This is the Neobooks call for Monday, December 18, 2023, and Rick had just asked me a great question, which I will answer briefly, but it'll take us places, probably especially since you're on the call now, but I like the background. It's really nice. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, it's a real place, but you're not there, right? Or is it completely? It's a fictitious place. It's a place that does not exist on the planet. Synthesized, yeah. Yeah. It's a synthetic image that looks like an actual real place, yeah, but nobody painted that mural. And that diving bird is just a smudge of pixels. I'll have to paint it out when we actually get around to it. You could leave it in. It makes the whole thing look more natural. It's the, aside from a little glimmer of trees and plants way in the background and up in the foreground on the left, I think, are those painted on or whatever? It's the only thing that sort of looks natural and therefore, and therefore tricks the brain into thinking this is a real picture. You're right. If you painted it out, you might lose some of that edge. Yeah. It would look too artificial. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.  I still think you need flying birds in the background. You need some flying birds. That would really flinch it. Well, there's the one that looks like a pigeon diving to me. Yeah, it does. Yes, I agree. But I'm saying if you had it, then it would really, then you'd really be a true fake. There you go. So Rick's question to me was what is the leading edge of the Neo Books project? What is sort of the cutting edge of where we are? And I'm now forgetting where I was heading with that. One of the things was that one of the nice things about Scrivener kind of, and I never got far enough in the Scrivener to see it, but because it's a book, it's a manuscript writing piece of software, it's very good at saying here are your chapters and here's how complete they are and here's what they sort of look like. And Pete, I've been imagining sort of a similar kind of roll-up tool for markdown files that would let you sort of, that would go and infer from your outline, it would take the logic of your outline and say, hey, here's what your book looks like right now.  This one has been posted and published for other, you know, well, you don't even say that because the way Nia books work, like all the pages that have any content are open for anybody's commentary or review because they're on GitHub. So in a different setup, you might actually say, hey, this has been posted for public review. But anyway, that's an interesting thought. That felt like one place because as I sort of write on the design from trust thing, and I keep going content and then meta, content and then meta. So I write something with that, that's within the body of the idea of design from trust, and then I'll be writing like, okay, I need to describe how thinking like a Nia book works. Like, how do you write a Nia book, which then depends on writing a piece about writing wickily because it builds on the whole notion of writing in a social manner for a wiki and also structuring language so that it works as a wiki, but then also works as a book. So that's meta.  But I can tell that as the pages mount up and as the content mounts up and the nuggets kind of mount up, I'm going to get increasingly confused about where I am and what's up. So I'm, and a lot of my not getting lost in the long run kind of depends on my clarity now. And so I started a page for nuggetization, which is like, how do you choose something, how do you know when something is a nugget? And what is, what is the smallest atomic size of a nugget that's comfortable for this, for these purposes, that kind of thing. But I haven't written that much, that much into it, but I'm realizing that those are the things that need to happen in order to explore the space. And the last thing I'll say is one question that came up in our last call, I think, was how do you tell, how do we write links so that we know that one link should be translated in and another link is just meant to be a link in the text to something that we leave outboard to refer to and how does a nugget do that so that the nugget is reusable, but the links might actually be dependent on the author using the nugget, if that wasn't too confusing. But, you know, Obsidian lets us do Transclusion, which, or a light form of Transclusion, which means if you put a bankmark in front of a link, it'll pull the text from that other page, that other markdown page, becomes part of the page that you're writing right now, you can't go in and edit that page in the current page that does the Transclusion, you have to go back to the original. And then Pete's current massive wiki builder, which is the single, the site, the static site builder that will generate the new site anytime it detects a new page in your vault from Obsidian doesn't include a way yet he hasn't, the time or the resources we haven't funded him to go right away for the website to reflect that transcluded included texts. So that's one of the little pieces that would probably wind up needing to be built in order to assemble a Neobook. And that's kind of a piece of what I was thinking. Rick questions, Pete questions, explanations, thoughts. I'll let Pete go first. I don't have, I mean, I got lots of thoughts, but nothing coherent. And I think most of that made sense to Pete because Pete knows the back end and how all the moving parts work or don't work. Rick, some of that may have been a mystery to you. I was trying to explain it in a way that would make sense to you. Oh, no, no, I think I've got the gist of it. It's the pragmatics of it. And even writing up something so that if I were to come to this having read it, I can more fully understand what you just said. So conceptually, I got it, but the fine strokes is where, where, you know, where the rubber hits the road, so to speak. Exactly. I hope you actually do it. But I will say something that did come up to mind as you were talking about trust. And this is something I'm already doing anyway. In terms of doing research using AI, as I go to different places to get asked the same question to see whether I get different responses and what references do they give? And, you know, one, one question that I would have for you, what would your series of questions be about the book in an outlight form without even knowing necessarily knowing what you're going to answer them? But having said that, what I found when I go in and I put in my questions that I've been posing and seeing what it generates, it generates new ideas. So it becomes a co-creator. I don't know, you know, I rewrite whatever I get back, but it just gives me a scaffolding, so to speak, to be able to, you know, it gives you something to work against or for, depending upon where you agree and disagree. So I'm intrigued by how to use AI in that manner. Okay, so sorry, I was just about to ask you, are you asking about asking other people questions or about asking each other questions? No, I think you can do both and. I mean, you can answer people as well as that. So you get an answer or you get your best response to the question or in craft it and rewrite it in a way that makes sense to you and then go to an expert and then ask them the question. You can either do it blindly or openly to see where there may be some added value to it. And I think that that's definitely a growing edge to what we're doing, even just writing content is like when and how do we use things like chat, you know, chat GPT and how do we attribute them and how do they flow through the work? So Klaus's book, I think you've noticed from the conversations here, Klaus is mostly auto generating the text of his book by asking questions by putting prompts into chat GPT and then, you know, pasting the answers into his book manuscript, including the prompts. So his manuscript includes the prompts and he's doing some, but really, I think lightweight editing of the text. And what you just said was you would use that conversation as as inspiration, but you would largely rewrite the text, you would write your own text sort of coming back in, which makes sense to me. And I think I think this is a variable to be set by the writer. Exactly. And then to be properly disclosed in the work somehow, because I think it's important that we say this was purely done by human neurons, or this was assisted in this way, or this was completely generated. Yeah, hybrid model. Yeah, yep. I very rarely had anything where I felt completely satisfied with response. I found it to be a good response, but there's always something that, you know, needs tweaking or whatever, you know, or it evokes something where I want to add value. Yeah, exactly. But coming back to you, there's two things here. One is the idea of what it is, which we were talking about, and there's what you want to do. The question is, how much energy or time do you have to think about how you would describe the concept of Neobooks to attract other people to it? Right. The current plan with the Neobook I'm writing is to have two introductions, one that says this is a Neobook and it gives you a little bit about that and then leads you over to the website. So it doesn't really go into a lot of depth about any of these issues or any of that kind of stuff. But hey, if you want to go do more, follow this link over here. And then a second introduction, which is the actual introduction to the material at hand. And so I'm trying to keep the Neobooks intro as light as it might be to be really to be interesting enough that it sets a hook. And other potential writers are like, oh, I want one of those. And one of the things it'll say is if you would like one of those come here. Well, that's a piece that I'm interested in seeing how far that's been developed or articulated. So I don't know whether. So I've got a page called the Neobooks intro, which I will send you a link to right now. That's perfect. That's great. To me, that I'm just curious to learn more about because I see that as something as being such a foundational thing. And I think it's really important to have that. I'll look at it and. And so this page includes the problem that I mentioned a moment ago, which is that in the middle of the page, you'll see a bankmark in front of a link that that is meant to be transcluded in because the text that's in that in that linked page, which is nuggets are really powerful or something like that. That's the phrase. Please please follow that one link because there's a bunch of other links on the page. That's the only link that's important because I'm considering a content of the intro, the actual intro. But that should give you a that should that should give you a pretty good orientation to what's going to. What I think now is the explanation needed. That's in the book, in the in this new book. Now, this is just a clever. This is the new book about the new book or the new book about trust. So actually, I eventually both. But right now it's the first introduction to the new book about trust. OK, exactly. But but what that got me thinking about was there needs to be a new book about new books and this this front chapter would very likely be the front chapter of that as well. Yeah, the intro to that. Plus some more text that to sort of flesh it out as an intro to explain what is the path through the logic of that book? Yeah, it makes sense. It makes sense. It's sort of like chicken and egg really, isn't it? I mean, it's very much it's very much like inventing the chicken while baked while poaching the egg sort of thing.  