In my experience a wiki can actually drastically reduce the amount of dead context.
I've handed my local agents a bunch of integrated command line tools (kinda like an office suite for LLMs), including a wiki (https://github.com/triblespace/playground/blob/main/facultie...
) and linkage really helps drastically reduce context bloat because they can pull in fragment by fragment incrementally.
Was also thinking to disambiguate context where you wish to express a tokens function (eg, top) as different from one could use unique ASCII prefix (eg, ∆top) to avoid pollution between the english and the linux binary.
Youd then alias these disambiguated terms and theyd still trigger the correct token autocomplete but would reduce overlap which cause misdirection.
Yeah you can sink a lot of time into a system like that[0].
I spend the years simplifying the custom graph database underneath it all and only recently started building it into tools that an agent can actually call[2]. But so far all the groundwork has actually paid off, the rooster basically paints itself.
I found a wiki to be a surprisingly powerful tool for an agent to have.
And building a bunch of CLI tools that all interconnect on the same knowledge graph substrate has also had a nice compounding effect. (The agent turns themselves are actually stored in the same system, but I haven't gotten around to use that for cool self-referential meta reasoning capabilities.)
Hasn't HN been traditionally a place where makers share the experience they had with building things?
Especially when you have someone working on autonomous research agents it doesn't seem that off to lament how much time you can sink into the underlying substrate. In my particular case the work started long before LLMs to make actual research easier, the fact that it can also be used by agents for research is just a happy accident.
then you seem to be somewhat blinded by your aversion to AI assisted engineering, because if https://github.com/triblespace/triblespace-rs is a "shitty vibecoded project", then I don't know what a good project actually looks like to you. That codebase has years of human blood sweat and tears in it, implements novel data-structures, has it's own WCO optimal join-algorithm, cutting edge succinct data-structures that are hand-rolled to supplement the former, new ideas on graph based RDF-like CRDTs, efficient graph canonicalisation, content addressing and metadata management, implements row types in rust, has really polished typed queries that seamlessly integrate into rusts type system, lockless left-right data structures, a single file database format where concatenation is database union, is orders of magnitude faster than similar databases like oxigraph... does it also have to cure cancer and suck you off to meet your bar?
I got 4 more github stars and someone dropping into the tiny tiny discord just from mentioning it, why do you think that is?
When was the last time you created something and put it out to the world? Your only big post on here is a lament of your wife not giving you children as if she was some expired carton of milk that owes you (that's something you discuss with your partner if you respect them and not strangers on the internet, and 39 is completely fine to have children as a woman - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YIz9jZPzvo).
Even your critique isn't an act of creation, neither creative nor substantial and doesn't go beyond an egotistical "I don't like it when people post their project and share their experiences when AI is involved" on _social_ media.
Is there even something you're proud of enough to share and present, or is all this bitterness the result of envy for those that have?
“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new, an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto: "Anyone can cook." But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more.”
I build a whole database around the idea of using the smallest plausible random identifiers, because that seems to be the only "golden disk" we have for universal communication, except for maybe some convergence property of latent spaces with large enough embodied foundation models.
It's weird that they are really under appreciated in the scientific data management and library science community, and many issues that require large organisations at the moment could just have been better identifiers.
To me the ship of Theseus question is about extrinsic (random / named) identifiers vs. intrinsic (hash / embedding) identifiers.
German here, with little stakes in your shitshow. At no point during the obama years did I think:
"Wow this looks just like the rise of the nazis!"
Which was covered extensively during my history classes.
Why did you even have all the school schootings if you don't use that stupid second ammendmend thing you have? This is the tyranical government you've all been waiting for.
Perhaps "what you thought then and now" is the difference between those times more than "what happened then and now". With the former being largely influenced by "what your bubble told you then and now".
We don’t have good data because it’s illegal to, for example, ask citizenship status on our census, but if you believe the numbers many democrats cite, Obama deported more immigrants than Trump. You can use Google to verify that though I’ll warn you the rabbit hole runs deep when it comes to official statistics. Importantly, under Trump we have far more violent felons to deport. The media thrives on salacious and emotionally charged stories rather unbiased reporting based on nuanced facts. It’s the entertainment industry.
