0:06:51 I think he's making a pretty
strong rhetorical point.
0:06:54 I guess I, I prefer to look at
this in terms of design goals and
0:06:58 kind of the qualities of different
materials that you can work with
0:07:01 rather than what's good or what's bad.
0:07:03 Though I am personally, I'm very drawn
to capturing my notes in files myself.
0:07:09 You know, I've got 10 years worth of
notes, you know, in a folder that syncs,
0:07:14 and I've used plenty of SaaS tools over
the years, some of which have gone out
0:07:19 of business and I've lost those thoughts.
0:07:21 So when I think about, you
know, why files, why, why is
0:07:24 Kapano interested in files?
0:07:26 you know, there's some areas that
I resonate with and I, you know,
0:07:29 I think files, to your point, they
live in a place that you control.
0:07:35 the file system is a sort
of user on substrate.
0:07:39 It's old.
0:07:41 It was designed in, you know, the
sixties and seventies and didn't
0:07:44 anticipate a lot of the things that
we ended up doing with networks.
0:07:48 It has a lot of problems around
security and conflicts and many
0:07:53 other things that we can get into.
0:07:54 But I guess the one thing it does do.
0:07:57 That the web tends not to do and
many apps tend not to do is it does
0:08:01 leave you in control of that content.
0:08:03 And that's kind of interesting
because it means often you can
0:08:06 open that data in multiple apps.
0:08:10 no one can
0:08:11 tell you no.
0:08:13 That the opening in multiple apps
was the other side of this thing that
0:08:16 I think is like, not actually true.
0:08:21 Except in a few very narrow
cases, which are the ones that
0:08:24 programmers live in, but that much
of the rest of the world does not.
0:08:28 Well, you know, much of the rest of
the world doesn't live on desktop
0:08:32 machines with file systems anymore.
0:08:34 I think, again, it's just, it's
not about it is or it isn't.
0:08:37 It's about, there are different
jobs that people are solving.
0:08:40 I think, you know, there are
actually a number of things
0:08:42 that open up in multiple apps.
0:08:44 They tend to have strong power laws.
0:08:46 Like there's only a handful that end up.
0:08:49 working out in this way, but I think
that it's better when you have this
0:08:52 sort of user owned substrate where those
use cases can emerge, permissionlessly.
0:08:58 Well, the thing is,
0:08:59 like, I'm reflecting on like the file
format wars of the nineties, right.
0:09:03 And like the EU legislation to try
and like force Microsoft to open,
0:09:08 you know, the office suites file
formats to other participants.
0:09:11 And, you know, I don't think that
was terribly successful, but, you
0:09:14 know, that, that this is, um, just
because you have the file doesn't mean
0:09:18 that you really own it in a sense.
0:09:20 Like there are certain properties
of it that are quite desirable.
0:09:23 And I think this longevity is,
is really remarkable and a really
0:09:26 excellent point to bring up, but yeah,
there's a tension here between like,
0:09:31 open file does not imply openness.
0:09:33 Sure, though that can
emerge retroactively.
0:09:36 Like we saw that happen with PSD
and with, you know, the doc format.
0:09:40 Like PDFs were proprietary, right?
0:09:42 Like they I was going to say PDFs
0:09:43 the same way.
0:09:44 So the thing that lets that
emerge is that, that substrate
0:09:48 that belongs to the user.
0:09:48 If it was up to the app, if it was
up to Photoshop, they would say, no,
0:09:52 a competitor can't open up our file.
0:09:54 but they don't get to make that choice.
0:09:55 I can open it up and, you
know, Affinity Designer or in.
0:09:59 some sort of other app.
0:10:00 And we saw the same thing happen
around image formats, around
0:10:03 video formats, around 3d formats.
0:10:06 They tend to be things that are pretty
low level and have like very broad
0:10:09 expressive power so that there's
a wide range of jobs to be done.
0:10:13 That people want to, to do with them.
0:10:16 I also think there's like a
Lindy effect around these things.
