 Finally, thank you. This is the finish of the link call of almost 30th, 2023. Thank you. Sorry to interrupt. No, no. And we're talking about like, I guess, you know, the AI as it interacts with note-taking and other kind of artifacts that groups and individuals want to produce and whether AI lacks a compass and a ratchet, like Chris put it very well. Yes, and I guess, yes, over the summer, I was saying like, I finally read and I finished, actually finished, as I said before, with all Engelbart. Oh, good. And I love, I don't know if you read like the last part, really reads like science fiction. Essentially it's like, he takes the reader through this hypothetical visit to the future where like this system that he has to describe the first part of the essay is already like widespread use. And he tries to describe how it feels to look at someone using this tool that is like, it doesn't exist. And to which extent it is even hard to understand exactly what they are doing with the tool. And it was so interesting to read that precisely as, you know, the world is like starting to, still learning to use things like GPT, right? Because there was this interesting aspect to, you know, like Engelbart trying to predict the applications of these ideas with this hypothetical tool and asked, actually doing the same here, I guess this is why I was reminded, like trying to imagine how the workflows of the future will look like as enabled by these new tools. Which Engelbart piece were you reading? Which doctorate? Yeah, so the classic being augmentation. So augmenting human intellect, a conceptual framework. Exactly, yes. 1962, thank you. 1962, I have like here from, straight from the aura, like some highlights from the end. And yeah, it was beautiful. I, you know, yes exactly, augmenting human intellect. And yes, very much, I actually haven't, I searched back in some of the video, but maybe not so thoroughly, somebody had actually written something specifically about reading Engelbart in the light of these new developments. But it seems like a very interesting exercise actually. It was, it felt quite interesting to read it in this context. Hey, Samuel. Greetings, nice to see you. Hello, everyone. Hey, good to see you. Have any of you met Eugene Kim? Oh my God, I haven't talked to them in ages, but yes, how's he doing? What's up? Or are you thinking about Eek, because Engelbart came out? Sure, yeah, that is why. But I used to see him a lot. He was brought on, we brought him on to lead the Wikimedia strategy conversation in 2009, 2010. Three. And I think at the time the purple numbers site was still alive and it's not anymore, sadly. That's a, I think it's still a good visual to keep in mind. That's something that people haven't brought back in current generation of tools for thought, interline annotations. We've gotten a tiny, tiny bit of marginalia, but what is the official manuscript term for interlinealia? Sorry. It sounds beautiful. Yeah, margin, it's not marginalia? I mean, what's... It's not a margin. I don't know. Anyway. There's certainly a large, there's a long history of interlinealiate, whatever it's called. Easy for you to say. We haven't tried to implement it. And no one has made very good use of multicolored text. At one point, I think there was a medium style that tried to offer it. Well, the tough part with color is what do you make that color mean and does that color universally mean that thing in all languages? Or is it even seen as does a color in all languages? And there's, I don't think color language is uniform at all. If you go read about Chinese colors, you'll be like, wait, what? It could just be grayscale. I think the point is it should just be slightly less noticeable and bold in the main text, however you are. In my use of the brain, I have three colors basically. The white is the default for everything. I use yellow to attract attention. Yellow means look here. There's a collection. And I use purple for opinions. Purple means there's something that might be interesting here. And I hate lots of colors and that, and you have to learn what those colors are. There is a thought in my brain that explains the colors, but you have to find it. It's under notes for using Jerry's brain. But I'm trying to do some harnessing of color within the same map because the map is always looks like itself. On marginalia and interlinealia, which I'm totally keeping, by the way. I really linked it. So it's a thing. I use a dash, but I think it will drop with use. So I keep going back, like every few months I go like, wait, the revolution was gonna be annotated. Well, they said. If you see the dance talk, and I'm like. That was right after the flying car, by the way. I think it will land earlier than the flying car. But, well, interlinealia, I'm totally adopting. And by these, I will take a hiatus because supermarket order is here, but I will be back and I can't hear you, sorry. Thanks. Yeah, I think that links and having some kind of persistent link organization on the web is still a nice open challenge. So is annotation, not any, in all these cases, not a particular implementation, right? Just the persistent move towards that mode of thinking and presentation. And I think a third that I've been thinking a lot about recently is evaluation of links that are specifically used as sources, which we should have a different name for. So the link, the note and the source. And specifically typed sources. What was the intention of using it as a source and what is the commentary on that over time? Do you have preferred nomenclature? I think of them as link note and site because I have an over fondness for having parallel concepts pick up the same number of