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The State of Climate Protocols

Talk Cory Levenson
researcher practitioner
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Cory Levenson (Corey Levenson), an engineer and climate tech consultant previously with Regen Network, surveys the state of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) protocols, distinguishing 'closed system' pathways like direct air capture and biochar (easy MRV, high cost) from 'open system' pathways like enhanced rock weathering and ocean alkalinity enhancement (cheaper but harder to quantify due to attribution challenges). He details emerging data protocols—including the Carbon Data Open Protocol, Cascade's ERW Data Query, and Carbon to Sea's Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement Data Protocol—and argues the field should adopt community-governed standards bodies (like OBO Foundry or schema.org's science working group) rather than letting registries like Isometric capture scientific protocol development.

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Protocols in Electronic Design

Engineer Vikram Shaker (Qualcomm RF front-end) surveys protocols across electronic design, from hard standards like NIST's cesium-clock definition of the second and the 50-ohm coaxial impedance convention, to communication standards (USB, chiplet interconnects like UCIe and CXL), validation failures (Intel's Pentium FDIV bug and the resulting birth of formal verification), and documentation disasters (NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter unit mismatch). He frames these through Protocol Institute concepts like 'tension' versus 'trade-off' and the efficiency-thoroughness (ETO) frontier, and closes by examining unwritten cultural, ethical, and geopolitical protocols governing chip industry work.

chiplet-interconnect-protocols-ucie-cxl-bow documentation-and-tribal-protocol-failures efficiency-thoroughness-eto-frontier

Vikram Shaker

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Guest Talk with Daniel Bashir | A Survey of AI for the Protocol-Minded

Daniel Bashir, ML engineer at AWS and host of The Gradient podcast, surveys how protocol thinking applies across AI—from funding and scaling laws (like DeepMind's Chinchilla compute-optimal training protocol) to benchmarks (perplexity vs. François Chollet's ARC benchmark for measuring sample-efficient generalization) to regulation (the EU AI Act's risk-tiered categorization). He argues that nearly every layer of AI development—research, engineering, deployment, and governance—can be reframed as a set of competing or evolving protocols, using examples like Sarah Hooker's 'hardware lottery' and Tolga Bolukbasi-style debates over fair/responsible AI operationalization.

benchmarks-as-protocols-perplexity-arc-vibe-based-evaluation chollets-formal-definition-of-intelligence-and-generalization-hierarchy eu-ai-act-risk-based-regulatory-tiers

Daniel Bashir

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AI as Normal Technology

Arvind Narayanan presents his paper/book 'AI as Normal Technology,' arguing against superintelligence narratives by applying innovation-diffusion theory (invention, innovation, diffusion stages) to AI, contending that societal adoption is bottlenecked by slow organizational, business-model, and institutional adaptation rather than by the pace of capability gains. In discussion with Venkatesh Rao, they connect this to protocol theory, framing workflows, business models, and context engineering practices as new 'protocols' that must be invented, while Rao draws analogies to naval warfare tactics, printing-press literacy, and the hardness/mud distinction from Josh Stark's work to explain why protocol adoption is inherently slow but durable.

ai-as-normal-technology-vs-superintelligence context-engineering institutionaltechnological-hardness-crystals-and-mud

Arvind Narayanan, Venkatesh Rao

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carbon-data-open-protocol data-standards-and-interoperability-schemaorg-linkml durable-cdr-and-voluntary-carbon-markets governance monitoring-reporting-and-verification-mrv open-vs-closed-system-carbon-removal-pathways protocols research technology town-hall