0:10:18 They consolidate around a few, like
text, plain text has a lot of problems,
0:10:22 but I fully expect it's going to be
here in, you know, 10 years, 20 years,
0:10:26 maybe even a hundred years, define
it in whatever way you like, but I,
0:10:30 I suspect whatever way you define it,
it's going to last longer than, you
0:10:34 know, the, the Notion API, like notion.
0:10:37 com.
0:10:37 Oh, certainly.
0:10:37 Yeah, yeah.
0:10:39 Yeah, I guess I'm just
pointing out plain text.
0:10:40 It's, I often think of
it as a fixed point, but.
0:10:43 You know, if you look back at, the
history of plain text, right, we go
0:10:46 from like ASCII encoding and having
to, you know, I don't know if you
0:10:50 were ever opened up like, fileid.
0:10:53 diz from like Eastern European countries,
which had different ASCII encodings than
0:10:57 your, you know, Windows computer did,
back in the like late eighties, early
0:11:00 nineties, but you get these sort of,
0:11:02 Yeah, plain text across Windows and
Mac had, different file endings.
0:11:07 That's right, yeah.
0:11:08 You would hand a text file back
and forth, and it would, you
0:11:10 wouldn't have line breaks where you
expected them to be, or you'd have
0:11:13 additional line break characters.
0:11:14 Control M symbols, yeah.
0:11:16 no, that's, I thought, there was,
there was a couple areas, like,
0:11:20 I think, Gordon made the point
that Kapano's making a really
0:11:23 interesting rhetorical argument here.
0:11:25 I love that he picks a fight
here, and that he has a very, it's
0:11:28 a really nice mantra, but he's
definitely cheating a little bit.
0:11:31 He cheats files as if they don't
have an encoding, like, as if, like,
0:11:35 plain text is some given thing,
but plain text is an encoding.
0:11:40 that we had to, like, as you come to
adopt it widely enough that there are a
0:11:44 large set of readers for that file format.
0:11:47 And I think that when you get
beyond, I think whether it's
0:11:51 programmer usage or not, it's when
you get beyond the document format.
0:11:54 That's when things start to
get, this argument is more
0:11:58 difficult to, not as clear.
0:12:01 because, you know, I, like canvases,
for example, are everywhere now.
0:12:06 And there's no single file format for
exporting the contents of a canvas,
0:12:12 whether it's Muse export or tldraw has the
tldr file, all of these things, they're
0:12:17 not compatible with one another, it
feels like the early days of text files,
0:12:20 like BDH was just mentioning, where
you've got a bunch of different formats.
0:12:25 And the weird part about saying
file over app is that you still
0:12:28 need a reader for the file.
0:12:30 Like you have to have some code
somewhere that reads that file.
0:12:34 And so it saying files are
better than apps or files or
0:12:37 should be preferred over apps.
0:12:39 It's like, well, a file without
an app is literally useless.
0:12:42 Like you have to have an app to,
manipulate that file in some way.
0:12:46 Can you define what you mean?
0:12:48 Like the word app is, is
carrying a lot of water here.
0:12:50 Can you, can you unpack that word a bit?
0:12:53 Sure.
0:12:54 I think when I simplify file over app, I
think what he's saying is data over logic.
0:12:58 Okay.
0:12:59 In other words, the, the data or data over
behavior, the data stored at rest in some
0:13:05 way that you can carry it into the future,
own it, copy it from device to device,
0:13:09 that's his idea for files, I believe.
0:13:11 and he's making that, I think he's
making, And then for app, he's saying,
0:13:18 he's basically, I feel like collapsing,
apps into databases, basically, of
0:13:24 like databases that you don't own.
0:13:25 you can't take your individual
records from that database and,
0:13:29 and do something with them.
0:13:30 They're stored in this, mash of things.
0:13:33 at least that's why I understood it is
like data over the application logic.
0:13:36 The term we use at Ink & Switch
is tools, not apps.
0:13:39 Can you expand on that a little bit?
0:13:41 the concept is that an app in its
sort of cultural construction, though
0:13:47 not necessarily in its technical
requirements, generally implies that,
0:13:51 you know, it holds the data inside it.
0:13:53 I think mobile apps and web apps both
have different kind of habits here, right?
