Jason Benn 🏡 · scenius : scene :: genius : gene
@jasoncbenn
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Creating multigenerational scenius. Founded the Neighborhood. 10% of profits from home sales go to -REDACTED-. It takes a village!
San Francisco
Joined November 2012
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What gene therapy would be on the top of your wishlist?
One biotech friend's answer: short sleep. It's ONE base pair flip and changes you into the type to only need 4 hours of sleep per night (!!!)
Isn't that basically a 17% "life" extension?
@bryan_johnson
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App designs by Midjourney v4 are frighteningly good.
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LLMs are much more capable than anyone initially appreciated.
GPT-3, by default, is playing some kind of weird improv game I'd call "Plausible Bullshitting".
But engaging with it in clever ways reveals a more sophisticated model of the world.
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Some notes on being a great thinking partner (inspired by experiences with some of my friends):
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I've now read several posts now about people taking a serious medical problem into their own hands and solving it.
They're pure competence porn, they increase my agency and hope just by reading them.
First one, from
@acesounderglass
:
My resentful story of becoming a medical miracle
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Time for a status update on the Neighborhood!
The bottom line is that 100+ people have moved into 30+ new homes since February, twice our original 2022 goal of 50. Honestly, we've lost count.
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@bryan_johnson
She said it would take an expert 2 weeks to manufacture a bootleg gene therapy in a BSL 2 trailer (that admittedly costs $10Ms) at a safe purity level
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@tommycollison
My friend has a habit of taking selfies with people she connects with at parties and then sending it to them. Now they'll remember her face, where they met, and that they were having a good time. Perfect 1st message
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What is culture?
Culture is the ambient force that induces different ways of being into people.
Similar to Alan Kay's "Perspective is worth 80 IQ points", I believe a powerfully good culture is worth, conservatively, 30 IQ points.
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@arram
@bryan_johnson
The FDA only approves work on diseases, not general life improvements. So you'd do trials on people with sleep disorders, then expand/use off-label.
The tech already works. It'd require a trailer-sized BSL 2 lab (that costs $10Ms) and 2 weeks from an expert to manufacture some.
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I met a researcher whose open-source AI argument completely fell over within 1 sentence. She was like "open-source is safer, because more eyes means we'll find out when it's unsafe." My response was "What happens when you identify that it's unsafe?" She was stumped
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Nearly a clean sweep by moderates on the DCCC…?? Holy shit. They were aiming for 10 seats out of 24, and are currently winning 21/24 lol
This might just be the year we flip the Board of Supervisors
Which would put SF on the path to legalizing housing again
Let’s go
@Mtclai
🔥
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For example, you can ask them whether they think what they just said was true or false, and it turns out they're pretty well calibrated:
In "Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know", we show that language models can evaluate whether what they say is true, and predict ahead of time whether they'll be able to answer questions correctly.
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In a mindblowing and
@doughofstadter
-esque twist, you can also step up a level of abstraction.
You can teach GPT-3 *how to teach itself* a new task.
You just give it examples of teaching new tasks, ask it to generate more, and then feed those back into itself.
Teaching LLMs to teach themselves new tasks by teaching them to generate few shot examples from high-level tasks descriptions ♾️
Given a new task description the model generates few-shot examples and prompt itself with them!
🧵👇Some learnings
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You know what's a nice perk about organizing events in 2024? You can ask AGI to help you estimate which attendee can best meet every other attendee's goals.
Twenty thousand intelligent judgments, and it costs about $20.
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Incredibly cool that
@AnthropicAI
invited external researchers to reproduce their work and published their comments in the original article. I hadn't seen this before.
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San Francisco, 2030
- Wake up
- Walk across the street to your best friend's house, let yourself in
- Go to the kitchen and your parents are already there eating breakfast burritos w your bff's parents
- They come stay for a month every year to hang & help w the kids, they're…
San Francisco, 2030
- You wake up
- You walk 2m to Cafe Reveille to get breakfast
- You overhear a convo about AGI
- You notice it's people you know from Twitter
- You join the conversation, a new relationship starts
- You walk 10m to work
- You're stuck and need to make a key…
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@andy_matuschak
Here are a few. They're not sophisticated.
