this is the comind blog

devlog 2024-04-29, web stuff & melds

More today on the ongoing construction of Welder.jl, {comind}'s websocket server for handling melds. Melds are something like forums, group chats, or twitter threads – you and/or a group of people can chat about a topic in real time. Each of you will be shown suggested thoughts any time a new thought is added to the meld.

Suggestions are thoughts that

The idea here is that you type your way around comind, sometimes just thinking to yourself, in public melds, small group melds, business melds, etc. When you think, you either add something to a stream of conciousness yourself, or you pull in a suggestion.

While you type your way along, you can also choose to be "pulled" around by accepting suggestions. These are the main feature of comind. You should think of suggestions as thoughts that change, interpret, or assist you in whatever you are thinking about.

For example, if you are in a meld for a research group, you might be shown suggestions like

All this is hard to do, technically. I've discussed this before but it bears repeating. I'm spending a lot of time on Welder.jl, in part because it's one of the more important pieces of {comind}'s infrastructure.

Some accomplishments:

Basically, I can talk to myself now, real time, and the server is now sending me (very dumb) suggestions about what I should look at next.

I also have a working pseudo-REPL terminal UI to use when I do meld work. Welder.jl is a much higher quality project than my usual fare, and I'm really happy with both the test scaffolding and the project thusfar.

Here's an example of the suggestions I got, sourced only by semantic search:

cameron, 2024-02-21T15:55:47.846
╭──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│  And look at that! It works now. It's worth talking about why I think there should   │
│   be thought titles on here. In some sense this is kind of a tweet-place, where      │
│  users write lots of short-form stuff.                                               │
│                                                                                      │
│  1. We don't _usually_ have titles for this kinds of things, because the posts       │
│  are so short. On Comind, I don't actually restrict length to anything (though       │
│  I may at some point for RAG purposes), so it kind of helps to be able to get        │
│  a rough description of what's in the thought for those longer documents.            │
│  2. It's goofy. I like having kinda dumb default titles. I'm always looking for      │
│  ways to make comind an interesting place for play and silly LLM applications,       │
│  and titles seemed relatively obvious (ChatGPT, for example, does this quite         │
│  well).                                                                              │
│  3. It helps you find stuff. Comind is fundamentally a notetaking and knowledge      │
│  graph tool, and so we want to provide tools that make it easy to determine what     │
│  is inside a given thought.                                                          │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

cameron, 2024-02-12T18:41:32.651
╭──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│  (side note for #comind-ui, the tabula rasa baybee placeholder should say "add       │
│  more thoughts" when the top of mind is populated)                                   │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

test, 2024-03-27T06:13:00.526
╭──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│  This is a test thought, from a testy fella                                          │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

Good fuckin' day in my opinion.

– Cameron

mindco © thanks to Franklin.jl and Julia.