 This is the build OGM call for Tuesday, February 8th, 2022. Thank you. And so yeah, podcast, et cetera. And I thought the thing that was on my mind for build OGM came out of yesterday's free juries brain call, which was, okay, okay, okay. It feels like we made some steps toward both maybe bringing my brain and getting some, the beginnings of a rhythm around structuring some projects and building tiles and things like that, and maybe being overly optimistic. And I have a pioneer session of pick juries brain this afternoon with Wendy, just to grab us to sort of test the thing out and see what it's like. And I think our question is going to be, how does the mosaic fit her tapestry idea and how might those be complementary and what does that mean? How would a tapestry be used, et cetera, et cetera. So I was thinking we would explore that space a bit. That's interesting to you, Pete. And if you had agenda items you were thinking we would touch, I would love to know. Yeah, I've got one agenda item, which is archiving OGM forum. I've been mentioning that it's going to happen but I wanted to reaffirm that it's going to happen. It has to happen soon. I have no objections to it and might as well. Should I send an email to the list? Sure. Saying it's going to happen next day or two or? I think that's fine. You put it in the box. Yeah, but not everybody reads that. We know readership was astonishing, right? I've got a decent number of subscribers so I was very pleased with it. Cool, good work, I guess. And congrats too. That's really lovely. But that means we have to get another issue out. Yeah. Well, that's good because we've got the Bentley front end and stuff like that. I think, there we go. And thanks for helping me figure out how to turn that on and off. So now that we, and I don't think we have a special name for Bentley's. It needs a name. It needs a name. We need a memorable name. Unless we just call it meme brain too. Yeah. Or something like son of meme brain. Or meme brain. Bride of meme brain. Or yeah, for... We could give it a name like the culture series. Like the meme brains. You know, I thought I would love you, but then realized that could be the name of the project. Meme brainy, meme brain face. Or McBrain face. Or the meme brain experience. Actually, McBrain face is good because that's kind of the territory we're in, right? That's almost exactly good. Okay, for now it's McBrain face. I was wondering how these names get picked. You know, it's done in dark rooms, usually by men smoking cigars, but in this case it's in a well-lit zoom. Okay, that sounds good. So partly I'm interested in a Pete style project plan, I think, for forward progress on that in maybe a couple of directions. One of them, so there's several different things that occur to me, which is what does the, what does a writable replacement brain effort look like? Like what would it take to get there? And that feels like the difficult, that feels like the longer term thing. In the shorter term, I think there's two others that jumped in my mind and I'd love to brainstorm what other sort of, without like trying to build a long list, but there's two that jumped in my mind. One is, for example, a picked Jerry's brain scenario like, hey, I'm going to do a consult with somebody and I'm going to use this brain to do the demo of what's going on. And at the end, I would like to have, for example, a simple output of all the thoughts we clicked on, or maybe even let them pick which thoughts to remember along the way, but they probably won't, I mean, even just a simple log of what we touched would be great and seems like a simple thing to output, but to think through the McBrain face interface, ha, ha, you know what? A good project name brings a smile to your face. So there we are. I think mission accomplished. So the, and it could be brainy McBrain face to really be complete, right, Pete? Okay, so I think that's the way to go here, which then gets long to say. So I might just have to say McBrain face as like the shorthand and we're agreed on that. Good. So another path is like, what helps make conversations across this new interface more useful to clients and to demo. And that might mean adding features like notes fields and a couple of other things. Then a third one is useful to mark Trexler, like what would make this useful in addition to the microsite stuff that you've written for Mark? Like how does this fit with microsites? If at all, is Mark interested in using this in some ways? Is this an exploration for him? What features would he need to make that work, et cetera, et cetera? And then a last one that I had in my head was to basically prep a new brain for experimentation. The thing I said earlier, the reason I was asking Bentley to write this openly and make it so that other people can come in and play with it and do an alternate UX, other sorts of things like that. So, and I don't know how overlapping these different goals are and Pete and Stacey, if you have other goals