I think a globally sourced profile of each person is best. You don't need a (L)LM ... or if you do, you'd have to somehow implement eras. I believe (but can't defend) that people have said different things (and in different ways) over the course of their contributions ... maybe partly in response to reactions to their posts, here. But also as an evolution of their meatspace generator. In any case, Dave and Russ have substack blogs, which can be used for training. We know EricS communicates in other fora. I'm sure a lot of us do. Tom's got artifacts like that SFNM opinion piece. Frank has a memoir. Etc.
As Nick's lamented several times, the bare content of the posts isn't adequate for a publication (or any coherent artifact - even a simulation). It's similar (I'm told) with novels. You don't actually write a novel, you write a *world* in which the novel takes place - or the good writers do anyway. Training merely on the posts here will , I think, result in degen and boring output. On 8/12/26 8:50 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
I once wrote an ABM of the Swarm principals. (I undersold it at the time, it was a decent sketch of how to use the Java layer.) I bet Claude or GPT could read the whole FRIAM archive and build an ontology and a simulation. Calibrating it to the message rates (yeah, thinking of Europe and Australia too) and the personalities would take some work, but I bet it could be done. Each conspicuous person could be a LLM fine-tuned to FRIAM content. That would include people like Dave that insist that no such high-fidelity model is possible. Or there could be skill files to avoid coding. A few paragraphs on someone like Doug Roberts would be a no-brainer. Maybe the approach could be applied to family therapy too. *From: *Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of jofr <[email protected]> *Date: *Wednesday, August 12, 2026 at 8:32 AM *To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> *Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] What is FRIAM and is it still alive A simple model is based on timezones. When I post something at 9 AM CET (or CEST) Central European Time, then I usually get no response before 5 PM when it it is 8 AM in California and 9 AM in Santa Fe. The posting times reflect where a person is physically located. The rest is more or less unpredictable. Posts could be correlated to even more posts. Some kind of self-reinforcing bubble. It also reminds me of the famous El-Farol Bar Problem which predicts visitors for a bar. Does this bar still exist in Santa Fe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Farol_Bar_problem In general it seems to be unpredictable. I posted for example less in recent weeks because my mail server provider from New York changed the settings and I had difficulties to access this email account I am using now. -J. -------- Original message -------- From: Marcus Daniels <[email protected]> Date: 8/12/26 5:05 PM (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What is FRIAM and is it still alive I was looking for a (null space) model of when and why a post occurs. Like why a person would reach for the remote and change the TV station. It may have nothing to do with the coherence or silliness of any particular programming. Like going out for a cup of coffee or a smoke. *From: *Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of jofr <[email protected]> *Date: *Wednesday, August 12, 2026 at 7:58 AM *To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> *Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] What is FRIAM and is it still alive You mean a "credit model" depending on correspondence length and authorship time? GitHub has a statistics page for repositories which shows who has committed the most lines in what timeframe. And some open source frameworks like Ruby on Rails list their most active contributors https://contributors.rubyonrails.org ChatGPT says about you Marcus that you are the most active poster by a substantial margin. You win clearly in this category. Nick and Glen are funnier according to ChatGPT though. ChatGPT is particularly fond of the Nick's post "All those who think Steve was wrong raise your hands" and Glen's post "Say it again … Say it again in a different way … Again … Again, damnit!" -J. -------- Original message -------- From: Marcus Daniels <[email protected]> Date: 8/12/26 4:28 PM (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What is FRIAM and is it still alive Correspondence length and apparent authorship time that follows the distribution of a compile/link cycle or system integration test suite execution duration? *From: *Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of [email protected] <[email protected]> *Date: *Wednesday, August 12, 2026 at 4:50 AM *To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> *Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] What is FRIAM and is it still alive ChatGPT proposed these two laws: FRIAM's First Law: We take difficult philosophical problems and worry them to death until someone produces either a profound insight, a completely insane hypothesis, or a phrase like "quantum woo". FRIAM's Second Law: If a theory is suspiciously elegant, somebody on the list will throw a shoe at it. The reason I have asked ChatGPT and Gemini is I am writing a new self-published book, and the first chapter is about FRIAM. Their summaries are surprisingly good. I asked them to find funny anecdotes in the FRIAM archives and they found a post from Nick that said "OK friammers, All those who think Steve was wrong raise your hands" :-) If you do NOT want to be mentioned in the chapter because it is too much quantum woo for you then please let me know or raise your hand. Will share a draft in a few days. -J.
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