[FRIAM] What is FRIAM and is it still alive

Wed Aug 12 11:50:05 EDT 2026

I once wrote an ABM of the Swarm principals. (I undersold it at the time, it was a decent sketch of how to use the Java layer.) I bet Claude or GPT could read the whole FRIAM archive and build an ontology and a simulation. Calibrating it to the message rates (yeah, thinking of Europe and Australia too) and the personalities would take some work, but I bet it could be done. Each conspicuous person could be a LLM fine-tuned to FRIAM content. That would include people like Dave that insist that no such high-fidelity model is possible. Or there could be skill files to avoid coding. A few paragraphs on someone like Doug Roberts would be a no-brainer. Maybe the approach could be applied to family therapy too. 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of jofr <jofr at cas-group.net>
Date: Wednesday, August 12, 2026 at 8:32 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What is FRIAM and is it still alive 

A simple model is based on timezones. When I post something at 9 AM CET (or CEST) Central European Time, then I usually get no response before 5 PM when it it is 8 AM in California and 9 AM in Santa Fe. The posting times reflect where a person is physically located. 

The rest is more or less unpredictable. Posts could be correlated to even more posts. Some kind of self-reinforcing bubble. It also reminds me of the famous El-Farol Bar Problem which predicts visitors for a bar. Does this bar still exist in Santa Fe? 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Farol_Bar_problem 

In general it seems to be unpredictable. I posted for example less in recent weeks because my mail server provider from New York changed the settings and I had difficulties to access this email account I am using now. 

-J. 

-------- Original message -------- 

From: Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> 

Date: 8/12/26 5:05 PM (GMT+01:00) 

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> 

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What is FRIAM and is it still alive 

I was looking for a (null space) model of when and why a post occurs. Like why a person would reach for the remote and change the TV station. It may have nothing to do with the coherence or silliness of any particular programming. Like going out for a cup of coffee or a smoke. 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of jofr <jofr at cas-group.net>
Date: Wednesday, August 12, 2026 at 7:58 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What is FRIAM and is it still alive 

You mean a "credit model" depending on correspondence length and authorship time? GitHub has a statistics page for repositories which shows who has committed the most lines in what timeframe. And some open source frameworks like Ruby on Rails list their most active contributors https://contributors.rubyonrails.org 

ChatGPT says about you Marcus that you are the most active poster by a substantial margin. You win clearly in this category. 

Nick and Glen are funnier according to ChatGPT though. ChatGPT is particularly fond of the Nick's post "All those who think Steve was wrong raise your hands" and Glen's post "Say it again … Say it again in a different way … Again … Again, damnit!" 

-J. 

-------- Original message -------- 

From: Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> 

Date: 8/12/26 4:28 PM (GMT+01:00) 

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> 

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What is FRIAM and is it still alive 

Correspondence length and apparent authorship time that follows the distribution of a compile/link cycle or system integration test suite execution duration? 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of jofr at cas-group.net <jofr at cas-group.net>
Date: Wednesday, August 12, 2026 at 4:50 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What is FRIAM and is it still alive 

ChatGPT proposed these two laws:

FRIAM's First Law: We take difficult philosophical problems and worry 
them to death until someone produces either a profound insight, a 
completely insane hypothesis, or a phrase like "quantum woo".

FRIAM's Second Law: If a theory is suspiciously elegant, somebody on the 
list will throw a shoe at it.

The reason I have asked ChatGPT and Gemini is I am writing a new 
self-published book, and the first chapter is about FRIAM. Their 
summaries are surprisingly good. I asked them to find funny anecdotes in 
the FRIAM archives and they found a post from Nick that said "OK 
friammers, All those who think Steve was wrong raise your hands" :-)

If you do NOT want to be mentioned in the chapter because it is too much 
quantum woo for you then please let me know or raise your hand. Will 
share a draft in a few days.

-J.

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