most helpful
you think actually testing so just running it and and connecting to stuff and just playing around
with it basically yeah i mean you know i'm a network engineer if i can get pinged to work you know my
job is done but the you know the guys at SEC here i mean we've got a port to windows 32 we've got a
port to mac we've got a port to uh freebsd somebody has got uh it working in web assembly inside a
browser yeah i saw that and you know it's just like these are all things that prove out you know
it can operate in different environments and there aren't like fundamental new features
you know what i i guess what i really want is try to break it so that we can fix it because if we
don't break it somebody else is going to and they may not have the same intentions that we have
yeah i see you know
yeah
and how was no it won't sound so out of breath
this is madera after all everything's uphill everything's uphill everything's you know it's
like the Bitcoin roller coaster guy he goes like this exactly but it we have nice views like that's the
that's the nice thing about climbing a hill like you get nice views oh it's uh it's fantastic here
yeah how how how were the last like almost three weeks for you um uh what what did how what did you
expect coming here and how how was it different from what you expected well i think i think the the
costa rica event sort of like paved the way because it was the first conference there was like 40
Nostr developers in one space and i had not encountered that kind of vibe in like three
decades you know when i was originally involved with the cypherpunk group in silicon valley in the
early 90s it was that same freedom tech um self-sovereign uh you know don't try to fight the system bypass it
you know yeah build a new one and leave the old one behind and let the old one do what it it's going
to do for whatever you know better for worse but you know opt out and build your own alternative um system
and a lot of stuff came out of that group you know in the early days and then in the Bitcoin days
uh in the early you know 2010 when i was involved uh it's the same idea you know we were focusing
almost entirely on the payment rails you know economic part of the problem uh but you know all
the other privacy issues still existed and they were even worse um the Nostr community and then now here
the Sovereign Engineering subset of that um has been very refreshing to see that young people today
are picking up the mantle of you know this kind of fight of not changing the system but building a new
one and opting out of the old one yeah and doing it in ways that really can't be stopped
the tools today to accomplish that are much better yeah i mean especially now with agentic tooling but
you know i don't think that Nostr itself would have been possible 30 years ago yeah
or even in the 2010s of Bitcoin uh era um it's a uh it's been
rejuvenating for an old guy like me yeah to interact with you know all these young people that
are earnest and trying to do the right thing and maybe they don't have all the history or maybe they
don't have all of the experience or or knowledge but you know that's what they'll get by doing all
this yeah yeah yeah yeah no i think you're right i mean what what we have on the not it's it's to me
it's not very surprising that like Nostr is full of Bitcoin people because you need to be able to
handle keys for example sure and Bitcoin prepares you for that most people are not
fine with handling key material like yeah well it's a hard thing to do and some people will never be
fine with that yeah and you know custodial solutions that provide the solution to that yeah will always
exist yeah and you know people will decide their their risk tolerance for how they want to handle their
money yeah absolutely you know the consequences of of losing control of your input are a little bit less
than losing control of your utxos very true but still it exists and in fact i think in the last cohort
the the issue of you know identity and um you know key revocation and key rotation was the subject of the
last one yeah um and i have some thoughts on that but i'm not well educated in like what everyone has
already tried and decided doesn't work so i i've got to go look at the you know the captain's reports from the
last one and and read all about that that also came up in costa rica there was a big group that was
interested in the in the uh dealing with in pubs and secret keys and all of that in a more robust way
i'm quite confident that this will be solved it's just going to take time and in terms of like you
know there's no real top town structure so you can't force it on all the clients and all those kind
of things it just have has to emerge organically and that's the way everything is solved nobody comes
out with solutions that work the first time you know it's a darwinian process you know you'll get
a hundred different variations on a theme and maybe five of them will work well and the rest will go in
the dustbin and um you know you'll you'll have a set of solutions and then people will pick like one
that they like and the network effect will take over from there so i don't think anybody even you know
you think of the modern internet and you know how rigid it is you know it didn't become this whole
you know fully formed you know in in the 80s and 90s yeah uh you know built in incremental steps to
deal with problems that emerged as it got bigger and bigger um and and some solutions you know the
classic one is the is the seven layer osi stack yeah and it's like that was a hallucination basically
well yeah i mean you know the standards body imposed you know this is how it's going to be
and everyone just kind of thumb you know thumb their nose at them and said no yeah i learned that in
school by the way like i i had to i had to learn the whole seven layer stack by heart and and the
first three layers made sense and yeah and you know it doesn't matter if it matches reality all protocols
you know have physical layers and mac layers and network transport layers but then above that it
gets really murky and and the rest of that was just a fantasy of some people on the committee yeah
yeah yeah and you know that'll happen with Nostr as well yeah no i agree you mentioned that the