letters in my own notes. And I think each of them deserves a web scale initiative that is not really technologically denominated and it's the place where everyone who cares about those things just tries to figure it out. And there's probably, I think the right way to add news to that trio is as summarization. So summarization is not any of those things. And hey. And we're losing Flansian. He seems to be falling out of the conservation of something. Conservation of participants. Peter, every time I see you, I assume that you're on like a Los Angeles set somewhere. He's actually in the Mandalorian set, which is like this round screen where you can project anything you want. It's really kind of cool. Pete's universe is all LEDs. That's not just the Pantone color of the year. I thought he was doing some marketing. If it is the Pantone color of the year, how did Babypuke Green make it? And Pete, the green is like shaded differently through Jitsie somehow though. It's not coming through as normal as background green as it was in the other. Yeah. I'm actually gonna tweak the color temperature. I have no white anywhere in the frame. So I don't even know how the white balance works on this, but if I make it go like that and then turn down the saturation. Oh, that's nice. Oh, that's more civil. That's fair truth. Yeah, you don't look like you're inside a spaceship anymore. So we've lost Flansian a couple of times. I hope we can mix it back in. We were talking about note-taking and it's importance over time given that, hey, now generative AI is gonna know everything and then we ended up with, how do we annotate texts and what do we call the different parts of annotation? And if SJ will repeat the thing he just said, I think you'll find it interesting because I think we've had conversations along similar lines. Oh, sure, so. About notes, links and sites. Yes, I was thinking that there are, so I've been thinking recently about sites and annotations on sites that help inform how they're used and how they're interpreted. But in the context of annotation and just link cataloging, all feeling like there's still really useful unsolved arenas, I would love to see web scale places to discuss how to make progress as a Knowledge Society that aren't specific, specifically fond of any implementation, just the place to organize current thoughts and help one another make progress. I like it. Of course, Joe, you were right. And I would add news. News seems like the one of these arenas, it has a lot of successful businesses, but none of them do the thing that we would want in terms of information summarization. So, news is probably the wrong term, but links, notes, sites and sums. Sums for summaries? I need a four letter word. You need a four letter word. A briefs is too long and sounds like underwear. Right. Anyway. Michael, yay. Either that or Flansian has converted into Michael Rosemont. Flansian is having trouble getting in the jitsie with something that works for him, so he'll be following him out. And he's back. Not that I'm superstitious or anything. Flansian, is this bandwidth? We can try to help. Keep your video on. I think he's having general systems issues. That's weird. Maybe it's a nationality thing. Maybe Switzerland has decided to cut itself off from the internet, audio and video. Our conversation has become sufficiently non-neutral. That's weird. Well, oh yeah, I just blamed jitsie. Yeah, yeah. It's working for the rest of us. Chris usually has the hiccups. It's always me. It's never Flansian. That's right. Shoot. And yeah. Well, we'll let Flansian troubleshoot. So any, where we'd like to take this conversation or is there another topic that's burning a hole in anybody's head? Oh, I'll mention some gossip while we're on annotations. Awesome. And ignoring implementations. While I was away for a half a minute, hypothesis went from a staff of roughly 35 down to 19. And in the first call I listened to today, I heard a word repeated dozens of times that here too far I have not heard many of their executives or employees use, which is the word customer. So I'm not quite sure. I haven't gotten scuttled but on where exactly they're going and what the shift was. They seemed to have lost a lot of customer, service-y people and one or two engineers but everything else seems to be moving at pace. So, you know. Chris, was this the call a couple of hours ago that was about new features? Yeah. Okay. I was on that call too, just out of curiosity. And I mean, very education centered. Yes. Strictly. I think they're moving, they're probably, and what's weird too is about a year ago they got a huge infusion of like 15 million from an outside group, which I expected meant they were going to like double down and then create twice as many employees and start building new stuff quickly. And they replaced one or two people who left. I think the two biggest, like about a year ago, a year and a half ago where John Udell was a major blow to have lost him. But I think he's getting to the point where I'm ready to retire or I'm just bored and I want to do something new. And then Nate Angel left and went to creative commons were like two big things. And, you know, their vice president of education is probably I think one of the bigger people to leave in this clean out. And most of the rest were kind of, you know, small foot soldiers, I think in the operation. But I did specifically ask the anonymous question. I noticed the shift. What does it mean for the future of the product? Which in a call about new features, they apparently chose to ignore the question and did not answer it. So I, you know, that also sends a signal of some semblance. So we'll see what happens. But my guess