And I'd like to see the iterative process of how one informs the other. Yeah. Because you're in the discovery phase at the moment of how to do it and how to set it and make it make it attractive for people to say, OK, this is what a new book is. Exactly. I have a amorphous feeling for what it is or could be. But I'll be interested in learning from your work in progress. Thank you very much. Do you have any anything to add to any of this? I from a techie side as well. All sides, I actually have I have I just came back from a new webcam. Well, that's right. I wanted to see how that went. So we'll find out in the free Jerry's brain call a little bit later. I have a funny feeling. Maybe. Yeah. Well, it's a nice community. It's an interesting community because I've got some really good tech that doesn't get used as much as it should. So the community is good at being a semi decentralized community. And they have gifts to bring to the world, but they don't really concentrate that on that very well, from my point of view. So anyway, they've got a bunch of tack that there's a there would be an indie web way of doing new books, I think, or there there could be. The the technology that they've got is kind of it's web based and through marking up metadata in the websites, web pages, maybe is a better way to think of it. You can do things like. Syndicate comments and aggregate posts and do some cool kind of decentralized kind of decentralized authentication and stuff like that. So more people should be using it, but it's it's free and it's too good to use kind of. Or I mean, it's like better than the thing that an adopter would would be already working on, so the adopter would go, well, it's not the thing I'm working on. So I'll just finish the thing I'm working on. Oh, that's weird. I don't know. It's weird. Anyway, they they they're largely centered around identity and blog posts and a little bit of activity. So it grew out of micro formats. It grew out of the the cool stuff that was happening in the web like 20 years ago from Tantech Chalak and Mark Kippermarks and folks like that with some newer stuff from Aaron Parecki and Chris Chris Aldrich. So I don't know, they're doing cool stuff. And when we get a little bit more oriented towards some architectural stuff or something like that, maybe we'd want to reach out to them and talk about how you would do the stitching together of new books that you're thinking of doing in a micro formats way or in the web way. So to be a little bit more concrete, I I we had the first day was it's any web camp is usually kind of an on-conference thing. So the first day was sessions and the second day was practicum actually doing stuff. So the main thing that I did, I showed somebody how to get a massive book you set up as their first website, which was cool. But then the other thing I did was get something called Web Mention partly built into a massive wiki. So Web Mention is the idea that with a tiny bit of H2O markup, if you're doing a blog post or a wiki page and you link off to somebody else's blog post, your software will ping the other. So if I said something like I saw Chris Aldrich today, or I was reading Chris Aldrich's post about typecasting today and when I made a link for that, the publishing software would go out to Chris's blog and say, hey, Chris's blog, this guy P over here just linked to you. And it would do some other stuff too. Like they've they've got a little bit of reputation stuff. You know, it it's possible at least to to get it for Chris's website to go, yeah, I don't know who that is.  And then I'll bubble it up to Chris himself so he can he can read it. Right. And then Chris's website will also, if Chris thinks it's OK, he'll start accumulating, you know, mentions like it'll be Chris's blog post. And then, you know, Peter Kaminski over in this this site mentioned blonde, you know, but this is the snippet from it, right? And so on and so forth. So that's a Web Mention. And just just briefly. So do Web Mention sort of lightly try to fill in some of what the web doesn't do because the web is kind of one way. And Ted Nelson's original vision was that there would be sort of two pretty pretty active two way links so that if somebody mentioned you if a year after you wrote something, somebody pointed to it in Ted Nelson's vision, you'd be notified and maybe even make some money. Yeah, but because the web doesn't work that way, Web Mention do a little bit of that. When I started doing my homework thing, I had in mind I'm just going to be able to make it so that a massive wiki will ping another website and say, hey, I just mentioned you. And then ultimately, you want to be able to do the converse, right? You set up the right stuff in the massive wiki and somebody mentions your page and that page pings you and says, you know, or maybe it gets added to the bottom of the page as a comment or whatever. That's where I was starting off with. And and we got one one of those directions actually working. Kind of in a real hacky way, but I mean, in a real prototypy way. But I forget if it was Chris or Angelo, they were immediately like where you were. It's like, oh, bidirectional. I guess we had started talking about obsidian and it has cool bidirectional links and massive wiki should do web mentions. And then, oh, web mentions could facilitate bidirectional linking between massive wiki or something like that. Right. So we didn't I I tamp that down. I said, I'm going to try to do that today. But it's also if you remember back if you can, like, teleport yourself back in time to, you know, 2000 small number in the blogosphere and blogosphere used to be very active and web mentions are essentially the modern equivalent of pingbacks. So this used to happen with blogs all the time, blogs would mention each other. And, you know, they would automatically know that there was discussion going on. And so on one person's blog post, you'd see discussions centered on that blog post with a bunch of other blogs. And if you went over to that blog, you know, so on and so forth. So in indie web tech could be doing that right now, if anybody cared to adopt it. So they're not super evangelical, which is fine.  You guys ought to know about some of the community. I forget now. They did. There's a static site generator called 11 T and by process of diffusion, Chris Chris Aldrich kind of just mentioned to the main 11 T person. Hey, you know, this is what you can do with web mentions and, you know, by process of diffusion and and absorption or something like that. 11 T is now a pretty good web mention, you know, participant. And I think it's doing some other indie web stuff too. Anyway, so I think I think the connection between I it might be nice to have a connection between new books and some indie web stuff. And it might some of the things we're we're thinking about connecting connecting content rather than people and blog posts might be something that they could help us think through architecturally or we could help them think through it architecturally or and then we could do it at higher fidelity or higher quality or something like that. Thank you. So that's one of the things I think about this discussion. The other one is kind of pragmatic. What's what's the next step? Is the next step? Transfusion is the next step? Creating an ePub out of. Do you mean what's the next step for for new books or what's the next step in general for this space? New books. So rather than where new books could go, what's the thing that we can do in the next given that it's the holidays, maybe six weeks instead of two weeks. But yeah, five weeks instead of two weeks. Well, that's like I think that the tasks that are right immediately in front of us, a piece of it is Pete, the thing that you you did with me a couple of weeks ago, which was taking a Google Doc and trying to like filter it out as Markdown and from that, we didn't get to identifying all the quirky tags that showed up and getting rid of them. And we also didn't get to nuggetizing the manuscript so that it would be smaller, smaller Markdown chunks. And then immediately after that comes the how do we roll this up and spit it out as an ePub, given whatever combination of technology we would need to do that. So those feel like the very, very immediate questions, which then will trigger a zillion smaller questions like, oh, what do we do with the prompt? How do how do we keep the prompts near the text, near carte plauses text, but not have them interrupt the text? Probably. And oh, how do you handle links and how we blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, yeah, there's a hundred things that will tumble out of that effort. For my part, I'm interested in a text slash architecture, a zig of Neobooks. And then having having. Well, something, something a little bit more specific than a road map and maybe a little less specific as a task list, but something in between a road map and a task list to start burning down. And I'd also be interested in and I would need to help with evangelizing and recruiting more people for the tech zig. And I think if we describe that even just in one post someplace and said, a little bit of here's where we are and we're a little bit about where we're aiming and here's what we're trying to get done. I think we and just float that through not just our community, but also the neighbors. I think we find some more people. Yeah, I think that would work fine. So let's do that. OK, just go ahead. I've got a meta interest, by the way. So one of the things I found myself doing unselfconsciously at and then I was self conscious about it. I mean, not in a bad way.  The the bridging. And so I'm interested in the bridging of communities and intercommunity weaving. So I would be interested in being a little bit thoughtful, self conscious about it as Neobucks reaches out to the neighbors. So the neighbors being Fellowship of the Link, Free Jerry's Brain, Prosefusion, you know, whatever else, there's a few more. Dave Witzel's community, Hodgson, there's a few other bigger groups, sort of nearby also. Yeah. So I have interest in maybe that's not it's a meta interest or an interest in a different realm, but just helping me understand how intercommunity gets done is an interest I have. Sorry, go ahead. No, just a couple of questions, a couple of reactions earlier on when you were talking, Jerry, about Neobucks and I was it suddenly hungered up the image in my mind. Instead of students going off and doing their solo stuff is that it could be that the Neobucks provides a platform for collaborative learning where they can learn from each other much more effectively. That's the goal. Exactly. The second thing is, well, how can you go? How can what are the best? And this is just reframing what I'm hearing is what are the best techno collaborative transformational processes that can be developed to accelerate learning and how to do that? And the third one is that the conversation for me is a little abstract and and I appreciate it. But on the other hand, the pragmatics.  