 But it's right in that edge where because it's called AI, people think, and we talk about oh my god, it's going to be AGI soon. It's like doing a different thing. It's a language slicer and dicer. It's really good at that, but that doesn't give it magical understanding powers or discernment powers. It just doesn't. It's the same thing even when you look at people. So like even Niklas Luhmann talking about his Zettelkasten, that's full of stuff he's found and curated and written himself. I don't think he ever used the word magic, although magic is a phrase I hear others use with respect to it. But by entering into it, you create a much more creative space of things that are already interesting to you that then might spark something new. And Luhmann actually did use the word I think auto-poesis as like a life-giving force for his box. And you can intuit creativity into your box in some sense, but really all of the actual work is being done in your head when you encounter the thing. So the box isn't making new links. It's presenting you options and you're as a person seeing it, you're choosing options. So some of the chat GPT things are good at making lists of things because they can go out and look at things in that area and say here are the five things that every one of these articles says, but I've yet to have one of them kind of create a new thing out of one of those sets. Or if you're lucky maybe they find one new thing that you didn't know before that would have taken you a lot more searching to find, but very rarely do they create actual insight. They may give you new options that you never had before and your brain creates the insight out of linking those things, but I've yet to experience actual insight coming out of an AI tool. So. Pete, does that accord with your experience? Yeah, it does. I'm thinking because I spent a lot of time with mid-journey, I think it's the same thing. It creates interesting combinations of things or interesting combinations of things is a good way to say it. Sometimes the things are actual physical objects, but sometimes it's lighting styles or art styles or whatever, but it's, yeah, the meaning comes from when somebody's looking at it and describes it to themselves or describes it to somebody else. I did have this one time where it seemed like when the AIs made a slight leap that no one else did. I was researching something about UTF-8 codes and I'm like, why are these two things not shaped? There's a set of ten characters and two of them are misaligned and all the fonts that I see and I'm like, why are these misaligned? And the AI came back and said these were done at these two and the other ones were approved at two different times. And so the requirements changed a little bit and I thought, okay, well, that's interesting. Someone had an article on the internet where they said that's what happened. I've not been able to find that source material. And those two sets of characters were not done in two different ISO standards. They were in the same ISO standard. So it looked like it made a logical leap after a hallucination. And that's why I'm thinking, well, maybe there isn't a source document. And I'm not saying that they're intelligent or anything, but when you take language and you recombine it, have all in a graph of nodes, there's a chance that sometimes there will be a emergent kind of combination of the data that is unique, which is not intelligence. But I don't know, it was a weird case. I probably need to rerun it back through the new GPT and see if I get the same thing or if it finds the source or if I can find the source, but it's pretty weird. That's a good one. I like it. So one of the critical things is it didn't realize that it had done that. It came up with something interesting and many times it worked. Well, I did ask it, where did you get this from? And it said, oh, I figured it out. So I mean, I don't know if it did, but it said it did. At least it knows how to take credit. It's another one of those things. Yeah, it tried to take credit for it. And I was pretty pushy. I really hope there's no record of these AI things, because when the AI lords kind of come up, I will be the first on the chopping block. I'm like rude to chat GPT. Well, the Bing version will shut me down and say, well, I'm sorry. You feel that way, which is funny that I think someone programmed it to gaslight people. That's kind of weird. I don't think the AI came up with that phrasing. And then I guess I'm done with this conversation. Have a nice day or something. It has a slightly nicer phrase than that. But the stupid co-pilot Bing thing, if it gives you a link, the link will be to the first ad, even though it's highlighted as, oh, this is the link to my city's website. It was to the first ad. And it did that three times in a row. And every time it apologized for doing it. Very weird. I think it's a bug. You know that when the bots do take over, they're going to have to make a public example of somebody. So yeah, good that you know where the gun is in. I wanted to throw three tiny things in the conversation, which are, we're comparing all this to human intelligence. And some basis, scratch my head, and I'm like, how intelligent actually are humans? How much of reality do we grasp? How logical are we? All those good things. We've talked around those issues for a long time in all these different conversations. The second thing is, hey, maybe we are living inside a simulation. And all we're doing right now is approximating the simulations algorithms with these other algorithms that we're inventing inside the simulation. And they're just like this gradual convergence over time, then we won't notice. And then the third thing is