repo.getmonero.org/monero-project/ccs-proposals/-/merge_requests/250 👍️

plowsof[m]: 👍

Discussion: The Monero Project should actively recruit technical talent instead of waiting for it to fall into its lap.

Rucknium I don't think that's controversial, but there are many moving parts to that which are challenging

What is challenging about it? I mean, I can think of some reasons, but what comes to mind?

Also curious

well Rucknium[m] fell into our lap :D

Lol. I mean I suppose I might have gotten involved sooner if I saw a clear path to making contributions.

I had no idea I could be useful for helping Monero. I just started work on Townforge a few months ago 😃

<Rucknium[m]> "What is challenging about it? I..." <- Recruiting requires someone (ideally many people) to actively reach out to talent and see what they want. There's a reason top talent acquisition firms make so much money

Those firms are rent-seekers

For something like Monero, it's doubly difficult if you need to explain that it's not like a normal job, it's a whole CCS application thing with high volatility in most cases

Rucknium[m]: Sure, but recruiting is still a lot of effort and often a lot of money

> Discussion: The Monero Project should actively recruit technical talent instead of waiting for it to fall into its lap.

Maybe you could make some type of bounty system where community members say what they need, donors can fund the proposals, then people can apply for this job or win the bounty? (But IDK what Monero needs exactly.)

It's going to be a small minority of people out there that would be interested, but I think there is an untapped hard core of people who would want to, but who are unaware of Monero or who are aware but don't realize they could contribute.

I mean part of the issue is that you need some minimal technical talent in some areas to know what needs getting done. But once you have that, you can "snowball"

I don't think we need money to recruit at all

I mean, to first get someone interested. Then CCS is a way

You have an army of academics and academic-adjacents out there whose talents are often way underutilized. And some of them are anti-authoritarian.

It was sort of known that the Monero Project lacked statistical expertise, but not enough was done to rectify that. Part of the issue is the Rumsfeldian "unknown unknowns"

A lot of pre-mined cryptocurrency groups are throwing lots of recruiting effort around. Ciphertrace et al. are for sure recruiting.

What do you imagine a recruiting campaign would look like

Emailing a bunch of professors?

For instance, I could identify specific areas of the Monero privacy safeguards that need attention by a statistical specialist in X area. Then go out cold-calling people who can help. I'll match talent to politics by monitoring news and social media for mentions of "such and such graduate student participates in Z anti-authoritarian political action"

Keep in mind that you're competing with the dumb crypto money for talent

Exactly. We don't compete on money. We compete with all the warm fuzzies we can provide people.

It takes a particular kind of person, for sure, but they are out there.

Sure, that's one perk, but it's also a lot of effort to find. If someone can champion this, it will be much appreciated. Up till now it's been quite difficult

Academics and academic-adjacents love working on interesting problems, anyway. And to work on an X billion dollar market capitalization coin? That would interest people since it has real world impact.

I've thought about this for MAGIC, since we are always looking for people to open grant proposals, and that's quite hard to pull talent in for too. Clearly we should be doing more but it's all volunteer with limited time

A lot of the natural sciences are oversaturated with expertise. In other words, the government and private funding for natural scientists is low compared to the number of natural scientists.

A typical grant proposal for the natural sciences in the US and EU might have as little as a 10% chance of success. That sucks! And even post-doc salaries are pretty low.

You can search for the statistics, but here's an article for you:

<sgp_[m]> "Sure, that's one perk, but it's..." <- I think this goes beyond, "If someone could champion this, that would be great." Keeping the Monero protocol in tip-top shape is _critical_ for user privacy, especially as its comes under increasingly sophisticated attack by state and non-state actors.

What we don't know can hurt us.

Yep I think no one disagrees. I've been of the opinion for a year or two now that the greatest threat is tye current state of MRL. fluffy was the original recruiter though, so it would certainly help if Core was (publicly at least) more visible in trying to staff it given the current state

Academics and academic-adjacents are canaries on the coal mine for authoritarianism. Just about literally: in many historical instances of state violence, they killed the teachers first. Then they went after everyone else. I am sure there are many academics and academic-adjacents out there who see the handwriting on the wall and would realize that Monero presents a solution to a tough problem in resisting authoritarianism and mass

surveillance.

Looks like someone released a new intro to Monero video today: m.youtube.com/watch?v=B7sLnmlZ-kU

* Academics and academic-adjacents are canaries in the coal mine for authoritarianism. Just about literally: in many historical instances of state violence, they killed the teachers first. Then they went after everyone else. I am sure there are many academics and academic-adjacents out there who see the handwriting on the wall and would realize that Monero presents a solution to a tough problem in resisting authoritarianism and

mass surveillance.

<DiegoSalazar[m]> "Probably April 29, 30, and May 1" <- I think all the details you've mentioned sound fantastic. I'm not sure how large the New Mexico Monero community is or how accessible las Cruces is to the wider community

carrington: you would have to fly into El Paso, TX airport, and take a shuttle which is like 45 minutes to Las Cruces, but the shuttle drops you off half a black away from the venue

<DiegoSalazar[m]> "carrington: you would have to fl" <- Half a black? I though that was abolished in the USA long ago...

