Decentralized Systems & Applications

**Location:** Strategy HQ 1850 Towers Crescent Plaza Tysons Corner, VA 22182 [https://maps.app.goo.gl/GWnJA7iWFNLinSjw6](https://maps.app.goo.gl/GWnJA7iWFNLinSjw6) Join us for BitDevs DC #20, our local Socratic Seminar covering Bitcoin protocol development, security, and governance. This month we'll be discussing Bitcoin bugs, cluster mempool in Core 31.0, Silent Payments adoption, the recent maintainer shakeup, and more. Pizza provided by Strategy. **Timeline:** 5:30pm - 6:00pm : Doors open and social half hour 6:00pm - 8:30pm : BitDevs Socratic Seminar **Parking/Transport:** * 🚆 Silver Line Metro — Tysons Corner Station + walk through Tysons Corner Center mall and over the bridge to the building * 🚗 Parking available in the Tysons Corner Center mall lots adjacent to the building or in front of the building Thank you to **Strategy** for hosting!

**Register Here:** https://reg.experiences.redhat.com/flow/redhat/4102500/rhexpressregistrationapp/page/expressregistration?sc_cid=RHCTN1260000485001 **Automate at the speed of mission** Today’s landscape demands a shift in strategy. One where automation isn’t just a tool, but the engine driving modernization for your organization or agency. Join Red Hat experts and your peers at **[Ansible Automates in Washington, DC](https://reg.experiences.redhat.com/flow/redhat/4102500/rhexpressregistrationapp/page/expressregistration?sc_cid=RHCTN1260000485001)** for a full day of conversation on building an automation strategy that scales. We’re moving beyond isolated tasks to focus on the topics that define modern IT: * **Operational velocity and scale:** Deploy faster and eliminate manual bottlenecks by standardizing on Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform as the backbone of your IT estate. * **Continuous compliance and resilience:** Trade audit anxiety for automated governance, stay ahead of configuration drift, and minimize human error to ensure mission continuity. * **AI-driven operations:** Put data and intelligence into automated action with the latest advancements in Ansible Lightspeed and gen AI. **What you'll walk away with** You'll leave with real, applicable insight from technical experts, peer practitioners, and Red Hat product leadership, including a 1st-look at what's new in AAP 2.7. **Who should attend?** **#AnsibleAutomates2026** is for IT business leaders and their teams: * CIOs, CTOs, and IT Directors * Enterprise and Network Architects * IT Operations and DevOps Leads * Security and Compliance Professionals * Automation Architects shaping AI and modernization strategy * Anyone interested in Automation - no matter where you are in your journey **[Event Details](https://reg.experiences.redhat.com/flow/redhat/4102500/rhexpressregistrationapp/page/expressregistration?sc_cid=RHCTN1260000485001)** * **Location:** Marriott Marquis\, DC \| 901 Massachusetts Ave NW\, Washington\, DC 20001 * **Date:** Wednesday, June 24, 2026 * **Time:** 8:15 AM - 4:30 PM ET **Note:** Please register using your business email address. Questions? Contact us at infrastructure@redhat.com

Important: Register on [AICamp website](https://www.aicamp.ai/event/eventdetails/W2026061814) is required for admission. **Description:** Welcome to the AI meetup in Washington DC. Join us for deep dive tech talks on AI, GenAI, LLMs and Agents, hands-on experiences on code labs, workshops, and networking with speakers and fellow developers. **Agenda:** \* 5:30pm\~6:00pm: Checkin, Food/drink and networking \* 6:00pm\~8:00pm: Tech talks and Q&A \* 8:00pm: Happy Hour at Courthouse Social (cross the street) **Tech Talk: Secure Developer Environments in the Age of AI Agents** **Speaker:** Patrick Brown (Coder) **Abstract:** Federal engineering teams are under pressure to ship faster while meeting some of the most demanding security and compliance requirements in the world. In this talk, Patrick Brown of Coder explores how cloud development environments (CDEs) give agencies a foundation to accelerate software delivery without sacrificing control — and why that foundation matters even more as AI-powered coding agents enter the workflow. He'll cover how CDEs keep source code off endpoints, enforce zero-trust access patterns, and provide the consistent, ephemeral infrastructure that both human developers and AI agents need to operate safely at scale. **Speakers:** Stay tuned as we are updating speakers and schedules. If you have a keen interest in speaking to our community, we invite you to submit topics for consideration: [Submit Topics](https://forms.gle/JkMt91CZRtoJBSFUA) **Sponsors:** We are actively seeking sponsors to support AI developers community. Whether it is by offering venue spaces, providing food, or cash sponsorship. Sponsors will not only speak at the meetups, receive prominent recognition, but also gain exposure to our extensive membership base of 5,000+ AI developers in D.C and 500K+ worldwide.