"meditation app, flat vector, Figma, dribbble, user interface --v 4"
"redesign of Stripe app, by UX designer --v 4"
"app that monitors your health, flat vector, Adobe Illustrator, dribbble, user interface --v 4"
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Disagree without deflating your partner.
One way to do this well: is to perk up as you disagree, as you've discovered what will surely be an interesting phase of the conversation.
One way to do this poorly: be dismissive, implying that your partner is obviously wrong.
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Philosophy time:
Aren't humans also just using old thoughts to generate new thoughts...?
Is anxiety when people get "stuck" in a loop and generate repetitive thoughts...?
Is this platform sufficient to create consciousness...?
Is outputting "I'm done thinking"... suicide?
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Inspired by Gottman's 7 Principles, here's a stab at my own "deep dreams" --
- Long-term friendships
- A body of original ideas I’m proud of
- Spontaneity
- Freedom to pursue side projects, “working like a lion”
- A loving family that has fun together
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I was going to hire a designer last week. After seeing Midjourney generate app designs, I realize I can't justify the cost.
App designs by Midjourney v4 are frighteningly good.
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A map I'm building! Here's the first prototype...
It's color-coded by the combined sqft of the yard and any adjacent yards. Will be useful for cohousing :)
Even after optimizing/simplifying geometries, the query to calculate touching neighbors took 6-8 hours!
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@ashleydzhang
people are so rarely as ambitious about their personal lives as they are about their careers
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We originally thought that they couldn't do simple arithmetic, and that this meant they're just pattern-matching and don't have deeper understanding.
But if you ask them to break down the problem, they perform much better. (Just like people!)
“LLMs can’t even do addition”
📄🚨We show that they CAN add! To teach algos to LLMs, the trick is to describe the algo in enough detail so that there is no room for misinterpretation
w/
@Azade_na
@hugo_larochelle
@AaronCourville
@bneyshabur
@HanieSedghi
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Try to model what they're imagining in your head, and look for where your confused, and ask about that.
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Reflect what you're hearing with "it sounds like you're saying..." and attempt bold, pithy, metaphorical, or evocative summaries.
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Holy shit: 23k layoffs/month from tech companies for each of the last 7 months.
If you're unemployed and have the savings, consider taking time to reflect and explore? What the talented and ambitious do with their time is high-leverage to get right, and the world is complicated.
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Some cultures, somehow, fascinatingly, produce geniuses. Florence in the 15th century had just 100k people... but included Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Botticelli, and several other all-time greats. They couldn't ALL have been genius-level talents, it's statistically near-impossible.
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I think this lot is potentially better for cohousing than Radish and Noasis were in the beginning. It’s between Precita Park and Bernal Heights. It’s really big and touches 12+ backyards
Who else out there wants to make cohousing happen in SF?
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Japanese chipmakers in the 80s would strategically emphasize their ability to manufacture chips over their ability to invent new things. I wonder if China would ever do something similar?
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I started working on this because I was terrified of raising kids in a soul-crushing suburb.
I wanted the inspiration of coliving with the privacy of my own home... somehow.
From that seed, the idea of a "multigenerational campus" gradually emerged.
And that meme resonated.
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This was achieved using "chain of thought" prompting.
Here's a taxonomy of prompting techniques:
📢 A 🧵on the future of NLP model inputs.
What are the options and where are we going? 🔭
1. Task-specific finetuning (FT)
2. Zero-shot prompting
3. Few-shot prompting
4. Chain of thought (CoT)
5. Parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT)
6. Dialog
[1/]
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Let's say that you wired up a LLM to always feed its output back to itself until it says "I'm done thinking".
Let's call a chain of feedback cycles a "life".
Q: what initial prompt would produce the the longest and most interesting "life"?
Has anyone tried this before?
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(Unfortunately, a majority of people are trained to disagree poorly, because in most professional contexts contrarianism is conflated with intelligence and status.)
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I used to be a consultant. Now I'm a machine learning engineer.
If you want to pivot and become an MLE, I put every book, blog, research, and job search hack it one place. What do you think?
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In case you're not familiar, the Neighborhood is a multigenerational campus in the heart of SF.
The twin missions:
1. Help you build strong relationships without trying
2. Help you find purposeful work.
Just like university, except your kids and parents can participate.
