Invest in the millennium. Practice resurrection. Executive Director @instdin, Chief Technologist @BKCHarvard

Most tweets deleted after 1 week.
Joined February 2010
When I feel intimidated learning new things, especially systems, I often think about “Fog of War” mapping in RTS games. A FoW map is obscured in darkness, only to be revealed as you explore, tile by tile, until the entire domain is visible.
3
7
1
39
We are entering an era where software releases are simply cached compute.
AI is now being used to recreate Adobe’s software, a developer has released seven free, open-source apps as clean-room alternatives to Adobe’s main tools: - PhotoCraft → Photoshop - VectorCraft → Illustrator - FilmCraft → Premiere Pro - LightCraft → Lightroom - EffectCraft → After Effects - DesignCraft → InDesign - PrintCraft → Acrobat Pro Built in Rust with help from Claude Opus 5.5, they run on Windows, Linux, and macOS under MIT/Apache licenses without using Adobe’s source code.
2
2
196
Also true for certain data releases, etc.
20
Greg Leppert retweeted
Today we're unveiling Trillium Labs @trillium_labs, a new non-profit to foster the open science of frontier AI. We're building open post-training recipes and will expand into open infra to study RSI, reward-hacking, multi-agent systems, and whatever comes next. We're built around the theory of change that you need more eyes to solve hard technical problems. We have faith in the scientific methods and communities that humanity has built, and worry that AI is becoming too closed to utilize them. Trilliums are wildflowers that bloom briefly in the spring, before the forest canopies fill out. Though they are small, they lay the foundation for the cycles of growth and nourishment through the rest of the year. At Trillium Labs, the recipes will be the slow nutrients for the seasons and the model releases will be the blooms. Building an institution dedicated to this is needed because, much as nature’s trilliums are slow to expand and grow, the open-ecosystem needs time and dedicated resources to catch up. I co-founded with with a long-time friend and collaborator Tom Zick (@thesezickbeats). We're hiring (full time + student collabs/interns), we're fundraising, and we're looking for compute. Please get in touch if you're interested in helping out. Offices based in the Bay Area and Cambridge MA, remote okay. I’m in the Bay Area until for The Curve and COLM to connect with people who are interested. We’re thankful to have initial support from Halcyon Futures and Schmidt Sciences with more funding en route to enable our ambitions of scaling. Our advisors @Thom_Wolf, @HannaHajishirzi, @gneubig and @ctnzr have been instrumental to building the ecosystem that exists today, and I’m stoked to get to keep working with them.
252
303
83
3,282
257,257
SHEIN puts a CAPTCHA in front of marketing-list unsubscribe. Wild.
146
AI seems to have ushered in a golden age of analogies.
1
124
The best way to prepare for all possible AI futures is to invest deeply in your human relationships.
1
5
118
This and the Elon/Altman AI generated videos are proof that committing to the bit is the lion’s share of projecting real presence.
can't believe palmer and pg get along now
134
It’s still a dream of mine to get featured on Surfstation and K10K.
In 2001, we really thought this was what the future of web design would look like.
3
300
Beginning to suspect that whole Guns N’ Roses tough guy thing was just a front.
1
155
Then again, maybe she was truly a dangerously sweet child of his.
27
Is no one at Apple left-handed
But does it work for lefties
3
1
1
4
1,498
But does it work for lefties
1
1,313
The Institutional Data Initiative continues our work to increase the computational accessibility of the ~1M volumes in Insitutional Books. Today’s releases add access to 22M photos and illustrations as well as 1.9B annotated paragraphs. Dig in.
Institutional Books is expanding. The Institutional Data Initiative (@instdin) at @Harvard_Law Library has added paragraph-level text analysis and 22M extracted images to our work on ∼1M books, opening new possibilities for research, experimentation, and discovery. 🧵
2
6
751
The stars are almost aligned.
187
“you begin with an air of critical reasonableness, and promptly resort to the glib logic of a salesman”
Wendell Berry has died at 92. Author, poet, environmentalist—and vocal contributor to debates on long-term thinking and technology. Read this lively debate between Berry and Long Now cofounder Stewart Brand on space colonies (1977): wholeearth.info/p/space-colo… Read this thoughtful review of Berry’s “Home Economics” (1987) by Long Now Board member Kevin Kelly: wholeearth.info/p/whole-eart…
4
187
Immensely proud of this collaboration with @BPLBoston. A dataset of 1.47M newspaper pages and a new processing pipeline that breaks pages down to their component parts, increasing OCR accuracy and computational addressability. The historical record has never been more searchable.
This quoted post is unavailable.
2
206