Around three years ago I started tinkering on a software project where I'd decided: "I want to change the baseline for what people consider knowable." This was rooted in having started a personal note-making practice and losing a lot of my fear of forgetting things.
Since then I've been building a (kind of) personal digital assistant to help me stay organized easily, but there's no concise way to describe it, and I can't expect anyone to read a wall of text today about anything AI-adjacent. (My thing doesn't use LLMs, for now anyway.) So, potentially contrary to your advice...
I'm thinking of trying to tell my story through a game. I feel like I can't linearize what I have to say for any audience, I just have to give them a non-linear way to explore it for themselves. I'm thinking a game along the lines of Mafia/Werewolf or Among Us, where you slowly build out your own digital assistant as the game gets too hard to play without one. You can then take that assistant out into your regular life.
If you've heard of OpenClaw, I would want to make it easy for people to use it and software like it in place of what I'm promoting, because part of the narrative I want to talk about is how we determine what empowers us, and how that changes over time.
I'm afraid this is so much work that it'll never happen, but these are weird times, so 🤷
I love the idea of a story told through a game! It calls to mind hyper-text, choose your own adventure, even the meta-fiction of the 90's. I don't think this is contrary to what I'm saying at all - since in some ways for this, the structure IS part of what you want people to notice and get engaged by!
It's funny that you mention hypertext because my note-making practice uses Obsidian so heavily. I've thought of my notes as "love-letters to my future self" and really loved your serendipitous story of receiving a letter from your past self right before a time-travel narrative, that was surprisingly fun. (Do you have a pic of the poster the grad students took, by chance? I'm very curious.)
I've been playing with different theme ideas in my notes, but one of them is a funny parallel here - my project allows my notes to send messages to each other (or me). This was inspired by IFS (internal family systems) right before ChatGPT was released, but I'll give a concrete example:
Some of my transcribed voice notes are about sifting my cats' litter box, and I used to manually organize those litter box notes. I was in a sense embodying the agenda of the litter note, so that it would contain the right facts. I then externalized that agenda into its relevant note, using code, so now it can receive all transcribed voice note messages and organize the litter sifting ones it cares about.
I'm afraid the "message passing" theme will end up getting dropped, because it always feels not quite right, but I'm not sure what I'll up on using instead. I'm definitely interested in your coaching, do you have prep homework or anything? 😅
Around three years ago I started tinkering on a software project where I'd decided: "I want to change the baseline for what people consider knowable." This was rooted in having started a personal note-making practice and losing a lot of my fear of forgetting things.
Since then I've been building a (kind of) personal digital assistant to help me stay organized easily, but there's no concise way to describe it, and I can't expect anyone to read a wall of text today about anything AI-adjacent. (My thing doesn't use LLMs, for now anyway.) So, potentially contrary to your advice...
I'm thinking of trying to tell my story through a game. I feel like I can't linearize what I have to say for any audience, I just have to give them a non-linear way to explore it for themselves. I'm thinking a game along the lines of Mafia/Werewolf or Among Us, where you slowly build out your own digital assistant as the game gets too hard to play without one. You can then take that assistant out into your regular life.
If you've heard of OpenClaw, I would want to make it easy for people to use it and software like it in place of what I'm promoting, because part of the narrative I want to talk about is how we determine what empowers us, and how that changes over time.
I'm afraid this is so much work that it'll never happen, but these are weird times, so 🤷
I love the idea of a story told through a game! It calls to mind hyper-text, choose your own adventure, even the meta-fiction of the 90's. I don't think this is contrary to what I'm saying at all - since in some ways for this, the structure IS part of what you want people to notice and get engaged by!
It's funny that you mention hypertext because my note-making practice uses Obsidian so heavily. I've thought of my notes as "love-letters to my future self" and really loved your serendipitous story of receiving a letter from your past self right before a time-travel narrative, that was surprisingly fun. (Do you have a pic of the poster the grad students took, by chance? I'm very curious.)
I've been playing with different theme ideas in my notes, but one of them is a funny parallel here - my project allows my notes to send messages to each other (or me). This was inspired by IFS (internal family systems) right before ChatGPT was released, but I'll give a concrete example:
Some of my transcribed voice notes are about sifting my cats' litter box, and I used to manually organize those litter box notes. I was in a sense embodying the agenda of the litter note, so that it would contain the right facts. I then externalized that agenda into its relevant note, using code, so now it can receive all transcribed voice note messages and organize the litter sifting ones it cares about.
I'm afraid the "message passing" theme will end up getting dropped, because it always feels not quite right, but I'm not sure what I'll up on using instead. I'm definitely interested in your coaching, do you have prep homework or anything? 😅