But they are primarily a _research lab_ exploring tools for scientists and journalists etc. The real product they create the essays, and with what they've learned you are now free to go and make the world a better place starting a few steps ahead. Kind of like Bret Victor.
Read this article twice and can't understand what problem it is trying to solve and it's use cases. Can someone please explain it better?
Apparently it is a distributed file management system that is Local-first access control. What is the point if the data is on my machine then I have full access already so it already is local-first access?
Local first doesn’t mean local only. There are times where your device will need to sync data from a remote location/other peers. That data may be encrypted. This project is trying to solve for local access control in such situations.
The general research program seems very interesting, things like Embark have that special kind of simplicity that comes from long and deep thinking about a problem.
In particular,
https://www.inkandswitch.com/crosscut/
has come up multiple times here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855556
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30845034
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39249631
and I'd love to try it out, but AFAICT there aren't any repositories/releases available.