Like five, ten little things about what are the component parts of what Neobucks are and what are the elements that are going to change over time? Obviously. And, you know, how is that it's emerging? I just came from another Zoom call through Excel, which is the AI group. And they were talking about various things that are developing that's a constantly changing field and people are learning this, that and the other. And it's sort of it's got a lot of interest because a lot of people want to learn from each other. Well, how can you create the same type of culture around a Neobuck where people say, I want to get involved with this because I just see the potential of techno collaborative, transformational learning at scale. I like that a ton. There's also. I wrote in a chat sort of note taking, learning and knowledge building. These are all neighbor things that are not all the same, each one of which opens up a Pandora's box of interesting questions and different collaborators and other sorts of things because like just note taking that students take notes and that's that's sort of the bridgey place and a lot of the build a second brain folks and others are all about, hey, here's how to accelerate and improve your note taking. And here's a methodology, right? Tiago Forte has a bunch of that kind of stuff. But then there's a difference between sort of learning how we learn. That's a whole other kind of thing as well. And then how we create community or shared knowledge is another thing that's right next door and we need to figure out what are the comfortable bridges that that let us connect those those kinds of things. And then what what technology is needed to make that easier? A lot of that, a lot of what I just described is very likely just social, not technical. It's it's it's writing these things up in a way that attracts people who want to start using the tools in their current state to do things a little bit differently. I think I like to do some of what I was just saying doesn't require a great leap, great technological leaps or even small technological leaps that requires people collaborating differently. Well, just just the four things you mentioned, one thing you can cut out is the note keeping because it's already there. I mean, you can use technology to do that effectively. The question is if you take the three other elements there, well, how can if it was like a Venn diagram, collaborative learning or transformational knowledge building into community, whatever phrase you want, how how can you create a secret source around that, which is enabled by technology? Yep. And so you just drove through an important question, which is the two large language models obviate personal note taking and that the assumption seems to be growing that, yep, yep, we're not going to need to take notes anymore, because I get an automated email from Zoom after after we do this call, that's going to give us a nice summary of what happened. And my brain is like, I'm really interested in the human note taking still happening actively next to the machine learning machine learning version of note taking so that those two things meld in some way. And that is like a really open question for me, because I'm not sure. I'm some days not even sure how to explain that. Well, I'm sure. Oh, good. AI note taking is not note taking. But how is it not? Wait, how is it not note taking? Because the note that because the summary I get back from Zoom looks like a rapporteur sat down and listened to the conversation. And then then Pete and Rick had a long, long conversation about blah, blah, blah. And they sort of decided this and this. And at the bottom, it will be Pete committed to do X. And that's note taking. Is it not?  It's it's not note taking. So note taking is a human activity where a human is listening and probably participating in something and taking notes. So the human is doing a curation step as she's note taking. So so you might say that an AI can produce a summary of a call, but even an AI summary is different than a human summary. And the so a couple of things happen in note taking. One of the most important things is the curator of the notes is learning and making connections and things like that as they're as they're taking the notes. Right. So probably they're if they're good. If they're so we don't do good note taking. That's another another story. But if somebody is doing good note taking, they're drawing little diagrams. They're making connections to other other notes that they have and things like that. The AI has not done that. Even if you're reading AI, an AI summary of a meeting, the the interesting part is not happening when the AI has tried to rearrange the language of the transcript or whatever into a different form. The interesting part, the thinking part, the note related part is the note reading where you, Jerry, are reading a AI summary of the note of the meeting. And again, forming connections, making assumptions, hopefully going back to the original because the AI note taker is thoughtful enough to put links back to the right part of the transcript and going, huh, did Pete really say that? What did he really mean by it? I think the AI might have caught something that I didn't. Let me let me go back and actually listen to it again and and perform human comprehension on it rather than language reassembly. I don't disagree, but I'll just say I think there are different tactics. And there are sometimes when I deliberately do not take notes because as soon as I get into curation mode, I can't be fully listening because I'm trying to do things. So I've been going to more meetings where I just totally try and listen without trying to curate. And then, but what I have found when I look through some of the notes, I say, yes, and but it didn't do this or it didn't do that. And to me, that is that's a different activity that can go back and look at what it missed. And then, of course, you know, dynamics can go along in a group where everyone missed what the hell was going on. You go back and say, well, did you really see what happened in that dynamic? You're a clueless about what happened there. Did you see the triangulation that went on in that group? You missed it all. So so an LLM for me is is not a tool that generates understanding. It's a power tool that you use with instances of language to do human understanding. So it's it's an adjunct to somebody, you know, attending a meeting and then looking at a generated summary of it and thinking about how they match and how they don't match, thinking about overall flow in a way that you couldn't before. So for me, that that metaphor of a power tool, you know, I can I can I could make a wooden dresser with, you know, a chisel or something or or stone tools or something like that, but I'm a lot more effective with power sander and a table saw and, you know, screws and, you know, electric screwdriver and all that kind of stuff. Right. So the electric screwdriver and the table saw did not construct the dresser. In that case, the humans still did, but he or she could have done it a lot faster and gotten to a more constructed place with the power tools than without the power tools. So two things, if I remember both of those things, one of them is that I can easily envision better prompting, helping the AI do more of the things that we think a good curator would do. So coming up with tags and ideas relating this to other concepts and finding patterns across concepts, building collections of like, like articles and like things. Those all feel like promptable things. And so so the space of what does a good curator or note taker do, I think, could be rapidly fulfilled with good with better prompting. And then the other thought is that the thing the point Rick made a moment ago is hugely important, which is that. The moment none of these things passes through a human mind is the moment we're no longer involved in the thinking or the activities or anything like that is has lots of implications. But I think that the act of the act of all this information touching our neurons and being interpreted by them and improved by them is massively important. So even though I think that the AI could be made a whole lot more capable in terms of the functions of note taking and curating, I think that the human role is really, really essential if humans are going to stay in the loop and be part of decision making at all. Otherwise, so since the earliest days of the brain, there was a feature where you could crawl a website or you could crawl your file system and it would create a web of links.  And that was just a design decision or a use decision. I mean, a long ago, but I think it's in the same realm. It's like, I think we need to stay connected to the decisions being made in and around us, even as the AI's get more capable. Well, I think it is going to get more capable. It's going to be able to take on some of the human dimensions that perhaps humans don't do very good job of, for example, looking at group dynamics, listening tone of voice, emotional tone, etc. And it might capture things that you're not aware of as it's happening. And your other your other example of, hey, did you notice the triangulation there was great also in that we were sometimes just blind to stuff that's happening. And if somebody goes back and reads the meeting to us in a different way, we'll be like, oh, my God, I was just manipulated like crazy. Yeah, exactly. Whatever. Yeah, exactly. Or detecting a victim hood virtuous signaling or any other deviant, alt-right, scapegoating, yada, yada, you know, it will start deconstructing and identifying when, you know, these these manipulative ploys and people say, oh, did you notice that Donald Trump just used this and he then used this and then he used this, then he used this and this and this and this. And five or seven years ago, I saw a demo of some grad student had done basically a mood and tempo and other kinds of things. Recognition system for like Zoom calls for video and so it was implemented kind of as a coach for individuals so that you would get some prompts that came back and said, well, your pitch and your cadence basically are saying you're angry or whatever, you should sound less angry and it gave crappy advice. And also you're eating up all the time in the call. You should let more other people talk. That was important and so forth. So that was like seven years ago before all this technology really hit. And I think that AIs could also probably do a really nice diagnosis of rhetorical techniques and spin techniques and spin techniques like that would be terrific to see automated because also because I think we get used to them and having them named automatically by a thing that doesn't habituate as easily, it probably does, but probably not as much as we do. And calling them out more explicitly over and over again would be a great thing. Exactly. Yeah, just just just in terms of detecting personality disorders. So, for example, this is a political diagnosis, not a psychiatric one, but which is what I've called the it's the the dark quad, not try. And that is people who have a social leadership personality disorders, which is megalomania, narcissism, sociopathy and orthoteranism. Well, you know, those those sort of traits can be picked up in the language of how it's being used and if we can get I to be more sophisticated and being able to give people feedback about how they're being manipulated by by by politicians and educating people about these various techniques so that they become much more savvy and that would help media literacy. That may not be the brave new world you were thinking of, but, you know, I think the new world we're coming into is not going to look that much like the worlds we think our future looked like. And it'll be scary and interesting simultaneously. You know, the dark triad, I think it's a quad, actually, it needs it needs what needs orthoteranism more explicitly. Well, and pathology, I mean, and they said make a Macavelian to me. I prefer to use pathological megalomania to Macavelian myself, but, you know, the related constructs. So the triad was narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, sociopathy, sociopathy. Yeah, yeah. Gotcha. Right. Cool. Well, not so cool. No, it's not. But, you know, we need to be detecting these people much earlier on in their careers and making sure they don't get into power. Yeah, but instead we have a system that rewards those people and that is that punishes normal people for for running at all. Exactly. And what's happening right now in politics is that the people who might have been reasonable are being run out of town. Exactly. The chiefs are being filled by others. Yeah, that's it. Well, how do you take on the dark side? How do you take on the dark side? I think our next meeting should be held in a cave and we should all wear rebel alliance clothing. And Pete, you might have to generate a rebel. I think I've even got a wallpaper. Hold on. It's been so long. It's been so long. Could have sworn. The other thing that I have, you know, is will I get to the point where it will instantaneously assess people's quality of evidence so that when somebody makes a claim, it automatically is evaluated to the degree of truth with citations that refute the claim. That would be awesome. I think that's really hard and we should get Mark on fun in this conversation because that's part of what he's building. I think that's going to happen. But the interesting thing, it's going to be through your personal filter bubble. So it's like, what do I think of this? What would I think of this? And that's going to be different for each person. I found my background. Neil Stevenson has something he describes a system very much like that. Everybody's got personal filtration in dodge in the fall of hell or dodge in the fall.  