is they're going to double down more into the LMS educational space and start selling it as a product rather than as a free kind of social tool to a broader public. Yeah, I really, I felt like I had wandered into something different than I knew hypothesis to be. And they were really talking about, you know, what you got when you were a customer of this product, when your institution, you know, was a... They'll post the video probably in the next couple of days, but I'm pretty sure I heard the word customer about 80 times. And you'd be lucky to go three months and hear two people on any of those calls, use that word. So it sounds like hypothesis has gone through some pretty traumatic change recently. Yeah. It was, I'm an outsider. I don't know much about hypothesis, you know, happy user, unhappy recommender because the initial user experience is really terrible. But it's never been... So I guess the UX has always struck me as a real problem to adoption. And a company, our organization, organization that was looking for itself, kind of. So I'm not surprised that they found something that maybe isn't the thing that we would have hoped that they could have found. This, speaking of hypothesis, does anybody remember crit from foresight and... Crit, sweet. Kapingyi, yep. Kapingyi, yes. Noyi. The other thing I remember, Ping was super sweet, always a fun person. The other thing I remember about Ping, he was one of the few people who was a Google employee and also got hit by the Nimors because he tried to use Ping for his name. Oh. Google is like, Google plus, back in Google plus days, Google plus is like one word, that's not a real name. And so he had a bunch of people testify on his behalf. He's like, Google employee, and he's like, everybody knows me as Ping, that's my name, I don't know what you're talking about. Anyway, I miss crit. I don't remember much about it, but the C2 page is interesting to read about it. I never used it, but I remember crit link, all the different sort of moving parts. Yeah. S.J. Ping and OLPC, that was like back in the day, right? 10 years ago or 15 years ago, whatever. I haven't seen him for a long time. He was doing great when I saw him last year, but I think he was already exploring new things. Yeah, I'm sure. Crit is super, super old. And yeah, I'm sure. So I guess it's a thing that I remember had some really cool stuff to it, and now I don't really remember. Fine-grain link targets, purple slip-all off of the C2 page, that kind of wings the bell. We were also talking about purple numbers from Eugenia Kim, Eugenia Kim. So I feel really feeling the need for a modern, a modern collective space a little bit that fills a role parallel to what Meatball Wiki was for briefly around some ideas of collaboration, but something that's around these thoughts of how to make persistent progress in how we share and organize information. And we've fallen in the current generation of the design. I don't wanna say, it doesn't really have anything to the internet, but we've fallen into this weird universe where all people's conversations about these things are denominated in terms of companies. Like, oh, is that company that's implementing that idea still successful, or did it cut its staff in half? Like, who cares? We should all care that there is some good implementation of obvious classic feature, but it's terrifying that the best demonstration of an essential thing could end up getting bit-rotted because it happened to be hosted by a company that went through like the wrong part of a, what's the opposite of an S-curve, an N-curve? See, the compliment to that is I happened to be helping somebody with NPM yesterday. And we actually had to go to npmjs.org or whatever it is. And I'm like, and it's got a big thing, we're part of GitHub now. And I'm like, oh my God, Microsoft sucks up NPM. I forgot that. So it's like, so it either dies because the company died or it gets absorbed by the Borg. Is this the ultimate fate of all such projects? We're sitting here bemoaning all these nice things that we thought were gonna fly or take off that have each met an unfortunate fate through a sequence of unfortunate events. The fate of all projects be acquired by Microsoft or destroyed by Yahoo. Yeah, I was gonna say, which would you rather have your baby eaten by Yahoo or eaten by Microsoft? It's a great black thumb of Yahoo. There was just an article in yesterday's flow about the rebirth of Yahoo. It got bought by a private equity firm and it's trying to make a comeback now. Okay. Again, time number eight, maybe now we're on. Yeah. The thing that always killed me about Yahoo was, it managed success because of where and when and all that, but what a terrible brand and they would suck up good brands and the good brands would die under that umbrella. And it was just such a shame. I mean, something like Flickr or, I mean, Flickr still exists in form, but... After it got rusted away from death at Yahoo. Yeah. And do they own Tumblr, right? At one point. They did, but it was saved from total extinction by word of mouth as parent or automatic. Yeah, automatic. