July 6, 2021

Yak trails 2021-07-04

A mostly automated roundup of what the Yak Collective was up to this week. Yaks can jump on the server to join in. If you’re not yet a member, consider joining.

Yak Rover updates

The Yak Rover project — a project to design a real Mars rover prototype that can actually be built and trialed on Earth, and evolved into a production model that could potentially even be launched to Mars. Roam.

This week‘s meeting notes - How and why I connected Wonderful Wandering Growth to the world.

Nature is Murder. Finally booted up the Beaglebone Blue and configured it and got to led blinking. Get to first servo control test on the board. Driver snafus under MacOS Catalina so having to use my wife's Macbook on High Sierra. Realized that embedded software ecosystems evolve much more slowly than personal computing. Many things are years old. You're living in slower time.

Abio Flex Wanderer. Fix integration of OAK-1 on the bot. Now available on a /dev/videoX file, for working with Maier's Twilio tools. BOS software only, focusing on what we now call "situation construction". OAK-1 works with v4l2 now, but then we cannot leverage its compute and ML capabilities. For that I need to switch it to its specific XLink interface, usable from Python or C++. This may be a permanent limitation, according to the maker (not an issue, because v4l2 is just for video, whereas XLink allows new use (current understanding)). In the BOS software trials---aimed at a toolkit for autonomous rovers---I have plans for several complementary components. I have come to realize recently that "situation construction" can be quite useful to many, aside components for "driving" or ML for example. This could be a good opportunity for contribution. This is also complementary with recent discussions on multi-compute rover software.

Infinity and Beyond. Print the head. Print the final parts. Play with Beyond SDK. Learn more about video editing. check overhangs while printing, otherwise a repeat print is needed. better to print without overhangs

Stubborn. Completed a rewire of the rover. After a lot of precision soldering I have proper connectors and a much more reliable rover. I'm exploring swapping out my ground station Arduino with a raspberry pi. This would provide some interesting potential for connecting the rover up with the world. My latest Adafruit order brought me a little camera I want to play with as well. Seattle heat wave has impacted productivity. After rewiring the rover the motors seem to be operating with a lot less resistance. So much so that it runs faster and it had to be re-tuned. I had no idea how much it had been suffering.

Channel activity

Astonishing Stories. Fiction study group that occasionally publishes speculative fiction.

based on the last infra call I've come up with an outline for project managing the editing process for stories. I think it would be nice to have a bot that sends notifications on this channel when a story moves from one stage to another, including details of who moved it. Idea would be that once a story is submitted, anyone can pick it up for editing/review/proofreading. And kind of like github it is up to the author to decide whether to accept the changes and move it towards publishing. Can join the infra call this week and explain further. (#)

Bot Testbed. Use this channel for your own bot tests.

EXPERIMENT Created #bot-testbed so that yaks can play with bot commands without feeling like they are cluttering up a channel. tk: master doc of yak bot tricks. Commands need to be a standalone post to fire.
@gigayak: $unfurl $agendaadd $readingadd $links $lunks.
@Yakyak aka Carl: !suggestion !quickpoll !rm.
Carl docs

Coffee with a Yak. Setting up a mechanism for potential YC customers to have a non-committal talk with a YC member who works on a project. May lead to gigs for YC member or YC in general. Roam.

Agenda: YakC to drive team formation and team gigs, herds, imagined as opt-in to a small team that wanted to offer similar services together. might be multiple herds on overlapping topics. id 68
what's our stack for the Yak Cafe service? profiles for yaks, for team conversations, for scheduling, for calls, for coordination messaging? id 72
what's the workflow/ux for Yak Cafe lifecycles? for yaks to profile themselves and leave, to define cafe groups for conversation and suspend/end the group, to join a group or leave a group, to initiate a conversation with a cafe group and get trickle notifications before and after. id 73
what are blanket ToS for Yak Cafe for the yaks and for guests? id 74

General Discussion. A place to chat about anything and everything you might find interesting or relevant.

