We encountered many types of characters in our Season 2 readings, often embodying recurring tropes. Regular attendees used a lightweight group process to sort these character types into a handful of archetypes. The archetypes — benevolent dictator, backstopper, shapeshifter, and anarch — can be found in two modes, Mature (–), an underdeveloped or corrupt version of the archetype, and Mature (+), a thriving, purposefully actualizing version. Our Archetypes Benevolent Dictator In the Yak ...| The Yak Collective
Rules are meant to bring predictability to an area so that individuals can reliably make value judgments and figure out what is good and what is bad for the group. At their best, rules set up clear incentives that allow for group flourishing while bringing stability to individuals. The clear line between rules and “to rule,” i.e. governance, is too on the nose to say much about. What is interesting though is how rules are indirectly related to governance. As Rivika Galchen notes in “Why...| The Yak Collective
The Yak Collective engages in collaborative tinkering. The tinkering can be practical and involve Mars rovers, infrastructure, or indie career acceleration. It could be creative, with pop-up poetry jams and speculative fiction. And sometimes it’s conceptual, with Fermi estimation practice, studies of distributed systems, old- and new-wave AI workshopping, and governance. What follows concerns the Yak Collective’s ongoing studies of governance, perhaps the longest running activity track wi...| The Yak Collective
The talk that Kilian Butler gave to kick off Part 1, on productizing machine learning research, is online now. You can check it out on our YouTube channel here: Async week is a wrap, and we head into Part 2 on Sunday, 15th at 1600 UTC. Here’s what we have lined up. Guest speakers All-hands intro to YC and 2023 activity previews Two rounds of breakouts (Fermi Gym or distributed robotics; governance or infrastructure) picking up from last week The difference will be in our guest speakers. For...| The Yak Collective
YakCon Part One is done! We had around thirty participants (+/- 5) for the full four-hour session. If you missed it, but still want to attend Part 2, read on to get caught up, and look for the sign-up link at the bottom. Part 1 Review There was a mixture of active and inactive Yaks, as well as some newcomers; approx. 40% of attendees were new to YC or returning from a hiatus. The consensus is that the 4-hour session just whizzed by. Here’s a recap that may indicate why. Killian Butler (Link...| The Yak Collective
A lot’s changed since early 2020. One thing hasn’t: the Yak Collective continues to slouch steadily into yet another year; its third. To mark the occasion — and to usher in 2023 — we’re holding a week-long interactive tinkering session: YakCon. It comprises two consecutive Sunday virtual meetups (on the 8th and 15th) book-ending a week of asynchronous activities (curated by volunteer track leads) on our Discord. YakCon is intended to give both new and returning yaks a chance to lear...| The Yak Collective
(This event is now over. Thank you to all presenters and participants!) A lot’s changed since early 2020. One thing hasn’t: the Yak Collective continues to slouch towards another year. It’s third. To mark the occasion — and to usher in 2023 — we’re holding a week-long interactive tinkering session: YakCon. The core of YC is synchronous study, collaboration, and tinkering sessions with async research and comms. Both occur at an easy, sustainable tempo with an infinite game outlook....| The Yak Collective
One of the strengths of the Yak Collective is the diversity of people, skills, and opinions here. We have a client willing to pay to tap this. Two years ago the Yak Collective did the Neurofuturama project, where contributors gave fifteen different views of potential new uses for a technology. (Work product was/is embargoed, sorry it can’t be made public.) A new client wants to do something similar. This company has three products relating to the sustainability world and wants to get wide-r...| The Yak Collective
Contributors: Open to all Discord Channel:⌗fermi-gym How many trees are there on Earth? What is the weight of the atmosphere? How tall can a mountain be? What is the total length of DNA in a human cell? Questions like this are perfect fodder for the art of Fermi estimation, the cultivated skill of posing and answering arbitrary quantitative questions using a variety of rough and ready estimation, assumption, and approximation techniques, informed guesswork, tasteful googling, and high-schoo...| The Yak Collective
A couple of weeks ago, the Yak Collective published the Yak Online Governance Primer. It is one of our most ambitious collaborative projects to date. The primer is based on about a year of weekly governance study group meetings on the Yak Collective Discord. It explores and synthesizes a curated set of 49 readings, and is intended as a resource for individuals, groups and organizations trying to develop a solid foundation of governance tools and practices in a virtual-first world. You can rea...| The Yak Collective