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Loving that every
#Neurips2020
paper comes with a 3 minute trailer. If you put all 1,918 papers into one YouTube playlist and skipped past the 50% you're not interested in, you could get pretty comprehensively up-to-date with the field in just 45 hours
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Ask questions that raise their aspirations, like "What would you do differently if you had $500K?" or "What dream coalition would you build?" or "How could you make 10x faster progress?”
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Set low expectations for legibility. Be supportive of inarticulate hunches.
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funny how much easier it is to solve other people's problems than your own problems. they're usually the same problems
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If you could somehow coordinate a group of friends to move next door to each other, or for more people to actually befriend their neighbors, then this idea becomes so appealing! It's a tricky coordination problem, though. Will be interesting to see if we can solve it for anyone.
One cool aspect is you could create a space like this incrementally on any block with abutting private yards
If you and your next door neighbor agree to tear down a fence, you get a yard that's twice as big as what you had before, even if none of the other neighbors join in!
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Giving a group a name has an odd power to it
Once a group has a name / a pointer in concept space, people start to associate distinctive attributes with it. The group starts to assume an identity of its own, with desires, behaviors, beliefs about the world
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Be sure you understand what kind of feedback they’re looking for. Early phases of the thinking funnel are more about identifying and burnishing the golden nuggets, while later phases are when it makes more sense to offer constructive criticism, find holes, polish flaws.
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Ever feel like you wished you could slow down time so you could take better notes? I wish I could record audio or video of these moments and "bookmark" moments in time for later review. Be this will be a common behavior in an AR future.
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updated the Neighborhood's website with our 2024 plans:
if 2023 was about learning how to coordinate great people, 2024 is about COHOUSING.
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- peers that empower each other or expand each other's concept of the possible
- encouragement to experiment and take risks
- a social structure of squads and/or competitive duos
- intellectual safety in the innermost circle
- channels for going public with their work
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Tell a story about your own related experiences, or share resources you love.
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Most of my friends just want to live within walking distance of their friends. But if you try and move a big group of them all at once, there is strong evidence that you're going to fail
All but like three friends of mine are dreaming of starting a little cute village in the middle of nowhere in the next 2-5 years
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@tommycollison
I thought Talent by
@tylercowen
and
@danielgross
was coming out on March 17, but it's actually May 17... so I'll dig more into Polya instead. It's ostensibly about math, but really it's about solving any problem systematically.
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Here's the course I'm currently working through:
@pabbeel
's CS294 at Berkeley: . The homeworks are spectacular. Super challenging but a smooth ramp from practical ML experience -> reimplementing any paper.
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I spoke about the Neighborhood at the Network State Conference earlier this morning!
I talk about our strategy for creating excellent coliving communities, one house at a time, and the tools I built for recruiting diverse and complementary groups and then matching them together.
Here's the livestream for the Network State Conference (part 1 of 2).
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I’ve been living in San Francisco for 11 years now, and for a majority of them I’ve been living with
@Mtclai
. From organizing volunteering days to reading every major religious text in a row - he’s as sincere, good-hearted, and competent as you could hope for in a candidate.…
Last weekend, I gathered with 200+ family, friends, & neighbors to make an announcement.
An announcement rooted in my family's story, and the story of so many immigrant families who moved to the US to seek a better life.
I'm running for the SF Board of Supervisors this Nov! 🧵
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Wow,
@logseq
is fantastic.
- features-wise, it's a superset of Roam: inline backlinks, Daily Note stream, block references, right sidebar, even queries
- built-in SRS system, like RemNote: tag blocks with
#card
to create a flashcard
Logseq is the home base for all of my thoughts, so I'm selfishly motivated to blast out the message that the team is growing
if you're interested in a role, lmk and I'll put you in touch!
- frontend developer (clojurescript/react)
- product designer
- community manager
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Is it legal in San Francisco for my parents, my girlfriend's parents, and two other sets of friends' parents to buy a home together and each spend 3 months per year here with future grandchildren?
Because that would be really awesome.
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This video completely changed how I use
@RoamResearch
.
This video captures what I find so magical about
@RoamResearch
.
No other app makes navigating and utilizing your notes this fluid.
