"Broadly in favor of humans"
San Francisco, CA
Joined January 2025
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raise your hand if you’re excited to learn about the history of pipettes ✋
Big news! Our new book, "Making the Modern Laboratory," is now available for pre-order. It is a stunning, 504-page hardcover book that explains how the research laboratory, and everything in it, came to be.
Did you know that the modern micropipette was invented by a German postdoc so frustrated with mouth pipetting that he ditched his lab for two days until could return with a prototype?
Or that an 18th-century scientist sewed tiny taffeta pants for male frogs to determine whether or not semen was essential for fertilization?
These stories and hundreds more are told in the book, which has a hard cloth cover and is printed in full color on Arena Natural Rough, a textured, uncoated paper made by Fedrigoni. The book is also finished with colored endpapers, thread-sewn binding, and a squared spine. It is priced at $49 and worth every penny.
Learn more and order: press.asimov.com/articles/mo…
what is life for if not commitment to the bit?
the bit giveth and the bit taketh away
it demands of us but gives us so much more in return
watching Astra Blender demos and Opus 5.5 music videos go viral makes me think “GTM Research Engineer” is the job of the future
Education must be a priority for AI to support flourishing and empowerment. I'm so proud of the work our team has done to launch Ello with a free tier
Peter Maldonado retweeted
Got inspired by 5.5 graphics this weekend and built a prototype of on-the-fly interactive explainers for kids in Ello.
This is my 7 year old self's dream come true!
Ask Ello a question: chat for 30 seconds while it makes you a diagram to zoom in on the exact thing you're curious about.
Your Ello can control the animation steps and walk through it interactively. Then, she suggests we make a book about the topic you're curious about and turn this into a reading lesson, why not.
Managed to get generation time down to about 30-40s and cost to roughly 10¢ per generation at list price, which makes it actually viable to bring this to millions of curious minds at scale.
And ofc you can figure out the most common topics kids ask about and cache-and-personalize to have more impressive graphics for lower time and cost.
Diamond age is here. The future for curious kids is bright!
Education is an opportunity for AI to help us become better versions of ourselves. I believe innovation should help us flourish.
Congrats to @rshanreddy and the @hey_aristotle team on the launch!
America is banning AI in schools.
China is using AI to create geniuses.
Introducing Aristotle: The AI tutor that solves America’s broken education system. heyaristotle.com
a man cannot make the same mistake twice, because it is not the same mistake, and he is not same man
Selling your seven-figure plot of land because there’s a townhome nearby is called “cashing out” not displacement
considering Agent Skills and MCP, Anthropic designs more durable interfaces than their competitors. sure, there's some marketing hype, but grappling with abstraction is how engineering scales. curious to see if MHS gets the same traction
Today, we're kicking off the first phase of the research preview for Model Hardware Standard (MHS): a new standard for AI agents to safely operate physical equipment in scientific research and advanced manufacturing.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/model-har…
how lucky we are to grow accustomed to the gifts our ancestors could only imagine
reminds me of @CharlesCMann’s “We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It”
thefp.com/p/we-live-like-roy…
In 1843, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to a friend after seeing her first daguerreotype: “The very shadow of the person lying there fixed for ever! … I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest artist’s work ever produced.”
Our lives and homes are filled with things that once inspired similar awe. I tried to collect those feelings, in quotes like the one above, from people for whom what is now ordinary was brand new. A friar who met the inventor of eyeglasses, a founding father on the new smallpox vaccine, a woman in Iowa on her family’s first indoor bathroom. To look at a modern apartment through their eyes: ordinaryabundance.com
“The central drama of the modern world is innovation against suffering, and we have made incredible progress so far.”
banger
BIG NEW piece by me.
A few years ago, if you asked me to summarize my entire worldview in one article, I would’ve said it was too broad and too difficult. But this year, I decided to do it.
worksinprogress.co/issue/fut…
The central drama of the modern world is innovation against suffering, and we have made incredible progress so far.
But we are doing far worse than we could. Millions still suffer from untreatable diseases, because of bottlenecks that we could fix. You can help fix them.
Proud of the work our team has done here!
We got a lot of people asking about how we built Ello’s tutor to achieve sub second latency. The architecture behind this was a real technical challenge.
Our tutor steers the UX in real time and makes complex decisions on the fly, so it operates more like a coding agent. However, the standard tool-use loop doesn’t work here.
"Generate a call, execute it, feed the result back, generate again" stacks up to 3-4 seconds of dead air between turns. Fine for a coding agent. Fatal for a conversation with a first grader.
Here's a deeper look at how we actually built it.