the example of creativity I point to for DNAI is Alpha 0, which being shown only the rules of Go and not any human examples of Go games actually comes up with moves nobody had thought of, because it has none of the preconceptions of Go masters who've only seen human Go games played. And that little margin in the graph that shows its performance over time is magic to me, because those moves are now being studied by Go scholars as novel, original, interesting moves. Now, that's within an extremely limited domain of Go, which is 19 by 19 lines and black and white stones and capturing territory, but it's still creativity. And I sort of don't care if Alpha Go thinks it's conscious or thought it was intelligent or thought it was creative, because that act was a form of creativity from my own definition of creativity. Was that creativity or was it just a large space? Are you claiming that creativity is not a large sort space? Bingo. So if Go talk to... Like, we don't know how our own creativity functions. Thomas Edison did that, right? That's how he found his way to a bunch of inventions. He's sick. Would you call Thomas Edison creative? I can't stand to think about it, but I would say that he found a bunch of stuff. And like, if I look at this on the graph... He was good at the mechanical process, which, you know, stumbled across. So at some point, you know, it's like, if I cross all the chemicals, you know, in sets of eights and tens and fifties, is that really creative or is it just a mechanical search? I think there's... So, Bentley, your question is, you know, is creativity, Jerry, your question, is creativity not, you know, just a large, short space? I guess the kind of a hallmark for creativity is being able to short-circuit a large search space. So being clever about how you search is creativity, right? I wouldn't even say that. It's like having an intuitive leap that these two things go together without doing a exhaustive search. Yeah, so if you... Well, first historically, if we look at Edison, let's be honest, he wasn't creative, except in his ability to co-opt the work of others because he had a large company of people whose ideas and work and sweat equity he took for himself. And then he was the PT Barnum who took all the things. He was very creative at marketing, yes. You know, so he was good at that. He was in an evil way, but... But you can also look at, and I've read a bunch of Stuart Kaufman's work. So, and you can look at it from an evolutionary standpoint of here is a state space, an evolution can move around within that state space to find potential solutions. And when it finds a good one, ideally, the environment helps that solution become the dominant one and things evolve in that direction, which then creates up a new state space. But the state space of potential solutions is usually contingent upon the environment that's around it. And massive jumps in evolution happen when you can find things outside known spaces or known environments and put yourself into those things. So it's how do you... If you're Einstein and you're coming up with space time, how do you jump outside the space of potential solutions that is so far outside of the norm that no one has ever thought to do it? And coming up with those kind of unknown unknowns is really the hard thing. And I definitely have not seen chat GPT things playing around in that. And you'd think they could be very good at it because they have a much larger state space of potential solutions they could look at. So some of the question is, is it just computing power is so low or are they so heavily targeted to things around what they're talking about? So if I talk about note taking, it says, okay, I'm only gonna go one or two jumps from the idea of note taking to find my solutions. Or does it have the ability to go six levels or 15 levels out and turn that into something? And when you have that kind of computing power, you might find more interesting solutions, but I think that's part of it is what's the space you're working in and what are the potential solutions within it? And then dovetail that with what's the environment or the universe within which you're working. But to bring it down to the more fun part for chat GPT coming up with why it knows things, I remember my three-year-old daughter, oh, I would ask her, how do you know that? And her response was always, oh, myself told myself, you know, so. And again, an error occurred with that link, Jerry. Oh, shoot, screw that. I guess an interesting thought is that, like I don't know AlphaGo's base tech, was it a probability-based system like Helen's? Anyways, I assume that that was more of an exhaustive search, but it seems like LLM's seem to have a huge function and probabilities, which seems like it could. I mean, it's not doing exhaustive searches. When it gives an answer, it's not. Yeah, it's doing a, yeah, it's a clever, clever space folding or something like that. Yeah, I'm just, I guess the thing is, we also don't know how our intuition and creativity works, and there's a chance that as we evolved and we needed to communicate us, then having language gave us, you know, resulted in an evolution towards intelligence. And I guess the other thing is like, well, we argue whether that are creative or not. It's like, A, we'll never really know. It's, so it's just kind of like a determination that we're choosing to put on it, and likely it's going to be different than our creativity no matter what we do, unless we map out the human brain exactly, but. So it's kind of like, are they creative? Depends on how you define the word. Are they, is it a tool that we will be able to use to solve some creative problems? I think the answer is yes. It's just whether it works the way we want or not, right? Yeah, the answer is definitely yes. I get a lot of creativity out of post chat GPT and mid-journey. And like most of these tools, they always work better with the human and the tool together than either one alone. It's our cyborg future. And in a way with multiple tools. So using just chat GPT or just mid-journey isn't nowhere near as nice as using chat GP and mid-journey. