Post #1439516
2026-04-09 23:10 UTC
After the success of our first zine project, I began looking for a student who wanted to work on a follow-up. Ayush Manocha, who had just taken my undergrad PL course, was keen to help, and we began tossing around ideas.
My grad students Yan Tong and Nathan Liittschwager and I had been working on a new protocol for causal message delivery. We called the protocol Cykas, which stands for "Can you keep a secret?", and Ayush liked the idea of collaborating on a zine to explain the Cykas protocol!
Replies (1)
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@lindsey@recurse.social 2026-04-09 23:17
We quickly realized that to explain the Cykas protocol, we'd have to back up and explain what causal message delivery even *was*, and say something about the classic approaches to implementing it. So our zine became a bit less about Cykas and a bit more about causal delivery generally. We went through lots of iterations on the writing. One of our goals was to explain concepts precisely without needing to introduce a lot of jargon. Feedback from @b0rk and @omarieclaire helped *a lot* with this!