oliverbennett

We’re playing with embodied LLMs that can externalise thoughts in a virtual environment. The idea is to help facilitate knowledge work.

It’s not our main area of interest, but it’s been interesting to experiment with how human/machine and machine/machine interactions work in real-time when you limit how fast agents can move or write. It's much easier to engage in a dialogue with agents that can't create / move tens of sticky notes and graphics faster than you can create one.

You can see a short, old video of the environment at https://www.temin.net

I see the red rings in front. I tried adding some depth cues to see if I could see it both ways - https://i.imgur.com/LsPtsRr.png

It kind of works, but for me it feels more like the blue ring now has a variable depth, with parts below and parts above the red rings, kind of like a piece of fabric draped over a bar.

I wonder how it feels for people who see blue in front?

In 2015 the UN created 17 ‘Global Goals’ (https://www.globalgoals.org/) that are meant to be a "shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future":

Goal 1: No poverty

Goal 2: Zero hunger (No hunger)

Goal 3: Good health and well-being

Goal 4: Quality education

Goal 5: Gender equality

Goal 6: Clean water and sanitation

Goal 7: Affordable and clean energy

Goal 8: Decent work and economic growth

Goal 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

Goal 10: Reduced inequality

Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities

Goal 12: Responsible consumption and production

Goal 13: Climate action

Goal 14: Life below water

Goal 15: Life on land

Goal 16: Peace, justice and strong institutions

Goal 17: Partnership for the goals

Each one is broken down into subtasks and targets. Making a dent in any of them would be worthwhile - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sustainable_Developmen...

Of the 10 most popular multiplayer games in 2023[0] seven of them owe their core mechanics to mods / flashes of brilliance from a handful of amateurs.

A more or less correct history of their origins:

- Four of the games on that list are battle royale games, which started life as a somewhat popular Minecraft mod and really took off with "Battle Royale" - a mod of "Dayz" which itself is a mod of "ARMA II". It's mods all the way down.

- Two are tactical FPS games, which owe a huge chunk of their mechanics to "Team Fortress" a Quake mod and "Counter Strike" a Half-Life mod.

- One is a MOBA, which started life as "DotA", a Warcraft III mod.

Of the other three, one is Minecraft. Created by a solo dev, and I expect its moddable nature has helped its multiplayer popularity significantly.

One is Roblox. Created by two devs, and is itself a game creation system.

The final one is Genshin Impact - something of a an outlier in terms of team size and genre origins.

[0] https://twinfinite.net/features/most-played-games

Exactly what I was after, thank you. Your other comment[0] with a link to game engine recreations is also super useful.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374297

Does anyone have examples of games with a client/server architecture, where new clients have been written, but that can still connect to an original server? I think there's a valuable learning exercise in the idea, but I can't find anything that actively courts multiple clients being developed.

The only UI/UX newsletter I subscribe to[0] also has a a similar problem, but the advice is usually solid. Maybe the first and/or last rule should be ‘seek feedback’.

[0] https://user-interface.io/

I still think of early human progress as this slow march forward rather than what I expect it really was - thousands of years of rediscovery and reinvention by a few million people spread far and wide. Who knows how many groups of people, and their knowledge, were wiped out through bad luck, bad judgement, or worse.

Both metaphors seem apt. One is leaning towards how a product makes a person feel when using it, one is about what the product offers.

I hear arguments around what products can offer me all the time, they make sense, but I generally go with how a product makes me feel. Probably more than I even realise.

I don’t use Emacs, I do whisk eggs and fish doughnuts out of oil with chopsticks, I couldn’t fully say why for either.

If we’re at a place a LLM can make and use tools I’m excited about the limits of its ability to create tools... specifically to create new tools.

For me that kind of entailment is one of the more exciting pillars of general intelligence and unique among humans (I think?).

I'm never going to stare at TV static and see deeper meaning in random noise, and while this is almost the opposite of that, I'm surprised by how I felt watching this.

Awe and mild discomfort aren't the usual feelings I get watching information being processed.

SEEKING CO-FOUNDER | Metaverse/Collaboration | Technical Founder | UK | Pre-Seed

A couple of years ago I started to build https://www.temin.net/ for my own personal use. Describing its current feature set as "Miro/Mural in 3D" wouldn't be too far off. Really interested in helping teams with externalising thought/visibility/community/serendipitous collisions.

Give me a shout if you're interested in turning it into something - email is in my profile.

That makes sense. What the long-term effects of such 'performance enhancing' tools might mean for how its users think, or externalise those thoughts, is hard to call.

I also wonder what it means if everyone is farming out parts of their intellect to similar models, which might be limited pathologically, by training data or enforcement.

Some people are better at writing than editing, some people are better at editing than writing.