0:13:57 Like, For the most part, a mobile
app is a hermetically sealed box.
0:14:01 Nothing gets in or out of it.
0:14:03 You can't open your Apple Notes
in Dropbox or, you know, Notepad
0:14:06 or, you know, anything else.
0:14:08 That's not necessarily true, but it
is practically, culturally the case.
0:14:12 And so the idea is that tools operate
on some kind of material, right?
0:14:16 And so Obsidian has strong tool culture.
0:14:19 Right?
0:14:19 Like one of the interesting things
with Obsidian and reflecting on
0:14:22 Gordon's comments is just that like
Markdown and like plain, Obsidian
0:14:26 doesn't operate on plain text.
0:14:28 It operates on Markdown, but
there's no such thing as Markdown.
0:14:31 There's like as many Markdowns as
there are apps that use some grammar
0:14:35 of Markdown, but you get like a
certain amount of interoperability
0:14:39 because it's like these really
nice, graceful degradation patterns.
0:14:43 Yeah.
0:14:43 Markdown is like an escalator.
0:14:45 It can't break.
0:14:45 It can only become text.
0:14:47 Right.
0:14:48 So like, it's kind of an inspired choice
from that perspective, but I think your,
0:14:53 your point is well taken like these
formats, they tend to layer and it sort
0:14:59 of necessarily like interoperability
is an ecological condition.
0:15:02 It's something that emerges over time.
0:15:04 You don't design it.
0:15:05 This is often, this, this is actually
why for me, sort of permissionless
0:15:08 substrates, substrates that belong
to the user where their data saved
0:15:12 seems important because it allows
interoperability to emerge retroactively.
0:15:18 But in any case, like these things,
they tend to emerge over time where,
0:15:23 you know, one person creates a format,
another kind of app implements it.
0:15:28 it doesn't happen often, but when it does
happen, it tends to be very valuable.
0:15:32 It's often oppositional though, isn't it?
0:15:34 It's often oppositional and
often happens in layers.
0:15:37 Like I think that, you know, text
is on top of, you know, bytes and
0:15:41 then markdown is on top of text.
0:15:43 And then we have like Obsidian
layering their own sort of like bespoke
0:15:47 markup forms on top of markdown.
0:15:50 And, and these layers tend to move at
different speeds with the lowest layers
0:15:54 kind of necessarily moving slower.
0:15:56 Like the part of the problem that's
standardized and that people can
0:15:59 interoperate around is necessarily
the part that has to move slowly.
0:16:03 Well markdown's not standardized, right?
0:16:05 Like it's that's an emergent
Like cultural phenomenon.
0:16:09 It's de facto, right?
0:16:10 Like there's sort of flavors that people
converge on, like GitHub flavored.
0:16:14 And you know, like all, all
standards are sort of cultural
0:16:17 constructions at some level.
0:16:18 Yeah, you're right.
0:16:19 It's, it's not like standardized
in like the W3C or IETF sense.
0:16:22 Or even in the Unix POSIX sense, right?
0:16:24 Like files are.
0:16:25 You know, these kinds of bytes
and these kinds of orders, and
0:16:28 this is how you end a file.
0:16:30 But there, there are a couple
of emerging standards, right?
0:16:32 We're at the, we're at the situation
where there's multiple plain
0:16:35 text formats of Markdown, right?
0:16:37 There's Common Mark and different
parsers that you can adopt that give you.
0:16:41 true, guarantees around the way
that markdowns, but there's as
0:16:44 you said, there's no one Yeah,
0:16:46 this this actually seems important to
me Like I think a lot of people think
0:16:50 about standards and interoperability
as these sort of platonic forms that we
0:16:53 design in standards bodies And you know,
while that's true that there are people
0:16:57 who craft that kind of material it's
like Typically done in retrospect and
0:17:02 in real life cooperation usually happens
in the sort of ad hoc or de facto way.
0:17:07 And when our systems aren't designed to
support that, it's not a huge surprise
0:17:12 that, you know, interoperability
doesn't emerge and then we can sort of
0:17:14 point and say, well, nobody wants to
interoperate and it's like, well, yeah.
