Beam Manifesto – A Tool for Thoughts

That's a really good feat, selling vague terms for 3 million. And I'm not really joking.

I feel right there with you, a few years behind, but also feeling adrift post-graduation. It feels as if there's been a "junk foodification" of digital bytes (pun intended), with our relationship with digital content becoming more ephemeral. For all the miles we scroll and all the paths of URLs we travel, there is very little that allows us to create maps, way-markers or any form of bread-crumbs for us to follow later.

Because we don't have good ways to store away content for later, it sometimes feel like we are cursed to wander aimlessly, creating files and bookmarks here and there, with no real aim or purpose. On the one hand, the world of cyberspace is almost seductive for its incredible vastness and on the other, it is almost paralyzing to explore without a proper set of tools.

I am anxious for tools designed to assist in forging paths through digital ecosystems, establishing a map over digital landscapes that enable me to understand the land, and how to travel through it. Without these, it feels that whatever I do will radically fall short of what I could do.

Without the fluff, what the hell is beam?

Also, per HN guidelines soliciting upvotes [1] is forbidden, which explains why this is in the front page even though no one can understand what this is.

[1] https://twitter.com/domleca/status/1318593216363569152

(Note: I am in the early stages of developing out ideas for a similar tool, so feel free to answer with discretion.)

Part of my problem with the current software toolset is that almost all allow a single view over a document or a webpage. In the physical world, I can have multiple books or papers open in front of me, drawing from a collection of sources concurrently rather than a single one serially. Additionally, if I open something between different apps, there is no integrated way to annotate at a layer above documents.

- What do you envision as a proper interface for digital exploration? - Will it allow for digesting multiple sources at once? - What will annotation, tagging and relations between documents look like?

There are references to "structured content" and the organic "building up [of] knowledge" in the Beam-ifesto. The most ready structure that I have been working with is a network of nodes, each representing a unit of digital data (a document), which can be found by file URL or by http URL. To relate these nodes, one could form "node structures" that abstract multiple nodes into a structure of some form (list, table, group, hierarchal links, etc). This offers abstraction and composability between digital concepts. While this may be private, I'm curious how you are picturing the "database" aspect of your product.

- Are you drawing at all from what we know about neural storage in your development of a "digital database"? - How are you enumerating the possible relational structures for multiple objects?