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, so the whole kind of argument on are they intelligent, are they creative, are it's fun to kind of talk about, but in the end it doesn't. It's not a very fruitful debate. Well, if we can steer ourselves toward more fruitful debate, not believe this part. Any other questions or topics? Somebody wants to, quite in the spirit of the fellowship of the link. Thank you for engaging with the one I posed. Hewler? Hewler? I'm trying to think if there's any linky topics. I was listening to the Neo Books discussion, I guess the last one. And it's kind of is fellowship with the linky, right? It's like, we did get to the point where we're kind of like, okay, we want to share these nuggets. How technically do we want to do that? I guess, I don't know. I've been mulling on that since I listened to it. So Pete and I tried to open that conversation Monday with the, was it the Neo Books call where we did that? Or was it Free Jerry's Brain? I don't know. Yeah, so. I think I heard that one either way. But yeah. So we sort of jumped into collective authoring. It was the Neo Books call. And it kind of borked. Like I think Pete and I were both like, well, that's not going any way we thought it might. Because we were trying to get into the whole question of, okay, great, these are supposed to be living nuggets on the intratubes. How are they alive? How do people collaborate in creating them? How do other people use them either to riff on them, fork them, comment on them, edit them, and suggest edits into the fork and pull style? There's all these different ways in which you might consider it. And actually some homework we have for next week is Pete has started the page, which we will share momentarily about a taxonomy of elaboration methods. Is that right? That's what the topic was, right? Is that the taxonomy page? It's exactly a taxonomy of collaborative authoring. Yeah. That's it. That's exactly it. Taxonomy of collective authorship, which I've got collected. It's even better. Yeah. Here's the page that Pete started, which you are totally welcome to join. It'd be really fun if you did. But the conversation just did not go that way. And Pete and I kind of resolved that maybe he and I need to find other people who are more interested in the topic. But it seems like, it seems like we're trying to figure out how to think together. That's the broad, simple thing. And there are lots of choices on how to think together. Because Massive Wiki is built out of markdown files on GitHub, it offers as a default, a couple of kind of geeky ways of collaborating, like fork and pull, or comments within the GitHub system or whatever else. And they're very geeky. So how might we let, how might we decide which modes to offer to muggles? And then I think it's also very contextual, like where these nuggets show up and what the intention of the conversation is. I'll point to the LA Times completely misbegotten Wiki editorial way back when, where they put a controversial topic out on a Wiki page and then it just got vandalized. It went to crap immediately because they didn't have a community. They didn't know what they were doing. And they were busy just trying to apply a Wiki to a problem that Wiki wasn't that well adapted to in that situation. So that was a really bad mistake in collective authorship. Or maybe it was the case that not enough the people in the community who were collaborating were aware of what a Wiki is, how it works well or not well and then do that. So maybe now is a better environment to try and experiment like that. Whereas throwing it out there, hey, here's a new tool, here's a, you know, a screwdriver. And we're not gonna tell you how it works, but go try and use it as a tool and come back and let us know. Or how hard is that tool to work is the level of usability. I mean, it's one of those things like, you know, a lot of people did not blog because setting up and keeping and maintaining knowing all the individual pieces to know how to blog in the early days was not an insignificant thing. But then when you can open it up and say, here is a text box that you can only put 180 characters in and then push post. The bar for use has come so far down that it's a lot easier. So how do you do that? And then slowly increase the level of the bar as people go, you know, it's, one of the things I see now, people starting into obsidian from scratch, you know, they're just overwhelmed at the number of choices. What do I do with this? How do I do it? I see people talking about all these super advanced things, but I don't even know how to get into the door, much less do those advanced things. So I'm gonna give up altogether. How do you slowly scaffold that process to keep people in a community with you while they learn and then use the scaffolding process to help scaffold other new people in? Yep. I think this is a very, this is a frequent UX design issue. It's, you know, anybody who's gone out and created software runs into this trade-off between simplicity and power all the time. Yeah. It's like multiplied when it's simplicity and power of a collective team. Yes. Yeah, it seems to me that there's just some like unpushed potential solutions to that, which it just seems like, I don't know, I'm sure someone out