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the good news is code is like DNA and de-extinction is a lot easier for some of these things or should be. The problem what's missing is a business model or a community to support things like delicious. I'm so mad at Josh Schachter for selling it and then like not caring. It would be so nice if delicious existed. And it doesn't. That's yet another like Yahoo. It's death. It exists in zombie form within Pinboard. Yeah, but Pinboard doesn't actually do what delicious did. It does. It just lost the social community around it. So it has all the features but it doesn't have the community? It's not just code. It's also the community. Yeah. User based. Flickr is a good example of that. It needed the code as a substrate but in the glory days, Flickr was the community, not the code. So this appears to have happened in relatively short order to threads. Is anybody following like subscribers with threads? But I actually kind of know what threads is. Not that I care. Yeah. The meta Instagram Twitter competitor offer thing. I've never even looked. Really? I had negative interest in anything ever. It's like seriously guys. And there are things about things that Facebook has developed. Yarn for instance, talking about NPM. Awesome stuff has fallen off the back end truck of Facebook and maybe I guess Meta too. So it's not like I hate everything from Facebook but seriously, threads. Come on guys. The only thing that interested me about it is the potential Fediverse expansion. But I will say, I was on Netflix and whatever. It's like a, I mean it's just, well it's, I mean, it's like, oh we're going to make an Instagram clone except it's going to be taxed because Instagram is dying. We're going to make an Instagram clone but it'll be taxed like Twitter, which is dying. And then we'll, we'll bolt on Activity Pub because Activity Pub is, it's like, you know, any, anybody, any threads, architects listening to this. I don't mean to demean your, I'm sure you had a good intent thing but it, organizationally, it was doomed to absolute abject failure. Since we record all of our conversations and feed them directly up into the board, I think that once the new intelligence takes over, it'll know exactly whom to hunt down. So I think, I think our message here is here. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Oh good. Hunt down and congratulate. Yeah. Hunt down and either, either coordinate or be head. Who knows? Well, I'm, I'm proud to say that I was one of the people who made for that incredible, you know, 100 million sign ups in, you know, six minutes or whatever just because like I have an Instagram account, it was almost easier to sign up than not to sign up to see what it looked like. And I've never been back. One question though, when it said, would you like me to import your Instagram contacts to start you off? Did you say yes or no? I did because I actually wasn't even using my personal account. I was using kind of a, I won't call it a burner account, but just an account that I have that only follows, you know, it's following mostly based on just kind of interests, a lot of design stuff. Okay, so it might have been relevant because the mistake a lot of people made was taking their normal begins to follow and making that their threads follow. And that was a very bad idea. Yeah. I mean, all I got on Fred, I mean, Fred's was very bitter life experience in that it was their algorithm leaving me a bunch of generally popular stuff that didn't have anything to do with my interest because there weren't people that related to the interests I was expressing on. Aram, do you mind muting when you're typing? Oops, sorry, I was. That's all right. I'm pretty sure it's you because it sounds like you're typing. Yeah, none of the writing was typed that fast. Yeah, exactly. It's like a journalist. That's right. Cool. Other fellowshipy topics? Now that we've destroyed threads and hypothesis and who else can read? Oh, we hope hypothesis continues on. Yeah, yeah. But it seems to be going through a character change. Well, it seems to, I remember, it may have been like Mayish, we were talking about like institutional structures to help make turning ideas as a ratchets into like a usable thing. So that it didn't, a thing doesn't need a corporate structure to focus money and resources, but the commons can kind of come together and allow volunteers or different people to come in and either work on things individually or help provide money to help people work on things outside of the traditional capitalist structures. It seems like Peter was doing some experiments on that. And I don't know how those are going. In the middle of a couple of organizations doing that. So Lyonsburg, that's Lyonsburg's charter. And then Map of the Future is a much smaller idea that, or it's a much smaller organization maybe that is kind of along that same line. So we kind of have some of that too with things like the Linux Foundation or even there's a NSF grant proposed, NSF grant grant application workgroup that I'm part of. And it's a workgroup of like five or so people who want to go for organizations that wanna go for an NSF grant that's kind of an open source thing. I said it's kind of like there are funding mechanisms, none of them are great. And I'm not sure that you'll ever end up with a great funding mechanism. Another part of it is kind of the magic intersection of a market and users and some really bright, smart, lucky product designers, UX people, community development folks. So Flickr, some of it was the resources that they had to work with, but a lot of it was kind of the magic combination of the right UX people and the right pre-alpha users and some people who've led the vision for long enough to kind of have the thing ignite and take over. So it's a good point, Chris. I wonder how much of it is resources versus the magic combination of the right people and the right place, the right time? I have a parallel question to this conversation which is of Fediverse and IndieWeb and anything like them, which ones are working well and getting traction? Which ones are not? And do they stand a chance of being a hospitable environment for the kind of infrastructure we want? I mean, I feel like it's sort of two very different