that you can think of that we should add to that list. But is that a reasonable list? It's a good list. The one I would add is that it's comfortable for you to use during the brain tour. And ideally as comfortable as using the brain itself, even better would be even better than the brain itself. Exactly. And I have to say that's the one I would do next. And one that occurs to me all of a sudden in a strange way, which this may not solve at all, is the resolution problem we were having with all of the virtual cams to get it to show up readably behind me. If this solves the visibility problem, which it won't because it's text of the same rough size. And text is text, it has nothing to do with the brain app. It has to do with text making through the munging. Yeah. Okay. And the one of making it useful in a consult is the easiest of these I think. Yeah, that's my one. That's the Picturi's brain one. I, you know, that one actually is a good example of it's kind of hard. Let me type the thing that I want to return. So the weird thing about the, so the Picturi's brain one is, so I think you need the other one first. I think it needs to be comfortable to use and it's not quite yet. But then keeping track of what nodes got clicked is like a new feature. You can do it, it's a new feature and it can be done in a number of different ways. And you can either do, I don't know, it requires more experimentation kind of. It requires architectural development as well as just a feature thing. So really clever thing about McBrainface where that the Bentley did is he's like, okay, so McBrain looks really ugly right now and I think I can make it pretty. And it's a fairly straight mapping. It's fairly not to take anything away from his design and development because he did some clever stuff, but there wasn't any architectural changes that he had made. He was benefiting from the pass through cash, the read through cash architecture and a couple of the things that McBrain already does. Yeah, and he could just pin on those things being there and then he didn't have to invent anything new really. I guess some of the ways that he drew stuff on the screen and there were some architectural choices there. But working on the architecture for, I don't know, either as a consultant, I would worry that I would do it cheap and dirty way and then the client would ask for the next increment and it's like, okay, well, I chose the cheap and dirty way and it's not extensible and so we have to redo all the work I just did. Or you can pre-do all of that work. You could do a couple architectural spikes to kind of get going in the right direction and go, okay, I think this is the one that's gonna have legs. But then you've blown a bunch of hours like doing work that may not pay off or the client might not want to pay for ultimately because they'll go, okay, well, that was an interesting spike. I don't care about the rest. I don't care about the stuff that you could have done. So it's a weird, it's an easy feature to say and it's got kind of potential architectural considerations that make it more expensive than it seems like it should be. Or risky, expense or risk depending on which one you want to trade on. And apropos what you're just saying right now, the four different reasons that I put in the chat feel to me like tier one thoughts that fit inside the larger OGM build OGM project map, which is the mosaic and the larger goals of shared memory and all that, which then brings in an architectural consideration like how do we separate apps from the healthy layer of open linked connected data which is not living inside of Postgres SQL but rather on IPFS or on some other distributed infrastructure. If indeed that's a good path to go. I mean, HTML, the pieces that compose any webpage do not live inside of IPFS. They live on servers around the world, not that redundantly. And DNS is a not very redundant, it's a distributed but not very redundant kind of service. It's not, well, I'm actually not sure how to describe that for DNS specifically. But there is like one DNS engine that's not content addressability. It's its own very specific mechanism. So how do we design the meta project so that we're moving toward not just something that's a nice replacement for the brain and maybe an experimentation platform for touching other products, but rather the more toward the vision of some environment that allows us to have a variety of tools looking on distributed reliable data. And is that, how do we architect a path to explore that? That's partly, that's sort of the, if I bump out of these projects, that's the next layer of projects I think I see. Does that make sense? Yeah. Would you do it that way? Would you do a different way? And do you agree on where I'm aiming? I don't disagree. Okay. Part of, we're not sure exactly where to aim. So part of it is just, I don't know, the cool thing about McBrainface that Belly did was he saw a short or low risk hop that had a high return. So that's a