How do you do online governance? This primer is intended as a guided tour through a curated set of readings — based on a year of study by the Yak Collective1 — that can help groups and organizations navigate this question. In selecting the readings we cast a wide net, but in our discussions we made an effort to consider them from the specific perspective of online governance challenges. We believe the ideas surveyed here are applicable to groups and organizations with widely varied purpos...| The Yak Collective
If you’ve been looking for the right opportunity to join the Yak Rover project, and perhaps build your own rover, or contribute a piece to someone else’s, tonight’s Yak Rover meeting might be for you. Build leader Anuraj will be leading a discussion on how to get started, including low-cost kit options to suit every budget. We’ll talk about every level of the rover stack from mechanical and electronics design to single-board computer options, programming, and simulation. Whether you...| The Yak Collective
Hi all! We hope you were able to attend and enjoyed the YC annual meeting and Rover demo day! If not you can find a recording of the Rover Demo day hereand YC annual meeting here. Regardless if you were able to attend, we would love to hear from you about your involvement and interest in the Yak Collective. Please fill out this short eight question survey that really truly just takes a minute or two. Click here to take the short eight question Yak Collective Annual Survey. If you have a LOT o...| The Yak Collective
Greetings! The Yak Collective will be holding TWO events in the next week or so. Both events are virtual (Zoom) and free, but you do have to register, since attendance is capped for both. On Sunday December 12th, 1500 – 2000 UTC, we will host the very first Demo Day of our flagship 2021 project, the Yak Rover project. We will do demos of the rovers we’ve been building all year, host discussions on the future of robotics, open-source space programs, and much more. There will also be orient...| The Yak Collective
This study group discusses composable and distributed systems throughout the world. It was created as a broadening of our previous blockchain studies. This was the Distributed Systems Study Group until September 2024, at which point it became the CADS group has a broader scope, and covers: Distributed computing (technical) Including Blockchain technologies Distributed computing (social) Distributed systems generally (including swarms in nature etc) The goal is to have a track complementary to...| The Yak Collective
A mostly automated roundup of what the Yak Collective was up to this week. Yaks can jump on the server to join in. If you’re not yet a member, consider joining. Yak Rover updates The Yak Rover project — a project to design a real Mars rover prototype that can actually be built and trialed on Earth, and evolved into a production model that could potentially even be launched to Mars. Roam. This week‘s meeting notes — How and why I connected Wonderful Wandering Growth to the world. Natur...| The Yak Collective
A mostly automated roundup of what the Yak Collective was up to this week. Yaks can jump on the server to join in. If you’re not yet a member, consider joining. channel activity Astonishing Stories. Fiction study group that occasionally publishes speculative fiction General Discussion. I’m looking to assemble a computing reading starter pack that contains, at most, 10 books. Assume, say, an undergrad level of familiarity with computer science and programming. What ten texts are up for inc...| The Yak Collective
A to-be-automated roundup of what the Yak Collective was up to this week. Yaks — jump on the server to join in. If you’re not yet a member, consider joining here. @now ⌗Soapbox. “It is now obvious that the concept of ‘project exhaust’ is central to everything we do here. It is not just fuel for marketing/PR on the website, newsletter, etc, but it is also the input for automation processes. Everybody here is here not only because we all kinda hate being managed, but because we hate...| The Yak Collective
Herewith a roundup of what the Yak Collective is up to this week. Yaks — jump on the server to join in. If you’re not yet a member, consider joining here. @now ⌗Internal Learnings. “[…] bot-based automation is one of the abundance variables we have that I think we should use to cover for the scarcities, in this case of coordination labor. To handle differences over bot UX, perhaps it is worth defining a new ‘yak style bot automation’ project to think them through and arrive at a...| The Yak Collective
Herewith a roundup of what Yak Collective indies have been up to this past week. Yaks can jump on the server to join in. If you’re not yet a Yak Collective member, check us out and consider joining here. ⌗yak rover project updates Stubborn. Completed next iteration of command language. Much more usable. Operability tests performed by a 6-year old to great success. Will plan to focus more on drivability. FFWD command, for example, kicks so hard it registers as an impact. Need to develop so...| The Yak Collective
Herewith a roundup of what Yak Collective indies have been up to this past week. Yaks can jump on the server to join in. If you’re not yet a Yak Collective member, check us out and consider joining here. ⌗soapbox I’ve been wondering, what’s the internal time zone here? Our cadence is driven by “things happen when they happen” and “it’s always lunchtime” (inspired by Douglas Adams megadodo publications/Alice in wonderland mad tea party). It’s a generally slower and more rel...| The Yak Collective