things. I don't think of the IndieWeb as like a specific technical framework. It's a community approach or maybe more accurate to call it a community of practice. And in that sense, like it can encompass anything as long as you get buy-in from the larger community of contributors. I consider that like, I'm certainly not a perfect, I'm certainly not a perfect IndieWeb practitioner, but I do consider that what I work on eventually flows to integrate with people who are involved in IndieWeb's community of practice. But whereas ActivityPub and the Fediverse, I guess, is like a specific technical framework that requires compliance to participate. Whether or not it's the specific technical framework we want, maybe. I don't know if that's necessarily a thing we're even in the position to decide on yet, but yeah, I think those are two separate things. Is ActivityPub and Fediverse roughly the same thing? I mean, at this point, most people think of it as basically the same thing. Obviously you'll get argument from like the AT protocol folks consider blue sky to be its own federated protocol, but not, but like, I think generally the majority of people who use the Fediverse are going to consider the Fediverse ActivityPub. That is what they are using to federate 90% of the time. Not to disagree, you're more experienced and more in the middle of it than I am, but I had kind of assumed that Fediverse was a little bit like IndieWeb. And then IndieWeb, community of practice sounds right, but it's almost more like a community of vision, right? There's some rough manifestos of this is the right way to do it. I wouldn't even say rough to be clear. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Chris. You're even more familiar with IndieWeb stuff than I am. Well, the nice part is you can, and I have kind of come and gone. I'm on the like a short IndieWeb hiatus right now, mostly because of my summer schedule, but it's the type of thing that if you're in it, you're, you know, no one's gonna pressure me and say, hey, Chris, where did you disappear to? Unless they're, we just wanna make sure you're okay as a person and things are fine, but no one's gonna pressure or stress me to say, hey, why aren't you doing X, Y, and Z for the group anymore? And I'll come back and I'll still do things. In fact, I've got a huge list of notes of stuff I wanna do when I get time, hopefully later this month or next month to kind of dip my toes back into it. But it's kind of, if nothing else, it's a group that understands life happens. And if you can't be there actively participating, it doesn't mean you can't come back. You're not forced into it, you're not. You don't, it's not the kind of thing where you're gonna miss a meeting and they're gonna vote you in as the president and suddenly you've got to do all the extra work because you missed the meeting where they voted. And similarly, it doesn't also mean that when they make a vote and start a direction that that's where they're always gonna go and then there isn't any respect for new ideas that are coming in the door. So I think first it's kind of a community that works in a specific area, but it's also one too, I think, that very explicitly works by example. So it is what the people who are there practicing it make it. And if you're not there and you're not actively participating in terms of creating or making or doing something, then it's not that thing. So if you're interested in something and you show up, some people there will like to have the theoretical discussions and it's fun to do that, but typically the only theoretical discussions that are taken seriously are ones by people of actually written code and have something up and working to say, here's a direction and it's not just all theory, but it has to be practice. And in a code and web space that generally means they're actually moving the needle and going somewhere because every other community I've seen that's done something like that, there's a lot of people talking about the problem, like the three guys in McDonald's that you'll see every day, but they will never ever solve that problem. Whereas in the indie web, even if it's small increments, they're solving some active problem if for no one else themselves. And I think there's a lot of power in that we talked earlier, we mentioned the word ratchet earlier, but that community is a ratchet of things and they're documenting all the examples of how this problem has been attacked before so that when you come into it, instead of having a theoretical discussion you can actually look at actual examples. Here's what people have done before. Here's how people have tried to solve this annotation problem as an example. Here's what it looked like. It worked, it didn't work, why it didn't work, but then you can use those examples to build the next big, better thing because you've seen the problem space in a whole lot more depth. Thanks for that. And it sounds like you're saying that indie web has a healthier dynamic that is both more fruitful, more forgiving and more emergent or something like that. Some of it too is the people who are doing it have had those experiences like we all have in communities that either come or go, some work, some don't work, but they've seen that before and they really go out of their way and it's a lot of quiet, silent work that is heavily underappreciated but they really go out of their way to make it kind of a warm, welcoming, let's help the people who wanna get things done, do them type of atmosphere and that's a super hard thing to create. Yeah, I think like the indie web is a lot more close in approach to us than any other thing, right? A loose group of people who are aiming towards