really sweet thing to do. And I think part of the way that we, this again, I don't know if this sounds weird to me thinking about it, the way that we got to be able to take that short, low-cost, low-risk, high-reward step is actually just by waiting. Is by what? Waiting. So we could have spent more resources doing affirmative experiments, kind of in the realm of the experiments we've got in chat. But it would have been costly to do that, relatively costly, not super costly. Yeah, not super costly. But it would have taken investment resources to experiment around. And then we would have done four experiments and gotten one good one or something like that. Instead, what we did is we just waited for six months or 12 months or whatever. And the discussion you and Bentley had was backgrounded by a bunch of other discussions that we kind of just had in the background. They didn't feel like they cost anything really. Right? And then this started to line and it's like, hey, I could do this quick hack and it would be super fruitful. So we just waited for that to happen. I think if we waited again, we'd get another good, cheap, low-risk, high-reward thing to happen. So waiting until someone has the initiative to propose something that smells right and I don't know. I mean, partly long ago, I was like, how do we set up a dash board, a teen dashboard of tiles so that somebody could walk in and say, oh, I'd like to do that. How do we then create funding that is attractive to somebody to come in? Jordan and I are caught up with each other a bit and he still wants to go out and pitch for, hey, let's find somebody who's willing to pour $25 million into the ecosystem and then figure out where that goes. And I think in order to even begin to consider doing that, we need to be able to show where we're aiming and how we're going about the process of building these things out. And I think that the dashboard and the tiles are one mechanism for saying, this is in fact how we get there. And without pushing on that and without actually sort of actively going and trying to find some more resources to do it, I don't think we'll ever get there. I think the let's wait until somebody rises and eats the worm in some sense is gonna take, it feels like forever, no? It'll take longer, yeah. Yeah. But it's cheaper. It's totally cheaper, that's for sure. But I'm happy to go pitch if there's a sort of something substantial that we can pitch and then act on and which implies things like project plans and dashboards full of things and a bunch of open source code and a bunch of it. Like there's a whole lot of things that this means that I think we just sort of intuitively know. Yeah. So what we've had instead of a dashboard is kind of it's kind of like commander's intent. All of us kind of know where we wanna go. We haven't really written down and we haven't really agreed on it, but you know, Mark Antoine kind of had an idea. Stacey kind of had an idea. You had an idea, I had an idea. Belly's had an idea. Mark Trexler, you know, Julian, everybody kind of knows there's a goal out there and it's kind of fuzzy, right? But there was enough intent and group understanding of what forward progress looked like that Bentley was able to like grab onto a chunk of it and go, right? So yes, you could systematize that. I mean, in this method, if we're lucky, if we're really lucky, we'll get Turducken. If we're unlucky, we'll get Haggis and I'm trying to get us like a really beautiful buffet. I'm trying to set a buffet where other people show up and go like, oh, I can bring some pudding and it's gonna be delicious and it fits over here. That's kind of where I'm trying to steer. And we won't be that lucky that often. I don't think if we don't push this in some direction, if we don't guide and instruct it more is my thought. Yeah. Yeah, sorta, kinda. And I'm trying to think this throughout loud in a way that fits the way you're working and the things that you would like to get done too so that like the funding flows to you and so that the pieces you're building fit into the larger mosaic and to Wendy's tapestry and to whatever. And I'll also say that the flotilla calls you've been leading are the closest thing we've got to various entities showing up in the same conversation saying, all right, how do we fit? Like what does it mean to interoperate? So you're kind of guiding that piece of the work anyway as it stands. I think, so you've got a good kind of hypothesis of how to like proactively kind of inter-architect into the future. But I think the architecture we ended up with might be different than what I think it might be kind of over-architecting up front because I don't know if that makes sense. Well, so kind of what you're talking about is doing architectural scaffolding essentially. And that's fine. But I'm not sure it's as useful as something else that we could do. So the architectural scaffolding is cool because it kind of sets up the ground for people to come in and fill in the bits