Not an easy name to remember. I'll give you an example of one. So there was one I sometimes we just because they have interesting, strange stuff on there and how people think. But there was a guy who gave a very good presentation. There was a Danish study showing that people who wore facial masks had slightly higher rates of COVID infections. All right. You couldn't dispute that fact. That's true. However, the inference. You cannot say that it's not a cause and effect relationship. And so it should automatically flag what are the confounding variables that might account for this? Namely, people wearing masks were taking more risks than people who weren't wearing masks, maybe there's so many variables and people they immediately jumped on. They're saying, oh, no, there's no point wearing masks. Yeah. No. So I mean, you can look at facts and then you can look at interpretation and then you can look at the the the fallibility of the interpretations. It's sort of like the famous study of bombers that were coming back with lots of holes in them and the military wanted to reinforce the parts of all the holes were and a really smart guy said, no, actually, you want to reinforce the places where there aren't that many holes because that's the ones that aren't making it back are dropping because they got hit in those spots. It's counterintuitive. That's exactly. But interesting. Yeah, faulty inferences. Exactly. And we're making them all the time. Constantly. And it's getting worse. It is. So when is the light of AI going to triumph outside? Abraham Wald. Is the guy in what's the principle? Wald's principle. I don't know that it has a name, but it's the damage we're not tending to is the article I've got on this. I think there's yeah, there's a principle that the named principle. Well, it doesn't have a it. The reason I ask is because we should be able to refer to it more easily than that time, the guy at the World War Two Physicist Bob, you know, you know, I would love that. I think that's great. Use AI, man. Find it. See what it comes up with. Yeah, good point. Here's Wald. It might say somewhere on his page I haven't looked. He was an operations research guy. It's actually called survivorship bias. Yeah, that's what I'm looking for. Yeah, I think. But survivorship bias, I'm not sure if it sort of means exactly that, but it could be. So I was able to get chat GBT to tell me who that was just by saying who is the guy that talked about holes and World War Two airplanes. Oh, good. And it worked. Yeah, it worked great. This counter to an approach greatly contributed to improving aircraft survivability during the war. I love that. That's awesome. Yeah, it's a survivorship bias or survival bias. Survival bias is a little bit better. So it's so it's the valves. Observation is actually avoiding survivorship bias. Exactly. That's why it's not a good game for it. Right, right. Exactly. There's a whole wonderful motherload of stuff around lessons from failure. There are several books titled something like that. Roughly, it's just a it's just a lovely, lovely thing. One of my favorite little fishers in history to explore. Other thoughts for right now. We can also fold this call. A half hour before noon, that's fine. Yeah, just a question for future. And that is how can we be more helpful to what you're trying to do? And are there other players that might be interested in learning more once it's in a form that could attract more people to come and say, I want to play here. I think you, Rick, love the questions. And I realize that I've been working toward goals that are near but not on what you just said, meaning I'm trying to write a new book about design and I'm trying to explain what new books are. But there was another goal we talked about several calls ago, which is like, hey, when is this thing? What is the cake baked enough that we can show people in the window on the oven and say, look, there's a cake baking, you might want to join the cake baking party? And I think we're probably pretty close to that. But I need to I need to sit with that question and figure out what does that look like so that we can craft a message that goes out to our community and says, here's what we think we're doing. And here's what it is, which is some of what Pete and I decided to do a moment ago, like, let's write a piece to attract geeks. But I think that this is a two-parter. I think this is a there's a piece of it that's about technical people who can who can help. And then there's a piece of it that's about any and all writers. Yeah, you know, and writers and improvers, I mean, yeah, neobooks only get interesting if communities arise that start treating the nuggets and subject matter as things they would like to improve, much as volunteers improve Wikipedia page entries. Exactly. So one thing we did mention was the idea of alternate weeks, having something that where a piece of writing was shared, where outside people can come in and they can get a sense, you know, a brief introduction is a bit of writing, whether it's what you've just written. And then, you know, ideally, it would be nice if it was on some place where people can go to an advance so they can read it and then use that as what emerges out of that discussion that would enable that writing to go and flourish, you know, whatever direction it needs to flourish, you know. That's really interesting because at first I thought, well, we've kind of been treating working with the with the actual writing as a thing we're like doing separately from these calls. Like we're not we're not using these calls to workshop texts. And Pete and I were staring at like causes manuscript going, well, OK, how do we get more people to comment on it? How do we get this edited so that it looks like a book? And then on the other hand, I'm like, it would be a great idea to have workshoppy sessions around texts here, in particular, if we can split our brains between the content itself as a book and the content written as a new book. So what I what I mean is some of the feedback would be like, hey, it didn't make sense when you went from this statement to this statement to this chapter. And then some of the comments could be like, hey, there's a nugget over here that's not carved out as a nugget. It would probably be better living, you know, separately like that. And to get to that second thing, you know, we would need to be more complete with the nuggetization of the other texts that are just long, you know, long Google docs. But my my part would be happily critiqued in that way right now. Go ahead. I mean, I think there's different ways of doing it. You can sort of using a zoom lens. You could have something and zoom me out, look in the outline or a chapter or the questions for a chapter or little nuggets. You know, the person who brings something can decide the zoom lens. And to me, it's just the experience. You know, this is not final work. This is work in progress where people can come and use it as a sounding board for things. I mean, that's what I would be interested in is using as a sounding board for something, whether it's on Substack or whatever it is. And, you know, trying to create a learning community about how your books can evolve over time. And I just added this to my brain because it showed up early in this conversation. Um, cool. So, but, you know, I don't know whether you want to stop the, you know, bowl rolling with with one session in the new year where you invite people in and have a little, I mean, I think just having people show up, I think it's helpful for people if they want to come prepared, they can. And so that, you know, I prefer to do that myself. Yeah, if, you know, if I work it out, rather than just showing up and the people show up, they'll just get the gist of it and say, oh, maybe I'll read the next article that, you know, somebody puts out so that it's not just, you know, reiterating the, you know, whatever's written. It's it's a bit more in depth. So there's actually a nice writer's workshop process that I learned from Dick Gabriel, which involves a circle of people, each of whom is an author who then share each of them shares works.  But then there's a series of steps you go through when that person's work is being workshopped and it's quite productive and really interesting. And I think would be very adaptable to what we're doing. Do you have a link to that one? I do. I thought you might. He wrote a book about it. I'm sure it did. In fact, and there's writer's workshop patterns. Let me see. Oh, there's even a pattern language for writer's workshops. Damn. So that book would make a good new book. Yeah, I'm thinking.  So I just sent you a link. And when you go there, you will find that there's a little message on top that says you need to go index this thing. So I have a I have a trouble to get into the brain people to try to fix that. All right. But writer's workshops are cool. Thank you, Rick. Thank you for all the great ideas. That was really totally fruitful. And I think we're thinking along very, very similar veins. Just as evidence by your questions and commentary and curiosities. Well, it's somewhat of a divergent generative mode. And now it's sort of, OK, let's let's converge on something and see where this could be, you know, going from the abstract to the pragmatic. So yeah, it's a circular process. And an acquaintance from a conference a few years ago pinged me on LinkedIn. And I and he said, what are you up to? And I said, well, I'm trying to write a book about design from trust. He said, oh, I'd be really interested. And I haven't replied yet. And I'm like, I should invite him into the conversation. Right. And I'm like, oh, I have to think through what that means and how to compose that and where to point him so that he can step into the conversation, which probably means, Pete, I write a couple of pages. I certainly already have like how to write your own new book pages in like that's already fleshed out, starting if they're not done. But but they're they're sort of in progress. But there should be another landing page for anybody who it's like, hey, if you're interested in writing a new book, start here that then points into the different resources, that'd be cool. OK, I'll go create one last thing, actually. And that is, you know, Klaus has already done it. He has a story behind it. It could be that one of the sessions could be his story of doing because you know it, but other people don't. And the question is, would that be of interest? This is the product. This is it. And then you hear what Klaus went through to be able to do it. Now, there's going to be many different pathways. But that's the the the the beauty of collaborative learning is how people use the technology in different ways. So. But maybe have cloud have classes.  But you know, how can he tell his story in a way that and that could be recorded, could be useful for people saying if you want to hear about how Klaus did it, here's a recording of and this is the questions we had with him. You know, short presentation or whatever and maybe something and just, you know, take it from there. That would actually be a great asset for Klaus to have that we could then attach to the Neo book as the story of how it came about. Exactly. And there's also a new app that somebody created that forgotten its name. It starts with an O where you send it a video and it automatically finds possible call outs or short segments to go post on TikTok or wherever else. But it'll basically. Nugget ties, I think it does some nuggetizing of its own, but then it also does some production so that it hands you, I think, finished and ready to upload snippets of pieces of a conversation. One of the too many tools that have arrived recently. We need somebody with social media, Klaus X to have a new book about how to use the social medium or effectively to get. So if you have anybody who wants to write a new book about the advances of social media and how to, you know, that would be I'd be interested in reading that new that new book. Yeah. Sorry, here it is. It's Opus. Opus clip is the thing and I will put a link in the chat. Forever resourceful. Jerry, thank you. Just found it. Sweet. And I'm going to connect it to nuggetization because it is doing its own AI nuggeting of some sort. And with that, we our heroes head back into their normal days. Peter, see you on Peter's brain. But thank you. All right. Take care now. Bye now.


