You see the wind-up, and here's the pitch.

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Build Missing Pieces, in Public.

Operand Company has an ongoing marriage to open-source programming. This is a challenging dynamic to uphold, because the year is 2025 and we're all challenged beyond measure. Global telepathy landed on Earth around 45 years ago, and in 45 small years all of us slipped loose our sanity.

In the end, global communication really sucks. There's so many people to care for, so much pain to sense, that all of us go numb from the simple reckoning.

There's no turning back the dial on this one, though. The speedometer is cranked up and the brakes line snapped, so let's keep heading for the open spaces and seek a means of adding some friction to the mix.

Here's how to build some new brakes into the speeding global economy, at 299,792,458 meters per second. Buckle up.

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Missing Piece # 1: Media ON-line (MON)

Music production is big business, and so are the programs used to make modern songs. You need sample packs, percussion patterns, bass lines, input controllers for MIDI. Then you get into live playback and recording, using loop pedals and sequencers. You can build a full rack of gear, for plug-and-play operation of your precisely-tuned signals.

Many people leap the queue, and purchase Logic Studio, ProTools, Ableton, or BitWig. These programs are the big incumbents, and there are others besides. The open-source choices are unable to keep pace; although more of the building blocks for these programs are ready to go than ever before.

Full programming languages and sound-rendering playgrounds are up and running today: Faust, Strudel, and VCV Rack are the primaries. Of these, more colourful combinations can be mixed.

Audio? Sounds like a good place to begin, sure. I'm especially eager to see how graphics and motion can be blended into the mix; made of a signal, channel, frame - all the same. You may also see some Friction animations used to explain coding ideas on this domain soon!

Open Source programming has a rare chance to leap a full industry ahead in the music space, based on research being done in a field of programming called Local-First; mainly based on a collaboration library called Automerge by Ink and Switch alongside a messaging layer called Iroh by number0.

Sorry, in build-mode already. Hurry up and help!

These programming approaches enable full production groups, small media businesses, and independent band members to all log onto the same program space, modifying the same media landscape with all cursors on one page.

I've spoken to band members who assembled albums by emailing home recordings to one another.

Seriously, dudes. Upgrade already!

Build in the open, or share your media broadly so more people can remix than anyone heresofar has imagined possible.

The age of open-source code needs to embrace and enable the age of open-source media.

Pass the mic around! I need that new sound. (open-mic freestyle session at The Pocket, DC)

Missing Piece # 2: 3D-grees (D3G)

Once you're done splicing Faust, Strudel and VCV Rack - hold on, hurry up!

We're gonna take on this one in parallel. To begin, here's some background on how open-source is coming along in realspace.

If you click around the documentation pages of Open Source Ecology, you'll come across designs for fully-functional housing modules, industrial-grade farm equipment, a car, a bakery oven, bioplastics extruders and welders -- seriously, go click on the documentation and be as amazed as I am.

All of this gear is designed to be rapidly-reproducible from basic supplies. These designs can be passed freely across the globe for a shipping fee of zero point zero. Once someone with a need has the designs, though -- how are they to use them?

Even basic 3d-printing has had a hurdle to hop for beginners, and many are limited in the field by the lack of knowledge of 3d-modeling programs. 3d catalogues like Thingiverse, Thangs, and company are all good for the quick fix, but complex pieces are held up from - existence? production? realization? - because so many people need to learn complex modeling programs.

Again, the industry has been siezed up in an iron-clad grip by SolidWorks, AutoDesk's Fusion360, and now the modern challenger Zoo. These and similar programs that place the opening bid at a corporate or academic license.

Such predatory pricing policies place precarious pressures precisely on pupils preparing precious public production plans. Please, people.

Already in this space? If you're dedicated to building re-usable designs, you're likely using the cumbersome combination of OpenSCAD or FreeCAD. Perhaps you've had to bend Blender, a 3d-animation program, to the requirements of solid engineering. Shapr3d promises to do all they can to lock your designs in the cloud until they're properly mined for machine-learning models. If you're using anything else that doesn't require corporate or academic sponsorship, please message me because there's a species on Earth that dearly needs to know about it.

So, the moment we've all been eagerly asking for: a mission up to the serious skills of all those misguided and misanthropic independent game production businesses (mine included?).

People know how to do 3d modeling for games, and they'll push silicon to the edge of physics and back for a chance to see the machine humming through complex scenarios.

A simple forum and all the moderation should be all it takes to get this ball rolling. And screws turning. And cylinders firing.

Solid plan!

Missing Piece # 3: Mesh INDex (MIND)

Here's a lesser-recognized issue to cap off the tables.

I've heard here and there, rumors of a "graph database", called Neo4j that is able to accomplish some miraculous indexing and domain-modeling challenges.

In this sense, "domain-modeling" means we are no longer producing signals as in missing piece #1 (MON), or shapes as in missing piece #2 (D3G). We're modeling a space to explore ideas, and the links from one idea to another. If you've had a chance to explore WikiData, this needs no explanation.

So, I had some luck running Neo4j and quickly asked if anything else is out there. I had a read-up on the curiously-named Apache Tinkerpop, which has a nice summary of the current options for graph databases in production. 26 currently, is my enumeration, and once I clicked through to the source code, I learned that one is obsolete, one fails to support the common Cypher query language, and the remaining 24 are made in Java.

This is the reason no one uses open-source, because there's a huge missing piece in the middle.

Databases are becoming simply incredible. As long as you use relational databases. I could explain all that's going on these days in ElectricSQL, Jazz, Graft, and heck - I'll throw in a bonus document-store database because we already spoke of Automerge.

All that's going on these days in ElectricSQL, Jazz, Graft, and Automerge - is sync.

Sync is here. Sync is good. Use sync.

Sync also needs to happen in graph databases.

Sync to graph databases means offline Wikipedia - only the pages you care for, or the search results you choose, or the idea you're researching plus the pages reachable in 3 - no, 4 clicks. Sync means offline mode. Offline social media. Sync means "I SAID DO NOT DISTURB!"

Sync means so much, and graph exploration means so much, because there's simply too much of this online mess to care for all of it at once. So graph the pieces you see, map the links you care to see, and finally query using a model that has a clear analogy to the way we all already see the online sphere.

Once you see the problem space clearly, you can make the connections you need. These graphing problems are the basis of Operand's diagrams in D2; these nuanced maps could be made in seconds, from real sources rather than LLM hallucinations.

Best yet? That Cypher query language I lobbed up earlier is really OpenCypher, a full spec of how graph databases should operate. A full spec that can be clicked into any programming language we choose (Rust) to put production into hyperspeed.

Since we're in Rust already, you know we're going for client-side webassembly. You can be sure we're going to do in-memory programming-language embedding, so you can graph database from your Python or your Ruby or your Elixir or your Go. Rust means all languages are good to go from day one, and the people who like clicking the keys on their mouse more than on their keyboard are on equal ground for exploring the scenes.

There's so much to explore! And so much more we can do, once we add meaning to and purpose to the scene.

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I hope to speak on these ideas soon, and perhaps record some ensuing discussions. There shall be forums for sure. Please message sponsor@operand.online, because my parents are sick of paying for my 5g charges, and the builders in Baltimore are gulping up all our cheap ramen.

Peace, please people. Happy to help.