Alex Jarvis has joined our design team! Nick Ludlam has gone from a contractor to become our full-time CTO! Matt Jones is now a partner!
Kari has taken on project management of internal projects. I’ve given her two goals:
- Velocity
- No surprises
She pulls projects through the studio while project leads push. It’s working well. I’ll leave tomorrow for a week’s holiday a confident man.
These things I’ve been working on are a combination of things: processes, tacit knowledge, published goals, regular meetings of particular sorts. In short, part of my job now is creating the software of the studio, in this sense: software’s strange duality as both information and machine.
At the end of the last week, I looked at the shape and flows – the software – of the studio and saw it had become ship-shape.
And so this week – after three months consolidating, learning to read and garden this synthetic ecology – I took the studio out of its holding orbit and – well, you’ll see.
There’s a bit in Ken Macleod’s sci-fi quartet, the Fall Revolution series, where Dave Reid’s company “Mutual Protection” are in orbit around Jupiter, building a massive, complex structure to instantiate a wormhole to the edge of the universe. It takes several years. To build it they have whole populations of uploaded human consciousnesses that occupy and run construction robots (uploaded minds are easier than writing artificial intelligences). They call these robot clusters macros.
Macros.
There’s something about this combination of sustained effort, and the use of leveraged software and effort, that makes me think of what’s just beginning, right now. So that’s what we’re doing, making and running macros to build a wormhole. Continuous effort, hard scaling, big goal. I don’t know what to call it, but this voyage has a particular character.
Ken Macleod, the author, has this perfect quotation on his blog. Get this:
Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.
Yes!
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