0:17:17 Cause the material doesn't support it.
0:17:19 Like, like there's a kind of
chicken or the egg problem here.
0:17:21 Right.
0:17:22 I think both in your work and
Jess's work and our work, right?
0:17:26 We're all exploring.
0:17:28 Different ways of exposing the
substrate in more interoperable ways.
0:17:33 Yeah.
0:17:33 And it's not so much like locking the
door open as like, right now, I think
0:17:39 like the political economy of choosing
files over these other things, right?
0:17:43 Like if it's so much harder and worse
for you as a developer to choose, Like a
0:17:48 file like thing over an API like thing.
0:17:52 You're probably going to
pick the API like thing.
0:17:54 Indeed.
0:17:54 Some of this is like technical capability
and some of it is cultural norms.
0:17:58 Yeah.
0:17:59 Like files are just
the thing that's there.
0:18:01 And they're actually in many ways, an odd.
0:18:03 odd shaped thing for the problems
we're trying to solve, but they're
0:18:07 just, uh, at least in the app store
and on the web, there aren't really
0:18:13 good, viable alternatives yet.
0:18:15 Like in the browser, we're starting to get
things like the file API and I, you know,
0:18:20 on, on iOS, we're starting to get like
a little bit of a sort of file system.
0:18:25 So it was very charming when
Apple excitedly announced
0:18:28 files like they'd invested in.
0:18:29 Yeah, totally.
0:18:30 Right.
0:18:30 But I, I, it's actually kind of
telling that like, why, why is
0:18:34 it actually that we want this?
0:18:36 It seems like a lot of knowledge work that
0:18:41 needs to cross boundaries
of multiple apps.
0:18:44 and this is just the only tool
we currently have to do it.
0:18:47 Mostly because there haven't,
I think, haven't been good
0:18:49 commercial incentives to build.
0:18:51 Right.
0:18:52 Interoperability layers that, that
makes sense on the network, at least not
0:18:56 yet.
0:18:57 Well, you still need a
data container, right?
0:18:59 Like it's one of the nice things that
files make is like this, you know,
0:19:02 relatively, this thing that has boundaries
that contains a certain amount of data
0:19:07 that you can then pass around via a
whole bunch of different, units of
0:19:11 sharing.
0:19:12 Yeah, exactly.
0:19:14 So I, I'm actually curious.
0:19:15 So for people who are listening, who
don't know, Peter's work, he's working
0:19:20 on a, CRDT, which is, basically a data
structure you can think of it's called
0:19:24 Automerge and Automerge actually calls
their, unit of, merging a document.
0:19:31 So.
0:19:32 Peter, do you guys think of documents,
Automerge documents, as files in this
0:19:37 file like way we've been describing, or
do you think of them in a different way?
0:19:41 The specific stated intention
of Automerge is to invent the
0:19:45 new file system of computing.
0:19:48 Like, the CRDT thing is just
like an implementation detail.
0:19:51 The problem is, We don't want
places and we don't want things.
0:19:54 We need properties of both, right?
0:19:56 There's a wave particle duality here.
0:19:58 We don't want to give us the good
things about files, things that we have,
0:20:02 things that we can hold, things we can
maintain, things we can keep for as long
0:20:05 as we want that we can use in whatever
way that we want, we can pop open the
0:20:09 hood and peer under the covers, right?
0:20:10 Like all that stuff is, is I think vital,
but like, it's so apparent that the POSIX
0:20:18 metaphor of the 19th, literally 1970s.
0:20:22 Right.
0:20:22 The series of bytes, it
assumes single access, right?
0:20:25 Like, God, the amount of my
career I've spent trying to figure
0:20:28 out how to lock a file system.
0:20:31 There's so many, so many tricks that,
that we use in like professional
0:20:36 contexts to cope with shared
0:20:37 mutable state, shared mutable state.
0:20:39 And the whole idea behind Automerge was
to say like, look, what if you could.
0:20:43 Really think about this, really take your
time, really sweat all the details, not
0:20:47 be in the rush that a startup's in, not,
you know, spend years with Martin Klepman
0:20:52 proving the algorithm correctly, then
spend years with, you know, Orion and
0:20:56 Alex Good getting the performance right.