and bobs. But I think what there's a good chance of what will happen is to get what we want it'll become, it'll be a different architecture. So the architectural scaffolding doesn't actually have a lot of return value to the people who come in and do the architecture. So a different thing to do and a different thing to do and I'm just brainstorming. I'm not sure if this is a better or worse thing but it's a different thing. A different thing to do is to do the world of the future Apple video kind of thing. A vision basically illustrative, illuminate, illustrate, markup prototype a vision of some sort. Yeah, and for that you kind of work backwards, right? You can, you have enough fidelity in the demonstration that it looks like there's architecture behind it but it's like a movie magic trick, right? There's actually no architecture there. It's just, you know, you know enough of the kind of the patterns of the future or whatever that you can fake the fact that there's architecture underneath it convincingly. So starting from now and doing some work into the future you could tile out, you know, some architectural scaffolding and then say, hey folks, we've got enough scaffolding here that you could build architecture on top of it. A different thing to do is just to make a vision video and skip over the fact that we don't actually have any architectural like underpinning and somebody's gonna have to come along and actually build architecture that gets us there. But I think that it's kind of the same kind of effort that architectural scaffolding is work. It's, you know, not trivial work. And we've also kind of like if you call it if you think of it as architectural scaffolding then it actually has to be real architecture. It actually has to hold together and you end up in little blind spots and you go, okay, well, that didn't work and the tiles don't quite fit together. So let's go back, rewind a little bit and go forward and make the tiles fit better. You can skip over all of that and just get the vision thing and make it a higher fidelity vision with the same amount of effort that you're kind of trying to do a good job of architecture. And I think that might be more productive actually that might be so then saying to the world, pick 20 people that you would kind of cold email and say, hey, here's our vision of the future. If you're sending them an architectural scaffolding that what the architectural scaffolding mostly does is it gives you a vision into the future, right? It's like, okay, I see what you're doing here with these tiles, you're kind of drawing a picture of the future that's got this in it. The other way it's like, wow, this is a flashy vision and I get where you're going with this and I can imagine that there's architecture you've kind of thought about and maybe even have but the vision is, I think more compelling, more interesting, it would get people, it bates the hook better, it would get a better response and better brainstorming about the future, right? Like, well, I wouldn't have done that in 3D. Actually, there's this cool 2D thing that you do on a table, you get visioning energy coming back rather than architectural energy coming back. So this is a problematically intriguing path and I say that totally tongue in cheek, partly because, partly because, this is funny, partly because for me, the tiles on a dashboard with people who are able to come in and pick tiles and move things forward feels to me like something that you and Jordan would be like thrilled with and let's be like, hey, there's like project plans and there's people who can look up and see where the pieces fit and all that and then on the other hand, I'm very aware that once you start doing that, you start ironing down architectural bits sooner than you need, you start looking down at the tiles that you're building instead of looking up at the vision. So in some sense you're saying, let's just go freestyle, paint the mosaic, right? Instead of let's go make tiles and let's go like start shaping the tiles and figuring out what they're gonna be made of and how they get glued to the background or whatever. You're saying, no, we need to actually go paint the mosaic and I hadn't actually thought about a vision video or map or a knowledge navigator equivalent expression of what this thing is and it would be a delight to do and I think you can intuit that it appeals to me more than the tiles. That's why this is ironically dangerous, right? Am I wrong here? I, yeah, my intuition had an intuition that that was true. I think it's just a better, I think it's a better choice. And the observation I have, a hard one observation I have is that you would think that getting a project kind of started having a project plan and stuff like that would make people like would make builders go, oh, wow, look, somebody's kind of already done the planning. All I have to do is pick this up and pour water into it and it's gonna grow. There's this weird thing where, and this is kind of a