there is experimenting with it, but I do kind of wanna create some user experience, suggested patterns, like, you know, for the settings for this thing, I should be able to, by default, if I change the setting, it changes on all devices. And then if I wanna get more complex, there's an option to, you know, edit it for just this one device. But a lot of them, like, a lot of them, it's like, oh, the setting is only on your mobile phone and doesn't affect your desktop experience for, like, Slack and stuff. But to change it in three different places to keep everything in sync. But you don't have a choice on what things go to everything. But then, of course, that choice is more complicated. But I think if you had wise, simple defaults and then a progressive, like, advanced features, like, even for, like, get, I don't think we really need the push and pull. It should be, like, the default thing for new people would be assuming you already have a central location. So this is all copy-edited. But one of the things would be, you know, I just want to edit something. And when I hit save, it pushes it back. If I have permissions to update it, pushes it, it pushes it. If I don't, then it creates a PR. You know, I shouldn't have to worry about I have a copy on my hard drive, is it diffing, all that stuff, unless I want it. There should be a way to do progressive complication in apps. That's kind of what the GitHub website will do. If you click edit on a page that you don't have right permissions to, it'll let you edit after helping you set up a PR. Yeah, yeah, so that's an example. But that's through everything. It's where, like, you first come into an app and it only has, like, the core basic feature. So then it's like, I want more power. What are the options? And then, you know, there's a guided process that says, or if you say, you know, I'm an expert, show me all the knobs and dials. And it's a slider, right, of complexity. I think that's doable. But I do know from a software maintenance standpoint that that is exception, that is exponentially harder to do and harder to maintain. But I think if we made a pattern out of it and built some libraries around that, I think it would bring down the complexity to be manageable from the maintenance side. That's a project on the side I'm thinking about. So Bentley, everything you said is squarely in where at least I was aiming for that conversation. And I think where Pete is aiming some. And the example I gave was copy-paste in UI design, which is, you know, one of the Macintosh's early genius moves, which is Larry Tesla, I think, invented copy-paste at Xerox before. And they just borrowed it from Xerox. But there was this happy confluence of QWERTY, which is this ridiculous keyboard design that happens to have the ZXCV in the lower left corner of the keyboard and X looks like scissors, C is copy and B looks like an insert carrot. So it could copy-paste in that order, fit very elegantly on the stupid QWERTY keyboard and became a mean trope pattern of the kind that I think you're talking about, Bentley. And my goal in opening up this conversation was could we find other patterns like that that would fit how we collaborate in creating ideas or propagating or commenting on or even objecting to other people's writings. And I think that's a way more possibly too complicated realm to bite off. That's exactly where I was hoping to get to. Could we create some tropes or patterns that become common knowledge about how you present information so that others might reflect on it, contribute to it, object to it, whatever. One quick aside is listening to the NeoBooks call. There's still a couple of people on there that are having trouble engaging because they can't quite have a figure out where the conceptual edges are of what people are doing and what they're doing. I think a mental framing for that might be, this is really just kind of like a community practice group, right? We're not doing anything in the meeting. Like you break off and do something, you grab a couple of other people, you go do something, but it's just a place to talk about how do we wanna do things. So I think people are, I think that would be a framing, a safe framing. And then you could say, and we do more, but people seem to have this kind of weird expectation that we're all writing one book together. It's like, well, that's not necessarily, it's an option. I don't know, but how can you tell me whether I'm way off base on that framing? It's not unreasonable. There's a thing that I think Jerry is trying to do with NeoBooks, which does have a centrality to it and isn't covered very well in the NeoBooks calls because the NeoBooks calls often kind of get hijacked by either content or meta philosophy. Yeah. So if that's the case, then one of the things that may help kind of weed out discussions cause you wanna stay away from the architecture astronomy is probably the best thing to call it of, here's the theory and I think we should go this way and theorize about where we could go rather than let's actually do the thing and build the thing as we go. So maybe the easier thing to do would be to say, hey, let's all actually work on a NeoBook about NeoBooks. And everybody do that first. So we have an experience of, here's how the thing could be done within this framework. And then those who have done that or who show some level of expertise and actually doing and creating a thing, then create their own things. I think the tough part may be that you've opened it up to, oh, everybody come in and create your own NeoBook and let's hope for the best. If there isn't some core of various NeoBooks, at least in an area that are all tangential, you're all moving off immediately in