a specific outcome that are implementing their own iterations on how to get the outcome, sharing the results and continuing to iterate towards better results, right? Like that could describe the fellowship of the link and that could describe indie web equally effectively in terms of like what's going on. In that comparison set, indie web, Fediverse, are there communities that I'm missing that should be included there? Is the platform design tool kits, Simone's sister's thing sort of like this? Is there like, who else is trying? I think like there's clearly a very different approach but that is perhaps worthwhile to give out coming from like the, we've discussed it earlier and I don't know, and exactly what they're doing really well but from what people have explained and the people who are involved around it, like the MetaGov folks and the folks around that, right? They're taking the inverse approach to Activity Pub, which is Activity Pub is we're gonna create a technical standard and hope the community and web we want arises from that technical standard and the MetaGov and that type of like, let's experiment with ways of doing governance folks are doing the opposite. Let's create rules for a community and then hope the technology arises to support it. Whether those two play areas are aiming at each other, I think is up for argument but they're both sort of thinking about similar things just some very different approaches. Thank you. Any other D web monies? Oh, D web, that's right. Thank you. Yeah, I don't know if this, I don't know if that's a good link or not. D web camp is a good link. I haven't kept up with D web in the last year and a half but my impression of it before about a year and a half or two years ago was they were kind of an interesting space but then they went like maybe too far into kind of crypto and Bitcoin crazy. I don't know if they covered from that and got themselves on a kind of a better track. There's a couple of things called D web but the main mainline one I think is not crazy at all. Or the D web camp? Yeah, yeah. And D web camp is kind of centered around what used to be D web SF meetup. That's kind of the, yeah, that's the mothership of the camp. I mean, I think a lot of sectors of it are very deep into the crypto but I do think there are sectors of it that are taking different approaches and there's other stuff in there. Like I don't like the IF, the interplanetary file system folks IPFS, right? They're not strictly cryptocurrency. They're a whole different operation and the app protocol people have gone to D web as sort of their community as well. And so has, I mean, we could have an argument over what exactly the underlying technology is supposed to be for something like Nostr but like they clearly think of themselves as a D web application too. Yeah, I mean, I was at D web and D web camp and there was certainly crypto adjacency going on but there I think the prevailing sentiment was, how do we do this in not necessarily a crypto unfriendly way but we need to generally be thinking in a more mainstream direction. And folks like, I mean, Hilo and Tibet Spray, you know, Tibet Spray, Brad DeGraph and trying to remember some other doc circles and Joyce, you know, other people who are in no way crypto folk were like big parts of that. Christina Bowen from Social Roots. Yeah, lots of folks that were in no way crypto folks. And there's sort of two neighboring things that I don't know that I'm distinguishing them from one another very well but I'm trying to sort of, I'm putting any web Vetaverse and technical platforming projects, sort of software platforms in one group and then there's another collection I have of communities trying to fix world problems which may or may not have a platform but are more about how do we solve the world's problems and like, you know, how do we go about that? And I've got a, that's got a bunch of, there's probably 60 different groups there, some of which are the techie ones like the Holo chain people, I think are, you know, that's another group that should be in this mix. Right. And the Consilience Project and... Yeah. The adjacent Metacrisis, remember what they called there? There was a gathering in Austin last year, the number of a lot of D-Web overlap in that group, D-Web camp overlap. Yeah. What was that last group? I'm trying to remember, there was a, I'm trying to remember the name of the event that took place in Austin like about six months ago that was around the Metacrisis and there was, I mean, it was, you know, definitely Daniel Schmackenberger and I'm just trying to remember something about, oh, oh. I stopped drinking, so whenever someone says his name, I just have to wince. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, with you. Nice photo, Aaron. It wasn't South Byer, right? No, no, it was, it was, but it might have been just before or after for convenience and sake. Jerry, I'm getting an error on the web or the brain. Brain links are not working? Yeah. Damn it. Sorry, Michael. Yeah, I'm getting an error too. I like your list of communities trying to fix things. As a D-Web participant, I think these communities generally lack an aggregate output that everyone can contribute to and some kind of checklist of things that need to be done that people can knock off. It's nice to have places to talk with like-minded folks, but if the like-minded folks are all encouraged to, create a startup idea, whether it's commercial or not and try to get it off the ground on its own merits to be the solution to the problem that they see, that's just tying a lot of things together on the same raft and seeing it through floats and not building weather stations and lighthouses. D-Web