Hello and welcome to Yak Trails, a new occasional roundup of what hundreds of Yak Collective independent consultants have been up to recently in projects and on the Discord server. Yaks can jump on the server to see details. If you’re any flavor of indie consultant and not yet a Yak Collective member, check us out and consider joining us here. ⌗yak rover project updates The Yak Rover project is an effort by Yak Collective to create an open-source rover design capable of being deployed on ...| The Yak Collective
Robotics tinkering for everyone The Yak Robotics Garage (YaRG) is an informal robotics research group with a relatively mature focus on rovers, with an aspirational goal of deploying open-source rovers on Mars, starting with rovers in living rooms on Earth. In 2024, we are starting to explore other verticals besides rovers. Since 2021, we have been tinkering with a variety of both from-scratch and kit-based rovers and robots, and simultaneously exploring current cutting-edge technological tre...| The Yak Collective
2021 has already started off as an eventful year with every Wednesday so far bringing a new global event starting with the Capitol Insurrection leading to the second impeachment of a sitting US President. Then we had Biden Inauguration on Wednesday that followed. Finally, last week we saw Wall Street elites freak out about r/WallStreetBets leading to Melvin Capital requiring a capital infusion that some called a “Capital Insurrection”. January brought to the forefront the growing influenc...| The Yak Collective
Reminder, the annual meeting of the Yak Collective will be held tomorrow, Thursday December 10th at 8 AM Pacific. It’s a public Zoom event, so do drop by if you’re curious to hear what we’ve been up to and what we are hoping to do next year. We’ll talk old projects, new projects, our rapidly evolving infrastructure and production capabilities, Here is the public calendar invite. Topic: Yak Collective Annual Meeting and Holiday Party Time: Dec 10, 2020 08:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Can...| The Yak Collective
An Era of Democratized Access to Frontiers? In the 14th century, around the time of the Black Death, citizen explorers like Ibn Battuta and Petrarch planted the earliest seeds of democratized exploration culture. The Age of Exploration witnessed the voyages of explorers like Zheng He, Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Ferdinand Magellan, who relied on royal patronage. By the 20th century, exploration had become accessible to the educated middle classes, and institutional and state support catalyze...| The Yak Collective
By Benjamin Smith Sometimes I just marvel at the world we live in. People always bitch about the global, remote workforce — a race to the bottom, downward pressure on wages, blah, blah, blah — but here I was getting ready to Virtual HouseGuest with my new girlfriend’s parents for dinner tomorrow, and I was about to get some niche expertise on styling my hair on a Sunday night. When you needed something, no matter how minor, someone, somewhere in the world could help you with it. It was ...| The Yak Collective
Thank you Yak Collective for such an interesting year! Especially in studying how to develop assets within a decentralized large-online community. This newsletter has evolved and changed hands within the year and will continue to ebb & flow as we work on formalizing its structure. In that same vein, I’m interested in YC members who want to contribute to this newsletter, please contact me at praful.mathur+yaktalk@gmail.com. Announcements Yak C Holiday Meetup When: Thursday, December 10th, 8A...| The Yak Collective
By Sachin Benny Vijayan looked down in pain at his programmable forearm tattoo after finishing his last note. The microbots in his arm etched a new web of nodes, mirroring his notetaking system on a Roam graph. His mind had become a tangled graph since his father’s death, now reflected on his arm as a messy graph of interconnected lines for all to see. He gazed into his coffee and cursed under his breath while he thought about the decision to get the Roam microbots. He was now stuck living ...| The Yak Collective
By Chris Butler I jabbed the accept button on one of the many touch surfaces that suddenly popped into reality in my shared office, home, and daycare. Can’t be too eager on your first day of the job. There was a low din of my five-year-old arguing again about what xe would or would not eat for breakfast. Thank god for the AR distraction-canceling face mask. It was cranked up to 98% reality canceling. With it on I could safely ignore the mounting skirmish between little Tovio and my partner....| The Yak Collective
By Scott Garlinger At a certain time, in a certain space, a person may speak or act and find himself under a recent form of judgment: cancellation. Indeed, this algorithmic tribunal stands watch over many, many occurrences and its decrees hold unforeseen consequences. Those people, those consequences, still navigate day-to-day life but haven’t the chance to go back or go forward. This growing body of consequences now finally sees a new option, an outlet for moving forward. A select team, ca...| The Yak Collective