I find it necessary to heavily edit when writing - up to, and including, this comment. I don’t mind it, and I don’t mind doing it to other people’s writing either, so this new way of doing things appeals to me.

I’d be interested to hear what anyone who’s able one-shot their writing thinks of this. I feel like that type of person may have less of a desire for this kind of stuff?

What I'm waiting for is when these imagined conversations are generated for an audience of just me. When references I understand and abstractions I'm familiar with are tossed around with ease, but unfamiliar concepts are expanded on and picked apart, as you might with a good friend.

If the speakers are brilliant I often don't want to actively be part of a conversation, I just want a personal performance. Though I imagine in 10 years, with a tricorder on my face (brain sensor included), I'll probably always be part of the conversation/performance, however passive.

Successful people (judged by their own metrics of success) are generally willing to make short term sacrifices for long term gains.

My reluctance / fear / discomfort often isn’t even recognisable to myself for a while. If and when I do act on it, it quickly subsides and I can do stuff I that’s in some sense still uncomfortable, but that I seem to genuinely enjoy even in the moment - making things, experiencing novelty, being challenged etc. And yet my brain hasn’t put that together.

I sometimes set a repeating personal alarm* that just asks ‘are you doing what you’re meant to be doing?’. I’ll try framing some of how I answer that around discomfort / sacrifice from now on.

*I usually use it when talking with people who meander/derail conversations as much as I do, and we recognise it’s a problem.

I always framed this more as ‘the tools will not save me’. A better pen won’t make me a better illustrator, no system/framework/methodology will take in garbage and spit out gold. But, in retrospect, I think I should partly blame seeking a foolish level of preparedness. I’ll try to recognise/abstain from this ‘preparbation’ in the future.

A lot of videogames have their value tied up in 'forcing' players to spend a few minutes (or hours) on logistics that eventually give rise to ritual, rather than just giving them a teleport button.

We're building a metaverse for knowledge workers with a default approach of "use the physics engine, not magic" when moving around objects - be they virtual robots, sticky notes or walls. Simulating the seemingly annoying, tedious, mundane logistical act of moving through space seems to have genuine benefits in terms of how you think, what rituals you undertake (big and small/collectively or individually), and who you bump into.

Maybe it's not utterly ridiculous that in the future your first few minutes clocked into a virtual environment will just be getting to your workspace. Or I could just have overly fond memories of the Half Life opening sequence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw63pZcBJH8

I was never a fan of this genre as a kid, but recently attended a launch event for a choose your own adventure book about change management, of all things - https://www.change-ninja.com/

Maybe part of the charm came from the novelty of the approach to the material, but I really got into it and 'cheating' felt more like learning. It got me wondering if the genre has legs outside of pure entertainment/fiction.

The article mentions different tools to think with (pen, paper, keyboards) and different methods of thinking (drawing/writing). Knowing when to pick what, or when to transition to using other tools/methods (usually CAD software or programming for me) often isn’t as obvious or as easy as I’d like.

By far the closest online equivalent to pop-ins I've had has been... inside video games. The first 10 hours of playing DayZ, a survival FPS with in-game spatial audio, was a revelation to me. Mostly relating to how, why and when people to talk to each other. I'm convinced you can't separate the work (talking or doing) from the workspace (real or virtual).

I've been building a 3D visual collaboration platform that has some fairly obvious value in how you externalise/connect/recollect thoughts, but I'm really keen to explore if it can become a workplace where pop-ins and serendipitous social collisions come easily. For that to happen it needs to become something you can spend large chunk of your workday inside of, which is no easy task.

For the software side of things, I was frustrated enough to develop what basically ended up as sticky notes in 2D+3D (shameless plug: https://www.temin.net/). I use it for note-taking quite a bit.

How I experience those notes in Temin is different to other software, but my methodology is basically unchanged:

- Even if it's just text (I doodle/sketch a lot) I actively consider using a pen before a keyboard.

- If it's something external I'm trying to remember/integrate I experience it (listen/read/watch/do etc), then take notes.

I think some of the allure of note-taking software comes down to the idea it can eat your vegetables for you when it comes to methodology. It can't. Software can add value to your notes via how experience/relate/link/query etc them, but if you put garbage in, you will get garbage out.

Nice, I'll reach out to you.

Great insight into the use cases for Temin depending on the I/O. It took me using a desktop and VR headset to form the same opinions. Initially I thought my VR usage would be higher, but it's below 1% of the total time I spend inside Temin. VR is also pretty good for presenting/telepresence.

Mixed reality excites me way more than VR, so I'm keen to skate more towards that technology long-term.

Please do sign up if you haven't already, or send me an email and I'll get you setup.

Thanks for the book recommendation, I've started to read it. It's nice to get some history and depth to concepts I had some awareness of.

