It’s Daniel. Together with Matt, we are building Inanimate - devices and a platform to transform any home or workplace into an agentic environment. This is our route to human-agent augmentation. 

If you’re new here - welcome! Thanks for signing up for Lab Notes. This is our record of our work and thoughts as we ship Inanimate.

It’s written by humans and published every two-weeks-ish. Enjoy!

Here’s what’s been happening since the last note.

We’ve just wrapped up our time at the amazing Betaworks Agent Systems Camp!

It was a 12-week, in-person “hack/build/grow thing”, which honestly defies easy explanation. An ex-camper called it “YC for cool kids”.

But it’s best understood as an outgrowth of Betaworks’ former incarnation as a venture studio, and a manifestation of the values and experience of John and the team. That is - teams of a similar stage, and similar view of the future, grouped into a theme, that co-locate, get a lot out of the experience, and succeed together.

And it’s true! The proof is in the companies that have grown with Betaworks support - like Twitter, Tumblr, Giphy, Bitly, Granola, Hugging Face, The Browser Company, Sandbar, Instapaper (personal fav) and so many more. 

Camp is hosted at Betaworks’ studio in New York’s meatpacking district. Each camp is thematic. This one was about Agent Systems - that is, a product or company where “agentic AI elements interact and compose an integrated whole.”

So what were people building?

New vision models, agent-friendly messaging, adaptive software infrastructure, personal agents, and other fascinating new ventures.

Last week was Demo Day. While not the focus of Camp, it is one of the big moments.

In our demo, we shared our vision for the future of human-agent augmentation. We then ran the packed room through three live demos of what it’s like to work alongside Inanimate. We had our agent, devices, and platform, all running live. It was our first public demo, and we got some incredible feedback (including from legend Denis Crowley!). 

Huge thanks to John Borthwick, Jordan, JC, Analisa, and everyone involved in running camp. Super grateful to you all.

Betaworks is a special place, made that way by special people. It sits at the centre of a community, which we are now humbled to be part of. 

Good luck to all the campers on the journey ahead. Onwards!

We’ve been… prototyping new experiences and interactions, writing demo scripts, building tech to help show use cases live, singing karaoke, running along the Hudson River, and battling jet lag!

Here’s what’s been influencing and inspiring me since the last note.

For a long time, building your own PC was the best way to get a computer that wasn’t slow and expensive. Plus, by choosing your own components and adding some flare, you could make it personal to you.

Then Apple, Dell, and others started making great pre-built machines. Laptops took over as our primary computers and the incentives to build and modify your own machine fell away.

But people like to personalise. They want to hack their own tech, challenging themselves to build and run awesome, weird machines, and create a device that is unique, and personal to them. 

Enter: the cyberDeck.

Take a single-board computer (see: Raspberry Pi), add a cheap LED display, keyboard/wheel, and power pack, then print (or upcycle) a custom case, and you have your own cyberDeck. William Gibson would be proud!

What’s driving people to do this?

It’s cheap. As an outgrowth of the Shenzhen consumer electronics ecosystem, it might be only $150 for a simple build.

It’s challenging. You explore technical (LiPo batteries, I/O) and creative skill, but you build together as part of an online community finding their way.

It’s shareable. Devices look so unique, that a slop-doubletake is needed to check you are not being duped. Hardware is the new media.

You can’t buy them. You need to build your own.

Hobbyists and elite hardware hackers are sharing their results on TikTok and Reddit. Aesthetics range from Mil-tech and retro-gamer to fashion and steam punk. Some favourite cyberDecks below. 

What are you waiting for?

In Our Time is the BBC’s long-standing radio show where academics perform a speedrun on their specialist topic. In over 1000 episodes, from “The Theory of Colour” to “The Battle of Clontarf”, they have covered almost everything.

Almost. Now under new management, In Our Time got round to one of our favourite tech history rabbit holes - cybernetics!

Listen on BBC Sounds. And check Matt’s Braggoscope visualiser of the In Our Time archive here, which recently got him a nod in the Economist!

Truly iconic consumer electronics companies are about more than feature-led “we did it because we can” devices.

Behind the hardware, is a team with values, distinct beliefs, and with a different vision of the future they are willing to take risks to make real, all communicated in novel, creative ways.

Friend of the house, James Greenfield from Koto, last week called on consumer electronics brands to move beyond product marketing, and “create worlds people want to belong to.” 

This. 100x this. Read it here.

After 13 years of silence, Boards of Canada signalled their return last month…

“...when a handful of fans reported receiving VHS tapes imprinted with BoC’s hexagon-mesh logo. According to the obsessive archivists at BoC Pages, the tapes contain audio for an ad for a Christian bible school magazine that stopped publishing in 1991.”

Shortly after, they announced a new album - Inferno - which is due for release on 29th May.

Electronic music fans are losing their minds. The Boards of Canada subreddit melted down. 

For good reason. Boards of Canada are arguably one of the greatest electronic music groups of all time. Their music is the refrain to the argument that music without a singer has no voice.

But what do they sound like?

It’s psychedelic, it’s hypnotic, it’s “evocative, mournful, sample-laden downtempo music often sounding as though produced on malfunctioning equipment excavated from the ruins of an early-'70s computer lab.” (Wikipedia) 

Pre-Save the album here and sample the aesthetics below. Can’t wait.

Psst! If you reply to this I will email back. Imagine that!

Talk soon.

Daniel