balance we do in flotilla, right? The makers are really, it's an ugly word to say kind of but makers are really insular, right? It's like when you get a maker, they get passionate about their vision and it's really hard to transplant a vision into that, right? You get all the juice from Vincent going, I've got this idea for a stove thing and I'm gonna frickin' build it with whatever I can get my hands on. And as much as I love trove and I love that Vincent loves trove, it's not my deal, you know? So if somebody gave me proto-trove and said, Pete, this is the thing, you should just build this, just pour water on it and go, you know? It's like, yeah, you know, yeah. I'm not passionate about it. I'm not worried about the proto-molecule because in that case, it's dangerous. Kind of a primordial soup thing. Yeah, primordial soup thing, but I get what you're saying. So it's more like it seems supery actually, you know? Don't talk about, you know, the, I forget what the don't part is. Give them the flavor of the sea, right? I don't have the quote in my brain, unfortunately, but yeah. I've got a good translation in Ojiomuki actually. Thank you. Which I think you'll find. So while you're looking for that thing, two things, let me just show that. We're having- I think maybe someone else has a wiki somewhere, but I'm not sure it's in Ojiomuki. So I've got the problem of too many massive wikis. Oh, damn it. Okay, so here, so the note-taking I've been doing, basically, you know, two pads ahead, architectural scaffolding or pre-invasion sense-making environment, which I connected to knowledge navigator, which is under tech utopian visions and videos and demos, which has a whole bunch of things, including a sub-thought called very useful ponderings about the future, et cetera, et cetera. But this includes like Cisco and AT&T trying to explain how to use the telephone, all of those kinds of things. There's a lovely, there's a really lovely history of people creating, compelling things that, you know, including the New York World's Fair, which ought to be connected here, which was a mistaken, it was definitely a utopian, oops, I gotta probably spell it right. Probably Worlds is, there we go, 1939 New York World's Fair, that one. Bink, bink. So that's sort of the two paths. And then I also did reasons to improve Brainy McBrain face, and I typed in the things that I put in the chat. But the vision thing, I'll just stop here, even as we're sitting here talking, I can envision what the video looks like. Like my brain is starting to narrate that video. Yeah, yeah. So in some kind of meta way, what you want is everybody super passionate about something, right? And if you're super passionate about, you know, knowledge navigator videos, then that's a better use of your times than trying to make the mosaic. Well, it is the mosaic, but then trying to build the tiles. Oh, even better, yeah. I mean, the mosaic metaphor lends itself really nicely here, because are you coming at it from the tiles or from the mosaic? And I have not painted the mosaic and it's on my list of things to do to paint the mosaic, but it doesn't, I wasn't inspired by knowledge navigator as an example of what the mosaic might aspire to be. And once you said that, I'm like, oh crap, that's right. Huh. Which means the strategy might be like, I need to pay you guys and Bentley from the RUT funds and then switch my attention to figuring out how to create the video. Yeah. As a piece of building OGM next to picking Jerry's brain and all the other kind of stuff. Yeah. That's my conclusions from this conversation. That's more or less to a Weave the World episode. Uh-huh. It's maybe it's the pilot episode or it's maybe it's the prototype vision that illustrates why weaving the world exists. Yeah. And what it is, it is a holodeck vision of what weaving the world might look like in 10 years. That makes sense. I read this yesterday. Uh-huh. My sort of thesis at Wharton was basically played off the Dynabook idea. Yeah. So then that was a reply to something like this which is a response to Ellen Kay's paper from the Perther Foundation, which looks like a kick-ass paper. Um, some of these things. Cool. And oops, I think my brain just crashed. No, it didn't. Okay, so what does that mean? I think that means we take it into advisement and then go and think about it. Yeah. But this is a lot of good stuff to think about. Well, and... Is it worth writing out this sort of question and sending it to certain key people like I'm thinking Mark Antoine? Certain people that come at it with different perspectives a little bit just to get a conversation going. Sorry, say that again, Stacey. I was wondering if it's worth it to write this up as a question as far as the two paths and start a conversation with a few key people. The one that came to my mind was Mark Antoine. But again, I don't, you know, I'm only, I have a limited perspective, but just to get some other ideas because you'll also see where the passion is. There