LAI Devlog 0x01

LAI Repo

I've said before that it is my belief that we're well behind on how we interface with the internet.

I've worked in cyber security for a decade now. Almost all of that has been remote. You're telling me after all that time, the best mode of team collaboration across a networked company is still SharePoint, Slack, Outlook, Confluence and Jira? We can process petabytes of data on a daily basis, but the best way we can come up with to present that data is through Grafana?

In the 20 years or so I've been using the internet, we've come a long way. Most sites then were static. YouTube was around but it was very slow to load a 144p video, even if it still felt like magic. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, all of these technological marvels later, and a lot of change has taken place... but not that much.

Yeah, JavaScript and later JS frameworks gave us a much more dynamic experience. Beefed up hardware and leaps and bounds in data streaming gave us 4k ultra HD streaming to phones that fit in our pockets and have more compute power than most clunky gray desktops of 20 years ago had. But the way we interface with the world is still through a flat screen, rendered with HTML, JavaScript and CSS.

The way we interact with data on the web is still mostly through websockets and REST API endpoints. Most of our interactions are through clicks. We are phenomenally interconnected, but our closest friends and family members are very little more than a blue hyperlink on our screen. We tap a keyboard, maybe hop into a Discord voice chat, and stare at a flat screen full of text for the majority of our networking and socialization.

Our data visualization is extremely similar to how it was before I was even born. Line graphs, bar charts, long, long charts of logs. All two dimensional. Fairly little you can do aside from spicing up the colors, fixing the spacing and trying to make the data presentation as readable as possible.

We have access to more data than anyone ten to fifteen years ago thought would be possible, but the way we present it is still bar charts on HTML screens if we're lucky, PDF files with questionable machine parsability if we're not.

Parsability is another matter entirely. We're well into the Age of Agents now, but we're still building the way they interact with and visualize data on top of this antiquated world. In some ways, this works: they can parse flat text data extremely well. The way they present their own information is still just as limited as our own. The way they interact with the world is still just as limited as our own. We have so much power at our disposal, but we're still spending most of our day clicking around with a mouse and keyboard.

Collaboration, networking, research, all of this can and should change. LAI(N) is my experiment into changing it. We're going to build the Metaverse that's actually useful.