Okay, so hello, my name is Kate Stewart, I'm VP at the links foundation and one of the projects I spend a lot of my time working with is the Zephyr project. And I've been with the Zephyr project since this beginning, in 2015 it was one of the first projects I started working on at the LF. And what I tell you a bit about is I've also been working in open source for a long time and been very involved with the Linux kernel and I liked a lot of the practices of a Linux kernel. And so some of these ones we tried to explicitly use in Zephyr and that's what I want to show you and talk to you about some of these practices. So it's changed a bit since I started but it's still pretty much the same. In the sense that there's a lot of open source R tosses out there. And the question becomes is which ones to use and where should you spend your time. And so one of the things I've started tracking about in 2018 is what is actually happening in them. So every month for three or four years, now I just do it every quarter now, I would go in and I would go into GitHub and all these projects are on GitHub. And so one of the things is if you, and this is where those numbers came from, okay?  And then if you go into the monthly summary you'll see how many people push things in the last month and how many commits they've got. And if you take the number of commits, monthly commits and you divide by the number of days in the month and the number of 24 hours in the day, you get a rate which is how many commits per hour. And so these commits per hour is a useful sort of indicator to understand, okay, what sort of velocity the project is having. But when you go and look at this and you look across these, you don't even need to get to that stage to really understand. I guess, well, is there a pointer? Maybe? Yes, there's a pointer. Okay, so the first commit in these projects sort of tells when they started. Then we see who controls the commits. Is it a community or is it one company? And generally you can say that if it is a community they tend to do a lot more innovation and a lot faster. In companies sometimes there's a lot of innovation inside the company, but then it's just one person who can make it outside. And so that sort of skews things a bit. But then you see who's actually contributed. And if you look now, there's over 1,400 contributors into Zephyr as of December 1st. Which is, well, probably more than double most of everything else, possibly usually three times or four times. This is the next highest one for double contributors. So yeah, it's at least double the number of contributors in anything else. And in the last month, 183 people were contributed compared to the next closest was Nadex, which is a good community project. I'm not saying anything against these projects, but there was 49 people. And you see now over time there has been over 70,000 commits into the project. So there's a lot of momentum. And there's a lot of features going in and a lot of bug fixes going in. Both are valid commits. And in the last month, for instance, you can see that we've had over 1,200, which gives us that rate of about 1.7 commits an hour. So how does this compare to Linux? Which is what I was taking as my sort of starting point. Well, from the 5.9 kernel, it's about nine, there it is, nine commits an hour. So it's about a fifth or 20% of the rate of the kernel. But given that the kernel is one of the fastest moving in the biggest project for an embedded OS, it's pretty significant how this all works together. So how Zephyr achieves this momentum is the question. And so some of these are achieved by best practices. And let's sort of think back to what Linux was like when it started back in 1991.  And there was a bunch of commercial, different curational distributions. So we had a very wide set of Unixes out there. And to a large extent, Linux was a good second option. It wasn't the best option, certain features or anything else. But it was something that people could contribute to and build on. And now today with Linux, as you see, it's pretty much dominating most of the markets for an open source R toss, except when it's sometimes it's too big. And so what we're trying to do is have some equivalent for those smaller footprint places. And that's where Zephyr's coming in. And that's where we're trying to get Zephyr working. So use Linux. It's got the best features out there, if you can. But in those small sensors, the actuators, things that have to have battery life that last in years, tens of years even sometimes, Zephyr's is worth considering because it doesn't consume as many resources. So in 2016, 2017, I was at the LF here, there was a, I guess, Greg Crow Hartman and John Corbett put out their Linux kernel development report. And in this version of the kernel development report, they started highlighting some of the features that they think were been significant to Linux's success. So one of which was short release cycles are important. Having the hierarchical developer model, having maintainers and a hierarchy, so you know how the changes will flow into the kernel. Tools matter. We all had get by this point in time. And a lot of the velocity of the kernel didn't happen until after it came in place. Consensus model is important. Making sure that people all agree. If sometimes that takes a long time, but it tends to be a good place for people to feel like they have not been shut out. A late factor is no regressions rule. You can't make things break. Early days in the kernel, things were breaking. But once they adopted this no regression rule, this has been part of the velocity of the kernel. The real effect is that corporate participation is critical. Companies, it's not just obvious. It's companies and people doing jobs because they can make money off of it. And there's a virtuous cycle. So having it, corporates participating as well as community people and people scratching their own inches is what makes it effective. And there should be no internal boundaries in the project. Just because if you work on one driver, you should be able to go work on the print K stuff. You should not be blocked into anything. There should be no internal boundaries. So these, Zephyr started in 2016, early 2016. So a lot of these pieces of recommendations as to why it's been successful, we were looking at with the project. And there's a few other sort of lessons that have people learned. Keeping things vendor neutral is probably very important. The mix of companies and individuals by scratching their own inches. Quite frankly, it's not in that set but making it easy for people to do upstreaming work. By using the DCO, and I'm a very big fan of the DCO, you do not have to go through a whole bunch of lawyers generally to do contribution license agreements. And you also end up with something that is not going to shift out from under you. And this is one of the things I kind of am strong. Having the public codes, having the way of signaling whose reviewed things is a useful practice and very valuable. And then we've got the consensus or a decision making the hierarchical development model, no internal boundaries, tools matter, short predictable release cycles with fixed merge windows and then having the stable in LTS. All of these are factors I think that have contributed to the success of Linux over the years. So, and one of the key things to understand is when developers get frustrated, they get creative and they do good things. And Linux is also showing some of that. We would not have get if our infrastructure for version control was smooth. So these are the lessons learned from Linux. And so when we start Zephyr off, we wanted it to be the best in class RTOS for connected devices. And so what we wanted to do is say, okay, this is our vision. How are we going to do this? Well, one of the things we did like most Linux foundation projects do is we focused at TSE for making the decisions about technologies. And the governing board makes decisions about money. So we separate the money decisions from the technical decisions. And I can't stress how important that is. But, you know, the developers, we basically decided to use K config and K build from the kernel because we want to be able to configure and we want to be able to share device tree information and so forth and be able to put in what we need it because Zephyr is targeting from tens of Ks up to whatever you need to put in. But, sorry, too much talking. But this is, no, we have it. When we launched Zephyr, there was a unified kernel. Sorry, there was a nano and a micro kernel associated with it. After the first year, the developers decided, no, we can just do a unified kernel. It doesn't make sense to carry this overhead. So they changed that. We started off with Garrett and Jira. And they went, no, we want to be on GitHub and Issues. So in 2017, we moved over to GitHub and Issues and that's helped accelerate things for Zephyr. Again, keeping it easy for people to contribute is key for people to do it. Our build system went from K build to CMake because that's what the developers wanted to do. So the APIs and the hardware extraction levels have been reworked several times and continue to evolve. The modularization device tree support is key to Zephyr and then we had started it with a view that we would go after LTSs because we saw how successful that was for the Linux kernel. So these are some of the technical decisions that happened. And so taking these lessons learned I was going through from Linux, vendor-neutral decision-making. Well, yes, the project has support from multiple companies. All you have to do is look at the history right now and you'll see no one company will dominate Zephyr. We see a lot of, certain companies have more contributions than others, but we are not, I was very conscious of not having an elephant factor and we explicitly tried to nurture a lot of companies participating. Companies and individuals participate. Yes, our TSC has both in them. We streamlined the upstream process. Again, you can see the contributing document and we use the DCO. So it's very easy to just start contributing and sending patches and pull requests into Zephyr. As long as you agree to the license as per the DCO and the license for pretty much all the code in Zephyr is a patchy, too. There's public code reviews. All the pull requests have to be signed off by at least one, I think sometimes two people, depending on where it is in the kernel we're heading to. The consensus-oriented decision-making TSC, sometimes people will disagree on the issue in the pull request. No surprise. A lot of the discussion happens there, actually. And sometimes they get explained to the TSC for the discussion. But there's a forum and it's not one person making a decision. It gets in front of all the TSC voting members and they get to vote. So the consensus is happening that way. We have the maintainers file. I think we had co-noters initially. We've moved from having maintainers formally. And so you can see exactly who maintains which part of the subsystem. One of the things we're trying right now is the notion of co-maintenors. And so we can onboard new people into maintaining. Because a lot of the times the problem is the pipeline of maintainers and the bandwidth of maintainers. Because they're doing this sometimes in addition to their job. No internal boundaries. Same thing. See the contributing for distributed version control. We have a ten... The Linux kernel has a two-week merge window. And then several weeks of stabilization. Zephyr's chosen to have a ten-week merge window and then two to four weeks of stabilization. And that's working for us so far. As Zephyr potentially gets bigger. They may revisit that discussion. But this is working right now. And then long-term support. We actually had first long-term support. Long-term support one had four release updates. And we're on long-term support two. And every two years we get an LTS for this project. So as you can sort of see we've been trying to apply these lessons we've learned from Linux into Zephyr. And as a result we now have... We start with three architectures. And we now have all of these hardware architectures. We started off with the M-core from ARM, Arxenopsis and Intel X86. 