Monthly meeting: Second Saturday of the month International House of Pancakes (IHOP) 775 Rockville Pike, Rockville, MD 20852 7:00 PM – 10 PM. Late arrivals always welcome. Look for the table with someone wearing a red hat. Questions, please call 1-240-644-5230 Agenda: What are more things we can do to wake people up? What can we do to get more people involved? Other things people would like to talk about. This will be a joint meeting with: DC 9/11 Truth [https://dc911truth.org/](https://dc911truth.org/) dc911truth Facebook page [https://www.facebook.com/groups/dc911truth/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/dc911truth/) 911 Meetup Group [https://www.meetup.com/meetup-group-kyegaoqu/](https://www.meetup.com/meetup-group-kyegaoqu/) Central Bank Digital Currencies CBDC Meetup Group [https://www.meetup.com/central-bank-digital-currencies-cbdc/](https://www.meetup.com/central-bank-digital-currencies-cbdc/) Freedom of Speech Meetup Group [https://www.meetup.com/silver-spring-freedom-of-speech-meetup-group/](https://www.meetup.com/silver-spring-freedom-of-speech-meetup-group/) One way to make it more difficult for them them to impose a digital currency on us is to use cash. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) With Digital Currency they can: Have a complete government dossier on every detail of your life. Use your purchase history to maintain a detailed social credit score for every person. Provide tax breaks to corporations who hire people with admirable social credit scores. Only grant government contracts to corporations with employees with admirable social credit scores. Adjust health insurance premiums to incentivize people to develop admirable social credit scores. Connect your social credit score with a digital ID to encourage you to look at only approved web sites when surfing the internet. Viewing conspiracy web sites could lower your Social Credit Score and make it difficult to get a job. With their electronic chain around your neck, they can control where, when, how you travel, what food you are allowed to buy etc. They will love the power to only allow you to use your digital money only where they want you to shop and allow you to buy only what they prefer you to buy. Require you to have to have a license to use your money. They will call it a Digital Currency License. Require you to take any vaccine they want you to take to maintain your digital currency license. Tax you in ways we have not even imagined. Adjust your income tax rate based on your social credit score. Use AI to increase your income tax rate if you eat too many hamburgers because they will tell you eating too many hamburgers will increase global warming. This is just one example of many behaviors they might not approve of. Adjust individual prices for different individuals. They will be able to make you pay more per pound for hamburger if you purchased too much red meat during the past 30 days. Require you to buy so many pounds of soy burger for every pound of hamburger to save the planet and increase the profits for the soy burger manufacturers. Turn off the digital money of people they consider to be spreading misinformation. Turn off the digital money of people they consider to be dangerous conspiracy theorists. Turn off your money at 8 PM if they want a curfew at 8 PM Turn off your money in another state if they do not want you to drive to another state without permission. Turn off your money when buying guns or ammo if they do not want you to buy guns or ammo. Turn off your digital money more than three miles away from your home if they want you to stay within three miles of your home during the next epidemic. Etc. etc. etc. From the standpoint of the government, one beauty of digital money is that your money is one “state emergency” away from being the government’s money. All they have to do is to take your digital money out of your Central Bank Digital Account for the “good of all”. It is not as easy for them to do this with physical cash, gold, stocks, or silver etc. Anything they **can** do, they will do. The essence of slavery is control. Digital Currency will enable them to make you, their slave. (in a global digital concentration camp). .

Join our new group’s fourth meeting. Meet fellow tech enthusiasts west of the beltway. ​Our meetings are a great place to work on and show off what you do. We are always welcoming. ​Our format is great for people who have started on but not finished one or several side projects. ​We will start off with basic introductions and what we are working on, along with what our goals are for the session. We’ll break the rest of the meeting into two working sessions. In between, we’ll do a quick check-in to see how folks are going. We also have some polls available which we use to shape our events: ​[https://submatrix.net/article/Meetups/e9ym4fr8Ca](https://submatrix.net/article/Meetups/e9ym4fr8Ca) If the meetup is full, we encourage you to come anyway.