The recent tragedies are indeed thoroughly depressing for all of us, but we shouldn’t let our emotional reactions destroy our ability to reason and think objectively about history and statistics. We can feel and think. Some of us believe enforcement of laws is the villain in this. Some feel the laws themselves or the idea of borders and sovereignty are to blame. Others that a surge of violent criminals such as those who killed Jocylan Nungary or Laken Riley is the cause of the recent tragedies. None of these views are inherently evil. All of these views have some merit. Truth is manifold. Don’t be narrow minded, we need broad thinking not simplistic pathos driven dogmas and references to nazis. Grow up.
The number of deportations under obama was definitely higher, but he had only one concentration camp (guantanamo bay), and didn't use that for his own people.
Learn about the tolerance paradoxon, there is no negotiating, nuance and reasoning with fashists.
Your enlightened centrism is nothing but smoke and mirrors. Get educated.
If you are German, then you are probably blind to the similarities between current German politics and the Nazis, so this is not a good point of comparison.
Which politics are you referring to? The AfD ("Alternative for Germany") who has been classified as a confirmed right-wing extremist organization by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution?
And which has heavy ties to trump, musk, and the current U.S. government?
Just because we currently have our own right wing populist faschists rearing their heads again, doesn't mean that the parallels of the current events in the US and the rise of the Nazis aren't real and glaring to someone who has had this as part of their basic education curriculum.
What does that have to do with the situation in the US? The situation in the middle east is completely orthogonal to that, and observing the rise of faschism there says nothing about my stance on the current german foreign policy in regards to the middle east.
If you want to know: In my personal opinion that conflict is fucked beyond repair because a small group of powerful people on both sides benefit from it, while a huge number of deep interpersonal conflicts and histories fuel it, with any moderates getting squashed by their own side. So I wouldn't send weapons, but I'd send humanitarian aid or the blue helmets. That whole region is thoroughly fucked beyond my pay grade.
Yeeeaaaah, I dunno if you wanna go there while the US is investing $100B in state sponsored ethnic cleansing, terrorism, and concentration camps. Glass houses, stones, etc.
But it's only Nazis if you disagree with them. After all, the whole point of drawing the comparison is to shut down any possibility for discussion and nuance - "people I don't like are just like the nazis so I don't need to treat those who who doesn't fully oppose them with any respect".
> After all, the whole point of drawing the comparison [to Nazis] is to shut down any possibility for discussion and nuance
Another way of phrasing this is that it's a call to stop assuming good faith discussion on the part of the boosters, stop being derailed by pondering nuance, and focus on putting the brakes on the new Nazi movement. History doesn't repeat but we're teetering on the edge of a large-scale horrific rhyme. Regardless of one's preferred policies regarding immigration, there is zero justification for where we're at.
Again, I have little stakes in your shitshow besides the international meddling they do with our own faschist party.
This dualist thinking seems to be a particular US thing, based on your two party system.
I see the erosion of the rule of law and decency in the US, the persecution of minorities, the populism, the defamation of journalism as "lügenpresse" and alignment of media to the party line, the personal police force (what the fuck is ICE doing in Italy), the person cult around a single madman, the violence without consequence, the fancy SS/SA style cosplay uniform by the head of ICE, and I think "that looks a lot like the stuff we learned about in school".
And it is infamously insecure, full of spam, and struggles with attachments beyond 10mB.
So thank you for bringing it up, it showcases well that a distributed system is not automatically a good distributed system, and why you want encryption, cryptographic fingerprints and cryptographic provenance tracking.
And yet, it is a constantly used decentralized system which does not require content addressing, as you mentioned. You should elaborate why we need content addressing for a decentralized system instead of saying "10MiB limit + spam lol email fell off". Contemporary usage of technologies you've mentioned don't seem to do much to reduce spam (see IPFS which has hard content addressing). Please, share more.
If you think email is still in widespread use because it’s doing a good job, rather than because of massive network effects and sheer system inertia, then we’re probably talking past each other - but let me spell it out anyway.
Email “works” in the same sense that fax machines worked for decades: it’s everywhere, it’s hard to dislodge, and everyone has already built workflows around it.
