Looking back now after almost 20 years (Nov 2009 to now for me), I can see the arc from what node was then to what celld can be now as your thinking has evolved A distributed operating system running in userspace is the primitive that can break apart the siloing that has become the default across the walled gardens we all operate in All the best in what's to come 🐢✨🚀

🪾 If a tree falls in the forest, & no one is around to hear it: does it make a sound? 🧮 If a mathematical problem is solved with certainty, & no one gains a deeper understanding: was it truly solved? For fifty years, mathematics was focused on one thing: proving basic arithmetic. Then in 1930, at age 24, in a discussion session at a conference Gödel announced the First Incompleteness Theorem almost trolling every mathematician that what they were after was itself unprovable. Sitting in the audience was John von Neumann, who independently derived the Second Incompleteness Theorem within weeks. When he wrote Gödel about it, Gödel responded he had already derived it himself & published that same week. That mutual derivation & exchange is what set up Alan Turing just a few years later to think creatively about "Turing Machines" & what they could or could not decide. In the spring of 1935 von Neumann was lecturing at Cambridge & Turing took his class where von Neumann later said he "knew Mr. Turing very well". Reading the history of how these seminal minds influenced each other is why I could not agree more with the 27 Fields medalists who agreed that open problems are "landmarks and lighthouses," because we have seen time & time again that merely solving the foundational mathematics problem is only the beginning. It is the shared understanding that empowered Turing's breakthrough. To remove that human aspect of the outcome is indeed a form of strip-mining as Tao suggests. This piece from two applied mathematicians shows many more examples of the value derived from cross disciplinary shared understanding between pure & applied mathematicians. It is worth reading it instead of summarizing it nytimes.com/2026/09/22/scien…

I hope you enjoy the story 💚 all-docs.talks.charlie.dev

Mikeal knew this, and I will be forever in his debt for what I learned from him. I'm looking forward to integrating his pkv (public key value cryptography) ideas into _all_docs in the coming months 🧠 we both didn't see it then, but he was onto something important 🚀

That it is just one problem a more holistic content addressable web make easier to solve. But the bigger the problem, the more contributors that need to gather

Package managers and the shared digital infrastructure for delivering packages to them become ever more important. If we step back and broaden our scope we see that it is just one flavor of a larger metadata & addressing problem

I knew speaking at @jsconf 2025 would be hard, because so much of what I had to talk about I learned from @mikeal – and am still learning even now. The goal of the talk was to tell part of that story, a story about how the web isn't finished, yet 💡 all-docs.talks.charlie.dev

Coming soon: make-dlx-from 'npm:<pkg>'

Life is chaos. Be kind 💔