tooling is better today um what can you say about kind of what other stuff is different when you compare
it to the early cypherpunk movement or the early Bitcoin movement in terms of i don't know like culture
or i don't know like state of the world or you you you mentioned you see lots of similarities but i i
would be interested like how is it different well you probably won't like my answer that's fine so so
with enthusiasm comes sort of short attention spans yeah and uh you know this just may be the old guy
and me talking again but in earlier um epics of of this movement there was a lot more academic structure
behind it yeah you know so all the early cryptography they all came from academia right yeah the early
70s or the late 70s with rsa and diffe hellman and you know the um hardening of uh symmetric
cryptography you know from like triple des to you know newer and newer versions that work better you
know that was strongly academically focused and um people in groups like the cypherpunks you know had
computer science backgrounds you know they were not necessarily academics from a you know their career
was you know working in academia at a university publishing papers but more like they were coming at it from
having been educated in you know what today we would just call stem yeah rigorous academic training but
but much more rigor involved in pursuing ideas and writing them up and um you know the critiques and the
you know fortunately you know the expression that's still well known today is you know rough consensus and
running code yeah you know so code trumped everything if you had something that you know worked and you had
code that did it then a lot of the fluff behind it sort of didn't matter you know so you could you
could talk about a protocol all day long but if you had something working
you know that that lent it credibility because people could you know pick them pick the code apart
and find out what was uh what was real and what wasn't in Nostr and SEC what i have seen
is very earnest well-meaning people trying to do the right thing but not necessarily taking the time to
do you know what i still think is the necessary step of engineering design and review and um
making sure the design is right yeah before you even attempt to implement it and uh you know
my my snarky joke of shower thought to zap store in six hours yeah you know is is is meant to be
triggering to people but um i no it's very true i mean i i think it's a good thing and a bad thing
you know it's like oh yeah it's like for some things you might strike gold with a shower thought
oh yeah sure well i mean there's nothing stopping you from doing that unless you know that when i say
the tools i mean the the ability to disseminate an idea today is vastly better than it was back then
you had mailing lists you know we didn't have you know discord everything was slower we didn't have
nostalgia um everything was slower and so you had time to be more deliberate about things yeah and now
which is also a feature in some sense right like you because if things are slow and require friction
you really need to want it right like like the idea it's a filter in in some sense so so so only
the most stubborn people and the best ideas come through in some sense sure uh so you don't drown
in in noise as much i think that's that's part of the issue today that we're drowning in noise in
general sure i so i agree with that and that's not just a an SEC or a Nostr thing you know so i say
those things you know in a kind of a snarky way um you know because i i earnestly do think that
Nostr could benefit from a little bit more slower pace of deliberate development and design you know
ahead of time but that doesn't mean that i mean you can just do things as the yeah you know we have
thousands of people working on stuff that they think is important and you know they're putting it out
there for other people and they're doing it for free it's a gift of their time and energy you know to the
world uh and you can't say there's anything wrong with that yeah you know and if you look at the
volume today versus 30 or 40 years ago it's vastly larger yeah you know so the output of new things
today is tremendous um you know it also means that the tail extends very far yeah so you get some
really bad stuff and you get some really good stuff yeah um yeah so i don't want that to stop yeah i just
sometimes get the feeling especially when i talk to you know normies so to speak who look at Nostr for
the first time and and the common thing that i hear is that it looks half baked it looks half finished
it looks like things are kind of slow and mostly work but i'm just going to go back to twitter because
you know it shows up instantly on my screen and then you have to like explain why you know yeah
maybe the stuff that's slow is actually all the things that you really care about
just working the way that they do so i don't know i i i'm gonna upset people by the comments i've made
no no no don't worry about that the uh and so i'm extremely pleased to see you know what has been in
front of everyone else you know for the last few years and i've only recently sort of rejoined this
community after a while to me it's amazing that it works at all Nostr and that it exists at all in
that sense like because not too long ago we didn't have anything we didn't have a you know like a
public square form twitter was the best but yeah owned by uh owned by a private company yeah basically
with all the issues to come with it yeah and all the good issues and the bad issues you know you
could you could use twitter for free yeah because somebody else is paying the bills yeah um and now
you can use Nostr for free because somebody else is paying the bills but the bills are really small
yeah it's like running a Nostr relay is not that expensive yeah um
i think to your comment about the long tail we went through that with the printing press as well
and books and music and so on right like it's a similar issue where it's just like anyone can
produce anything and then you just have to make sense of it after the fact now we just have it with
software and those kind of things as well it is funny because you bring up the music analogy
