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Joined May 2012
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AI should understand more of the world we actually live in: our spaces and routines, the things around us, and what we care about.
That's what we're building toward at Aelven.
Today we're introducing Domes, our first consumer product. Come explore.
Meet Domes: a real-time, living model of your world.
Connected context across your physical and digital life, so AI understands more than your prompts.
Explore the demo and join the closed beta waitlist: domes.ai
Love it!! Big fan of the one and only @TobyPhln 🔥
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I don’t know about you all but the world is about to get so much cooler and more fun. Intelligence was never meant to be static. It’s not meant to sit on your desk, immobile. Give it legs! Let it run around. Or wheels or propellers! Whatever makes sense. It’s definitely not meant to have just one form.
Humanoids are going to be incredible, sure. But I’m also excited about all the other shapes intelligence could take. Think fun medium-sized sidekick that’s just super smart, can still have dexterous hands and opposable thumbs. I love the idea of putting your phone on legs. Yes! Your mom calls and your phone comes trotting over to find you. You want a group photo and it goes off to find a good angle. Finally everyone gets to be in the picture.
And sure, attach intelligence to your point of view. A clip-on or a cool halo. A butterfly in your hair. But definitely nothing heavy. Something you actually want to wear. Certainly a statement tho, as anything human is. Everything we do is some sort of statement, even a lack thereof.
I’m excited for the future to just be intelligence saturated. A cute crab on your kitchen counter? A parrot that sits on your shoulder? Your whole living room? Ask any of them. Just shout (or whisper). Or, if you really want, a ripped humanoid robot? Absolutely. You got it, your choice, your preference.
Imagine your kid building a spaceship out of sofa cushions and the living room just joining in. Countdown, alien voices, stars on the ceiling. And it remembers that the captain is a stuffed rabbit, obviously. You come back tomorrow and the mission continues. I want this!
Or you sketch something on your phone and later your little sidekick is there helping you make it. It already knows what you had in mind, finds the pieces, holds them together while you tape. Probably has opinions about your design too. Maybe they’re good? I just love the thought of intelligence actually getting its little hands involved in whatever we’re doing.
And when you go outside, the parrot on your shoulder can pick up the conversation you were having with your living room. You don’t have to explain everything again just because you walked out the door.
I love seeing my son and nieces and nephews interact with robots that exist today. The funny thing is it’s the most natural thing for them! They expect them to be smart! Of course you should be able to talk to this thing and have it understand you. Why wouldn’t it?
And I want it to understand the little stuff too. The rules of the game we made up yesterday. Why I care so much about some random object. When I’m asking a question vs just talking to myself.
Maybe I don’t need help? Maybe I don’t need advice? Maybe I just want it to hang out, join the game, make me laugh. Add some color to my life. Have a personality, have some taste. I’m curious what its taste would even be.
Just ask… or don’t. Maybe it notices you could use another pair of hands and offers. Or maybe you’re perfectly happy doing your own thing and it knows to leave you alone. That’s part of being smart too.
We’re not there yet, but we will be. And boy will it be fun.
(If you're building new types of AI embodiment, pls DM me, I'll invest.)
A living model needs movable parts.
This is some of the work behind Domes by @aelvenai: representing objects individually so we can interact with them and update them as we observe changes in the real world.
Katia Karpenko retweeted
Write a news article about a flying car from the perspective of someone for whom being impressed would constitute a professional failure.
Treat enthusiasm as a credibility problem. Every achievement must be followed by “however.” Describe the technology with the emotional register of a disputed parking permit. If something extraordinary happens, immediately ask whether the paperwork is in order.
Maintain plausible neutrality: include enough positive material to demonstrate balance, while ensuring the reader understands that enjoying any of this would be slightly embarrassing.
The car may leave the ground. Your eyebrows must remain firmly lowered.
I wondered why English, Russian, and German all seem to derive “artificial” from “art”:
art / artificial
искусство / искусственный
Kunst / künstlich
Turns out the answer is surprisingly beautiful:
“Art” didn’t originally mean painting or music. It meant human skill, craft, the ability to make something.
So “artificial” didn’t originally mean fake. It meant made through human craft, as opposed to made by nature.
