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Júnior Mendes
Júnior Mendes

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Building my own Zero Dawn platform

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS TO THE ORIGINAL HORIZON GAME.

Some weeks ago, I started thinking about bots due to the Brazilian software developers' community migration from X to Bluesky. This was motivated by the flexibility of the platform, which gives back that good old feeling of "you can create your own Jarvis if you know how."

At first, my idea was to create a lot of bots: a thread "unroller" (which would build a markdown page with all posts from a given thread), maybe a Pocket-like bookmark helper, etc. However, soon the "big picture" popped into my mind: what about making a whole ecosystem of bots? Something like Gaia and the subordinate functions from Horizon Zero Dawn? Here's the original "blueet" at Bluesky (in pt-BR):

[1/N] Eis a ideia número #2, que vou começar a pensar como fazer: um ecossistema de bots, bem inspirado (pra não dizer parodia) em Horizon zero dawn. O próximo posto que vou fazer disso vai ser literalmente um teste em prod, mas vou deixar aqui como tô matutando essa parada:

— Mendes (@mendes.software) September 7, 2024 at 10:28 AM

That's how the idea of the Rainbow Platform started.

The Concept (So Far)

Even though it all started with bots and Bluesky, the overall concept is broader: a complete ecosystem based on Microkernel Architecture that can be plugged into any platform with social interaction and some bot SDK (e.g., Slack, Discord, Bsky, Telegram). This platform would have some "global back-office," something close to the AWS Console. The core functionalities would include user interface (chat, LLM, CLI), moderation (abuse reporting, spam control), connection with the platforms (i.e., SDK adapters), and extensibility itself.

The Lore

Zero Dawn in-game explanation

Horizon Zero Dawn is one of the greatest games of the last 10 years, mostly due to its brand new "tech post-apocalyptic" world. You can read about Zero Dawn at the fandom page, but I'll give you some TL;DR bullet points (spoiler alert):

  1. The world is ending (a.k.a. Skynet has been created).
  2. The best engineers and specialists alive are reunited to create the "good Skynet" to fight for us.
  3. This good AI is called "Zero Dawn" and has several modules, which include:
    • Minerva, which has control over all the global communication infrastructure.
    • Apolo, which stores all the knowledge generated by humanity (the database of databases);
    • Hades, which has the ability to reboot the Earth through volcanic eruptions and earthquakes when necessary;
    • Gaia, the "brain" that controls everything and has the ability to understand human feelings—at least, it can communicate in natural language, similar to the current hype around LLMs.

First scope

The platform will be called Rainbow - beacuse theres more in the sky than blue. Bluesky. Yep, thats the reason.

Rainbow Platform

The initial modules will be

With Apolo being the first "feature based" function, that will be added latter.

All the progress will be updated through my dev.to blog, and the code open-sourced at mjsdevs github.

Let me know if you have any ideas about the tech stack that could fit each need (I'll probably start with Deno/ts/React for Gaia and Golang for the other services, but that's for another post). You can reach-me on Bluesky (@mendes.software).

Thanks for reading!

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