re stretching the airport metaphor that reminds me of several sci fi stories like Station 11 or films where people get stranded in an airport in a post-apocalyptic or other scenario. There's also the incredibly true story of all the planes on 9/11 that got routed to that obscure Canadian airport that used to get tons of transatlantic traffic in the pre jet era but then was a minor pitstop thereafter until 9/11 happened. There's a play about the quiet heroism of the town to shelter, feed and take care of everyone during that crazy time. Cool story and well done. Perhaps worth a gander if you're looking for inspiration to flesh out the metaphor a bit more (#)

Any yaks involved in regional economic development work like this link for Bakersfield? (#)

Is there anything happening beyond white papers and press releases though? The ESG wave is taking a stronger hold over the earth observation / data analytics orgs a lot too. But I haven’t come across much beyond vague gesturing at climate change. (#)
It’s real action at one major client company in my case. Sudden shift from talk to action in the last couple of years. (#)

Infrastructure. Place to talk about the website, twitter, linkedin, facebook, and other bits and pieces of the yak collective shared infrastructure. Roam. Standing calls Wednesdays 11am ET

My top action items for today's call... Yak trails -- should Yak trails experiment continue? - Want to offer to stand aside for someone else to take the reins for July. - It's still pretty manual for now. In Substack will always be. Buttondown offers the automaticity we are looking for (maybe Mailchimp too). - Would be interested to continue if one of our API-understanding yaks wants to team up, now or in August? (#)

Jamstack conference and call for short talks in case we’ve done anything innovative here like the knack integration etc (#)

I think we're in a nice position to really shore up backend systems over the rest of systems and do a serious membership drive/new activity kickoff effort in fall. we now have both infrastructure and project capabilities at a maturing level and we know how to do it all right... (#)

New Old Home and Country. Making a call for interesting case studies in the emergent roles & projects spun up or faltered during the course of the pandemic. This would begin as a slide presentation just like last year’s The New Old Home and could go for there to multimedia formats.

Online Governance Studies. A place for discussing ideas about governance of communities, collectives, networks, etc. We take a somewhat scholarly approach to discussions. Friday 9 AM PT governance chats here on the voice channel. Roam

Today's agenda: 1. Short reading (5+5min) 2. Review/summarize 2 old readings in spreadsheet (same as last week) (20 min) 3. NEW activity! Insight extraction (20 min) a) a "log line" (tldr) of the year's readings, b) a "high concept" (the big insight that pulls the themes together. Here's the reading, it should only take like a minute or two.

Agenda:
establish content licensing model for website content id 18
establish financial governance model id 19
review status of meta-project list id 33
discuss cost and benefits of use of email for coordinating YC and whether it is possible to do without email given our constraints, with some suitable reading. id 35
discuss a mechanism for publicizing things that require no new infrastructure or project-like work, but just a clear statement of recommended behavior on a key point. Like a "best practice note" or "fatwa" or "supreme court opinion". This might actually be a way to build up a proper Yak Handbook, as a set of case-law type opinions. We can discuss something like "PM should use emails" at the meeting, vote on it, and then 1 person is charged with writing the "majority opinion" and dissenters can choose to add "minority opinions." Maybe in the announcements channel or a separate new policies channel. id 36
ip policy for hackathon output id 51

Philosophy. we are currently on hiatus; I'll have a time confirmed this week for the beginning of the next which will be early July

Quantum Computing. Would anyone be interested in a project or study group on quantum computing?

Reimagine Healthcare. Draft channel for a creative project to change the frame of how people think about healthcare in the US, especially as it pertains to gig workers and the emerging precariat. Roam.

Agenda: Schedule writing session on: understanding how healthcare needs for indie consultants like us and the billion people in free-agent-nation are different from other takes on healthcare id 77
Schedule a writing window for: drafting an agenda (a manifesto straw man) that builds on prior art that yaks can use to advocate in other fora for services/products that meet our distinctive healthcare needs. id 78
Schedule co-working time for: Fodder for pulling attention to the YakC Cafe in the form of social object creation. to drive consulting conversations and engagement on these subjects (healthcare design sprints, insurance product market research projects, corporate employee/contractor policy rethinks, etc.). id 79

Welcome Squad. Channel for discussing welcoming and onboarding process for new yaks.

Agenda: complete v1 of new #get-started-here welcome post id 82
restart newbie onboarding calls in some form id 89

Yakfit. Exploring wearables and fitness goals for yaks.

