[FRIAM] Dead Stack?

[Steve Smith]

Gary -

I was only "adjacent" to BiosGroup during it's heydey (hay-day?)... but 
had a love-hate relationship with Stu's work/presence even stronger than 
I had with SFI as it grew out of it's original amazing little polyp of 
fascinating people and topics.  I don't think I ever "met" you in 
person, in spite of a dozen offline convos we've had and my own 
fascination with your choice/style of expatriation.   You are, in fact, 
roughly half-a-hemisphere away?  In a semi-familiar enclave in a 
less-familiar embedding in a similarly unfamiliar region of the world.

I don't know how many folks made pilgrimages TO the area specificially 
to engage in such activites.  Did you move here for Bios or were you 
already here for other reasons?

I bumped into a Paywall with WIRED on the topic of "InfoMesa" rather 
than "Silicon Mesa".  My faulty memory has whiffs of references to 
"Silicon Gulch" or "Silicon Arroyo" but those terms may never have made 
it into print (digital or paper)?  Not to conflate with Silicon Alley 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Alley> in Manhattan or Silicon 
Ailee as Berlin 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Silicon_Allee&redirect=no> 
(Jochen?)?

    https://www.wired.com/2000/06/infomesa/

    https://pubsapp.acs.org/subscribe/archive/mdd/v04/i10/html/10money.html?

and a little more digging took me to the *book* Ed Regis published 
following the article in wired:

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/418288.The_Info_Mesa

I recognize the cover so I probably had it in my hands at one time...

I think these references were more about the complexity-adjacent field 
of Infomatics...   I know we have veterans of SFI, Daylight/OpenEye, 
maybe QForma, and certainly/of-course SFx and RedFish/SimTable.

- Steve

On 2/4/26 11:31 am, Gary Schiltz wrote:
> My feeling is that there was a bubble of activity in Santa Fe about 
> complexity in the late 1990s (see Wired’s article about “Silicon 
> Mesa”) that burst in about 2001. Many who were there are now old farts 😆
>
> On Tue, Feb 3, 2026 at 7:47 PM Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     I know I came to this group in what appears to be its twilight.
>     The in-person meetups are weirdly sad. I feel pressed to ask if it
>     is the case that everyone is either:
>
>     1. on vacation/ too busy
>     2. too depressed / failing to find inspiration
>     3. moved on to greener forums
>     4. preferring the company of LLMs
>     ...
>     N. waiting for someone frail to post
>
>     Sometimes I trawl reddit or whatever discord, but I cannot help
>     but feel like beacons of inspiration are becoming fewer and
>     further between. This group has managed to inspire me, keep my
>     interest, for over a decade. In that time, I pushed myself to
>     understand perspectives that I would never have dreamed existed. I
>     hope there is still something to talk about.
>
>
>
>
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