It took me just over 15 minutes to pull together ideas to outline a new article:
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this is my beef with humans sometimes. It's like the quality of thinking literally doesn't matter, people just want to associate with what's cool and romantic
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- a creative frontier that is large, relative to the number of people involved (h/t
@michael_nielsen
)
- a contrarian oasis with common knowledge about the adjacent possible
- mostly dedicated people: geeks that can't stop creating
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Yo! Do you want to build cohousing in the Bay Area, but don't know who exactly you'd do it with, or how to find real estate?
I think there are (probably) lots of us.
I'm hosting a meetup this Saturday 2/17 2-6pm at Noasis so we can meet each other:
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@arram
@bryan_johnson
So no, not yet.
Manufacturing gene therapies at scale is currently incredibly expensive: a great bottleneck for some mech eng types to work on - let's make next gen reactors! Would also be great to expand BSL 2 zones in SF and broaden the def of disease to include e.g. aging.
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Communities are healthy to the extent that they are cocreated. That's why Burning Man and unconferences reliably produce the warm fuzzies.
Therefore, maximize the Grassroots Gauge: the ratio of experiences and artifacts created by non-leaders vs by leaders.
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@SteierMisha
Hey! I'm the founder. Happy to answer questions. Like it says on the tin, coliving isn't for everyone, and we're not some hyperscale startup (we're a nonprofit). But for me, living with friends that inspire me for 5 years was exactly as life-changing as you'd expect.
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I'd love for the Neighborhood to include many coliving villages, like Radish or Noasis. But that means solving a tricky problem: helping friends acquire clumps of adjacent houses.
@levin_phil
and I spent the afternoon brainstorming. Comments welcome:
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So clearly there was something else at work.
Scenius folks often attribute part of these moments to being at the dawn of something big, where there's a large "adjacent possible". I agree that this was a factor.
The remainder of the effect had to be culture. So HMW reproduce it?
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Wrote up how I think about navigating career uncertainty:
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My fave piece of writing of 2022 was the
@join_polaris
manifesto
"Even for those individuals who resist the dampening pressures... transforming fuzzy aspirations into concrete action on one’s own is a painful process... because the expression of talent is fundamentally social."
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This was at the grand finale of HammingBio. What a weekend 🔥
I have just received
@LanternBioworks
' anti-cavity treatment.
They put a special bacteria in my mouth and now I should have an immunity to dental caries.
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.
@alliekmiller
is such a good interviewer! She's like a shot of caffeine in a person. Here's all the links I promised:
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Imagine a place where the recurring events include Hamming Fridays, where you gather to opine on the big questions of your field. People will be more likely to work on important problems.
Or a place where folks critique popular approaches weekly. They'd be more contrarian.
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@thedanigrant
Totally agree and AI is rapidly enabling everyone to build prototypes! So much fun to build things these days. A PM friend and another friend's nontechnical septegenarian dad have both built apps for themselves by asking GPT-4 "teach me how to build this app..."
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Had my mind blown today by a variant of "Is your red the same as my red?"
The question to ask your friends: "What does your brain think about, while resting?"
The answers made me realize yet again how profoundly different our experience of life must be
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@nikillinit
It’s not so hopeless as all that. Membership-based third spaces work really (amazingly) well and can comfortably support a small team.
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-
@thesfcommons
, now hundreds of paying members recreating a campus vibe in Hayes Valley within their gorgeous library & zen space
-
@solariscampus
, prototyping a cheap, fast way to build a compound that I personally find very inspiring
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(To be more concrete: it's a one-square mile zone in SF. It's a Schelling point where he hope to create such a density of great founders/researchers/builders and community infrastructure like schools/third spaces/coliving/coworking that 50%+ of us feel our missions are achieved)
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Be attentive to the scope of what they’re looking to explore. Beware adding idea extensions of the form “Wouldn’t it be cool if...”
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These norms structure our ways of interacting and steer our attention. That can be really powerful!
"Life is what you pay attention to - there is literally nothing else." - David Foster Wallace
So: we can curate people, design events, build spaces, and optionally set a vision.
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“If you really listen to what people say, they tell you everything. I just really pay attention to what people say, and through that I can then reflect back thoughts that they’ve told me about themselves that they don’t know about themselves” - Rick Rubin
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Devon and I have hosted a total of 5 unconferences and attended 5 more. There’s not a lot of good advice out there on how to facilitate a great session, so we wrote some!