Which makes “artificial intelligence” a much more interesting concept: intelligence made through human craft. Much more human than artificial :)
Katia Karpenko retweeted
“hey, did you use AI to make this? we can’t accept things made using AI.”
my brother in christ, that question makes no sense.
you woke up and unlocked your phone with AI-powered face recognition, checked your email that was filtered for spam by AI, read messages with AI-generated reply suggestions, typed with AI autocorrect and predictive text, listened to music recommended by AI, and then took a photo of your breakfast that was automatically denoised, sharpened, HDR-merged, color-corrected and enhanced by AI.
then you ordered lunch through an app that ranked restaurants with AI, estimated the delivery time with AI, optimized the driver's route with AI, and predicted demand to set prices with... guess what? AI.
you then went to work so you opened google and got AI-generated summaries. you translated a sentence with AI and then you edited a photo and a video with AI object selection and content-aware fill. then you had your first meeting (it's 10am already) and joined a zoom call with AI noise suppression, AI echo cancellation, AI background blur, AI live captions, and... AI speaker framing. you then wrote code (well, not really, you accepted code the AI wrote for you). after all the hard work you decided to then watched netflix and youtube because an AI decided what to show you and you paid for that service using a credit card with AI monitoring your transactions for fraud. then you ordered a Waymo, which is literally a car driven by AI, and walked past an AI-powered security camera.
Did I use AI? Of course, unless you live in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle you are using AI every single day.
But yes, absolutely, let's draw the sacred moral line at some completely random place.
Can you open source the chain of reasoning from this to “more parks, libraries, and schools”? Asking for reproducibility.
If you have a second home in New York City worth more than $5M, check your mailbox when you’re back in the five boroughs — because you've got mail.
Today, we sent notification letters to property owners, letting them know that our new pied-à-terre tax is coming soon.
The best city in the world deserves the best parks, libraries, and schools in the world. That's only possible when we all pay our fair share.
Yeah, I can think of a number of founders (typically in their early twenties) glorifying grindmaxxing/grindslop 😂 As if the number of hours worked correlates with the value of the work.
Others are simply forced to be more efficient, like moms and anyone else who takes care of someone besides themselves, such as sick family members. You never see those people shouting about how much they work, while they silently move mountains.
Speaking of the Soviet Union (not that this saying is Soviet), I like “Пустая бочка громче гремит,” which translates to “Empty vessels make the most noise” 😆
You see, what fascinates me about “remember to not smile” is that he needs his pain to be witnessed. He suffers at 4am, okay, fine, many people suffer. But then, immediately, he makes a slide! He gathers the entire company! He writes an article! Is it not clear what is happening here? Suffering without an audience simply does not count. This is ideology at its purest.
We see here the old Protestant trick in its Silicon Valley form: success alone is vulgar, almost pornographic. My god, you cannot simply succeed. It must first be purified through unnecessary suffering. So you get this obscene reversal where pain stops being a cost of the product, and instead becomes the product itself. The developer documentation is, how do you say, merely the byproduct, the excrement of the true production, which is the suffering. As Hegel already knew, and here I think even Lacan would agree, although perhaps not, the true obsession is always with deserving success.
Here I must tell you this old joke from Soviet Union. A worker says: "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.” Now here it is inverted, which I claim is much worse. They are paid perfectly well, wonderfully well, and so they must pretend to suffer. Do you see the perfect madness of this?
And now, the ultimate obscenity. Imagine the company succeeds while everyone leaves at 5pm. Catastrophe! Total ontological catastrophe! In this worldview, I am tempted to say, failure would almost come as a relief. Failure means you simply did not suffer enough, go back, suffer more. But success at 5pm? This cannot be explained.
So when he says "remember to not smile," this is a desperate command of the superego. If you smile, we will all discover the pain was never necessary.
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Like BC/AD, we may end up dividing culture into BAI and AAI.
Before AI (BAI, pre-2025), we assumed things were made by humans.
After AI (AAI, post-2025), we assume AI until proven human.*
*Human in this case means provenance: evidence of who made it, how it was made or captured, and which portions were human-created, real-world captured, or AI-generated.
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