I do wonder how method of loci strategies stand up to bricks and mortar sticky note use in collaborative environments. In my day job I've felt other people moving and adding things to a wall as almost destructive if I didn't experience it happening (purely in terms of memory). As changes in Temin are written to a ledger a fringe benefit is you can play back what's happened while you were gone, which seems to sooth that.

For work, I also spend a lot of time writing/drawing/thinking with a pen, and most of the artefacts in my metaverse are created with a Wacom not a keyboard. Being able to remember where things are I put down to Temin, being able to remember what's there I put down in some part to that. I'm not going to trying to convert people who prefer to use keyboards, and I expect pen-first users will very much be a minority, but the research on retention when it comes to pen vs. keyboard is pretty compelling.

Thanks, glad you like it!

For organising information Temin has been an entirely positive experience for me. For the first time what's in my head matches what's on a screen.

Early on I expected that mental model to fall over as the amount information in a metaverse grew, but I have ~12,000 sticky notes/pieces of paper in my 'main' metaverse and haven't personally felt the need to add any search functionality yet. I'm honestly not sure if I know where everything is, or just how to get back to it. Speaking to a neuroscientist or similar would be great - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_memory#Current_theories

I'd also be keen to speak to anyone who has thoughts on Temin as a graph, as more recently I've been finding sticky notes mean multiple things and belong in multiple locations. https://temin.co.uk/#links does a rather poor job of explaining my current solution.

It certainly scratched my personal itch for something that lets you relate/encode/recall information in 3D but also work in 2D.

The primary feedback from friends has been it's cool, but hard to use without much of UI (current version is all shortcut keys). That's something I can fix in the next couple of weeks.

A harder problem is there's a decent chunk of knowledge workers with no experience navigating virtual 3D spaces. If you didn't grow up playing Quake, Minecraft etc you might find Temin frustrating to use for a little while.

A couple of years ago I started to build a tool for my own personal use. It ended up being a metaverse full of sticky notes. I'm currently seeing if there's a market for it outside of just myself - https://www.temin.net/

Give me a shout if you're interested in turning it into something - email is in my profile.

https://www.temin.co.uk/ | Seeking Co-Founder | London, UK / Remote

What Temin is: Create whiteboards, sticky notes and virtual displays in a multiplayer 2D + 3D virtual environment that acts like a version controlled graph database.

I built Temin out of frustration when I was trying to get a Big Idea about the future of computing out of my head and ran out of wall space. With that in mind, it would be good to find a co-founder that shares my vision of the future/the utility Temin/what it could become.

What I want to do: have/implement ideas, talk to stakeholders, lead people.

What I want in a co-founder: someone to compliment the above as much as possible, and is willing to help pick up whatever slack is left over. Understand how to give a startup the best chance of success? How to sell/market something? What I should actually be looking for and don't realise it? Contact me.

oli@temin.co.uk

It's the 'Click here to try the browser-based alpha' link/heading directly under the video. I've just put it above the video so it's (hopefully) unmissable.

It links to https://alpha.temin.co.uk/

Hello!

Temin is a tool I built for myself that acts as a virtual environment for sticky notes, graphics and virtual screens (running Chromium). Technically it's two tools, as the HTML5-based drawing app is separate from the virtual environment. I use Temin mostly for big picture thinking, making stories and planning.

I built it when I was having trouble getting a grand vision of the future out of my head (standard 'future of computing' fare). In the real world I kept running out wall space before I ran out of ideas, and for whatever reason all the digital tools I tried weren't working for me.

I find adding/exploring/editing thoughts a pleasant experience in Temin. I'm not sure why, I have some pet theories that writing by hand in environments that are low on typeset words and clinically straight lines and boxes is a big part of it, but who knows. Outside of the articles that crop up on HN from time to time on the benefits of handwriting[0][1][2][3] I have nothing to back any of that up.

95% of the time I use a Microsoft Surface to input stuff into Temin and place the stuff I made using a desktop PC, but the I/O you can use is pretty flexible. I developed it as a desktop app, but as Unity can export to WebGL I spent some time recently getting a browser based version semi-working. The desktop build is embarrassing, the WebGL build doubly so, but it kind of works.

Switching between FPS, CAD/nolcip and pseudo-2D mouse mode isn't very intuitive. In fact, the whole UI/UX is bad.

Due 99% to my poor coding (the way the client and drawing app checks for updates is ridiculous) and 1% being on a $8 p/m hosting plan if this post gets more than a little interest it'll revert to a less feature rich version where you can't add/edit new sticky notes. Or maybe it'll just fall over. Who knows, Temin is the first piece of software I've developed.

I'd like to see if there's a market for Temin beyond myself and a couple of friends, but I don't really know what I'm doing so any thoughts would be appreciated.

I guess I'll just start rooting around LinkedIn and Twitter next week and reach out to any organisations/individuals who I think might be interested in it?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24519008

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24714990

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25031483

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8760392