and you think back well you know all the great classical music that we uh that we remember
you know we only remember the really good ones that survived 200 years yeah you know there was just as
much um you know what we would call vibe slop today yeah yeah there was just a guy at the corner with
like a fiddle yeah just doing whatever and and you just don't know none of that went down on history
it's kind of like you look at these buildings that are you know still standing after 2000 years and
you're like wow what kind of architecture is that but you don't see all the other buildings
that collapsed yeah of course you know back then so you know it's kind of a survivor bias yeah
and it's the same in Nostr you know you you see the sausage in the making yeah but do you remember
the stuff that was you know at the beginning of most i guess it's only been four years but you know
the stuff four years ago that like was a flash in the pan and was never seen yeah yeah yeah the early
clients there yeah i mean you know for all i know in two years people are going to say what was that
FIPS thing again you know we'll see we'll see we'll see about it yeah i really didn't do FIPS with like
the strong idea that i was going to go build something that would last for generations you
know it was you know to scratch an itch yeah yeah see if you can solve and see if i can solve it and
i mean i'll i think i solved it pretty well yeah you know i'll go on record saying that
but you know i could be proven wrong we have this demo day tomorrow the last one of the of the cohort
and i have a feeling that several of the demos demos are going to be people breaking FIPS
okay we'll see what happens we'll see what's that you know there's just been like these little rumor
mills like yeah he's working on something but he's not going to tell me until he gets to show off
you know in front of the group that hey i broke FIPS you know and uh i'll be humbled i have one last
let's see what happens i have one last question for you um regarding the tools that you mentioned you
mentioned the agentic tools as well how do you think about it right now and what did you use to
to build FIPS in terms of agentic tooling and other lands and so on so a couple there's a couple of
questions are obviously related uh so for FIPS i mean i'm a i'm a huge Claude Code user and and i will
freely say that Claude Code has been part of the both the design and the implementation of FIPS from the
beginning i've been using agentic tools for about a year um they're quite good uh especially in the last
like four months even yeah you know you can see the the increase in productivity they give you
my main issue with uh agentic coding is that it doesn't replace the need for engineering design
and people tend to blame their tool instead of themselves and uh i mean i'll say like it's easier to
play claude wrote 99 of FIPS yeah but i've reviewed every single file every line of code
i spent about two months iterating with claude on a design for it about how the protocol worked the
different layers how they interact the corner cases and all of that and i had you know 30 000 words of
documentation about the design before i wrote any code and then writing the code became easy because all the
ambiguity was gone you know it was like it had all clear instructions on how to do everything so you
did lots of rubber duck debugging with claude oh yeah leading up to writing code you know and
that's the same thing that traditional software developers do so that hasn't changed it's just
become much easier much faster to do and i have people you know i hear over here people say you know i use
claude for this or or my agent broke this or whatever and you know you don't blame your spreadsheet you
don't blame your your compiler you don't say you know my linter did this you just say i did this yeah
so why are you blaming the random number generator yeah you know so so lms i think are extremely powerful
tool obviously um and they've sort of unlocked a huge amount of you know like every shower thought
you've had for the last 30 years you're gonna go try to make it work at least that's the case for me yeah
but they're a tool in your toolbox or tool chest of things to use to solve a problem but it doesn't
change the fundamental calculus of know the problem you're trying to solve design a solution remove all
the ambiguity from it to get you know an implementation plan that you know is going to make it do this
and then at that point the coding just writes itself it's like um it's like compiling code now you're
compiling ideas to source code but you got to have all the ideas right first and then the source code
gets compiled down to machine code and all that we've gone up a layer yeah you know so yeah you're not
writing the code cloud is or codex or whatever you happen to be using but if you want it to work well
you have to write it correct you have to write the idea correctly now just like with a compiler you have
to write the code correctly for it to compile successfully and i guess that's the analogy
i think pretty much all of the pull requests i've gotten in FIPS
which have all been well mostly have been pretty good i think you've all been written by cloud yeah
yeah you know and some of my reviews have been written by cloud yeah you know well i mean yeah
yeah you mentioned that because we talked about drive-by pull requests and how do you deal with
well and so on and you were like you know just you just sent the slop back you match effort for effort
yeah if somebody throws a pull request that was clearly the output of their tooling with no you see no
evidence of like review or editing or or their own words anywhere in it i'm just going to say hey claude
do a review and post it i'm not even going to look at it and i'm not going to look at what claude says
you know just say you know it's going to address you know a bunch of stuff that you'll go back and
have your cloud address and all that if someone takes the time to use it as a tool and say here's my
pull request here's what i'm trying to solve here's the problem you know and you can tell that
they are involved then that's a high value pull request and you might figure out a bug and a
solution to it in a few hours that might have taken weeks and that's the value of the llm