By Benjamin Smith …my algorithm finds that you are currently at the 46th percentile amongst clarinetists in your peer competition group. Practice your arpeggios to improve your score before the final evaluation! 16-year-olds in your city with finely articulated arpeggios generally rank in the top quartile. Those with a strong swing-eighths style generally rank in the top decile. Say ‘practice arpeggios’ or ‘practice swing-eighths’ for a lesson. “Judd!” His father yelled as he wa...| The Yak Collective
Updates This newsletter, Yak Talk, is now being led by Praful Mathur and we’re looking for people who want to discuss what’s impacting Yak Collective members. The ultimate goal of our newsletter is to help consultants and gig workers connect with one another and help facilitate exchange of ideas and increase commerce. If you have gigs you need help with please email: praful.mathur+yakgigs@gmail.com If you have content you want to provide please email: praful.mathur+yaktalk@gmail.com Call ...| The Yak Collective
Weird is part of the job The upside of an extremely uncertain environment is that we have been free to indulge in pure speculation about the known knowns and unknown unknowns of the future. The result is Astonishing Stories, an anthology of short vignettes from the future developed from the networked thoughts of over 30 indie consultants. Our working process is open and visible to all on our Roam graph where we developed provoking descriptions of objects from the near and far future using The...| The Yak Collective
By Nathan Chen There are some activities the wealthy occasionally lust after. But there is one they will never stop avoiding. Koichi gripped his chef’s hat as the metal hand centered itself above the ingredients on the bamboo mat. The fingers twitched with faint whirs as they calibrated. His eyes followed the hand to its arm encased in white plastic, protruding awkwardly from the wall. It was tempting to envision a body on the other side, but Koichi knew from service repairs there were only...| The Yak Collective
A complex latticework of ideas, concepts, frameworks, idioms, neologisms and inspirations swirls around the Yak Collective (and its Yaks). Like so many storms insistent on performing the loudest thunderclap and the brightest flash of lightning, they both clash and complement. Here’s one such inspiration (full quote is, I assure you, definitely necessary here): “Hurling Frootmig was the original founder of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He then established its fundamental princip...| The Yak Collective
In This Week’s Yak Talk: Podcasting Needs Cognitive Hooks How to Become a Tech Contractor Emergent Infrastructure Podcasting Needs Cognitive Hooks by Joseph Ensminger Podcasts could be much more interesting to the audience and the speakers if they had a visual aid that mapped the conversation flow and dubbed points the speakers would like to return to. When I tune into podcasts, the most engaging ones are structured differently: They’re barely post-produced. They’re long-form, usually a...| The Yak Collective
In this week’s Yak Talk, we interview fellow Yak Varun Adibhatla. Varun works as a deployment strategist at Urbint, and also founded ARGO(Advanced Research in Government Operations), with a mission to research and deliver data infrastructure to transform how basic public services are delivered. Earlier this month, Varun teamed up with Alex Wagner(also the editor at Yak Talk) in response to VC Chamath Palihapitiya’s open call to create a proposal for decarbonization, sustainability, and cl...| The Yak Collective
Editor’s Note This is the ninth issue of Yak Talk, Yak Collective’s weekly email newsletter. The newsletter started mid-June, from an observation that Yak should probably have a newsletter. For the first few weeks, I did my best to simply curate applicable links w/r/t the output of Yak Collective, and the blog/email list writings of it’s members. Around the fourth or fifth issue of Yak Talk, a team coalesced: Grigori Milov, as our resident senior consultant, and voice of quality control...| The Yak Collective
This week at Yak Collective: Yak Projects Currently, Yaks are working on: Astonishing Stories, a collection of Yak-authored speculative fiction. Innovation Consulting, a collection of problem and response essays addressing challenges in corporate innovation. Yak-Network-Map, which is an internal experiment that which seeks to foster positive interactions in the Yak network. From the proposal, “the core objective of this experiment is to let a hundred interesting collisions spark among yaks....| The Yak Collective
This week at Yak Collective: We held regular weekly voice chats for “Online Governance Studies”, “BUILD A RIGHT BRAIN / NATURE THEATRE”, and, Jordan Peacock’s weekly reading group for Reza Negarestani’s book, “Intelligence and Spirit”. Vinay Débroureceived a micro-grant from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures program, for his Yak-Network-Map project. This week, Vaughn Tan released his book, The Uncertainty Mindset, “which is about uncertainty, innovation, organizational desi...| The Yak Collective
