It’s been a little over a year since I decided to take a leap and start Flower with Sam.

Since then, we’ve assembled a small crew of four, leased office space near our good friends, built a variety of custom furniture, launched a social network named Yuma, threw an office-warming, and had a good time along the way. It feels like a small pirate crew, a band of people with an insane collective vision for the future.

In each of our own particular ways, we believe in magic and want to weave magic into the fabric of reality.

Jenny and I had a second daughter. Her name is Daisy. Our first child, Elle, is starting to exhibit the ability to improvise humor. At breakfast the other day, she pretended to act mad, but would crack at the slightest sign of us smiling or laughing at her. She’d laugh and laugh and attempt to put on her serious face again, and we’d keep laughing in a loop…

Life of all sorts is blooming all over the place.

Without a doubt, attempting to build up a long-lasting organization and a small family at the same time is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever subjected myself to. I’m lucky to be surrounded by people in my life who impart great energy and optimism and wisdom, among other things. I am kept nourished through the harder times.

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I was inspired to take a moment to reflect on the year for a mundane reason: We’re actively reasoning through the next stage of our company’s life, settling ourselves into a particular form optimized for the current market/economic macro (all companies are organisms of a certain sort, after all), and figuring out how to communicate it all succinctly and commercially in a manner that will have people seeing dollar signs, and so on.

I’ve been shopping out our latest company memo to some close friends and people who generally understand what we’re up to. So far, each has recognized that we’re chipping away at an unexpectedly huge problem area — A massive opportunity that appears to have slipped by most people’s awareness in our industry. Our friends are starting to see. I think more people are going to see soon.

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Flower has been established to transmute an inert world into a world full of life. If we’re successful, you’ll see the magic in all things.

Life of all sorts is blooming all over the place.

Perhaps the most succinct way to explain Flower is that we’re interested in surfacing “the life of everything”.

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On September 17th, my second child was born. Her name’s Daisy.

In the three days we were in the hospital before and after her birth, I was struck by how calm Jenny and I were, how normal everything felt. I suppose what they say about first and second children is true.

On the first night of our stay, I was pacing the hallway adjoining the room where they keep babies in incubator-like bubbles and was thinking about how I have a tendency to allow spaces/environments to impress themselves upon me — I remember most places I’ve been, all sorts of nooks and crannies, the relative cardinal directions in each location. It is as though I become a soft material and I allow myself to be wrapped by a space and I conform myself to it. I’ve been aware of this aspect of myself for a long time, since I was a child. It’s not photographic memory but something close. I could close my eyes and wander everywhere I’ve ever been in reverse.

Daisy was born in the same hospital as Elle, a year and a half ago or so I was in the same hallway, thinking the same thoughts.

It's early June!

I've been writing a lot, but the vast majority of it will never see the light of day: This is the personal sense-making shit, rough notes, synthesis, scraps, etc.

Today while waiting for water to boil in my kitchen, I was scrolling through some old tweets of mine to find a particular picture of a kindle embedded in sand.

I ended up stumbling on a tweet I wrote that stated:

"Anything can be a timer/clock"

This led me to a realization that there's a pretty terrible issue at play with modern LLMs — they lack a (usable) sense of time, meaningful time-scale, and internal datekeeping, making them useless for a wide swath of ordinary human activity involving ongoing timekeeping.

I was reminded that the Animal Crossing series has always had a pretty tight gameplay loop around the time of day one interacts with villagers, or points of interest in the game. To my knowledge, most popular LLM chat interfaces that have been built maintain zero relationship with the flow of time — You might be messaging chatGPT 4o at 4am and it has no real idea, nor does it care why you're messaging it so late.

Given the line of exploration I've been taking when it comes to flower computers, I was thinking it would be pretty interesting for all objects in the known universe to have a sense of time apart from the earth's orbit around the sun, or the turn of the earth on its axis. What does a papaya's calendar look like? What sort of timers might people share with one another embedded in ordinary objects?

A few months ago while first cracking into learning Swift, I thought a fun beginner project might be a simple one-function app for sharing timers with friends. I still think this is an idea worth prototyping.

Thinking about carbon dating, tree rings, carbon credits, orbits, tides, circle packing, etc.