0:20:57 And people are like, Oh, Automerge is
this, Automerge is that, Automerge
0:21:00 is just getting started, right?
0:21:02 Like this is a, this is a 10 year project.
0:21:04 It's a 50 year project.
0:21:05 It's, it's a thing that you just
keep working on until it works.
0:21:09 And I think at this point a lot of
the pieces are in place and we're
0:21:11 starting to see that pay out and if
anybody's following Ink and Switch's
0:21:14 patchwork project right now, right,
like what we're seeing is like this
0:21:19 ability to do ad hoc, like new forms
of real time and asynchronous version
0:21:25 control on top of this substrate
because it has the right primitives.
0:21:30 And of course, this is a research project,
so in the process of working on this we're
0:21:34 discovering the ways that the APIs are
insufficient or where we need to add new
0:21:38 kinds of indexing to improve performance
or, you know, all those other kinds of
0:21:42 things, but it's sort of like we, We've
talked to so many people, you know, I
0:21:46 was talking to, someone over at Scratch
the other day and they were saying like,
0:21:49 oh, I did this in my thesis, but like,
it wasn't actually possible to build
0:21:53 because we didn't have the material.
0:21:54 Right.
0:21:55 And like a former collaborator,
Blaine Cook, who was a coauthor on
0:21:58 the Upwelling paper we did last year,
you know, he was saying like, it's so
0:22:01 amazing getting to work on this stuff.
0:22:02 He did a startup five
years ago or something.
0:22:05 Where you tried to build, you
know, text editing tools, but like
0:22:07 they didn't have the material.
0:22:09 And so it's about trying to figure out
what the shape of that material is.
0:22:12 And you know, I, I hadn't brought it
up before because I don't want this to
0:22:17 be about a particular like concept that
I have or that we have about a single
0:22:21 technology, but it's about like really
thinking about what the opportunities
0:22:25 are and the potential, but I think
a lot about this question, right?
0:22:28 Like I don't want my computer to
be a mall where I go in and I take
0:22:34 products out one at a time, you
know, and bring them home and consume
0:22:38 them and put them in the trash.
0:22:39 I want my computer to feel like a wood
shop where I have my stock of lumber and
0:22:44 I've got my tools and if I want to make
something, sure it's going to require a
0:22:47 little more thinking and expertise, but
I can make anything, I can do anything,
0:22:51 I can work with other people, right?
0:22:53 Like it's, it's a different
kind of productivity.
0:22:56 Like a kitchen is very much
the same thing as well, right?
0:22:58 We buy groceries, we buy staples,
you know, and a handful of like basic
0:23:02 tools, cutting board, a heat source,
a knife, you can do almost anything in
0:23:07 the kitchen with a few extra things.
0:23:09 You can do remarkable things.
0:23:10 Right.
0:23:11 And like, you know, we, we reject
the idea of unit task devices.
0:23:15 Often we make fun of people who
buy the one off gadgets for the
0:23:18 kitchen, but then we live in a world
of these one off gadgets on our
0:23:23 devices, you know, on our computers.
0:23:25 I'm trying to think like, if, if we're
gonna invent tools, we also need to
0:23:29 figure out what the stock material is.
0:23:31 And like Yeah.
0:23:32 Text files are cool 'cause they're
old and, and like what's old is good.
0:23:36 Like I don't mean that
in a dismissive way.
0:23:38 Like it, it is cool because,
and it stood the test of time.
0:23:40 Exactly.
0:23:40 It's, and it will stand the test of time.
0:23:42 It'll still be here in 50 years
if it was here in 50 years.
0:23:45 For 50 years SQLite is amazing too.
0:23:47 Simon Wilson's super inspiring.
0:23:49 They're working on, Like data
set and these kinds of ideas where
0:23:52 it's like, yeah, like a database
is a file like that's awesome.
0:23:56 Yeah
0:23:57 It's more or less written by actual
monks as well It's it really does feel
0:24:03 like a kind of cathedral of technology.
