sammy gwilym

https://social.coop/@cwebber/117525506922747693

do I know anyone in Stockholm who would house me on the nights of December 2nd - 5th? i’m a tidy guest with good manners and a fabulous blog, and i’m figuring out if i can attend Splintercon Stockholm

https://worm-blossom.org/#y2026w43

This week, Sammy and Emmy deal with a peculiar interaction between Willow's prefix pruning and access control. Aljoscha stubbornly focuses on something even more important (Macromania). And Auntie Source gives helpful, universally applicable advice.

Newsflash: Lego now makes minifig of a woman you met at an event called ‘Blahaj Blast’

And yes, we released the first year of worm-blossom.org’s music on Bandcamp. That’s two whole hours of chiptunes, plus a song about salmon

https://worm-blossom.bandcamp.com/album/year-one

https://worm-blossom.org/#y2026w41

This week, worm-blossom.org turns one!!! We’ve been doing this for a whole year! We add a new member, Emmy! We release the first year's music on Bandcamp! And we find the answer to 'why is it called worm-blossom'!

https://worm-blossom.org/#y2026w37 “hinged”

This week, Aljoscha details his Sufficiently Good Media Formats. Sammy has several theories. And links, music, and contributions from friends of the site.

Illustration contributed from https://youjung-noh.com/

https://worm-blossom.org/#y2026w35

This week, Sammy argues that always-online peers are more than just servers, okay? Aljoscha has a lot on his plate. And we have shout-outs for improvements to the Willow test vectors and Sneakerweb.

https://worm-blossom.org/#y2026w34

This week we announce Pillow, our collaboration with

! Sammy tells us what it's all about (and there’s a video). Aljoscha details his WTP deliberations. And the pandas share what they've been listening to.

https://worm-blossom.org/#y2026w30

This week, Aljoscha is really on holiday! So Sammy takes a maximalist approach to decorating the place, Emmy returns for a guest article, and there are shout-outs, reviews, and a good link. Mm-hmm.

8yo: Why couldn’t Einstein build a wall? Me: I don’t know, why couldn’t he build a wall? 8yo: Because he only had ein stein. Me: Ha, good one.

Me: … so you know who Einstein is? 8yo: yeah he’s the guy who tried to make a robot out of dead people

https://worm-blossom.org/#y2026w28

This week, Sammy and Aljoscha are at DWeb camp, and leave updates to

and

. We even get a guest comic from

!

thank you to the girl who came to our demo table tonight to deliver us a sneakerweb file named piss.snk

not leaving this spot until we have taught them all how to torrent

working on my willow talk while I can hear my 8yo son in the next room inciting a debate between three adults over whether there can be more than one mewtwo

https://worm-blossom.org/#y2026w27

This week, we release the sneakerweb. Sammy has travelled to Berlin for DWeb camp. Less remarkably, Aljoscha is also in Berlin.

lesson learnt

https://spectra.video/w/7hsRkrevhuTyV1q1qxkPjM

"Centralised systems were designed with the best of intentions, but were turned against us anyway. And peer-to-peer systems will be exactly the same.

How do we make the next generation of protocols more difficult to weaponise?”

Here’s a clean recording of my #FOSDEM talk “Willow - Protocols for an uncertain future”. This talk was a real labour of love, hope you enjoy it!!!

This Sunday at #FOSDEM’26!

Centralised systems were designed with the best of intentions, but were turned against us anyway. And peer-to-peer systems will be exactly the same.

How do we make the next generation of protocols more difficult to weaponise?

This is the lens which I’ll use to look at Willow (https://willowprotocol.org), a family of publicly-funded, open source peer-to-peer protocols. Join me for a presentation of drawings, music, and insight gained from working in p2p for the past six years.

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/CVGZAV-willow/

“Every piece of technology contains complex ontological, epistemological, and cosmological assumptions that engineers rarely question. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, and VKontakte in Russia are all based on the same model and the same set of assumptions. The ontological assumption is that society consists of individuals that are like atoms, and you can know the relation between these social atoms by putting a line between two dots, as in graph theory. These assumptions come to dominate our understanding of social relations and social formations, and an engineer would never doubt this or suggest that it’s a fabrication. But from the perspective of anthropology, a society could never emerge from individuals—individuals would already have been eaten by a tiger or a wolf. A society can only begin with groups. It is only with modern individualism that we came to understand society as being composed of atoms. This is only one assumption among many made by the engineers who design our technology.”

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/136/538400/the-call-of-the-unknown-in-art-and-cosmotechnics/