After the big meeting where we filled up the 8′ x 4′ board with session topics, we got to hang out, talk, drink, play, retreat into the world of email, etc. It’s quite a social group.

I got to spend a long time talking with Paul Graham; we both used to work for Interleaf and have kept in touch intermittently through email, but I think we haven’t actually seen each other in many years — we couldn’t figure it out. Paul in person is as brilliant and eclectic as his essays. This summer he’s brought together and funded young coders who have interesting business ideas. One of the projects, Reddit, is a social news aggregation site — there’s a better explanation here — that helps with the fact (as Paul contended last night) that only maybe 30% of what what we read about what’s new comes from traditional news sources. Reddit is compact and bottom up, two big pluses. Very interesting site.

BTW, Aaron Swartz, who’s here, is another of Paul’s summer fundees. He’s posted a job offering notice on his blog. (He’s also got some great posts up, as usual.)

Also BTW, I drove up with Susan Crawford, another ridiculously multi-talented person for whom I have fathomless respect. We decided to combine our session ideas and lead a discussion on “How Fucked Are We?” about how the battle for Net freedom is going (my view: badly) and what we can do about it (e.g., Susan suggests a World Net Day on the model of Earth Day). (Note: The scatological title is a sign of my despair.)

I wandered around a bit, watching out for errant Segways and home-brew segways, pausing for a bit at a home-made still (no samples were ready yet), and then went into the tech room where people were organizing a game of Werewolf, which I had never played for. Then, at 1am (= 4am east coast time) I crawled into my tent at the edge of the O’Reilly lawn and actually fell asleep. [Technorati tags: foo05]

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