building @5x5_Collective // explore all ideas
New York, New York
Joined May 2010
- Tweets5.1K
- Following2.5K
- Followers4.5K
- Likes40.1K
We have a society where decisiveness is rewarded handsomely, independent of outcomes
I would like to live in a society where curiosity is our most rewarded trait
Rewatched Dr Strangelove yesterday with friends
It’s striking how similar the archetypes of incompetent military and political leaders are from then til now: overly religious, bloodthirsty, conspiracy theory peddling, vain…
Awesome film, also bleak given our actual leaders
Harder to get a decent seat for You Can See Everything right now than it was for the Odyssey
Except the Alamo drafthouse in state island. They have plenty of open seats
Nikhil Kumar retweeted
Abundance usually gets explained as a list of problems: zoning, permits, licensing, slow approvals.
Here’s what we'd actually get if we fixed them:
Lunch costs $4, like it does in Japan and Singapore. Most US cities require three or four separate sinks, which makes a kitchen under 200 square feet nearly impossible.
Anyone can open an owl cafe or a vegan lesbian bookstore. Japan is full of tiny, oddly specific businesses run by one or two people. They survive because small spaces are cheap and enough people live close enough to walk in.
A room in a big city for $400 a month. These buildings housed millions of low-income and older Americans until cities banned most of them by the 1980s.
A three-bedroom apartment you can stay in after you have a kid. US codes require two staircases in buildings over three stories, so family-sized units only fit on the corners. Most of the world allows one staircase.
A new electric car for about $10,000. China sells these globally. Americans can't buy it.
A government so dependable it's boring. When a loved one dies, you report it once instead of to every agency.
We can decide to make it happen here.
The full list has 16 things, from taco trucks on every corner to no more pandemics. I wrote this to also announce that today is DC Abundance's official launch!
If you’re in DC, come celebrate and see the G.O.A.T. Derek Thompson speak!
Got a defunct Metrocard machine with my friends... if you're on instagram, follow along at @ 5x5_collective for updates on what we'll do with it
After picking it up from a city warehouse today, we got it to turn on (not trivial) and inspected a bunch of the internal electronics. this thing is from august 2001. lots of fun old stuff in there, which seems to basically still work.
next up -- testing all of the serial connections and seeing if we can figure out how to drive the printer, read/write to magnetic strips on the cards, etc
And then we start building new hardware and software for this lil guy :)
Played around with @_chenglou new Handwired project last night
First I had to wrap my head around the implications…and I found this idea of adaptive UIs really intriguing
This example is a re-forming tree based on tap targets
What happens in we unfreeze some of these weights and actually train them? Well you can apply existing neural net techniques to it, losses and backprops and all, and now the UI becomes a bit more “learned”
Here’s a photo gallery where on the left I edit the rectangles and the right side gives me a new view where the photos learn to align themselves, training in real time as you drag (because the param count is so tiny).
This demo done fully in JavaScript, with JS looping through them numbers and backpropping. Stupid but fun! I’ve exposed the loss param slider you can play around with
“Sehnsucht: A deep, bittersweet, or even painful yearning for an idealized life, an unspecified place, or a state of being that may not exist or is unattainable. While it doesn't specifically mean the future, it describes a generalized, aching desire for something out of reach.”
Nikhil Kumar retweeted
We did it! The Dead Internet Museum is open to Nov 1st at MAD Arts. 10,000 sq ft and 18 rooms. Guests move through the DIM with immersive audio and dedicated devices that let them manipulate screens throughout the exhibition. The arts research project explores the implications of AI. DIM is an open prototype from @ColumbiaDSL - co-created by the Last Human Collective.
blender mcp -> astra computer use of bambu studio -> 3d print -> make midi controller -> make music
i could buy this... but i'd rather build it
RT @aaronricketts_: What’s funny about this app is that everyone takes their own lived experience and uses that to judge other people’s liv…
Thinking more creatively is the #1 blocker for most people adopting AI in ways that are exciting and meaningful in their lives
Workflow automations are such a tiny portion of what makes these tools amazing, and yet that's how most people have been pitched AI
Made a fun little thing where you can use your agent's memory of who you are to create sylized / easter egg laden portraits
Nikhil Kumar retweeted
I’ve expected this for a while but it still hurts. The “Life Sciences Verification Program.” It breaks my heart to know that biological knowledge will be locked down and gatekept like this. I want to take a moment to mourn, because I believe this marks an end for open science as I knew it.
I think back to my education. I owe so much to the open-access literature. I'm so deeply thankful to the culture of transparency among scientists. All the free knowledge I've been given. The free GenBank sequences. The free PDB structures. The education and know-show that my colleagues shared with me for the pure love of learning.
The Life Sciences Verification Program will kill that spirit. The most important biology tools of the next decade will be locked down and controlled. Some fragments of the old literature will remain free, but the real heart of where science happens will not be free. Frontier knowledge will belong only to people who the authorities decide deserve it.
I want to fight this, but I don’t think I can. I don’t believe bioterrorism is a serious threat, but convincing people of that is not realistic. The fear is embedded too deep in the psyche. If I tried, there are armies of internet trolls eager to accuse me of evil things. It would become my entire online life.
There is a growing and well funded fear-industrial complex dedicated to the idea that Bio-AI is a terrible risk and the people who practice it need to be monitored and policed. Hundreds of full-time professionals whose salary depends on their belief that biology presents a dire threat. What hope do I have of arguing with them?
On the other side, the traditional defenders of free information are historically weak. Biology professors are struggling just to keep the lights on. The last thing they want is to be called reckless enemies of national security. They aren’t going to fight this - I’m sure many of them are already signing up to ask for permission to be on the list.
So I’m writing this to bear witness. This is how it ended. Biology isn’t going to be free going forward. That was an idea of the pre-AI era and it is over now. The fight now isn’t over free access to information. It’s over who gets verified access to the closed information.
Big pharma companies get permission, of course. So do professors at elite universities. But we can petition Anthropic to expand that list. Maybe they might allow access for high school teachers, medical students and nurses? I hope they will approve farmers, iGEM teams, community biolabs, birdwatchers, park rangers and community gardens.
Will Anthropic allow those people to study biology at the frontier? As of today, the power officially belongs to them. We can only ask.
Today we’re opening applications for the Life Sciences Verification Program.
Through the LSVP, life science professionals can use our models—including, for the first time, Mythos—with a new set of safeguards designed to enable the full range of biology-related work. We designed these new safeguards to provide a better experience for biologists and more protection from risk of misuse.
The program is launching in beta for teams of all kinds—from academic labs to startups, pharma companies, and more. We will continue to improve the program and expand access to individual Pro and Max plans over time.
Learn more about these access grants and apply: anthropic.com/news/life-scie…
I wish there were someone who sat at the center of the "experienced the development, use of, and reigning in of nuclear weapons" x "deeply familiar with frontier ai research and potential alignment policy" venn diagram
11 years living in NYC today.
I came here after leaving the Bay Area and the legendary early Coursera team to help open a restaurant as a chef, a challenge I couldn't pass up.
Since then I've been part of multiple amazing teams in tech (two of whom happened to also grow wildly) and even went to grad school to do weird art and engineering stuff that changed my life in ways that are still unfolding.
People talk trash about the city any chance they get, and they're always wrong. NYC forever. Knicks in 5.