[Profs and Pints Northern Virginia](https://www.profsandpints.com/washingtondc) presents: **“Can Artificial Intelligence ‘See’?”** A look at how humans and artificial intelligence systems interpret the visual world in fundamentally different ways, with Arryn Robbins, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Richmond and cognitive scientist who researches visual attention, perception, and category learning. [Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at [https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/nv-can-AI-see](https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/nv-can-AI-see) .] Artificial intelligence can now identify faces, categorize objects, describe scenes, and outperform humans on certain visual tasks. But does AI actually “see” the world the way that people do? Or does it arrive at correct answers using representations that differ markedly from human perception? Join Arryn Robbins of the University of Richmond for a fascinating exploration of how humans and AI construct meaning from visual information and a look at comparisons between human perception and AI that reveal just how dynamic and context-dependent our own visual systems really are. Dr. Robbins, who previously has given excellent Profs and Pints talks on flaws and biases in human visual perception, will draw from research in cognitive science, visual perception, and AI vision systems. She’ll explain how human perception is not merely a simple recording of the world, but an active process shaped by expectations, context, goals, and recent experience. You’ll learn how humans form flexible mental representations that allow us to recognize objects across changing environments and conditions, and why those representations continuously adapt as we interact with the world. Many AI systems, by contrast, learn visual categories through statistical patterns in data. They can produce impressive results, but sometimes they also produce strange and unexpected failures, and sometimes they classify images in ways that seem strange to us. Dr. Robbins will discuss what these differences reveal about the nature of perception itself, and why the mismatch between human and AI representations matters for technologies like self-driving cars, medical imaging, facial recognition, and automated surveillance. Important for anyone trying to understand the rapidly growing role of AI in daily life, this talk will explore one of the biggest questions in cognitive science and artificial intelligence: What does it actually mean to “see” and understand the world? (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.) Image: “Eye Farm” by Nevit Dilmen (Wikimedia Commons).

…Transform Our Lives, Work, and World (2024) by Jamie Metzl, 432 pages [Genetics] • Paperback • Hardcover • Kindle • Audiobook • Library: [https://fcplcat.fairfaxcounty.gov/search/title.aspx?ctx=1.1033.0.0.1&pos=1&cn=615082](https://fcplcat.fairfaxcounty.gov/search/title.aspx?ctx=1.1033.0.0.1&pos=1&cn=615082) Check the How To Find Us section for Zoom Link **(Remember, the Zoom Link is different each month, do not bookmark)** ### Review “In Superconvergence, Jamie Metzl takes readers on a magical journey through the science of the intersecting genetics, biotech, and AI revolutions, deeply explores the implications, and challenges us to think creatively and proactively about what comes next. Very few books are absolute must-reads. This is one.”―Siddhartha Mukherjee, assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and author of The Gene: An Intimate History "During the 25 years I have known Jamie Metzl, he has always been ahead of the curve. There is no one better to help us understand and prepare for the fast-approaching technological revolutions. Superconvergence is brilliant. I can't recommend it more strongly."―Sanjay Gupta MD, bestseller author, neurosurgeon, and Emmy-award winning chief medical correspondent (CNN) "Our world is defined by our science and technology—whether we like it or not. The question now is not whether to use these powers, but how best to use them. In Superconvergence, Jamie Metzl takes us on a journey through the new capabilities that are radically transforming ecosystems inside us and around us, challenging each of us to get personally involved with building the future we want."―Beth Shapiro, University of California Santa Cruz evolutionary biologist and author of Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined―and Redefined―Nature "In a fine counter-blast to the pessimism of today, Jamie Metzl lays out just how spectacular the future of humanity and planet can be if we harness innovation responsibly and imaginatively to create what he calls the 'spiral of progress.'"―Matt Ridley, author of How Innovation Works, and co-author of Viral: The search for the Origin of Covid-19 “A page-turning journey through space and time that shows us how our lives will be changed by imminent technological advances we once only dreamed of.”―David Sinclair, Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, and author of Lifespan: Why We Age―and Why We Don't Have To “The superconvergence of the genetics, biotechnology, and AI revolutions provides spectacular opportunities for building a better world. It also represents an almost limitless investment opportunity. We were excited to collaborate with Jamie Metzl, one of the world's great experts on how these aspirations can best be realized, including in capital markets. Superconvergence is a master class for imagining, investing in, and building a future we'd like to inhabit."―Jeremy Schwartz, Global Chief Investment Officer, WisdomTree “A clear examination of a transitional moment in the story of life on Earth…. Metzl capably describes recent developments in genetics and biotech and looks at how AI is providing an analytical engine of unprecedented power…. An important book in which the author sets out a path for the future based on his experience and expertise.”―Kirkus “Erudite, optimistic, and timely.”―Science Magazine "[In Superconvergence] Mr. Metzl has identified an important truth: that the convergence of new technologies is galvanizing us to reimagine how to meet urgent challenges in medicine and the environment. It’s a compelling opportunity—provided we manage to sidestep self-induced catastrophes along the way."―The Wall Street Journal ### About the Author Jamie Metzl is a leading technology and healthcare futurist and the founder and chair of OneShared.World. He is the author of Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity and four other books and was a member of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing. Jamie previously served in the U.S. National Security Council, State Department, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee and with the United Nations in Cambodia. His work has been featured by most major media organizations around the world, including 60 Minutes, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Fox, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, the Times of London, Le Monde, and Paris Match, and his podcast interviews with Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, and others have reached tens of millions of listeners. He lives in New York City. Visit Jamiemetzl.com.