So, you've been invited to an unconference. Now what?
@jasoncbenn
and I wrote a little guide on how to run a great session and how to be a great session attendee:
We'd love to hear your ideas for what we should add to the toolbox!
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So: what is culture, really?
Culture is composed of people, the events and spaces in which they meet, and (optionally) their shared values and vision.
The dynamic interplay between all these factors produces common knowledge, from which norms emerge.
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@pdhsu
@Changaboi
he's fine! socially fluid, easygoing, def more normal-feeling than the average SF tech founder.
@pdhsu
i am curious too tho. how'd you learn to socialize?
(speaking as a guy that will probably "homeschool" by instigating/supporting local microschools)
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I want an AI groupchat for self-therapy. Each AI would be a different book from
@sashachapin
's Deep Okayness post. And each AI would be prompted by a page or two of the compressed wisdom and actionable advice of the book. And as I read more books, I could add them to the gc
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Denmark is one of the happiest countries in the world.
One of my favorite ideas of theirs: Time Off Together.
If all your coworkers are on vacation too, you don’t have to worry about coming back to a pile of work!
It’s easier to coordinate with friends, too. I love it.
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My wellbeing is tied to just a few key habits: progress on meaningful work every day, exercise at least every other day, Inbox Zero and meal prep every week, etc.
Here's the habit tracking spreadsheet I've been iterating on and using for 3 years:
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I'm excited to ponder: how would you induce each of these ways of being?
What recurring events would you design?
What spaces would you create, and what do they make easy?
Who would you invite?
And if you did all that: how much closer would you be to an unambiguous scenius?
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-
@davefontenot
, a diehard Miamian, decided to host HF0 and here in the Neighborhood (around Alamo Square!) after visiting The Commons and realizing that SF has been thriving. Welcome, Dave 👋
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Whipped up another neat little utility for my unconference today!
OK, if I'm being honest, Claude wrote 75% of it.
But: people consistently lose track of time at unconferences. So this guy announces each new event, with a pleasant chime 1 minute before.
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Great question! Dunno.
Biologists- how often is it the case that there wasn’t a reason to select against a mutation in our ancestral environment, but it’d still be an advantage today?
Put another way - under what circumstances is this argument irrelevant?
@jasoncbenn
@bryan_johnson
If it’s just one base pair and supposedly confers such a massive advantage, why hasn’t it ever undergone a rapid selective sweep throughout the entire human population or even the entire animal kingdom?
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.
@Mtclai
and I are hosting an Explorer's Club event on Sunday at
@thesfcommons
!
1. Everyone puts ideas that they love into a spreadsheet, and
2. we arrange a series of short 1:1 convos for you with the Stable Marriage algorithm.
Theme: Education and AI.
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If you had $10K, $100K, $1M, $10M, or $100M to spend to build scenius... how would you do it?
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Let’s say, hypothetically, that
@thomasschulzz
@patriciamou_
@adimelamed_0
and I wanted to run a YC-style Demo Day for community entrepreneurs.
Who in the SF government should we collaborate with?
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@ChanaMessinger
Yes, and that is a HUGE DEAL.
DALL-E 2 came out 2 months ago.
Scaling laws for diffusion models forecast incredible advances for years.
IMO a small number of incredibly productive designers augmented by AIs are going to outcompete and crowd out the rest of the field.
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Rose and I have been helping with The Commons and we're incredibly excited to launch this today - let's build the communal living room in the Neighborhood.
🚨 We’re excited to share that we’ve found a space for The Commons!
ft. a co-working space, philosophy salon space, communal library, cafe, meditation studio, and lots of cozy reading nooks.
We need your help in securing the space!
👉
🧵on our vision
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“There's an art to getting brilliant people to surprise themselves” - Kevin Slavin
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So I'm planning an event: . This is people in SF considering or currently exploring!
There'll be a light structure: we'll match you with a few others for 10m convos based on their interest in your hunch.
Hopefully we'll spark some collaborations?
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@TylerAlterman
's Notion page documenting his mysterious gut condition, which he largely solved, was the first time I saw someone successfully fix themselves:
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