communal thinking tools

devlogs/2024-05-09.md

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+# devlog 2024-05-09, communal thinking tools
+
+@def rss_description = "communal thinking tools"
+@def rss_pubdate = Date(2024,5,9)
+@def rss_title = "devlog 2024-05-09"
+
+
+- Wrote a big-ass [X thread](https://twitter.com/cameron_pfiffer/status/1788791693619425715). I copied the tweets below.
+- Started permitting suggestions being attributed to specific thoughts in a meld. 
+- A _suggestion_ is a set of related thoughts that you may choose to introduce into your meld. 
+- Suggestions may be related content, something novel from a language model, another meld, etc.
+- There's an issue with how I've been doing them. I've been sending all thoughts in a bucket (A, B, C) and then just getting
+a bulk suggestion for all the items, rather than produce a set of suggestions for _each_ thought.
+- So, started laying the ground work on the client side to handle this. Thoughts now have "space" underneath them for suggestions, and the core code to handle that for different melds is now also working.
+- Here's a rough sketch of what this vaguely looks like:
+
+```
+╭────────────────────────────────╮
+│  A thought                     │
+╰────────────────────────────────╯
+
+      - A suggestions -
+
+╭────────────────────────────────╮
+│  B thought                     │
+╰────────────────────────────────╯
+
+      - B suggestions -
+```
+
+I'm tired as fuck. Sprinted up the steep part of Telegraph Hill today with my backpack and also I guess I don't sleep anymore.
+
+-- Cameron
+
+## the x thread
+
+[(source)](https://twitter.com/cameron_pfiffer/status/1788791693619425715)
+
+People will use this stuff for day-to-day things. Shopping lists. Booking flights. Messaging.
+
+And also for big things. Research too -- you could just write a paper into your communal thought pool. Elicit is starting this path already. Very cool product.
+From elicit.com
+There's two outcomes here and it really depends on how things evolve.
+
+1. There will be a monopoly. A single platform that handles everyone's thoughts and resembles google.
+2. Fierce, specialized competition not unlike the web of the 90s and early 00s.
+Comind is targeting the consumer social angle -- how do you do the social and learning part?
+
+Subconcious is tackling the "how" part -- how do you actually make a massive-scale, open P2P comms layer?
+
+Elicit is tackling the deep, focused research part.
+It'll be weird seeing these evolve, because people are going to use them. 
+
+Communal thinking tools are useful and interesting, and it'll get rid of a lot of shit we don't need (emails/slack/a million texting apps).
+I'm not really an e/acc person, I'm not really an AI doomer. I'm sort of both -- I think there's an amazing future for AI stuff in our world, but also great risk, and I think it's wise to be careful.
+That said, general artificial intelligence is probably right around the corner.  It is weird to say that, but it's true -- and I'm not the only person working on this stuff. I think it has legs.
+Who else is doing it? Subsconcious is the big one someone pointed out to me.
+@co_mind_co
+ has kind of a (very cool) competitor in the distributed protocol for thought called Subsconcious. It's been stressing me out and I'm struggling with motivation due to it.
+
+https://subconscious.network
+
+On blue place, Paul (atproto dev at bsky) has this helpful comment:
+The nice thing here is that I am product-focused. I want people to have a simple, clean app that can be nimble because it is not a protocol. I can just change things as needed. So, thanks Paul.
+
+(h/t 
+@ThatAkhilRao
+)
+Seeing others think about this stuff is good because I know that something like comind will have legs. 
+
+However, it is also bad, because that thing may not be comind.
+It is difficult to have a direct competitor, especially because I can look over at their (moderately large) Discord and see what's going on. The engineers are really seasoned engineers with a lot of technical chops.
+They have thought really deeply and clearly about how to do P2P correctly, which is sort of a long-term goal of comind's.
+From github.com
+They also have a cool little app demo in the discord (really loved it) that is upsettingly familiar to my general design. It kind of shook me a little because they have a person who is actually a front-end engineer, while I am an overextended hack.
+Kind of weird to be back in imposter-syndrome land. 
+
+But! I should probably try to keep in mind that I only work on comind because I absolutely fucking love it. If it flops, if I get beat out, whatever, got to fuck around in this tiny nascent space that I suspect will be large.