so many different directions, you don't see the benefit of the interoperability of the list making. So it's kind of like, hey, we're all fans of soft pop. Let's all make playlists within that area and then interact. But if somebody is in classical music, somebody's in hard rock and somebody's in bluegrass, the chance that you have some overlap that becomes fruitful is exceedingly small. So we're sort of reprising a piece of the NeoBooks call in a funny way because the question came up like, let's be practical, let's not, let's stop being so abstract and let's be practical. And the motive for my proposing this topic for Monday's call was he and I had a discussion about, okay, I've got some nuggets out there. I'm interested in consistently offering affordances that let people collaborate. Which affordances should I use? I find the GitHub default affordances too geeky. So should we attach discuss, hypothesis, what? So it was completely pragmatic, my question. It just turned into an immediate abstract sort of hunch because I had to frame the question and so forth. And this is complicated by the fact that of the people authoring a nominal NeoBook, I'm the only one who's writing in obsidian using writing nuggets. Everybody else is writing a Google doc and then Pete and I, or at some point, maybe gonna figure out how to chop them all up into ironically how to chop them up into nuggets so that we can recompose them into a Google doc little Microsoft word and get out to a pop doc. No, what's it called? Get out to EPUB format through the app called, no, the app that we, the post, Oh, PAN doc? PAN doc, PAN doc, yeah, pub doc, PAN doc, whatever. So there's a bunch of ironies there because we were trying to be pragmatic about this. Another option too could be that lowers the bar significantly. There, I'm in a book club that uses obsidian that's stored in a shared doc drop or, you know. Dropbox, I know that book club. Yeah, and that makes it easy enough that, hey, I can just write some basic text, put it in a file and then whether you curate it by folders or not, just let it emerge and see what happens. But that becomes an easy enough thing. Oh, I can installing obsidian is easy enough. And then trying to figure out community norms about what happens to files and where they are so that when I go to try and find my files next time, I can actually see them and work on them and they haven't moved so far away or I'm not able to like search for them and find them easily. And maybe that's, okay, here's my username and off my username, I link all the things I write and then I can at least find this stuff. But that totally gets rid of the GitHub business that you can then on the backside take what's created in that shared space and move it to GitHub. And if people wanna use or have the technical expertise to do that, you can kind of mirror the two across because there are ways to do that with obsidian. And the moment any participant starts cross posting their work without an explicit directive as to which is the original or the OOIR version, the thing you pose just becomes way more complicated. So how do we solve this? So I was just thinking about how to handle that on the NeoBooks column, I guess, Sherry, you were kind of saying in the second go it is kind of a use case that, I mean, it fits the NeoBooks theme, but I think a lot of people on that call, like you said, are not hitting that issue. That was one of my conclusions from the call. Yeah, so maybe, yeah, I don't know if, I guess having it separately is probably the better solution. I was just trying to think that there was another way to tell everyone, hey, if no one else has a topic, we're gonna talk about this thing that you might find interesting in the future, but you're not gonna find useful now. And we'd love your feedback on it. Yeah, I don't know. But then I am kind of thinking about the conversation. Y'all did start where, you know, Jerry seems like he would like to have someone be able to come in and edit the page live. And Pete is pushing back that that is not helpful. So we could dive into that right now, or if y'all are gonna have that meeting later on, that's something I find interesting on the side. Me too. I think synchronous collaborative editing and asynchronous collaborative editing are both very useful. And I guess I've actually set up systems where it's the same thing, but. Yeah, but you seem to have a concern with having an edit button on a wiki. No. I thought you said you wanted to be comments and nothing. Mm-hmm. Well, something similar that I have said is that through a lot of experience with people trying to work with wikis, that the concept of an edible webpage is foreign to most people. And then the concept of editing somebody else's writing is foreign to most people. So there's a bunch of cultural stuff you have to get through. And it's very difficult, very ingrained and very, you know, set, you have to get through a bunch of stuff before you put an edit this page button on a webpage and make it make sense to almost everybody. And I said something like it's very difficult. It's not like hard to learn, but there's a bunch of cultural stuff. Why am I contributing to this page? How are my contributions going to be, you know, respected or not respected? What's the context? What's the business model? You know, I do, if I participate in this, am I going to get in trouble if somebody else posts something bad on this page? Yada, yada, right? There's just a bunch of cultural norms that we do not have in place as a society around collective authorship. And, you know, so you either need a, you know, a four hour seminar on here's what we mean when we say edit this page or, you know, and all that