Unfortunately not. I hope it’s lovely, enjoy.

Learned a trick for this from @anildash.com : “Thank you, you’re very kind.” Not strictly a dodge, but shifting to a compliment of your own may reframe it enough to ease the embarrassment.

For whatever it’s worth, I’ve never heard you described as anything but an utter joy. Perhaps more authentic having come from someone with an overlapping social circle that you’ve never actually met? Hope it feels better soon.

A distributor risks their own badge with each badge they hand out.

I think if we’re signing each others keys we could take a count of those signatures as a trust proxy. So a certain number of people, a small quorum, who have collectively exchanged with a large number, might be able to appoint these distributors? The nice thing is that we can chain that trust.

I guess, for now, we could but help me come up with creative ways to replace that in-person level of trust?

The last of which is my favorite, where FAANG pays us to send 80 ____ devs with <absurd> levels experience to their party.

The badges are fun conference trinkets but extend beyond that, effectively building a private subnet of trusted actors that can do all sorts of things together: share resources, cache traffic, receive collective sponsorship in exchange for attending conference side events.

For now this hinges upon a human seeing another human and determining that they’re legitimately a developer. At this point that’s me, thus the small deployment.

In the future I’m hoping very smart friends will help us build smarter ways to initiate people.

Thereafter you can’t rejoin with the same username, and as you come to add credentials to your locally stored and encrypted identity file, for various purposes, we receive hashes that we can collectively use to prevent future attempts to rejoin the network, should you be banned.

You’re officially invited to join the order at our next meeting, happy to arrange that (I travel a lot).

Unfortunately part of the value is that we end up with 1 human 1 dev 1 UUID. I meet you in person, I personally assert you’re a developer by hashing your GH username in the identity file.

We had the boards but faced budgetary constraints for assembly on a short timeline. We tried to toaster oven but there are a ridiculously large number of tiny components, tightly woven. Azymologist is a genius.

Deploying the first few hundred finished badges this month at conferences.

It lives! Lots more to be done but it’s my favorite project in a long while. We have a strategy to keep everyone anonymous while ensuring bad actors can be permanently removed. What would you build on a tiny, private internet where trolls couldn’t exist?

A conference badge that does automated proximity-based key signing and private key exchange over IR, transmitted through a massive cubic zirconia and confirmed over 6 other mediums. They use the keys to form a secure mesh network so attendees can selectively expose contact details and chat.