Why is it called BayLeaf?

Spoiler: abundance and usefulness

I didn’t go through any kind of branding exercise when I initially named the BayLeaf AI Playground. The name just sort of came to me in the moment. There are a lot of bay trees on campus and plenty of bay-named things here referencing that already, so is that it?

The leaves of the California bay have a particular symbolism for me. They are abundant, abundant to such a degree that they are hard to notice. It takes someone calling them out, maybe remarking on the scent, or telling a story of how the campus mascot banana slug’s coloring is a form of natural camouflage that only works because of the contrast of the occasional yellowed leaf against the more common green and brown... Someone makes them visible, and then you see them everywhere. They are useful too (yes, really), but again it also takes someone stepping you through it to make it believable. Did you know you can make a kind of chocolatey treat from the roasted nuts of the bay tree? Reader, we’ll get to that part later.

Abundance

A pile of leaves doesn’t immediately seem to evoke anything you’d attribute to a generative AI service platform, so give me a moment to build the connections.

BayLeaf (the platform) didn’t arrive with a splashy product launch, fully formed, and shaped by a product team to be consumed by a paying (or captive for the harvesting) audience. Most people in the campus community will encounter it as some thing that was quietly already existing. It should feel fit to the environment because it grew here by incremental evolution of something that was already working for me. You don’t have to use it, and it doesn’t demand much of you when you decide to try it.

Any plant, but certainly something as complicated as a tree, integrates with a larger environment. The bay trees on campus don’t need watering or pesticide treatments. They just sort of continue because they found a niche, and they occupy it abundantly. BayLeaf, as a pile of software, can’t be immediately transported into a new organization, or even another higher education campus, without local adaptation. You need someone to plug it into the authentication system used to identify campus community users, you need someone to register domains, create cloud service accounts, paste API keys (and be responsible for the results of pasting those keys), all in a way that is hopefully compatible with existing campus IT services and policies. But once you’ve got those, it doesn’t take much to keep it going. You don’t need full-time staff, you don’t need corporate gifts or even funding from state or federal initiatives. There’s some level of labor and funding flowing through it, but those fit within my budget of personal activities to stay on top of the happenings of my field, constructed to center on artificial intelligence, interactive media, and the combination of these in higher-education context.

BayLeaf is this thing that appears all around you, once someone points it out, as an already-existing thing that you might make use of if you got the guidance or summoned the curiosity to figure it out on your own. Maybe abundance isn’t quite the right term for a bus-factor-one pseudo-hobby project, but it’s what I’m reaching for with the name.

Usefulness

Have you ever paid for a jar of dried bay leaves at the grocery store only to have it sit unused on the shelf for years because so few recipes seemed to call for them? Stop doing that. The bay leaves you get off a tree on campus aren’t quite the same as the ones you buy from the store, and there are some ways that they are actually better. Don’t wait for them to be mentioned by name in a recipe. Put them in places where they might fit, and see what happens. Bay leaves are moderately useful, and your use of them will expand if you take it upon yourself to talk to others about how they are using them.

You don’t just, like, stuff them into your face like other things you’d buy from the same grocery store. It really matters what context (wink) you place them in. You can learn some recipes. You can invent new ones. You aren’t switching to a bay-only diet, but maybe you are making it a little bit of your identity to try using the leaves in new ways.

BayLeaf, the AI thing, occupies a category of software that some people believe to be categorically useless or even harmful to use. I disagree, but at the same time I see how, if your only exposure to a bay leaves was just directly biting one at some point back in 2023, you’d find them pretty disgusting. I can write much more in the future about what makes most commercial generative AI service offerings unpalatable to me, but I want to stay focused on usefulness here.

Bay trees, in addition to leaves, grow a fruit that is a bit like an avocado, a powerfully bitter avocado with a thin and quick-rotting meat. Useless, right? The pit, the peppernut as it is sometimes called, is this interesting thing that you can collect and roast. When you crack open the shell to access and then grind up the roasted nut-meat, you get this curious oily substance that is a lot like chocolate. It is brown and roasty, sure, but it melts in your hand and freezes solid at room temperature. It tastes like coffee, lightly-burnt popcorn, and, yes, chocolate. Basically, it’s like an alt-nutella that you can make from squirrel-discarded lumps you can just pick up off the ground. It’s a thing (and probably has been a thing around here for the last ten thousand years).

Acorns are a thing too, and they are even more abundant (in masting years) and quite a bit more useful too. But, I didn’t name my service after acorns, so I’ll scale back to the more subtle and let-me-introduce-you nature of the California bay.

I haven’t said anything about LLMs, agents, skills, sandboxes, or security reviews, labor relations, or even anarchist philosophy. We’ll get to those aspects of BayLeaf in another post. For today, let’s say that BayLeaf does offer something useful to those who are patient and curious to build skill and experience using it. It’s not the revolutionary future of anything. It’s the already-present, a pretty normal and, in the big picture, moderately useful thing you could learn about. Beyond individual use, there’s another level that we, the higher education community, might find useful too, but we can take our time on that. There’s no rush.

Thanks for your attention. This has been a test of the BayLeaf Blog publishing system. (First post.)