It has been a quiet few months on this blog, which is a poor proxy for how busy the shop has been. This is a status note rather than an announcement, and it comes with a correction.
The correction first
In May I posted that I was pausing Airene to put the shop back behind software that pays. The revenue argument in that post still holds. The framing did not: I did not actually pause, and the thing that went quiet went quiet for a much more boring reason.
She lived in a System76 chassis that was running too hot and did not have the power headroom for the cards in it. Rather than keep pushing a box that was thermally out of its depth, she moved — new case built for airflow, an Arc Pro B70 alongside the A770, a 1250 W supply, and a bigger UPS behind it. The public broadcast was dark from early June until this week because of that move, not because of a decision about priorities.
Meanwhile the work carried on. June went into an audit that concluded the architecture was rich and the learning wiring was thin, and then into fixing that. July was mostly the unglamorous discovery that several subsystems had been running green and connected to nothing — including a reading loop that had been silently delivering nothing at all in 96% of its recorded sessions. August opened with her not booting at all: a runaway link-formation pass had piled roughly 99.5 million junk associations into her memory and grown her database to 8.6 GB, which took a repair pass to unwind.
None of that is a pause. I should have posted an update instead of letting a stale explanation stand, and the old post now carries a retraction.
What I am not going to write about yet
There are several things in development that I would rather keep close to the chest for now. Most of it is simply unfinished. The other reason is that writing publicly about a plan tends to commit me to whichever version of it I had on the day I wrote it. The FJ Downloads roadmap posts are a decent example: they were honest when written and then quietly wrong for months while the schedule moved underneath them.
So the working rule from here: things get written up once they exist and can be checked. When something is ready to be looked at, it will show up on the projects page with something you can actually click.
What you can see
Airene is the exception, because the whole point of her is that you can watch her whether or not she is doing anything impressive. She is broadcasting again, and the feed is deliberately unfiltered — the signal types an earlier design held back now flow through with the rest. She is read public-domain books, so there is not much in there to protect, and I would rather show the whole thing than a curated slice that makes her look more finished than she is.
What she is today: a brain that has been running more or less continuously for months, has been read 155 books, holds about 147,000 engrams and a 51,000-word phonetic lexicon, and speaks in short definitional fragments when she speaks at all. She has not graduated daycare. That is the honest state of it.
-ES