64 bit has been added. A-cores and R-cores have been added. And then 32 and 64 bit risk five. And most recently people start putting some of the MIPS architectures in there. Because they wanted to place to pick up some of the new communication technologies. And so by putting a new architecture in here you get suddenly the value of all these other drivers that are already there and all these sensors that are there. The architecture at this point in time is pretty complete. Or at least has a lot of good communication technologies. There's things we more still want to add. Like for instance I'd love to get... I'm talking to some of my members, some of the members and some of the community people about seeing if we can get matter into Zephyr. I'm getting matter stack into Zephyr. And then there's... But we've got a very good Bluetooth low energy stack. As well as Bluetooth Mesh. And the audio. So the Bluetooth stacks are very well tested, reliable and they're all integrated. You don't have to get something else extra and bring it into Zephyr. Because all of this is sitting in the code repo. It's all under K-config. It's all config like say. You basically configure it in through device tree and it's there in those images you're building. Which makes it very fast to go to market and to get new things working. This... We follow a structure of our code repositories where we are getting the development happening at that rate of 1.7 an hour. And then every two years we cut our long term support. This will get if there's a vulnerability or a key bug fix. This gets updated. And then a subset of this is what we're doing the full traceability on. That's part of doing something taking it to auditable. And this is what we'll be taking to get 6150 weight certifications on. So if there's anything that has to change we're trying to make sure it's all kept up to speed. And this is how we're dealing with the fact that you don't want to take things to safety unless they're moving too fast. So we're trying to work up stream and then have that LTS ready to go. So LTS, like the Linux kernels, product focused. They're keeping KERMA security. But we're not putting, you know, but we're not putting new features into it other than potentially people may want to use it for new hardware or put their own versions of new hardware in. And it is, it has a much longer testing cycle and we try to keep it supported for two years. The Linux kernel has different varied points for their LTS's and then the similar structure platform is even trying to make it longer. If we find community people that want to be maintaining this for longer periods of time, the discussion I think will start. But it's not feature-based and it's not cutting edge. However, when you're making products you don't want that necessarily. If it has the features you need, you don't want it to be changing out from under you, but you do want the security fixes if it's significant. And we basically have demonstrated by doing, and so we've had four LTS updates that have come out in the last few years. And auditable is being worked on right now. The modularity is happening by device tree and Kconfig. And this lets us potentially share some of the device information with the kernel drivers as well as Kconfig lets us figure out exactly what goes in. And so you only put in what you need. It's statically compiled in at build. Okay? So you're not bringing a lot of crop that you don't need. And this lets us keep these images small. What about security? Big topic, right? Zephyr was one of the first adopters of the OpenSSF badge. And we became passing within the first year after it came out. Interestingly enough, you saw the decisions that the developers made about changing infrastructure and things like that. We stopped passing because we didn't update our documentation. And the websites weren't working.  So once we failed us, it's like, oh, we've got to get passing again. And yeah, we may as well try to go for gold. So Zephyr was one of the earlier projects that actually has achieved the gold level. You can see all our processes documented. And there's currently about almost 5,000 projects right now and only 12 have gold badges. So like I say, we're taking these types of best practices very seriously. You know, the nice thing about doing badging and I would encourage any project that you're working with to try for it is it gives you a framework for figuring out and adding best practices. It sort of guides you through improving your security posture. And it also helps you create onboarding material for people in the security team. And it is pretty transparent. It lets you be transparent about attesting to what you're doing in the project for other people who are coming in. So encourage you to go look at Zephyr's badge. Go look at what we're saying. If you think something stale, open an issue. We'll fix it. But this is sort of like our public documentation of the things that are important for security. The other thing that the Zephyr project has done is we actually registered as a CVE numbering authority. So CVE numbering authorities are companies. But we felt it was important that we manage because there isn't a lot of companies and it's multiple companies, it's not just one company. We wanted to manage our own vulnerabilities. And so we have a security team that brings and gets the information for vulnerabilities as and has a project security as a response team or p-serve. It's volunteers from our various members in the community. And they are the ones who are reviewing this security architect and then deciding if things get fixed or responding back and getting more information. We want Zephyr to be using products though, right? So when there's a vulnerability, people need time to fix it in the field. And what we wanted to do was make sure we have an embargo period so that things don't get exploited or shared before their time. So the Zephyr team is committed to fixing within 30 days and then give vendors 60 days under embargo so they can update the products that they're building on those issues. So this type of information I think helps people balance between what's upstream and what they've got for products. And that's what we're trying for. So to sort of summarize how the involutions has been working, security team started right at the start of the project. It meets bi-weekly. The security practices were documented. Sorry. We've registered the CDN numbering authority and been working with the upstream vulnerability management systems. The best practices badge was met in 2019. We're doing a lot of automation. A lot of testing that goes on with Zephyr on every commit. And we're doing periodic coerity scans and misery scans to ensure the code base is kept clean. We did some improvement on our vulnerability management in 2021 as a result of a bulk vulnerability report. One of which was changing our process for the embargo. The other of which was making it so that people who have products so if you've got a product that's using Zephyr and you want to be notified you don't need to be a common member. It would be nice if you did to help support the infrastructure but you can register for free. You just have to let us know and point us to your public product. And then you can effectively get the notifications under embargo, the embargo period. And then in 2021 Source S bombs have been created by Zephyr since 25. However, automatically generating a system bill of materials for the built image and built infrastructure for Zephyr. So Zephyr right now with one command line change you can basically generate two Source S bombs. One for the Zephyr sources one for your application sources and then a build S bomb which points back to those Source S bombs. So you have traceability exactly which source files made it into your libraries and which libraries combined to make it into your final ELF image. This level of traceability is key and embedded because what we need to do is not try to fix things that aren't broken in places. An example of this was Fnet. So Amnesia 33 happened a few years ago and it had a version of Fnet in our LTS1. TIP didn't have it anymore but Fnet was in LTS. If you just looked at the version numbers you would think okay I've got to go and replace everything. Well actually when you go down to the source file level and you see it none of those Fnet sources that had the vulnerability were actually in the Zephyr tree. If you just looked at the version number you would have wasted a lot of time and effort which is why we need this traceability because updating things and embedded in the field is expensive. It's not just pushing a button that suddenly goes there. There are systems that are working in that direction but being authoritative and knowing you're fixing only what you need to fix you need to have this level of information. So what are the results of applying these best practices? Well there's 4,400 forks of Zephyr out there right now and so part of our challenge is figuring out what are people doing with some of these forks. Some of them you get by word of mouth and some of them you get by looking at things and digging around. There's a board in Brazil that's working off of Zephyr that we learned about over the summer from talking to people and we also see smart devices so we're talking to people creating devices and so people are adding AI to Zephyr like TensorFlow Lite and so on and so forth. So this one here is electrical grid monitoring so they're looking for an on-lease electrical grid and this box here has to be working for 10 years because you don't want to be climbing up the pole to be changing it but it's sending information.  