General purpose compute for sats

After several iterations of (GitHub) Actions runners I recently had some very good conversations that helped boil the whole thing down to one core component: Paid subprocesses.

The idea:

- IN: cmd + args + stdin + env + 🥜 money

- OUT: stdout + stderr + 🥜 change

⚠️ I'm showing a hacky proof of concept, by no means production ready. This is just to get the idea out.

- Operators advertise their preinstalled software. (ffmpeg, ngit, act, etc...)

- User filters operators by software/architecture.

- Operator can whitelist users

Workflows (CI/CD):

- Doing workflows will be a layer on top of this.

- Deals with the complexity of the ACT runners and (n)git.

- All the workflow orchestrator would need is an operator that runs both ngit and act (or install it manually as part of the exec).

Other stuff:

- Use this to run one-off video transcoding jobs on specialized hardware

- Video rendering

- Audio transcription

- [your creative idea here]

I got this (hacky) version running, the first worker there is whitelist-only (for my own safety)