There is no intrinsic content identity, no native provenance, no cryptographic binding between “this message” and “this author”. All of that has to be bolted on - inconsistently, optionally, and usually not at all.
And even ignoring the cryptography angle: email predates “content as a first-class addressable object”. Attachments are in-band, so the sender pushes bytes and the receiver (plus intermediaries) must accept/store/scan/forward them up front. That’s why providers enforce tight size limits and aggressive filtering: the receiver is defending itself against other people’s pushes.
For any kind of information dissemination like email or scientific publishing you want the opposite shape: push lightweight metadata (who/what/when/signature + content hashes), and let clients pull heavy blobs (datasets, binaries, notebooks) from storage the publishing author is willing to pay for and serve. Content addressing gives integrity + dedup for free. Paying ~1$ per DOI for what is essentially a UUID, is ridiculous by comparison.
That decoupling (metadata vs blobs) is the missing primitive in email-era designs.
All of that makes email a bad template for a substrate of verifiable, long-lived, referenceable knowledge. Let's not forget that the context of this thread isn’t “is decentralized routing possible?”, it’s “decentralized scientific publishing” - which is not about decentralized routing, but decentralized truth.
Email absolutely is decentralized, but decentralization by itself isn’t enough. Scientific publishing needs decentralized verification.
What makes systems like content-addressed storage (e.g., IPFS/IPLD) powerful isn’t just that they don’t rely on a central server - it’s that you can uniquely and unambiguously reference the exact content you care about with cryptographic guarantees. That means:
- You can validate that what you fetched is exactly what was published or referenced, with no ambiguity or need to trust a third party.
- You can build layered protocols on top (e.g., versioning, merkle trees, audit logs) where history and provenance are verifiable.
- You don’t have to rely on opaque identifiers that can be reissued, duplicated, or reinterpreted by intermediaries.
For systems that don’t rely on cryptographic primitives, like email or the current infrastructure using DOIs and ORCIDs as identifiers:
- There is no strong content identity - messages can be altered in transit.
- There is no native provenance - you can’t universally prove who authored something without added layers.
- There’s no simple way to compose these into a tamper-evident graph of scientific artifacts with rigorous references.
A truly decentralized scholarly publishing stack needs content identity and provenance. DOIs and ORCIDs help with discovery and indexing, but they are institutional namespaces, not cryptographically bound representations of content. Without content addressing and signatures, you’re mostly just trading one central authority for another.
It’s also worth being explicit about what “institutional namespace” means in practice here.
A DOI does not identify content. It identifies a record in a registry (ultimately operated under the DOI Foundation via registration agencies). The mapping from a DOI to a URL and ultimately to the actual bytes is mutable, policy-driven, and revocable. If the publisher disappears, changes access rules, or updates what they consider the “version of record”, the DOI doesn’t tell you what an author originally published or referenced - it tells you what the institution currently points to.
ORCID works similarly: a centrally governed identifier system with a single root of authority. Accounts can be merged, corrected, suspended, or modified according to organisational policy. There is no cryptographic binding between an ORCID, a specific work, and the exact bytes of that work that an independent third party can verify without trusting the ORCID registry.
None of this is malicious - these systems were designed for coordination and attribution, not for cryptographic verifiability. But it does mean they are gatekeepers in the precise sense that matters for decentralization:
Even if lookup/resolution is distributed, the authority to decide what an identifier refers to, whether it remains valid, and how conflicts are resolved is concentrated in a small number of organizations. If those organizations change policy, disappear, or disagree with you, the identifier loses its meaning - regardless of how many mirrors or resolvers exist.
If the system you build can’t answer “Is this byte-for-byte the thing the author actually referenced or published?” without trusting a gatekeeper, then it’s centralized in every meaningful sense that matters to reproducibility and verifiability.
Decentralised lookup without decentralised authority is just centralisation with better caching.
Stablecoins work quiet fine as exchange medium for millions of people around the world, including myself, so they are different from vouchers and ramen.
I've handed my local agents a bunch of integrated command line tools (kinda like an office suite for LLMs), including a wiki (https://github.com/triblespace/playground/blob/main/facultie... ) and linkage really helps drastically reduce context bloat because they can pull in fragment by fragment incrementally.
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