may be two paths. Yes, and I don't think that means abandoning the other path. I think that just means sort of priorities and what we work on. I may raise this also with Wendy this afternoon when I talk to her, because I think Wendy, I think Wendy'd be like, got this, like this totally makes sense. I was thinking that was gonna come up later. Yeah, yeah, it's sort of inevitable at this point. And I think I meant to say earlier, and Pete, it goes along with what you were saying, and with other conversations that have been floating around this environment is that this is kind of how emergent emergence works. And this is like what I think I've been trying to do with OGM is emergent leadership or management or whatever that is, where we're just looking to see who shows up and how it works, where conversations take us and then nurturing the stuff that looks interesting in some ways, even if just by calling them in and exploiting them and opening them up and inspecting them with the group and all that kind of thing. And I love that, so. I love that too. I, so then the meta question is how can you be a good emergent farmer? And so it's not either or between scaffolding and vision. You need both, right? But the thing I think I've kind of learned over the past year and a half or whatever is that it's tempting to think that scaffolding is kind of like good enough or better or something like that. And there's a lot of self-determination and self, whatever you would call self-interested passion, calling or something like that, that you have to factor in as if you're an emergents, if you're farming for emergence, it turns out that people are really motivated by the things that they're passionate about and that changes the way that you farm. And scaffolding is kind of okay, but not as good as... So throwing vision into, a passionate vision into the mix provides a lot of direction forward for you know. And informs where the scaffolding goes. I mean, this may not be a great metaphor, but these days they're figuring out how to make stuff out of mycelium. And what you do is you build a mold, you build a negative mold in the shape of the thing you need, like I need to hold this printer in the box and then you pour some, you basically spike it with some mycelium, you let it grow and it grows into that shape. And what the scaffolding tries to be is a mold for this larger thing. But if you don't have a nice vibrant picture of what the thing is, then you've got like scaffolding that kind of goes every which way. And doesn't function as shaping, but only functions to hold bits and pieces somewhere. Right? And we need to do some painting, shaping, illustrating, whatever, which is like really happy work. And which I think might be extremely useful for finding funding, like extremely useful. Mark Porat basically had a red book. Mark Porat was the founder of General Magic. He had a red book in which he had scribbled sort of visions of a little bit dyna-booky kind of thing. And I'm sure very much inspired by dyna-book and other kinds of visions and the knowledge navigator. And he basically got a tremendous amount of funding just from that little red notebook. A small side note, total side note, but it turns out that Ziba, where I'm about to walk over, built the mock-ups that Porat holds up in the documentary about General Magic, that the engineers at Ziba were involved with General Magic in the early days. They, you know, the Sorab knows Mark Porat and all those kinds of people. And there's a little bit of DNA at Ziba in the General Magic thing. So I think back to our regular schedule program, which is almost over. I read a good article about artificial. Subway cars are artificial reefs. And I was thinking about sinking a ship to build a reef as well. And it's funny. So the headline is it didn't go as planned. So you end up with, when you're trying to do scaffolding. Yeah. I guess, you know, the early thing was, oh, well, you know, these cars would be great scaffolding. Turns out if you sink the stainless steel ones, you know, which were lighter on the tracks, stainless steel doesn't grow Barnacles and corals. There was another one. Because it's stainless. Yeah. Damn it. Why didn't they build these things out of good old restaurants? It turns out, I think military tanks are good. They've, they dumped a bunch of military tanks at the bottom of the English Channel, you know, and those make good reefs. They're nice solid kind of thing. But if you dump them off the coast of Maryland, they just sink into the sediment and they're gone. And they disappear. They just get swallowed. So there's some story about scaffolding and, so we've learned a lot about artificial reefs. Thank you. That's a great story. It has a retellable story kind of smell to it, doesn't it? Yeah. Cool. Okay. That was interesting. Anything else for this call? Stacey, any thoughts? Cool. I'm, yeah. This is, thank you, Pete. Yeah. A lot. Thank you. Thank you, Stacey. Yeah. Stop recording. In transcript.