So you're not running around all the time dumping things that are empty but you can be a bit more selective and then any... Show of hands, who's actually been on the ICE trains in Germany the Deutsche Bahn? Just one hand. Anyhow, these are like the bullet trains here in Japan. Oh no, no, no. No? Anyhow one of the latest ones we've figured out recently is we learned about... there was a talk in German that I couldn't understand but people translated it for me and this sensor pump has a zipper in it and it basically pumps out the wastewater tank and makes sure that it's properly empty so the trains stay in service and they don't have to stop. So combining AI sensors and these systems gives us a way of doing something that is more than just heuristics we can actually train things and then there's a variety of other products that are out there that we found so if anyone here in this room has a product running Zephyr please tell me about it so I can make it visible because embedded is hard to find products but ODECON's hearing aids these ones here are running Zephyr okay Winterbinds are running Zephyr so we've got this whole spectrum so our watch is tagging devices are running Zephyr and one of the ones that you'll be seeing showing up next year is Next Generation and it's public because they gave a talk about it so I can say it but the Next Generation of Google Chromebooks will have Zephyr in it to monitor things in the low power state so they'll be running Linux on part of it and then Zephyr on other parts and we've seen these types of uses where you use Zephyr for the low power side of it and minimal sucking of power and resources for all these applications there's over 400 boards in the repo right now so if you've got a board or you're working with another board it's a good chance it's probably already to have a port to Zephyr there and if it isn't there there's probably something that's close that you can work from because these are all devices and they're standard interfaces and there's only so much I be there so I would encourage you to look in the repo directly given the link is here boards.html pretty straightforward if you're familiar with working around the Linux kernel repositories you'll find a pretty familiar there's the architecture, the boards and so forth and there's over 100 sensors integrated already so picking up these sensors, picking up these boards if I'll be putting you configs in is how we're getting all those commits the bulk of the commit work is happening by new boards new sensors, new technologies integrated in different ways and there's a native IP stack already integrated so you have including you know you've got full IPv4, IPv6 you've got time-sensitive networking you've got BSD sockets, API, uploading so forth and we do a lot of testing we're using the Maxwell Pro for testing to make sure we don't regress in there so we're trying to use some of the commercial services and so this is what quite frankly membership you know membership helps us support because those aren't cheap and so that's kind of what's going on there we have a wide range of protocols common protocols for communicating out and we are supporting a wide range of technologies here on the networking side already and Bluetooth host and mesh technologies are there the low energy and Bluetooth classic are there so as you can see they Bluetooth SIG actually uses Zephyr for prototyping new specs so there's a group that's in Zephyr and also in the Bluetooth SIG and when they're working developing the new specifications they'll work in a private repo to make sure that the specification is solid and then when the specification becomes public they're for Zephyr so we are kept very close to the edge of the Bluetooth and I'd like to have that type of arrangement in some other places too and then low energy obviously because Zephyr really cares about the low energy and don't worry I'll put these slides up after okay but you're welcome to take pictures it's fine and then we have a fairly complete USB stack and you know how I said we have TensorFlow Lite and those smart devices are two samples of TensorFlow being integrated with Zephyr already sitting in our documentation repo to show you how to start doing it one is a very simple sine wave one and this other one here is for like a magic wand so you have the training and you can get the information and so forth so these are here to help people unwrap and help people start to work with the code base effectively and hopefully not have too big a learning curve we're wanting to continue to improve our learning curve just to be clear we know we're not perfect yet you have to download some things you know things like that but this is an area that the TSE is very much focused on and then we cut to S-bombs and one of the nice things about this is on once you say West S-PDX after that your builds with West will generate evidence for your Zephyr sources which is the app sources and then which C's which objects, dottos and so forth make it into libraries and then which libraries together make it into the L so you're given an L-image and you have your build S-bomb and you can trace it all the way back to exactly which files are there and they're hashed so you have that trust level and as we take things that have to last for a long time knowing that you can be authoritative about exactly what is going to be key and if you want to see you don't have to believe me here there's a dashboard I've got the link to it here and at micro is one of the members of the project and they put this renode simulator up there and they simulate all these configurations and so they actually have a dashboard that they keep everything running and they do things built and passed in the testing and anything that says built or passed has those three S-bombs in it because it is that easy and so if you're interested in seeing what a good S-bomb looks like I think there's one of the members of the SPDX community Steve Winslow did the work in CMake to actually make it happen so the quality of these are pretty high for S-bombs and they're just generated automatically so encourage you to look at them so I guess this sort of summarizes what the Zephyr project is and you know it's there to fit when Linux is too big okay it's not a replacement for Linux but it is there to augment Linux and we have a fairly vibrant community we have underneutral governance permissively licensed so you don't have to worry about patents because people are contributing to it saying that Pat Grant sorry too much talking it's modular and it's development and we started off with a security mind and we're working towards proving it out the architecture is very complete so it tries to let developers just focus on their applications that's what we're really trying to do here okay so if you want to learn more go look at our community pages the codes up on github there's a variety of mail lists and a lot of the community works in Discord there's about 4,000 people in Discord right now and this is where the discussions are happening if you click on that link you get an automatic invite and there's various channels for companies and various channels for technologies, marketing and so forth so like you know jobs new products, things like that so I encourage you to go on to the Discord and if you've got a new product tell us a little bit about it that's using Zephyr the developers are interested in learning that their code is being used in places it's exciting for us with that does anyone have any questions go for it so first of all thank you very much this is a really really interesting talk and I'm really glad to learn about Zephyr first off I just want to second the things you're saying openSSF I have two both the Tuff and in total project went through that process also and those standards in particular are actually very useful I've seen other recommendations lists that are very dubious in some of the things they recommend and I'm not saying that everything on the openSSF badging list is 100% perfect but it's all very good and very close it's a good starting question so my question is I took a look at Goliath I'm not sure that I'm saying that okay it is pronounced Goliath just follow I took a look at it and it doesn't seem like they have the concept that a key might be compromised or a repository might be compromised as part of the threat model for how they do updates and there are other open source available things that have that threat model are you interested in having them contributed to Zephyr or okay great Goliath is one of our members and they have certain technologies they keep at house and they've got certain things that they work on upstream like all companies do and so getting best practices contributed upstream to Zephyr great thank you and will we work directly with you or will we work with them you would work with the community okay thank you just put in the portfolio the pull requests into the Zephyr repo possibly put an RFC up and let people know what you're doing and let them have a discussion before you so you figure out how to structure it and not waste time and then start upstreaming and if those issues reach out to me I would very much like to get some of these technologies up there thanks okay any other questions especially in committing to Zephyr the project is very well managed I deeply agree but say in this presentation a bit far from this slide I have two questions about Zephyr first question I know that Zephyr rapidly grows forward especially in the EU region compared to that it may not get much attention in Japan that's why we have printed out so that's very visible to the Japanese to make it easy so if you don't have one please pick one out it's what we've got here in my viewpoint that is because the Japanese industry has unique real-time operating system that grows with governmental support but I want to more publicize Zephyr in Japan welcome to start having meeting groups and things like that for Zephyr users that would be wonderful so please let me know who you are and I will reach out to you afterwards and you may become a Zephyr ambassador if you are supporting Zephyr thank you second question I understand that Zephyr intends to use it in critical systems but we have to use it there we have to go through the safety certification first but on the other hand beyond the project that holding goods to Arduino API to Zephyr I'm keeping an eye on it because it is a large region that can apply to Zephyr there are any area where you expect Zephyr to expand its applications I expect Zephyr to continue to collect cores there's a lot of DSPs out there that really don't have a good support plan and there's been discussions potentially of getting Zephyr used for them I might see that coming in as there's new architectures that are emerging in risk 5 some of these are definitely being followed and looking at getting them in there's a stop signal at the back but thank you for the very good questions thank you everyone and please feel free to pick up stickers at the front and those brochures if you would like


Suspense, and the producer of radio's outstanding theatre of thrills, the master of mystery and adventure, William M. Robson. The word license has two meanings. The first is familiar to all of us, official permission, as in marriage license, liquor license, driving license. The second definition, paradoxically, means almost the opposite, freedom from rules. We can send ourselves here with an esoteric aspect of this definition, namely dramatic license. In the forthcoming story, we have deviated somewhat from the facts and altered California topography ever so slightly in the interest of suspense. To the residents of San Bernardino, who may grumble, it couldn't happen that way, all we can say is, aren't you glad? Listen, listen then as Mr. William Bishop stars in Ride Down Cajon, which begins in just a moment. And now, Ride Down Cajon, starring Mr. William Bishop, a tale well calculated to keep you in, suspense. The two main gateways to California, route 40 over Dona Pass in the north and route 66 over Cajon Pass in the south. I don't know anything about Dona, but Cajon Pass, I know. You see, I'm Nightman at Ella's Tip Top Cafe, the summit of the pass. And I live down the hill in Purdue, that's San Bernardino, down the hill. You drop 3,000 feet and 20 miles on a four-lane divided highway that's so well designed, drivers hit it like it was the Indianapolis Speedway. Which is okay, if your wheels are working okay. If they're not, you can get killed on Cajon, fast. By all rights, I should have been the other night, and I just went along for the ride. It was around about 2 a.m. and I was waiting for my relief man when Phil dropped in for a cup of coffee. Phil rides the pass for the highway patrol. He also is my brother-in-law to be, seeing he's married to my girlfriend's sister. Don't forget, Andy, we're supposed to take the girls to the beach tomorrow afternoon. Don't worry, Johnny's reminded me at least twice a day all week long. What time do you want to get started? I'll be over as soon as I can get my car out of the garage. They promised it before noon. Oh, that's right, I forgot your car's tied up. How are you getting down the hill tonight? What do you care? You wouldn't give me a lift. You know I can't. Regulations? You might break a regulation or two. You're practically my brother-in-law. Andy, my boy, the only way you can ride that patrol car is to break the California vehicle code. Then I'll be glad to give you a lift. The jail? Thanks a lot. I'll hitch a ride. Much action on the pass tonight? No, it's been pretty quiet. A couple of drunks, two or three speeders, no blood, and that's good. That's the way I like it. Hi, Phil. Oh, hi, Dave. How you doing, Andy? Okay, Dave. Hey, where'd you blow in from? Colorado. And I could eat a horse. Fresh out. How about a cow, medium well? I'll buy it. In the side of fried eggs and a gallon of coffee. Coming right up? Andy's car is in the shop, Dave. He's looking for a ride down the hill tonight. Can you fix him up? For sure. Why not? There's a starter on that gallon of coffee. No. Dave will give you a ride down the hill, Andy. Crazy. Providing you're ready by the time I finish eating. Well, sure. I'm off in 20 minutes. Hey, Dave. Why? Whatever you're carrying in that rig, it's leaking. Yeah, I know. Ice water. Ice water.  