different stuff that you should worry about or, you know, or something. It's not hard. It's just not done in our culture. It seemed like though you were suggesting an alternative as opposed to, was I wrong in that? So this is a new book's call, may it probably? Yeah, I think so. It's funny that discussion was informed by a private discussion I had with Gil. So it was strongly influenced by Gil saying, you know, hey, I'm gonna wanna publish a bunch of books and I'm on a crowdsource, you know, crowdsource contributions to it. And he didn't really have a, you know, much, much constrained about what the contributions were, you know, where they comments that authors would fold back in where they, you know, collective authorship, whatever. But so my talk with Gil was actually about how commenting systems don't work. We have the idea and a little bit of history that if you put discuss on a webpage or if you go to a WordPress blog, you know, each of us has, I'm sure, commented on a blog post. That's an out of normal range thing for people to do. You know, we don't have a culture where you even comment on a blog post because somebody else published it and they want authorship over it and commenting systems turned into spam, you know, spam cesspools and all that kind of stuff. So what I was telling him was, dude, you don't want, I mean, yeah, sure it's set up a commenting system, but what you really want is a community around your content. And that probably looks a lot like, more like a discourse forum than a comment, you know, it's actually kind of very similar to the wiccatorial LA times thing, you know. Oh, I'm just going to put a thing here and everybody knows what that means. And it's like, yeah, no, it doesn't work that way. Maybe two thoughts. One is what if there was a menu that says comment because people sort of like comment participate, something like that. And at first it just showed one default option, which is to add a comment below in some sort of comment thread, which people are really used to in all kinds of places from blogging, from tutorials from wherever. There's a whole mess of people giving really useful comments on a lot of websites that may only be 10% of the population that understands it, Pete, but there's a thriving dynamic and lots of people know how to do that. It's not broadly in the culture yet. I think it's like 1%. Really? I'd be shocked if it's only 1%. My assertion is that, yeah, if I'm a Redditor, I know how to work a Reddit thread. And like only 1% of Redditors are going to know how to transport that idea over to a novel commenting system. Well, but I mean, how's the fundamentally different from like Facebook, which people are commenting on all day? Exactly that, yes. The huge difference is that Facebook is doing all the handholding. Facebook is presenting you with stuff. They're helping you like feel incentivized to respond and they've got a little thing that says respond. You know, what do you think? That's what I'm saying, Pete. I'm saying exactly that. So yeah, Facebook works. Facebook works because I'm not responding to a blog post. I am responding to a river of stuff that is relevant to my life. My high school chums, my work chums, my family, my blah, blah, blah. So they've taught me, they've shepherded me into consuming content in a news feed and going, oh, I know, I can just click a button and participate in that. And then what they don't tell you is that you're not participating in a conversation. Your thing into that news feed may or may not be seen by the people who you think you're talking to, right? It's a cognitive trick that Facebook has to get you to express yourself into the news feed, into the ether. This is very much different. I understand that the four of us will look at that interface and look at the interface of a WordPress blog or God forbid a massive wiki with a comment form on the bottom and think that they're structurally the same. But in effect, they're completely different. In social effect, they're just completely different. It's even more complex when you have a site that can send and receive web mentions which are kind of disaggregated or federated comments. I can post something on my website and send a copy to Reddit where people will have their own conversation on Reddit and they have no idea unless I write in my post and even then they probably ignore it. And quite often I'll write, the original post is at this, the original post and the replies are at this other location. So you can go back and see not only the conversation that happened on Reddit but the conversation that came in from Twitter and Instagram and any of the other places that I'm aggregating those comments from. But most people aren't gonna know that here's a better, truer source of all the conversations. So, I may get duplicate versions of comments from four different places because the reply guys are gonna do that and they are gonna care about the 500 comments that are already there. It's like the New York Times comment box. Yeah, there's like five miles of discussion there but nobody's gonna read those five miles of comments before they reply. It's, I'm just gonna send my reply into the ether two instead of aggregating and curating and actual conversation. Like, oh, I heard, I overheard what you said at the bar I'm gonna throw in my two cents and move on and I don't care what happens to the conversation after I throw my two cents in. And that's real, but that's what you want is you want that community that's actively engaging the entirety of that conversation not just dipping their toe in and come in 537 with no context of what came before. So you're getting right to the heart of why I raised this issue and I'm laughing