WHOOOOOOOP, I cancelled my Whoop membership today. Been flying blind for over a month and wasn't missing it. Granted, I'm still tracking my workouts, but I'm not missing Whoop's recovery features nearly as much as I'd thought. (#)

Starting on Zoe tomorrow. (#)

Yak Marketing. Marketing for and by YC to create a distributed CMO function shared by several Yaks to elevate YakC marketing capability that fuels its growth Roam.

Agenda: review past discussions for action items. id 8
discuss how to launch, in view of latest results of launch. id 9
where is teh GDPR issue to be discussed? id 10
rethink yc-marketing goals in view of input from annual meeting. id 11
how to coordinate the various players involved in launch, especially continuous launch. id 12
how to build a calendar of expected marketing events, like launches. id 13
discuss potentially presenting our capabilities by vertical sector for better marketing (healthcare, robotics) instead of/in addition to offering type (futures, analysis, trends...) or format (pop-up think tank, whitepaper...). id 15
interactive serendipity engine for yc. We had a good governance chat today around serendipity in interactive social e-commerce and an idea came up — can we build something like an interactive serendipity engine for yc. Something timeboxed and curated like a periodic hackathon or “festival” or “farmers market” but for production/participation rather than consumption/shopping. id 27
discuss whether to have yaks offer packetized work services a la fiverr, operating yak as a platform. So combining vertical, type, and format as a crisply defined, fixed-price, fixed-schedule, specific inputs-outputs product. $95 for a 20 minute coffee zoom to talk over a tactical execution problem in your healthcare technology digital transformation project. id 34
review proposals for coffee with yak and decide how many yaks. id 44
consider: custom URL and email address for shift to Buttondown for Yak trails newsletter. id 87
consider: minimal viable testing for pushing eg tweets and links from Discord to Buttondown via API. id 88

Yak-Tweet. Tweets via Yak Collective Discord with $yaktweet publish here as well. Keep tweets on the short side, #yakbot will be added. MadeYak Discord role only for now. See yakcollective.org/members which displays Yaks who have contributed to a public project.

Take-gig-leave-gig

Current gigs. Details on the server.

Was asked to spread word about this position at the Exeter Ed Incubator - part of the prestigious University of Exeter. It’s a remote job, but you’ll need to based in the UK. id 14

I am looking for a product engineer to work on a new headphone project I am looking to get off the ground. essentially the idea is modular over ear headphones where if anyone any one part breaks then as part of a subscription you can get a replacement part without having to replace the whole thing. id 18

looking for a graphic designer who can take technical process and architecture diagrams and make them look attractive. id 19

Client is looking for a react-native front-end dev for a 2 week UI sprint towards launch. id 20

cool job alert: Linktree is hiring a Head of Creators and a friend is leading the recruiting for the role. who’s the right person for the job? id 23

came across this 6 week research project for a food business thought someone here might be interested. id 26

Urban tech startup is looking for a contract mobile developer, for a small project, to get an app on the app stores (it’s a single-task app for sensor installers, with no commercial activity on the app) id 29

Justice tech startup is hiring a Product Designer! id 30

A friend of mine is looking for a web designer to help launch a web page for a start-up he's working with. Scope of work is to help determine overall design style, illustrations, and UI/UX assets; bonus if it can be done in webflow, or even better -- implemented end-to-end. The start-up is a fast growing billing infra B2B. id 31

Looking for a tech lead/collaborator my new startup! (I've coded a good chunk in MERN + GraphQL, but everything is flexible / fine to throw away / plan to transition to Postgres). DM for details. Our vision is a world where citizens are empowered to hold large organizations accountable using class action litigation as the vehicle. We're starting with ClaimClam, a fun consumer web app that aggregates & automates claim filings for existing class action settlements (think AirHelp/MainStreet/TurboTax for claim filing). There's about $20 billion in ~$5/10/20 checks that almost no one is filing claims for; ClaimClam redistributes corporate dollars and helps people collect on money owed to them. id 35