always feels like that's missing and we shouldn't do that. If you're, I think this is the biggest factor that leads to large companies ending up controlling what ends up being the historical record of things that get used. Because if you're an organization, you're like, oh, we need lighthouses and like a bunch of boring things. Okay, here are some people who can spend a few years doing that. It doesn't have to be a fun thing to talk about at the party. Everyone understands that's needed. And it's weird to see all the people who care about, say, federating social media who like the app protocol being like, well, I kind of differed on these three issues. So we're gonna build our own protocol and it's gonna be another 12 months, but I'm sure they'll end up working together sometime in the future because we all believe in decentralization, right? No, definitely not. That is not how this works. And if you cared about adversarial, if you cared about like the long-term non-directed, just ambient conflict between central organizations doing things and network doing things, one of the things you need to do is try to avoid duplicating obvious arenas of effort. That is, I don't know if we've been in the same conversation before, but that was the dominant theme, I would say, at the webcam and in the Collaborative Technology Alliance where I'm working. And it's still like a bunch of people talking that way, but a separate effort that I think is turning now is like, what is the economic diffuser that allows that to really happen? Cause we all think that should happen. Everybody's got a little bit of something built and a little bit of equity in there and there like links parked somewhere in Jerry's brain and everybody's got some amount to lose by adopting someone else's common standard and nobody's in a great position to be the one. So how do we develop the kind of mutual assurance to say, hey, let's synthesize our efforts. Doesn't mean you go to zero and I go to 100. It means we all get a living wage. Nobody's gonna hit the jackpot here. And that is the problem. It's an economic, I mean, the fact that we live in a capitalist society is the problem that makes the big players the only winners and all the people who believe otherwise and agree in their beliefs, unable to forge common ground. So be interested in talking about that more if you're interested. Well, I've been looking at some of the sociology and government structures and we've, the US government and the American people have generally been hijacked by marketing to think that capitalism is the solution to everything when it's patently not. So you can go back and even look at things, public utilities, water, the electrification of the United States. Yes, companies were electrifying the US, but they were only doing it in massive cities and didn't care about anybody outside of the hubs. So it required government oversight and help to do that to make it kind of a public good. Well, also cooperative, sorry. The utilities, it's funny because yesterday I was like writing up something about utility cooperatives because it's such a great example of like a group of people with a shared need that none of them can afford, but together, they can have this common good. And if nobody's running it for a profit and everybody, whatever excess gets fed back to the cooperators, there are models for that for social networks. The great thing about electricity or water, any of these things is that they're a common protocol. Well, I use H2O, but you use incompatible of whatever that is. So we can't be on the same waters. I use H2O classic, I don't know about you. I still use HTML, so, you know. There you go. So I read Cadillac Desert some years ago, which is all about water in the West and realized that like the middle of the country has got more social programs and more social welfare than they ever realized. And this is the part of the country that hates socialism and everything else. And it's like, they're getting water for $20 a square what's it called, a foot mile, something like that. Something like that, that costs $200 to get to them and have been for years, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, like any number of things. But the US under-invests in infrastructure. We have this phobia, anger, allergy, whatever it is to infrastructure, partly inculcated the way Michael, you were just saying about how we've been taught that everything should have a capitalist answer. And then we do all these funny giveaways like the early Hoover wanted radio, so he gave them spectrum, but then TV got a whole big, big slew of spectrum just gifted to them, which was then protected forever. And they didn't want to take it away from their cold, dead hands, all these stupid things, all sorts of subsidies and protections, nevermind the railroad right of way, et cetera. So our question, we were on a fruitful path a moment ago before we all got angry by shared memories. We were on a fruitful path of, so how do we do these generative commons that can intersect so that everybody gives up a little bit, nobody loses big, and we wind up with infrastructures that work? A thing that felt like it used to work, and I don't know, memory makes everything better, something like that, back in the day, the IETF and internet standards really worked well. And there were a couple of spoiler things. One of them was that a lot of the work got done by grad students or professors at universities, and they didn't have to worry about their jobs. But there was also a good camaraderie and the ability to come up with several technical things, technical ideas to solve the same thing. It seemed to work out pretty well that people would go,