Daily Journal 📓

Jeremy Ruston, creator of TiddlyWiki, is making native apps for iOS, MacOS, and iPadOS. I use Quine on iOS today, will be great to have across systems.

I’m giving a talk next week here in Vancouver Open Source Beyond Licensing - The Evolution Ahead, followed by a panel discussion. Come join!

Highline Beta is launching Highline Hub “a curated community & space that empowers pre-seed startups”. 5000 sq ft in downtown Toronto.

The IxDA non-profit is shutting down, seen via @jarango who comments: “how do we build a community of practice in a world where in-person conferences are no longer a viable means for funding community orgs?”

I have many thoughts on this, and we’ll be exploring this for Causal Islands.

If you let a channel be used for self-promo, then people will just ignore / mute it. Celebrate a “promo” channel and nuke it in all other topics.

I’ve published my Tech Event Budget Template. This is a very basic starting point for scoping the costs and ticket + sponsor revenue of an event that is mainly talks and networking.

Caret beta is now available as a beta plugin for Obsidian: “a plugin that brings the power of LLMs into your Obsidian Vault…local-first, privacy preserving and stores all generated data as local files”

Recommended by Ellie I’m trying out Pinokio: a browser that lets you locally install, run, and automate any AI on your computer.

Mozilla is funding Local AI (aka “on device AI”) with their Mozilla Builders Accelerator.

Application deadline August 1st, up to $100K in funding per team, 12 week program Sept to December.

Dispatches from the media apocalypse by Ben Werdmuller: “The internet landscape has been largely static for well over a decade”

And goes on to explain search and social crumbling and the rise of AI answer engines all impacting newsrooms.

A write up about Local-First Conf by Browsertech Digest Trip Report. Highlights covered: local-first vs offline first, sync engines, hybrid data queries, and app data interop.

Ryan Hoover curates The Evolution of Software as another rebuttal to Chris Paik’s End of Software. This is a topic we should cover at Causal Islands.

Caught up with John Edgar, who is quietly launching Ascent: a founder-aligned suite of legal support and other services for Canadian venture scale startups. Excited to see this evolve!

Avoidance Machines, Part 1, by Kevin Baker:

“Writing is a task which forces one to confront ambiguity, uncertainty, and one’s own limits directly, so it’s not surprising that a coterie of avoidance entrepreneurs sprung up around it.”

The Disappearing World Wide Web covers the loss of web pages found in Common Crawl (38% of the 2013 pages are no longer accessible), as well as the general trend of info to exist in cozy web spaces.

Good write up on Farcaster’s new decentralized channel system and the approach to moderation + algorithms, including comparisons with hashtags and Reddit.

Tren Griffin @trengriffin with a short thread on Software isn’t Ending

“There are zero significantly profitable software businesses with pricing power based on the expense of creating the software. Instead:”

“1 Supply-Side Economies of Scale and Scope; 2 Network Effects); 3 Brand; 4 Regulation; and 5 Intellectual Property.”

In response to @cpaik.

Chris Paik @cpaik wrote a short piece predicting The End of Software. The premise is that software will go the way of journalism, because of LLMs making it.

Here are three quotes:

“Software is expensive because developers are expensive.”

“Vogue wasn’t replaced by another fashion media company, it was replaced by 10,000 influencers.”

“Majoring in computer science today will be like majoring in journalism in the late 90’s.”

I’m someone who would like to see more user malleable software, but we’re not quite there yet.

At Z-Space for an afternoon of tinkering. I should be doing some more LOCALHOST setup and writing, but ended up working with the MiniPC PL63 here.

The Razor Core X Chroma stopped connecting, so I’m troubleshooting.

Along the way, I installed Obsidian so I could type these notes, and Github Desktop so I could sync the notes.

So, the Razor eGPU really should be plug and play (and was before). There are some drivers for MacOS (which is what I originally used it with, but it only supports Intel Macs), but really nothing for Windows.

I am going to attempt to install ASUS updated drivers. There is a Management Engine Interface (MEI) and Chipset update that could work.

Hmmm. Updated Thunderbolt drivers? All support for the Intel NUC devices are now with ASUS. This appears to be a 2023 thunderbolt driver.

The event logs say Thunderbolt isn’t loading because of the Intel graphics driver. Ok, let’s load an updated graphics driver from the MiniPC drivers.

“Something went wrong” when installing the Intel drivers. Hmm. Maybe I’m going to do a fun Windows re-install here?

I think I will Windows re-install. I don’t think I’m going to use this to run Linux on, so may as well remove the drive partition too.

OK, and we’re back! Did Windows update after first install. Seemingly the Razer is now recognized and even installed it’s glowing light thing. I did blow away the Linux partition.

The reset also seems to have updated the BIOS as well.

May as well log my setup.

• Setup Outlook — I haven’t really used this, but one way to shuttle stuff back and forth
• Uninstall McAfee
• Github Desktop
• Obsidian — so that I can type into here
• AMD drivers — they did detect the graphics card in the eGPU
• Steam

Now to learn about restore points now that I have all this stuff installed!

We registered Z-Space as a BC society today:

Z-Space Arts and Technology Society provides affordable, sustainable, community oriented office and creative space dedicated to supporting creative technologists, startups and innovative small businesses. We host a series of events and meetups supporting the community. We connect with similar art, science, and technology spaces globally.