Three point O

The year began with a haze. Welcoming in the New Year with fireworks on the waterfront. It felt familiar, yet so utterly different.

This time, I was with my partner and her work mates. We haven't celebrated the New Year together for who knows how many years. Long distance and all that.

Some of the ones further back I do remember. Like the time when my sister came to visit, and we bought the last $5 pizza of the year from a shop that was just about to close. Or another time when I was with a friend, whom confided in a secret that I still hold to this day.

But I digress.

At this 'unconference' I attended over the past week, there was a term that they used. On how you might just be 'arriving', not in a physical sense, but in a mental or spiritual sense. Somehow I felt, that the new calendar year, and new decade of my age, began there and then.

The setting was on a site, seemingly close, yet somewhat far from civilization (aka internet access). The agenda was loosely set, fully open slots of time decided by anyone, interrupted only by meal times, which themselves were casual to latecomers or those going for seconds. The people were from all walks of life, diverse being both an understatement and overstatement, but you could see kids running around, just as there are elders with white hair cooking, and all sorts in between.

My last exposure to this group, at least in name, was at a conference back in 2016, probably the first ever I attended post-graduation. This time, I was attending something that I heard a teenager describe as "Camp for stuff that matters". The concept, or theme that this group is enspiraling to be, is not definable, nor will it ever be.

You will only get it once you experience it, and each time, it will be different.

On arrival, I was questioning myself if I might have accidentally joined some cult, but everyone looked so friendly, people were consciously taking their Covid tests, and I heard someone complain about unmasked people on their flight coughing, so it couldn't be bad right? I wasn't alone though, there were maybe ten others that were new to this, and we had some nice icebreakers, or 'grounding' exercises from a welcoming team to set the scene.

The next day, we were all sitting in a circle in a field of grass for the official opening. The birds were chirping, and you could hear the gurgle of a stream in the background. I will refrain from describing the entire ceremony, but it had elements of a Pōwhiri, and I had a Hongi with a couple of people. It felt - special.

As the day progressed, I became slightly worried that I might not find anyone to talk to since we all work on such unrelated things? The 'marketplace' of session ideas on the initial board ranged anywhere from seemingly metaphysical things to musical jams, and swims in the lake/pool to a hike in the bush to a waterfall. You can probably imagine what introvert me went for.

After a bit of reconnecting with nature, I somehow worked out the bravery to jump into things. From experiencing a bit of the metaphysical (it was surprisingly interesting and got me thinking), to helping with the dishes, and having conversations that are totally random (a word that doesn't even properly describe it). I became less of a hammer trying to find nails to hit, and more of a someone thinking if I truly want to be a hammer or something else.

Being amongst people, whose trajectories are oh so different from yours, yet whose purpose is aligned or parallel in some higher dimensional plane. It begets so many questions, one of which is how does this system even work, and remarkably it does, it simply does.

At night was storytime. We entered a dark space, a couch in the corner of a marquee for the storyteller, pillows scattered around the floor for the listeners. The air had a sandlewood scent from the balm we all applied on entry. Fern leaves and parts of the forest understory acted as the backdrop, a disco-like meditation light projecting what looked like purple-y galaxies illuminated the centre of attention. We heard people's journeys, regrets, jokes, surprises, and it was magical, that moment we shared.

The day after on Saturday, I thought I was better prepared, or was I? In our Whānau group of five-ish, we caught up on what we've experienced so far, and our plans or ideas for the next day and a half. I was able to voice some of the work I've been doing on machine learning models over the past three months, surprisingly, and there was a topic that morning related to that.

The tagline of that session was AI as a monopoly vs as a commodity. While centralization and decentralization was brought up as a theme, the discussion went over AI's resource usage (electricity), openness (code, model weights), and related technologies such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). It was a big topic, with too little time, somewhat biased towards language models rather than vision models, but it did satisfy a small itch.

By that point, I actually wanted to avoid talking about the stuff I've been doing, and find out what I've been missing.

Over lunch, I got pulled into the table of Web 3.0 folks. They weren't the DeFi types though, more ReFi maybe, beyond that even. One of the main takeaways I got after listening to the real-life trials people have experimented with over the years (e.g. at Cannon's Creek), was that the technology-first approach doesn't work (duh), it has to be grassroots-first, developed from the ground up.

To expand on this a little bit, the group of us brought in what was called 'ancient wisdom'. It's not that these community-first approaches of managing the commons are new, they've appeared in societies all over the world in many forms, called by different names perhaps, but fundamentally the same. These local systems that may have been lost to the past can be digitally revitalized or augmented by technologies such as distributed ledgers, smart contracts, quadratic and conviction voting, etc.

But again, the emphasis should be on empowering communities themselves.

Later that day, I went on a bit of a journey to the past. Listening to the history of an independent journalism site that started in the 1990s, seeking to revitalize itself in this day and age. As the sun began to set, I sat with a Korean and a local Māori talk about their history, through treaties, dynasties, and the state we are in today with capitalism and colonialism stubbornly embedded still.

In between sessions, I also found out about various co-housing initiatives such as at Tākaka, where a group of people got together to create a sustainable space that cares for people and the land. The climate emergency also weaved itself into many conversations, from rants about Big Oil, to discussions about organizing a tree-planting event during the next winter gathering.

At night, we were seen partying under the stars, with a DJ jamming music mixes, and a violinist doing his tunes in harmony. It felt drastically different to the conference dinners where you have to make awkward small talk, and the vibe was so much relaxed than the club I was at on New Year's eve. Through music and dance, it felt like connections were made on a whole other level.

Towards the end of this short 3-4 day gathering, in the closing circle, we reflected on the default lives that we will soon go back to, and wrote letters to our future selves. The space we tidied up together, back to the way it was when we first arrived, and we say our goodbyes in physical space, promising to re-connect in the ether~

In a way, during the first few weeks of this year, I've been craving for a pivot away from some inefficient systems that I've been getting tired of. For one, I'm picking up a new programming language - Rust, to complement if not replace the Python programming language I've mastered over the past ten years. This move has also made me switch my IDE from Atom which has been unmaintained for years to Pulsar, the community-driven fork that works with all my old plugins and more!

Besides that, I'm re-evaluating the approach I want to take when implementing AI/ML systems. It is an incredibly priviliged position I am in to be able to design such systems, and personally, I don't think that concentration of power is healthy. So here's to a new decade.

Where three is better than two.