Software engineer contractors / freelancers in Amsterdam ! Backend Developer proficient in Nodejs+AWS, superstar if you have Typescript for the Backend and Serverless/Lambda (fully remote from anywhere in Europe) ! Tech lead - Java/Kotlin, Microservices, with Kubernetes ! Backend Java with Public cloud, Microservices, ! Android Developers, with Java and Kotlin ! iOS Developer with Swift Contact this recruiter - Leroy Watson on LinkedIn Find more freelance contracts in Telegram id 36

Yaks at work

Accidental Designs -- 1 - by Venkatesh Rao - Ribbonfarm Studio
Ask me anything! - Benjamin P. Taylor - Medium
The psychology of revenge bedtime procrastination - Ness Labs
The power of names, part 1 — why RedQuadrant? | by Benjamin P. Taylor | Jun, 2021 | Medium
The power of names, part two— @antlerboy | by Benjamin P. Taylor | Jul, 2021 | Medium
Not-to-do list: a conscious way to break bad habits - Ness Labs
IDoT Tempos: Cadence, Lifecycles, and the Long Now – Wider.Team
The REALIST Stack - by Venkatesh Rao - Ribbonfarm Studio

Links shared

Astonishing Stories
Yak Collective Calendar
He Thought He Could Outfox the Gig Economy. He Was Wrong | WIRED
Clutter | Moving & Storage
Refactoring
Ideas That Created the Future | The MIT Press
Concepts of Programming Languages - Robert Sebesta
fast.ai · Making neural nets uncool again
Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science – review by Cosma Shalizi, 2002 | Systems Community of Inquiry
Come from Away - Wikipedia
A common agenda for enduring regional prosperity - B3K Prosperity
The sustainability imperative imperative | Greenbiz
How environmental, social, and governance reporting grew up
Difficult Predictions about the Future – The musings of another soul tired of this off-balance world.
Twitter Rallies Behind HBO Max Intern Blamed for Test Email Accidentally Sent to Subscribers
More New Art Borders Revealed - by Edith Zimmerman - Drawing Links
Zero Price, Zero Competition: How Marketization Fixes Anticompetitive Tying in Monetized Markets - Todd Davies, Zlatina Georgieva
Telegram: Join Group Chat
Governance Chat 6-pager - Google
onboarding_robot/yak-links-to-markdown.sh at main · The-Yak-Collective/onboarding_robot · GitHub
Screenwriting Tip Of The Day by William C. Martell
Six Characters in Search of an Author - Wikipedia
Yak Bot Project · GitHub
Unwirer
How Twitter can ruin a life: Isabel Fall’s complicated story - Vox
Deep sea robots will let us find millions of shipwrecks, says man who discovered Titanic | Exploration | The Guardian
In a Divided Country, Communal Living Redefines Togetherness | The New Yorker
Analog electronic design without the trial and horror – Bits&Chips
Search for Life: NASA JPL Explores Martian-Like Caves - YouTube
What is the difference between a fast computing system and a real-time computing system? - Quora
Hyundai x Boston Dynamics | As mobility evolves so does humanity - YouTube
Modern Microprocessors - A 90-Minute Guide!
Unitree - Go1
This $2,700 robot dog will carry a single bottle of water for you - The Verge
Unitree A1 Quadruped Robot
Erlich & Fenster - Launch Meeting - Zoom
beagleboard - Questions about the battery management circuit of Beaglebone Blue - Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange
Understanding, Using, and Selecting Hot-S - Maxim Integrated
Understanding Hot Swap: Example of Hot-Swap Circuit Design Process | Analog Devices
Quadrupedalism
Implementing Robot Waypoint Navigation by David Anderson – DPRG Virtual Monthly Meeting, 6/12/2021 - YouTube
WWG and all is well in the world - Google
Yak Rover Weekly Standup
On Rover Languages · Discussion #3 · rhettg/stubborn · GitHub
Maier Fenster's Personal Meeting Room - Zoom
Starlink review: dreams, not reality - The Verge
Revealed: why animals' pupils come in different shapes and sizes
On-Board Decision Making in Space with Deep Neural Networks and RISC-V Vector Processors | Journal of Aerospace Information Systems
Canonical Gives RISC-V a HiFive | Tom's Hardware
The Summer of FPGAs -- Xilinx | element14 | FPGA Group