0:24:05 That'll be here in a thousand years Yeah,
0:24:10 I think that's, I love that woodshop
metaphor and it's often one that I
0:24:16 think about, it, it's so evocative
because if you've worked in a woodshop
0:24:20 and you understand all the things
that you're, the, the ways that
0:24:24 you're able to modify your shop and
your tools in order to get work done.
0:24:28 And then you just put that same
lens and look at your computer.
0:24:32 You realize how incredibly rigid, the
computer is, even when you're a software
0:24:36 developer who has, an ideological
commitment to using open source
0:24:41 software, where you have the source of
every single application that you use.
0:24:46 The difficulty in modifying
those applications to your own
0:24:50 custom specifications is, is
astronomical compared to working
0:24:54 models and metaphors.
0:24:56 Mm
0:24:56 hmm.
0:24:56 Yeah, the new materials
you're talking about.
0:24:58 It's great.
0:24:59 I was reading, uh, Brian
Kernighan's biography.
0:25:02 it looks like the C programming language,
but it's his, his self published thing.
0:25:06 Unix, a history and a memoir.
0:25:08 And, um, it's a funny book.
0:25:10 But there's some really great parts in
it where he talks about sort of like the
0:25:13 invention of Unix pipelines and how it was
sort of like somebody would ask how you
0:25:18 could do X with a computer, you know, or
with this new pipes thing they'd built.
0:25:22 And then, you know, him or Richie
or somebody would go off and, like,
0:25:26 write the next little piece, you
know, sort or whatever, so that
0:25:29 they could answer that puzzle.
0:25:31 And I just love this sort of, like,
they discovered the Lego bricks, they
0:25:34 you know, they built the shape and then
they just filled in a few pieces and
0:25:37 then after a little while it was kind
of like, yeah, all the major pieces
0:25:40 are there and that was good enough
and they stuck you know, it's still
0:25:43 out there and you can still use it.
0:25:44 But it's not really the best way
to do spellcheck anymore, you know?
0:25:48 Such a glorious vision though.
0:25:50 You know, I guess for me, like files
are not the thing, but what they are,
0:25:54 at least for particular formats is like
a kind of Lego dot and producing Lego
0:25:59 dots like this that allow you to compose
things together, like Unix pipe is
0:26:03 another kind of Lego dot this strikes me
as important in like a laws of physics.
0:26:08 Kind of way.
0:26:09 Like, one of my favorite books,W.
0:26:10 Brian Arthur's the nature of technology.
0:26:14 I always get it confused with Kevin
Kelly's book, but the, the nature of
0:26:17 technology, he basically makes this, this
very sort of, mathematically grounded
0:26:21 argument that innovation at its core
is a combinatorial process and not just
0:26:26 like technological innovation, but, you
know, evolution, language, art, like
0:26:31 these are about taking pieces, composing
them together to produce something
0:26:36 new in a sort of recursive process.
0:26:39 And like early computing was all kind
of like, I don't know if this was
0:26:43 intuitive or chance or what, but all
of these early pioneers of computing
0:26:47 designed their systems in this way.
0:26:49 And we saw this kind of Cambrian
explosion of really interesting
0:26:53 new things emerge very rapidly.
0:26:55 Like actually we've had mobile phones,
for Longer than it took the browser to be
0:27:01 invented after the introduction of DOS.
0:27:03 So it's just like, like a lot
happened in like a very short
0:27:06 amount of time in that first wave.
0:27:08 Right.
0:27:08 And that's part of me kind of wonders
that if, We sort of reduced the
0:27:12 combinatoriality of technology to
actually slow the rate of innovation.
0:27:16 not necessarily like there's someone
scheming in a room, but sort of the
0:27:20 purpose of the system is what it does.
0:27:22 And like, like big money, but also
kind of governments and people.
0:27:26 It's eternal September, right?
0:27:28 Yeah.
0:27:28 It's like
0:27:29 if
0:27:30 you have a bunch of silos and those
silos do one thing, like on Instagram,
0:27:34 you post photos and on TikTok, you post
short videos and on, like you, There is
0:27:39 no such thing as combining those into some
new medium because they don't let you.
