Oh wow, this hits close to home. Hope it’s not bad form to plug an adjacent project on your post — felt too aligned not to, and it seems like we've converged on quite similar ideas! I’ve been working on Wetware [0], which has significant overlap on the substrate (P2P WASM, content-addressed, single binary, no control plane).
Different design center, though. Wetware is aimed at people building multi-tool agent products who’ve hit Simon Willison’s lethal trifecta [1], so the design pressure goes elsewhere: cells are fully async WASM/WASI procs (cheap to suspend, parallel by default); inter-cell calls go over object-capability RPC (Cap’n Proto); and there’s a tiny Clojure-inspired Lisp (“Glia”) that doubles as an LLM-facing or human-facing shell. It’s pure by default w/ content-addressable, immutable data structures planned, and an algebraic effect system gating every impure operation exists today. An agent (human or otherwise) can list, attenuate, and invoke just the caps it’s been granted, and you can see at a glance which fragment of code can actually touch the world.
The cap-vs-ACL bit seems to be the main point of divergence, AFAICT. Pollen’s grant docs show capabilities as cert-baked properties the callee inspects in user code (closer to attribute-based access control than to invocation-time cap tokens, and a clean fit for trusted-cluster ops like delegating admin or roles -- very sensible and def don't want to knock it!). Wetware leans the other way on the spectrum: caps are unforgeable references to specific methods (Cap’n Proto), the runtime enforces that nobody can call a method they don’t hold, and attenuation happens by grafting a strict subset of those references to a child cell with per-method granularity. So tool-calls-tool composes naturally, and the worst case of pulling a sketchy MCP server off GitHub becomes “the call fails,” not “depends whether the seed wrote its property check correctly.”
It's a les polished compared to what Sam has shipped, but moving fast, and this post has jolted me into sharing a bit before I had planned! Sam, would love to compare notes if you're open to it. And I'd also love to talk to anyone who’s shipped a multi-tool agent and gotten bitten : pwned in eval, legal blocking a third-party integration, can’t audit every MCP server you depend on. We’re in the first 100 conversations.
Either way, congrats on shipping — the 10-node demo is super slick, and “pure Go, no CGO” is IMO a major win :)
I had a similar journey of enlightenment that likewise led me to OCaml. Unless you're doing low-level systems programming, OCaml will give you the "if it compiles, it's probably right" vibe with much less awkward stuff to type.
Hard disagree. The IDF kills civilians, yes, but I am not aware of a deliberate effort to target civilians. The civilian deaths are overwhelmingly a consequence of Hamas blending in with the population and conducting operations where any retaliation puts civilians at risk.
There is a meaningful difference between collateral death and terrorism.
Stopping humanitarian operations because these are being targeted by the enemy is not the same as targeting populations, regardless of what partisan news out lets like TruthOut have to say about it.
Everywhere you turn, you will find that Hamas' explicit strategy is to maximize the humanitarian crisis in the region. They do this so that people like you will be their advocate.
The argument is that the IDF is targeting enemy combatants, and not deliberately targeting civilians (unlike, e.g. Hamas). The existence of non-combatant casualties alone does not imply terrorism.
To your first point, it really ought not require a citation to understand that people who have been training full-time for years make better soldiers than people you pull out of civilian life and ship off to the front after a few months, and who want nothing more than to exit the service.
There is no modern, professionalized army that wants conscripts. None. Conscripts are a liability, and a measure of last resort.
To your second, it’s far from just the downtrodden that fill the ranks of professional armies. In many countries, e.g. France (where I served), the upper classes of society (grande bourgeoisie and nobility) are over-represented in the ranks.