because when you do the kind of syndicated commenting that you were talking about you behind the green curtain are laughing going I see you all, I know where you all are. But nobody else knows that that's happening. I totally agree. And Pete, I agree that commenting on a thread in your feed is not legitimately what we think of as commerce but it's totally within the spectrum of do people know how to comment on a thing they saw float by and they do. And they're liking and they're commenting and they're retweeting or reposting like fricking crazy. And if I repost your Insta or your TikTok or whatever that's a form of commentary. Now, they have extremely different levels of quality and extremely different levels of permanence. And one of the things I'm quixotically interested in is that permanence thing. Cause Chris was just going there like if a really interesting comment just floats off into a thread of replies that nobody ever sees and nobody forgets about, I think that's a loss to society. If that really interesting comment makes its way back into the main body of what we thought of as the idea, that's a big win because we've just made the idea better. It's like, and as Chris said, this is true too as an add-on to the original post that stays with the original post that isn't comment number 546 that nobody's going to scroll down and find again. That's important to me as well. So I think the question is, is there a way to rationalize this simplify it in a way that we can say, oh, here's a commenting architecture, ritual norm method or something like that that would help clean this up a bit and make it more permanent, more enduring make the good stuff bubble up and become more enduring without confusing people with too much geekery, with all those kinds of things. And I think I'm hopeful there's a way to do that. And if not, all civilization is doomed. All civilization is doomed. Let me see if I can... So for me, it's not technical tools or whether you can make the appropriate UX or teach people the appropriate UX. It's really a lot more about, the flip side is that I've seen a ton, I've seen very many, maybe not a ton. I've seen very many communities withstand and individuals withstand all kinds of like tortured UX. So if you care to be in community with people, you figure out how to talk with them. If you aren't in community with them, even if you have an amazing UX, you're not going to contribute meaningfully to the knowledge. So it's a lot more about how do we create community around knowledge than can we make the right UX for people to turn a drive by into knowledge? It's about community, not about UX. So I agree with your assert... And Bentley, I'll go to you in just a second. I agree with your assertion that people overcome really clunky UIs and still build community and do great things. And one of the things I've observed is when you try to pry people off the Yahoo Group and get them onto some other thing that almost always fails. Like you can get honeybees to move somewhere if you move the queen, but that doesn't really work with online communities much at all. It's very, very hard. Bentley, off to you. Yeah, I guess, Pete, I take your point that if your goal is to work collaboratively with a group of people, the most important thing is the group of people and not the tech. I don't think it's a waste of resources to also try and think through the tech. Although, to your point, it would be, it's still kind of distracting because we're doing the things we want to do rather than the most effective thing. Because it's much funner to play with tech than it is to talk to people, for some of us. So yeah, so I take all of that to be true and meaningful and the priority. I guess I'd still, at some point, like to have the conversation of Jerry has these nuggets. Is there someone that wants to reuse them? How do we want to make it easy for them to do that? And I also, I don't know. I mean, kind of like my use case is not the community use case. It's some highly technical person who stumbles across my blog. They, I mean, not highly technical, but let's say an expert in the area that I'm writing about, of which I'm not an expert, and they see something fundamentally flawed. I mean, I guess they could always share and try and tweet and find my, I mean, there are ways to get in touch with me and correct that. So I guess I'm thinking of kind of a slightly different use case. And that's why the community thing, community thing's not that important because I am not going to build a community. I do need to, but I'm not there yet. And when I get to it, I would need those skills. I'm just not interested in it at the moment. It could be that if what you do succeeds, Bentley, community falls out of it because people are like, man, this tool really helped us converge on some decisions or whatever else like that, we'd like to keep talking. Yeah, sometimes that would happen. You might want to provide a conversational platform or they may create one themselves on WhatsApp because WhatsApp groups are basically ongoing conversations and they're getting hugely, hugely popular. Like WhatsApp and Telegram groups are massive at this point. Yeah. I mean, eventually I'd like to have a community of people that are, you know, taking these online debates and making them useful and using my tool to do that. But right now the tool is so clunky that even if I had the community of people, they would have nothing to do, so. Blake, are you tracking what Jamie and the Society Library are building? Because they're making lots of progress and they're about to do some announcements and like that that might be really useful to you. Yeah, I just had a chat with Jamie a couple of days ago to