0:27:44 And so you kind of have these known
quantities that you can regulate
0:27:47 and control and also extract 30
percent taxes on pretty efficiently.
0:27:52 So there's this kind of like striation
that's happened of the space.
0:27:56 Some of this is probably inevitable, but I
do kind of want to click the dial a couple
0:28:00 notches in the other direction, just by
0:28:02 nature.
0:28:03 I kind of think this is, the way you
describe that is, to me, a lost cause.
0:28:08 Or maybe lost cause isn't
actually the right term for it.
0:28:11 What I mean is that, actually,
a television is great if you
0:28:15 want to watch Love is Blind.
0:28:17 Is everything necessarily a television?
0:28:20 No.
0:28:20 Well, this is, this is the point.
0:28:22 And so what I think though is like,
0:28:25 I don't think we should be trying
to convince the mainstream systems
0:28:28 to change their minds or solve
the problems we want to solve.
0:28:31 It's that we need to, you know, like a
woodshop is not the right way to build
0:28:35 an IKEA, you know, assembly line, right?
0:28:38 Like, but we need the existence
of this other kind of computing.
0:28:41 It is, it is not.
0:28:43 a replacement for, it is an
alternative to, for the people
0:28:47 who want it and need it.
0:28:48 Yeah, we don't disagree.
0:28:49 Like there's always going to be Facebook,
and there's always going to be like the
0:28:52 Big Bang Theory or whatever, but I would
love for there also be like a world where
0:28:57 like there can be, you know, I don't
know, independent films or hell, like,
0:29:01 uh, Dune II is like something that's, kind
of in the air and kind of strikes, that
0:29:05 balance in a nice and interesting way.
0:29:07 It just feels like Like
what we want is diversity.
0:29:10 We want like a technological
ecosystem that can actually support
0:29:14 a plurality of, of different
ends and not just like Walmart.
0:29:19 Yeah.
0:29:19 And well, and the political economy
is the challenge here, right?
0:29:21 Which is that right now it costs so
goddamn much to write a piece of software.
0:29:26 It's like completely untenable to
build or operate software at all.
0:29:29 And I say this as somebody who
has done quite a lot of it at all
0:29:33 scales, you know, in production.
0:29:35 It is just insane.
0:29:37 We think of software as an
informational good, right?
0:29:39 Like that's sort of the
like conceptual model.
0:29:42 Oh, it's just some bits on, you know,
floating around, but it's not, it's
0:29:45 like a whole, like massive amount of
extremely expensive infrastructure that's
0:29:50 operated by a, you know, a priesthood
of like DevOps people who sacrifice
0:29:56 themselves to get up at three in the
morning to figure out why the transaction
0:29:59 wraparound on the Postgres has happened
again, you know, like it's hell.
0:30:03 It's crazy.
0:30:04 Yeah.
0:30:04 The strange economics of,
software, I guess, support that
0:30:08 kind of, like, rising floor.
0:30:10 Because if you do have a hit, it
tends to make a ton of money and
0:30:13 then all of that's a rounding error.
0:30:15 Yeah.
0:30:15 It's the
0:30:15 network
0:30:16 effects.
0:30:16 The complexity of software is
determined by the economic value that
0:30:19 can be extracted from the software.
0:30:21 Yeah.
0:30:22 Yeah.
0:30:22 And that, that sort of
sets the floor as well.
0:30:24 Right?
0:30:25 Like if you're, if you're making not
thousands, but billions on a success,
0:30:29 then you can afford, you know,
0:30:31 Yeah.
0:30:31 To burn out a bunch of, software
engineers and, you know, leave them
0:30:35 staggering around, their hometown, gazing
bleary eyed into the morning light and
0:30:40 wondering where their life went wrong.
0:30:42 At the same time, like these economic
incentives, they create individual
0:30:46 choices for like, individual developers.
0:30:48 And I think that's, I think that's where
a lot of the slowdown has happened is
0:30:53 when you, there aren't, there weren't
options if you were into computers in
0:30:58 the sixties to go make whatever the
sixties equivalent of 450, 000 a year.
0:31:04 and kind of at a cushy job where they.