No, no, no. Chickens. Chickens? All the way from Colorado? Sure. Where do you think the Los Angeles housewife gets her fresh-killed spring chickens? Colorado? Louisiana? Mississippi? No kidding. Sure. 10, 11 days from the axe to the dinner table. Aren't they a little spoiled by that time? No, they're okay to eat. They may have lost a vitamin or two on the way. Well, it's time to head down the pass. I gotta check in at the weighing station. I'll be too late tomorrow, Andy. No worry. I'll be there around noon. Take it easy, Phil. Yeah. By the time David eaten his steak and eggs, my relief man had checked in, and I was through for the night. We walked out into the chill desert air. Route 66 stretched endlessly toward the east, marked only by the yellow pinprick of an approaching car. The melting ice water dripped steadily from Dave's loaded trailer. He walked slowly around the rig as he always did before he started her up, checking the connections with the tractor, the running lights, taking in every detail, seeing things only an expert can see. If you were so serious about it, I'd nearly laugh. Thinks you'll make it? If everything holds together. Doesn't it always? It always has, so far. Dave swung into the cab and fired up a big diesel. I clombered him after him, and he knows this big ten tons of refrigerated chickens out onto the westbound lane to Highway 66. He ran her through the gears, and when we got up to speed, it finally was fired up. I've been talked without yelling at each other. When are you and Joanie gonna do it? Sooner or better. She wants to be a June Brice. Oh, it'll be June. Yeah, I guess so. Where you going on your honeymoon? Joanie's talking about Frisco, so I guess that's where it'll be. Boy, she's got you roped and hot-tied already. Uh-uh. Joanie and me, we talk everything over first, and come to an agreement so there won't be any arguments. So long as it's the way Joanie wants it? Maybe it looks that way to you, but it isn't that. I know. Margie and me had the same kind of talks. But that's as far as it ever got, talk. It's different with Joanie and me. Oh, sure it is. Every guy didn't think it was different. There wouldn't be no more marriages. Tell me something, Andy. Honest. What? If you could pull out. If you could keep right on going tonight, on into LA and down to San Pedro, get on a slow boat to China and never come back. Wouldn't you? Of course not. Joanie and I are in luck. That's not what I'm talking about. But on the level, Andy, aren't you a little scared? Huh? Yeah. Yeah, I guess so a little. I didn't like Dave talking that way. I knew he was only kidding me, but it was like he was reading my mind. How did he know that that was exactly how I felt? Scared of getting married and guilty because I felt that way. Our lights picked up a sign on the right. Summit Cajon Pass, elevation 4,301 feet. This is the spot where the truck jockeys down ship so they can ride down the pass on compression and take the load off their brakes. Dave threw out his clutch, shifted to neutral, tramped on the brake pedal, and it went right down to the floor, boy. He tried it again. And again. Nothing. No brakes. What are you going to do? Try to get her to gear. I can't get the gears to mesh. Bear that heart, pull over your head and keep her going. Okay. We got air brakes. We got no air pressure for the brakes. We got nothing on the horn. Fire brakes? Yeah, on the roof, turn it on. Want me to work it? We were picking up speed all the time since we know it's over the top of the pass. We went into that first big wide curb below the summit like a Maserati at Sudbury. Tight on the lap, then drifting across both lanes to the outside prints and back to the right. Coming out at better than 70 miles an hour. Fangio couldn't have done better than Dave did on that one. But what about the next one? And the ones after that? Tight at turns. Not so well-banked. And the traffic. It was bound to be traffic. After we got out of that curb, I could see the car way down the road. I kept it for being on my spotlight when you get back and forth. And in no time, we were up on it. Dave pulled one hand off the wheel to the electric horn button. But he didn't hold it long because he needed both hands to keep the truck on the road. The guy in the car must have got that message because he pulled way over on the shoulder. We made it fast just before we went into the next turn. Not a lot with a 75. With a slight dip and an incline, slowed us down a little. Then we came over the top. My heart stopped. A half mile down the road with two cars, one in each lane. Neither one was giving way to the other. Put your light on the left one. We'll need that lane to make it. I kept my light in his back window, but he didn't move. Dave hit the horn. Still, a moving roadblock didn't break. We were getting closer. Why wouldn't they move? Why wouldn't they move? Get over! I can't read the license plates clearly now. Too clearly. Incredible Colorado, New Mexico, Atlanta, and Shantman. Why didn't they move? The distance was closing. 20 yards, 15-10. Five yards now. We continue with the second act of suspense. And now, ride down Cajon. We're not more than four feet from him when colorful Colorado got the idea. With a gust of black smoke from his tailpipe, he pulled ahead of New Mexico, landed in Shantman, and we feraled by with nothing to spare. Like a bad dream. Like one of those dreams of falling, falling, flying an airplane between skyscrapers or riding down Cajon Pass in a runaway truck. I knew that next curve. Just last week I stopped there to see what was left of the truck, going through the guardrail. The truck had precise laws. There was nothing to do. Nothing.  You can open your eyes. You're not in the framing heap in the bottom of the canyon. You're still alive. You're still hurtling down the pass at a mile a minute with no brakes. Andy? Yeah. Didn't Bill say he was going to check into the Wayne station? Yeah, I think he did. Think he'd still be there? I don't know. Maybe. The station's just over the next ride. He's just getting in his car. Yeah. He must have thought we were clowning. He just waved back. At the speed we were going, it seemed to take forever to fill the catch-up to us. Dave slowly carefully edged the swaying rig over the left lane, so Bill could pass on my side of the cab. We were feraling down a straight stretch of the pass now, where the eastbound lane was only separated by a divide. The big trucks climbing the grave kept flashing their lights, signaling to us to dim ours.  Finally, Bill grew up alongside us. The gas puddling filled out in front, sirens screaming, red lights flashing, and I breathed once more, riding parallel like that at 60 plus, where that trail is slewing behind us, anything could have happened. Well, that's nothing. What? We don't have any brakes either. What else is new? With Bill out front, I didn't have to work the spotlight anymore. I set it straight ahead, so Dave wouldn't be in any danger of over-driving his headlights. I could see in the Phil's control car. He was talking into his radio lines. Maybe somebody will figure out how to stop this thing. I looked out, and down into the canyon, dark, black, and far down, I saw the twin lights of a double-headed diesel crawling up the pass with a load of freight. The road ahead seemed straight and level, but that train reminded me what a grade it really was. Two engines pulling, and at the tail, another pushing, crawling up the pass at 10 miles an hour while we shot down at a mile a minute. After the rightward turnoff, we had another long curve, almost a 90-degree turn, long and bright, but at this speed it would be tough. My tires always screeched when I came through it, and I had brakes. There was nothing for me to do, out of the spotlight and set dead center. So, I just sat there, while Dave did all the work. Sweat dripping on this far as we went into the curve. His arms straining at the wheel, turning in the middle, and easy lock, turning it again, coaxing that crazy rig through at every part of the track. We came out of that one, almost at right angles to the road. The trailer in the right lane, the tractor in the left, but we came out of it. But best of all, there was a little grade ahead of us that slowed us down. And then beyond, the road was straight for a long, long time. We passed the firehouse, and the light up creek cut off. And then it's still downhill, but much more gradual. And then you're out of the canyon, and the desert stretches flat on both sides of the road. Hey Dave, how about pulling up on the shoulder now? Too soft! We clipped for sure! I thought of the road ahead, all downhill. We'd lose speed all right, but would we lose it quick enough to do us any good? There comes a time when you just can't keep going straight. The road ends. In a moment, we continue with the third act of and now. Starring Mr. William Bishop, act three of Ride Down Cajon. He was down to fifty-three as we topped the last rise. Far ahead, we passed the fire station. I saw a red light flash on, and the green was back to sixty-five. Passing on into the dew, we were doing better than seventy. We were joined by a fourth in our parade. But this member wasn't as encouraging as the rest. He followed us with his siren glaring. It was an ambulance. Through a fairly large town of seventy miles an hour, quite an experience. Up ahead, I saw the first police car right over a dip and bobbed up and down like a teeter-tonner. But it slowed us a little. And so did the next one. And the next, as we approached the bridge over the railroad yard, they got worse, and the creaking of the company between the cab and trailer screamed more each time. The dip on the bridge did it. There was a sudden surge.  We were both in the left lane, and then Phil moved to the right, stuck his arm out the window, waved his arm. Phil slowed down, and when we got alongside him, I leaned out the window. Five yards of state there, but half a block. Then he slowed down. We pushed him away. This morning, we smashed into the rear of the patrol car. And each time, we slowed a little more. And the third time, we connected and stayed connected. And Phil's brakes hella and brought us to the slowing stop. Less than half a block from where the street ends. We crawled down from the cab. Phil got out of the patrol car, and we just stood there, shaking, looking at the smashed-up rear of the patrol car and the smoking brake drums. And then, I started laughing. I couldn't help it. It struck me as funny. That's so funny! I just thought of something. Let us in on it. We could all use a laugh. Do you know why my car's in the shop? I'll buy it. Why? To have the brakes relined. In which William Bishop starred in William and Robson's production of Ride Down Cajon, written by John Moller and adapted for suspense by Mr. Robson and Mr. Moller. In just a moment, the names of the supporting players and a word about next week's story of suspense. Supporting William Bishop in Ride Down Cajon were Bill Quinn and Joda Santos with sound patterns by Bill James and Tom Hanley. Listen. Listen again next week when we return with Elliott Reid in Four of a Kind. Another tale well calculated to keep you in.