but we have a little we have had a little bit of a problem with you know just agents like seemingly
unknowing to their owner posting issues on the repo and you're like well this is completely out of
context sometimes even on unrelated uh issues you know they'll post a comment that's like it has
nothing to do with you know yeah in any case yeah so to answer your question um i'm very pro agentic
coding uh but you have to own it and it doesn't replace actual engineering yeah it doesn't replace
human thought yeah yet at least we'll see well yeah now maybe a year from now it really will be you
know claude make me a sandwich yeah yeah you know and there's a sandwich you know but um
uh the the the agentic tools let you talk to the tool at the speed of your own thought
which is really good because you can iterate quickly and you don't have to spend
a week translating a single thousand years into code to test it you know you can you can think like you're
talking to another person like we're talking i think i think that's also what makes it so addicting
because you can stay in the in the flow in the zone basically and just go back and forth you don't have
to wait for whatever another team to come back to you with feedback or what have you and all those kind
of things but yeah i think that's what's interesting it's also i mean you know it's a double-edged sword
because they kind of work like slot machines as well where you you prompt something in and it's very
exciting what will come back and then you just you stay on it forever and you just it can be very
addicting i mean you can tell some people are like that you know yeah it's where ai psychosis comes
from you just you're up all night prompting and and if you ask them how does this work they're like
well let me go ask claude what he did yeah you know it's like well if you haven't reviewed the output
then yeah yeah it could be anything it's definitely a double-edged sword because it i mean the evidence
is clear that that llm use for students for example it will make you on average it will make you a
number um i think there is a way to use them that actually helps and assists in learning and makes
you learn faster i yeah i mean that takes but it takes discipline i think it takes a teacher you know
a human teacher you know in the case of students to help direct them on how to use the tooling but
the teachers are learning at the same time and this is new to everybody yeah it's it's absolutely but
my final snarky comment on it is uh agentic tools will make bad programmers worse
it'll make good programmers non-productive yeah or a good program oh that sounded bad it'll make good
programmers more productive and it will allow non-programmers to actually program for the first
time yeah and we've had one attendee here at SEC who has never programmed before but they were able to
uh design a solution for something that you know was within the spirit of how SEC you know works
and you know it worked well and everything and it was just an incredible use of or extension of
somebody i want a solution to exist i don't know how to do it because i've never coded before
but this person was able to use the tool to create the solution and it actually worked
and you know there you could see that you know as iterative and you know they fixed things that
they didn't like and you know so it wasn't just random output it was yeah you have to sit with
it and and iterate you know and and that has never been possible before you know to to have never
coded but have a crystal clear idea of of what you want to exist and to be able to translate that
through uh lms yeah no awesome i promised you to keep it short so i've won one final what may you
give one final piece of advice to the younglings out there what have you learned from your early
cypherpunk days and your early Bitcoin days that might be useful for the you know 20-somethings that
might be listening to this that don't have your experience and your wisdom let me think about
this for a minute before it gets committed to uh to tape um take all the time you need i'd say don't
don't be afraid of going your own way there's a tremendous um inertia in the world that is pushing
you to turn the crank to conform to um act within the system and you know i'm not talking about
um you know going off and doing crazy things i'm talking about
your own mind and your own ability to think and to make judgment calls about how the world works
will lead you to more success than just believing what you've been taught and you know your parents
raised you in a way that was the best way they knew how but they filled you with information that will
only get you so far and then you know it'll run out and eventually you get to the point where you're
like wait a minute that's not how the world works and the ability to have confidence in your own
ability to look take a fresh look at how things are will go a very long way in helping you not to
you know struggle against
that feeling like i know it's not right but i'm gonna like do things the way i'm supposed to and
i'm gonna you know the fiat world so to speak you know when you're that age you know you can do
anything you get my age and you've kind of set your place in the world and it's kind of hard to
to change you know so don't be afraid to
don't be afraid to dissent and don't be afraid to say you know what i'm going to go try doing it
this way instead of the way that you know and walk your own way yeah make your own path it's very cliche
but it's it's very real and it's probably more relevant today than ever is um uh there's a there's
a layer of conformity that's pushed upon you constantly every day and uh you know stop scrolling
and start doing stuff and and that's the thing about cliches right the older you get the truer they
become yeah that's true i should take my own advice all right that was awesome i hope you had fun as
well we always end on the hug may i sure thanks so much for doing all this building all of it being
here coming here it's been wonderful and i'm glad we pulled you out of retirement so now i have 10
more years of supporting FIPS before i can retire again it's it's gonna be fine the young links will
We'll step up eventually.
They absolutely will.
All right.
Thanks so much.