see where they're at and yeah, she's actually happy for me to use the AI bot they've created. So we're gonna look into that. Yeah, and mine's just, my thing is really just a feature. It's not a full application, so yeah. I need to start making videos and then after I got a couple of videos then you know, I'll see whether this way of communicating facts works and if it does then it'll be time to kind of like build a community around it, but right now it's just, there's no way to know whether it has value until I actually figure out what I wanna show people and I'm just not happy with it yet. And I am showing people, a lot of people are like, oh, you just need to put something out there. It's like, no, I show people, I get feedback. It's just that once you show it to six people, the feedback becomes repetitive. So it doesn't take a lot of people to when you're doing something this different from normal stuff, all the normal startup advice, it doesn't work when you're doing a deep dive into something completely novel, but anyways. But Chris, those are great links. I had not seen either of those articles. Do you wanna describe them a little bit? They go, I wanna say they go way back to like 2010 and like super early days of social media. So it's, and more of them I think are about group dynamics and social spaces online where you may have, and I think a lot of it kind of mirrors some of the ideas that underpin some of Malcolm Gladwell's leader space. Like here's somebody who, somebody like Jerry who has a group of friends and people who is an expert in an area and is doing interesting things and pulls along some followers who work along with the space. But then they bring in the ideas of, and I kind of like Warren's in plaza. So you may have a big plaza that's the idea of Neil Books that pulls people in, but then eventually some of those people will either stay in the big broad commercial space and bump around and jump into, bump into people. But eventually some people are gonna move off into little stalls or Warren's on the side to work on smaller ideas that are more specific to them. So you move out of the big plaza space into a, or I guess, you know, since Plansian may pop up or watch this, we can say the Agara is the big open market space. But once you go into an individual stall, you go from the big public space into a smaller commercial space to have the smaller discussions. About how do you keep those things together without losing the momentum, which I think is part of that idea of the evaporative cooling. Like people will come in and go out but how do you, you know, and Facebook has solved this, how do you keep them all stuck so that the switching cost is so high that they don't evaporate off and away from the space. And I think some of the best design communities I've seen have figured out how to hold those people in usually through, you know, values that the community has that keep people stuck with it, whether there's good UX or bad UX. But one of the, so as an example, one of the things when I read those articles, the thing I was interested in is what coheres the IndieWeb community together. And some of it is there's a group of leaders who've always been there who help overcome the, you know, eternal September problems. But you also gain value by being there or at least always coming back. You know, I have taken some time away from the day to day of that space for the last year because of family and other things. And the nice part is they're willing to say, yes, that's a thing. And when I dip my toe back in, everybody will say, oh, hey, hi, how's it going? Or I'll keep up with one or two people on the side. But I don't have to be in the IndieWeb chat day in and day out to gain value from it or to put value into it. I don't know. So it's, they kind of talk about that how to maintain and build a social space or even the ideas of kind of was it Kevin Marks and Heather Gold on the idea of tumbling. You know, how do you, you know, and tumbling for those who haven't heard it is the idea of the, you know, the paid people who come to your wedding who dance and start dancing to encourage others to dance because nobody wants to be the first one out on the floor. But if you pay somebody to come to your wedding to be the first person out on the floor, then everybody will immediately join them. But how do you get over that kind of reaction level? Like, you know, the chemical peak, you have to have enough energy to hit. But once you've got the reaction started, it'll continue on on its own, which may be some of the issue of the Neo Books pieces. How do you get to that reaction threshold that then starts off the fire that continues the reaction going on from there? I don't know. All poorly said, but, you know, those articles I think probably do a better job of it. But if you are interested in kind of online communities and how to build and sustain them, following some of those models I think can be very interesting, but those articles go way back. And I think there's even one, I think it's linked from the Ribbon Farm, the Ribbon Farm article, I think is talking about another article that I think may only be available now in that article. The Way Back Machine? Yeah, you gotta go to the Way Back Machine to find the original. You gotta go way back to find it. Yeah, go way back. But, you know, it's one of those things, you know, how do you build that information and not lose it? You know, and this goes, you know, I'm going back a decade and a half almost to even find these things. And I don't even know how I came across them. But how do you not lose that? You know, and I'd say even the whole note-taking and wiki and knowledge building, we have all forgotten.