Dropbox - Video 30.6.2021, 13.00.16.mov - Simplify your life
LD-AIR LiDAR | 360° TOF Sensor For All Robotic Applications by LDROBOT — Kickstarter
Search for Life: NASA JPL Explores Martian-Like Caves - YouTube
644/1284 Wide | Crowd Supply
ZeroBug Is a 3D-Printed Micro Servo Hexapod Powered by a Raspberry Pi and STM32 - Hackster.io
Buy a Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer Kit – Raspberry Pi
MicroMod - A modular prototyping platform for interchanging microcontrollers - SparkFun Electronics
Getting Started with MicroMod - learn.sparkfun.com
Gitpod - Always ready to code
Scripting News: Monday, June 28, 2021
EECS Instructional Support Group Home Page
11 strategies for keeping your coliving community clean - by Phil - Supernuclear
The 9 types of people you find in coliving - by Phil - Supernuclear
Group decision-making in coliving - by Phil - Supernuclear
Spotify | An Emergent Organization - by Stowe Boyd - work futures
Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews James Suzman - The New York Times
Disney Got Itself A 'If You Own A Themepark...' Carveout From Florida's Blatantly Unconstitutional Social Media Moderation Bill | Techdirt
How Our Team is Building Asynchronous Communication into our Workflows | by Nadia Tatlow | Medium
Unlocking the Treasury. Over the next 12 months, we will see… | by Larry Sukernik | Medium
Shifting the impossible to the inevitable
A Spark of Hope: The Ongoing Lessons of the Zapatista Revolution 25 Years On | NACLA
Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria - Wikipedia
Understanding Urbit - Urbit
Permaculture - Wikipedia
Tech stack for decentralized cities — Mirror
Plague and renaissance - by Anand Giridharadas - The.Ink
Sociocracy - basic concepts and principles | Sociocracy For All
Our distributed company is a garden - by Tim Casasola - computers suck
How To Be An Educated Layman | Sarah Constantin
The Wetware Crisis: the Thermocline of Truth : Bruce F. Webster
Partial Common Ownership - RadicalxChange
Stewardship of global collective behavior | PNAS
Motionographer Hold me, I’m scared: Your guide to navigating the hold system
Ise Jingu and the Pyramid of Enabling Technologies — The Prepared
III. CBDCs: an opportunity for the monetary system
How Haier Works - Video Animation - YouTube
‘At first I thought, this is crazy’: the real-life plan to use novels to predict the next war | Books | The Guardian
How organisations are changing.. The next “next” generation | by swardley | May, 2021 | Medium
Amazon.jobs
GitHub Copilot · Your AI pair programmer
Can I Wear My Oura Ring at the Gym? – Oura Help
All The Gear — Ridgeline issue 119
Use Automatic Activity Detection – Oura Help
ZOE - Understand how your body responds to food
The MASALA Study
Improve health, fitness, wellness through blood tests, doctors, nutrition - WellnessFX
NutriSense: Unlock Your Body's Data
Opinion | Exercise, and Accept Your ‘Inevitable Demise’ - The New York Times
The Secret to Superhuman Strength - Alison Bechdel
Carl-bot Documentation
Winning the Internet | 2021-06-27
EasyPoll | Discord Bots | Top.gg
Infomation/Polls - Carl-bot Documentation
Suggestions - Carl-bot Documentation
Logging - Carl-bot Documentation
Jamstack Conf 2021: Call for Papers
Scripting News: Wednesday, June 30, 2021
I suck at regular expressions · Issue #215 · scripting/Scripting-News · GitHub
Knack
Luma - Activate Your Community
Is there a way to have new users be automatically logged-in after they register? - Knack Knowledge Base
Join the Yak Collective
Imgur: The magic of the Internet
What I've learned about data recently | Seldo.com
Help a computer win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest
The standard for data onboarding | Flatfile
The Technium: The Essential Workshop Tool Kit
Learning to Work with Fewer Pixels
Yak trails 2021-06-27 - Yak Talk
Yak trails 2021-06-27
GitHub - The-Yak-Collective/menus: Bot to manage #experimental-help-channel.

https://twitter.com/SachinB91/status/1408140834659352577

https://twitter.com/blkahn/status/1411078040654860289