In This Week’s Yak Talk: The Democratization of Simulation What Exactly Will Transnational Governments Look Like? GPT-3 and “The New Fake Intelligence” Plus: Yak Writings published this week. The Democratization Of Simulation By Matthew Sweet and Joseph Ensminger From time immemorial, humans have conducted thought experiments concerning social systems. Some are lofty: a philosopher asking,“How would a society of benevolent humans that attempts to maximise collective wellbeing unfold?...| The Yak Collective
This week we continue our ⌗trends-and-futures, and ⌗complexity tracks in the newsletter. Next week, we will return with our regular ⌗online-governance-studies track, as well. ⌗trends-and-futures Are K-Pop Stans the Future of Activism? By Alex Wagner On June 20th, US-based members of the Korean-Pop fan community, colloquially known as “K-Pop stans”, trashed a Trump rally in Tulsa, OK. Sadly, this was not the long-awaited first appearance of Antifa supersoldiers, as continually prom...| The Yak Collective
In the fourth issue of Yak Talk, we continue to practice an experimental, but iterative approach to the Yak Collective newsletter. We are in this process of shaping a project that began as a weekly digest into something that is more editorial, engaging and reflective of Yak as a whole, although not necessarily comprehensive. Going forward, Yak Talk writers will be covering specific “tracks”, which are topics that are informed by specific chat rooms in the YC Discord channel. We will be co...| The Yak Collective
“The Dog Daies” It’s been a relatively quiet week at Yak as we lope into the Dog Days of Summer: Pandemic Edition. Historically, the “dog daies”, as medieval scribes called them, begin on July 3rd, and coincide with the time of the year when the Sirius star system appears to come closest to the sun. The name Sirius comes from Homeric Greek, referring to “Orion’s dog”. To the ancient eye, this seemed to be the reason summer was the hottest at this period: the brightest star in ...| The Yak Collective
Sending out a quick reminder that Yak Collective is seeking project contributors for its second round of project ideas. Here’s what you need to know: There are four projects, and each has 2 proposers and 2 referees. Each also is trying to level up previous projects in one way or another, so this third round should hopefully be an overall level-up. You have until Sunday July 5th at 11:59pm to express interest. All projects that get at least 8 expressions of interest in participating will be ...| The Yak Collective
As we meander through the doldrums of the pandemic, the general mood of many, irl and online, seems to be a two-fold acceptance of current events. One, that the pandemic has cozily settled in for the summer, bringing with it second wave of infections and deaths(you could also argue that the first never left). Two, an (even deeper) entrenchment of precarity, which was sufficiently dire for many, pre-COVID. 40+ million Americans have filed jobless claims in the past 10 weeks, with predictions b...| The Yak Collective
Greetings Yaks and fans of Yak, here’s the latest from Yak Collective. Yak Content This Week: Jordan Peacock on the Founders Live podcast, discussing YC’s Don’t Waste the Reboot project, and his work as CEO and co-founder of Becoming Machinic. In A New Old Pattern Language, Shreeda Sagan examines how to create “patterns of living that let us thrive not only alongside, but integrated with, technology”. Thomas Holland writes on the importance of “minimum-viable novelty” in a fully...| The Yak Collective
Welcome to the Yak Collective Weekly Digest, Yak Talk. Released every Friday at 12p EST, Yak Talk will contain a digest of Yak Collective updates, project launches, and other announcements. For those not familiar, the Yak Collective is a loosely coordinated network of over 300 independent consultants, coaches, and freelancers with varied technical and creative skills. The New Old Home Last week, we released our second report, The New Old Home, which offers 22 perspectives built around Pamela ...| The Yak Collective
Rediscovering the Home as a Production Frontier The Yak Collective’s second report, The New Old Home, offers 22 perspectives built around Pamela Hobart’s central thesis: as work returns to the home in the form of remote work opportunities (a trend now dramatically accelerated by pandemic circumstances), we can turn to historical modes of integrated living, reconsidered in light of newer technology, to guide our attempts at co-located life and work. Many of our contributors are balancing t...| The Yak Collective
The Yak Collective Infrastructure team maintains this website, as well as a variety of Discord bots and related infrastructure.| www.yakcollective.org
Making the Next Normal Better Than the Last One The inaugural report by the Yak Collective, Don’t Waste the Reboot offers organizations a smorgasbord of 25 creative and unexpected provocations, ideas, and action frameworks to navigate the COVID-19 crisis.| www.yakcollective.org
The Yak Collective is an online space for collaborative tinkering. You can learn more about the what, why, and how on the about page.| www.yakcollective.org