Block Builds - still going strong

0 views

Skip to first unread message

Steven De Costa

unread,

Sep 9, 2025, 5:53:21 PMSep 9

to Odious Xers

I've locked in the block builds for Friday and Sunday my time, Canberra, from 6am to 8am.

There have been some nice guests over the last two months who have dropped in, but the mode if simply being there with a live meeting and 'available' is the whole thing. I've noticed myself that folks can work and publish in the open, but even still, there can be something opaque about the practice if there isn't any easy access to such folk.

The CKAN project is great as the tech team that maintain the project have two meetings a week, so the project is both open source and open doors. When I was living in Berlin and the timezone was kind, I really appreciated being more of a regular at those calls. But, from Canberra, the time doesn't work to always be regular. So, the open door to the work I'm doing in the open is here, via these block builds :)

As an update to this google group, and as something for the record, these are some catch up comments I posted into the CODS slack fro the Objective Observer Initiative. Lots of progress has been made for that initiative over the last 50 days and I'm keen to return to building the core components for opendata.ai.

The main components remain the same - experiments that lead to public interest data. However, there will be some additional thought needed for the time deference of what is 'verifiable' within a trust oriented set of networked agreements.

Hoots!
Steven

Wow - I can't believe I've not updated this channel since July 18!But, I know why. It was because after the Global Data Barometer submission and presenting it at CKAN Monthy Live I took a break and relaxed for a few days.... and then, fell into the 'next' compelling part of the OOI which I think has been the main breakthrough in terms of this 'verifiable honesty' framework I've been keen to establish as a something like a replacement for trust.

6:05 AM

Trust, it turns out, is needed for more than just confidence. It is needed as a kind of cognitive unloading, or a memory swap. It is like we have a whole bunch of scratch discs in our personal, familiar and community systems that are expected to be there to simply allow us to set things aside and largely ignore them.So... in this way the 'verifiable' part of honesty is a time sensitive thing. We don't want to have to verify facts in situations, or the truth or someone's claims, as that would defeat the purpose of seeking to trust the 'reality' of what is put in front of us.

6:38 AM

There is probably some fairly meta level wisdom to this kind of willing blindness, as those that present fiction as fact are part of the 'reality' we need to model and come to grips with. And, if their fictions have a causally effective outcome that aligns with the intent of those fictions, then the facts are to be a matter of the system's ability to show such resuts.For example, a crypto scammer may pump the value of a meme coin and we can factually take the claims they are making as lies and deceit. But, that the meme coin might launch and rise in value is still something that would be likely if most people took the scammers words as a prediction of the market value.Anyhoo - from the 24th of July I have largely been working on something that might better fit the collaborative reality of how systems evolve, and especially how knowledge evolves as an accessible and present moment phenomena within complex systems. Now it has been almost 50 days of development, it will sound a bit radical, but it is no less fun and no less 'art-first' than all the other work I've been doing for the OOI to date.Three accessible articles on medium are maybe the easiest way to get into it, but it is referred to as the GSC Model, or the Ground State Configuration Model. Why this name? Well, mostly because it began as an alternative to the Lambda Cold Dark Matter model of cosmological structure development. I wanted to have a crack at some 'physics fan fiction' and try to find an explanation for the bits that the ∆CDM didn't cover well.This latest article is one of the three, and the other two are linked within it. There are also two google docs linked within it - one relates to computational applicability of the GSC Model. The other is more about the standard explanatory scope of the model in physics and math. I have to draft research proposals under review with University of Canberra with the intention to move one of them forward with a PHD student. One is using Constructor Theory as a formalism to explore falsifiable predictions of the GSC Model in complex informational systems. The other is to use quantum computing and test for the predicted phase transitions in emergent 'informational richness' within toy universe simulations.The article is a light and easy read, related to what I think may be a general misunderstanding of von Neumann's reported concern of human society and institutions approaching a technological singularity.https://medium.com/@steven.decosta/von-neumanns-prophecy-and-the-true-nature-of-the-singularity-c0669711de8b