0:31:06 You know, bring food to your
table and you can get up and take
0:31:09 foosball breaks whenever you want.
0:31:10 like the, the cruise ship mentality,
I think, lures a lot of people away.
0:31:16 and I think it's really hard to kind
of wake them up to the fact that
0:31:21 software doesn't have to be this way.
0:31:22 We might have to do a little work.
0:31:24 We might have to be a little
uncomfortable for a little while.
0:31:28 You got
0:31:28 to make the right thing.
0:31:29 The easy thing.
0:31:30 That was the lesson we learned at Heroku.
0:31:32 If you make the right thing, the
easy thing, people will do it.
0:31:34 All the, you know, all of the principles
and ideals, like, yeah, there's a
0:31:39 certain amount of cultural affinity and
there'll always be some, like, weirdos
0:31:43 and early adopters, but ultimately if
you want to win the day, you have to
0:31:45 make the right thing the easy thing.
0:31:47 But you need some people doing that,
making the right thing, the easy thing.
0:31:51 And I think that's what I'm talking about
is like, I want to find that 2 percent
0:31:55 or 3 percent of the developer population
who actually wants to do the work and
0:31:58 make the right thing, the easy thing.
0:32:00 and that, and for that,
you need to talk to people.
0:32:02 You know, you need to have, these
wonderful mantras that, Kepano and
0:32:05 that, um, Peter and, Gordon, you
guys have honed over the years.
0:32:10 actually, Gordon, I, to turn the
conversation a bit to your work,
0:32:14 because you are working on a, network
tool, network thinking tool that
0:32:19 captures those thoughts in documents,
files, one might say, and, You
0:32:24 have not chosen to use Markdown.
0:32:27 You've chosen, you've made some
interesting technical choices.
0:32:30 So I'm curious how, when you, when you
look at file over app, are you like,
0:32:34 yes, that, that aligns with my, The
decisions that I'm making right now
0:32:39 for the tool that I'm building, or how
are your thoughts different from kind
0:32:43 of what you've seen Kapano lay out?
0:32:45 Yeah, that's a good question.
0:32:46 I guess what we are building is a sort
of notebook app called Subconscious
0:32:50 powered by this decentralized note graph
protocol, and the protocol is multiplayer.
0:32:56 So the notion is like, what if you had
your Roam graph or your Obsidian graph,
0:33:00 but it could sort of freely network with
other graphs in this cloud of graphs.
0:33:05 But that cloud of graphs doesn't live on
my server where I can sort of, you know,
0:33:10 extract a 30 percent text or whatever.
0:33:12 It exists on this decentralized network.
0:33:14 I actually, that's not quite right either.
0:33:16 The protocol is local-first.
0:33:18 so basically it syncs your slice of the
graph, like your content plus the content
0:33:22 of people you follow onto your devices.
0:33:24 So you have your files.
0:33:25 and then this was clear,
0:33:27 right?
0:33:27 They're, they are actually files.
0:33:29 They're actually files.
0:33:30 If you
0:33:30 run orb on a, or what you
guys used to call it, orb.
0:33:34 Yeah, it's called orb.
0:33:34 Yeah, no, it's called orb.
0:33:35 There's, so there's a
couple of things, right?
0:33:37 There's the app, but there's also
like a command line interface.
0:33:41 You can use if you're a
developer, that's like git.
0:33:43 And, and actually it works a lot like git.
0:33:45 The whole thing uses kind of
git like, versioning semantics.
0:33:48 the difference is that it syncs
not just your code, Quote unquote
0:33:52 repository of notes, but also kind of
the, those are the people you follow.
0:33:56 So you have your own little
internet archive, I guess.
0:33:58 Right.
0:33:58 You like Git, uh, it's like Git sub
modules or that's a terrible example,
0:34:01 but it's like, No, don't say
0:34:03 that.
0:34:03 That's mean.
0:34:03 It's not like that.
0:34:04 I promise.
0:34:05 It's, it's, it's all, it's
much, much better than that.
0:34:07 It's all versioned together.
0:34:09 I mean, I, yeah, without getting
deeply into the details, it's