Ping, how does one set a Matrix account to away (not présent?)

That's not supported afaik, depends mostly by if the homeserver you are using has presence tracking enabled or not

You can't manually set presence, afaik.

You homeserver detects whether you are present, away or offline, and sets those presence options up by itself.

* You homeserver detects whether you are present, away or offline, and sets those presence states up by itself.

Thanks ErCiccione and mechanic41turk , that's clear that a user cannot force a particular presence state. Too bad. I see that every single Matrix user on the IRC network has identical presence indicated as 'present'.

It's no big deal, just an artifact from a primary IRC user on Matrix.

Also not good for users who don't want to broadcast their sleep-wake cycle.

Geonic your continued shit slinging against me is getting old. Your recent insinuation in -events that I'm behind the CCS going down today as retaliation for you telling Firo that theirs was still up is both false and slanderous. Cut it out, please.

Yeah that was just unnecessary and stupid

anyone heard from fluffypony

I heard he is treated well

For transparency purposes I would like to disclose that Diego Salazar has asked if I might be interested in giving a remote talk about the mixin selection algorithm at the proposed conference. I have responded, "50/50 maybe; need to think about it."

Ye

FWIW re read receipts and wake cycle privacy, there's an experimental solution to it as of Synapse 1.40 about 2 weeks ago

Not sure w/o trying to look up the server stats via some Matrix dashboard if monero . social is on 1.40+

v1.40.0

DiegoSalazar[m]: the insinuation was that they were being hosted on the same server, not that you turned it off as retaliation. it's not such a grand conjecture to make when they were both apparently being managed by pigeons, who afaik is a CypherStack employee. but I don't think this is a discussion for this channel.

I think it's very much a discussion for this channel.

go ahead then, please.

pigeons: do you know where the #monero matrix <-> irc bridge is currently stuck?

Stop being a dick to me. Enough shit slinging.

currently discussion is split in half which is a bit unfortunate

selsta: Yes, I dropped a communication to libera, where they wanted me to verify something for the 3rd time and then life blew up. I dropped the ball on this one, let me check if they have changed anything and update you in 15 minutes

thanks!

Like, if I open a CCS and you want to say you don't trust it because of things, then of course go for it.

But what happened today was unprovoked, helped no one, and was you just making drama for no reason.

DiegoSalazar[m]: are you going to address what I said? did CypherStack try to save money by piggy-backing the firo infra on the getmonero VPS? or did one magically go offline when the other one was turned off?

I don't host the CCS dude.

I don't host any of the getmonero infrastructure.

why is pigeons the one talking to the host regarding the outage then? isn't he your employee?

diego doesn't actually know anything about the getmonero or ccs infrastructure, you would have to ask binaryfate about that, and I know his approach is not to broadcast sensitive information

and its not a vps

pigeons is contributing on his own this had nothing to do with DiegoSalazar[m], cut the shit steering already

pigeons: ok. I hope binaryFate releases some non-sensitive logs regarding the outage when it is fixed so we can know what happened.

binaryFate: pigeons also happens to be working for the company that forked the CCS over to Firo, so I'd say they're kinda related.

your insinuation that we have the same host as firo is complete BS.

stop insinuating BS while people are contributing on their freetime to solve issues

okey doke. just weird timing, that's all. firo.org is still online, so they obviously have their own hosting. my question was regarding the ccs.firo.org subdomain.

Your issue addressed doesn't address mine though.

but I guess you'll let us know when it's fixed and we won't need to make conjectures?

Stop raising drama and cut out the unfounded slander against me.

DiegoSalazar[m]: if you feel you're being harassed, speak to the mods and they can act accordingly. I've said all I had to say to you.

I surely will let you know when it's fixed. For now I think the way you are conjecturing (which is always directed at the same thing really) is just not constructive at all.

<selsta> "pigeons: do you know where the..." <- I can also try to push here but they are ignoring me also for #monero-space

binaryFate: copy.

Does Core want responsibility for this room or should I do it? Previously it was Diego on behalf of Core

sgp_[m]: why is the choice between Core and you? maybe raise it at the next community meeting and we can decide who should have responsibility for this room.

Ultimately it is Core's choice I suppose since they have the namesake

sgp_[m]: selsta I am including #monero-space #monero-gui and #monero-swap in my request to Half-Shot and libera for matrix bridging. I'm not sure why those channels don't work.

pigeons: Ty, let me know if you need help with any of those. Hopefully they respond soon

The main request is for #monero which hits a limit imposed by the bridge that they need to override

oh also #monero-hardware in the first group

I don't really have a strong interest in this channel anymore. It's just a lot of talk and not much value to me personally

Probably not a good idea that you have responsibility for it then.

:)

wait till they learn it's called calligraphy :p

pigeons: Is there a problem with #monero-hardware? I believe I bridged that to Mattermost while at Freenode, and didn't resolve the bridge afterwards.

twitter.com/WatchFund/status/1432841831872671744 binaryFate 😁

lol

big oof