For anyone getting into biology, please consider taking airborne disease resistance more seriously. It's a super important area of medicine that is a huge cause of death and sickness but easily gets forgotten. We're likely to get many more airborne plagues in the future due to the combination of not just extremely dense and interconnected society (including city and farm animals), but also accidents from bio research and offensive biotech (both from random people and from secret government programs that can easily get themselves exempted from safety restrictions), all enhanced by powerful AI. Right now, this area is getting way less love than longevity research (which continues to be super important!), but it's an area where there are lots of unclaimed wins that we know exactly how to do (but are not yet doing) with present-day tech: * early detection * passive universal testing * filtration/ventilation/UVC * better vaccines (including making them open source and open science) * cryptography to make all of the above privacy-preserving We can have China-level pandemic resistance with Sweden-level limited intrusion into people's lives, and then go even further. We just have to actually do the work for it.

We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit. It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion. In total, this means that roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares are committed to the public good. Our co-founders have already pledged to donate 80% of their equity, and around half our employees are donating a portion of their equity as part of a donation matching program we’ve run since our founding. In the post below, we share more details about our new fund. anthropic.com/news/public-be…

the only moat left is the love of the game

If you make light up models of people’s favorite bar they will give you money for them and you can go to the store and spend the money on stuff like groceries

guYS With the power of Crack GPS Asstra 6.9, Claus Opoops Slopnet 5.5, I was able to Mod EVERY GAME INTO ONE, I did it all myself with hard work by my typing and coding thanks to AI assistant!!! THE FUTURE IS HERE AND NOW

i was unplugged over the weekend, so I'm only coming back to this now. Design Twitter has probably moved on to the next thing, but I still want to address the accusations of copying someone's design. First of all, Chia @nonperformant, I understand your reaction. you open Twitter, see a reel of website concepts one-shotted with AI, and in the first 3 seconds there's a hero section that echoes your site: centered rainbow gradient, two-column text. It's fair to say "wtf is going on here" and ask questions, especially as a talented designer who poured a lot of love into their site, like you. This will be a longer post, but I want to be clear about one thing immediately: I didn't take your website URL, hand it to AI and say "rebuild this for me, one to one." I only saw your website today, and I agree with everyone else, it's pretty cool! What I did? I saved a screenshot of your site on Pinterest, where it sat among roughly 30 other moodboard images I was using as visual references for my exploration. You can actually see it in the process video in my thread. I recorded a long voice note describing the moodboard and asked AI to generate a few website layout variations as raw material to speed up my exploration. I showed that as the first step of my thread, which is why the one-shotted directions were the first video. Before I go deeper into the process, here's why I'm writing this. I've always shared my design process openly with the design community (my Working Notes series, the reality of freelancing…). I use generative AI in exploration, in polish, and in QA automation. I'm not hiding that; I like new tech and enjoy playing with it. But as with all new things, it's a currently a grey area and space for missteps, and I made some. i also think this is part of a larger conversation about how we designers use AI tools, because how we work is shifting rigt now. Quick note before I go further: if you're a creative who sees any AI use in the design process as inherently bad, and it's a black-and-white decision for you, this probably won't change your mind, and that's okay; you can stop reading here. I'm writing for those interested in the grey spectrum of how references, remix culture and accountability work in this new way of designing. So here's the actual workflow behind my process thread: 1. I build a large moodboard for every project: dozens of references for layout, type, motion, color, mood. That's not new to AI; it's how I've designed for years. one of those references, as I mentioned, was the screenshot from Pinterest. I didn't know it was Chia's site. I liked the vibrant gradient and thought it might be cool to add a dramatic, vibrant element to the website I was designing. 2. I recorded an eight-minute voice note about what I liked and envisioned for this project. I selected many of the visual references from the moodboard, plus elements I'd already decided myself (font, colors, content). I spoke about what I liked in the references. For the rainbow gradient, I said something like "I like the vibrancy of a rainbow gradient, it could work well in a more pixelated, sharp form as a background for a strong visual CTA." I'd do this pre-AI too: verbalize what I like in a moodboard to myself or a teammate, talk about the elements that stood out, and bring similar principles into my work. i believe almost every designer works in a similar way. 3. I pasted the voice note transcript and asked AI to one-shot a few website layout directions I could use as raw material to ideate with. Why i do this? it speeds up and broadens my exploration: instead of manually brainstorming with pixels, I can see multiple ideas at once. Most of the time, the AI blends across the full set of references. This time, on one variation, it stuck too close to a single source. The color treatment, layering and type were different, but yes, it's still a centered rainbow gradient on a white page, similar to part of Chia's website. But I don't intend to use these one-shot AI prototypes as final design, show them to a client, or pass them off as my work. (i shared it on X as part of behind the scenes process thread, raw AI output). Here's what i did / do next. 4. I start pulling interesting ideas from the concepts. This is what you can see in my original thread: I redo, delete, adjust. The AI output is raw material to play with. I don't use Kim's hero section in my final version. Yes, I use a rainbow gradient, further below on the page for the Open Roles section, but in different colors, not blurred but in stripes, aligned left with a Reckless typeface CTA on top. And I use gradient stripes for blog thumbnails; a vibrant visual style to create consistent look. I'd do this without AI too; a rainbow gradient, in my head, is an element like a big logo in the footer, a dark-mode section, a bento box or a floating navbar. It's an element, not the main idea that carries the whole concept of my web design. To be clear on intent: I never prompted anything like "recreate this site." It was one image in a large reference set, which is how designers have always worked, AI or not. I don't feel shame about that part. but here's what was definitely a mistake: I posted a reel of raw, untouched AI output (one-shotted website layouts) as the first thing in my longer process thread. That reel got all the attention, and I failed to check it against my own reference set and notice the first concept was too close to one image on the moodboard. The actual process, where I take that raw AI brainstorming output, throw most of it and rework it into something different, sat further down the thread where fewer people scrolled. So the framing that landed publicly was "she claims this is her finished design, but she stole it" when what I meant to show was "this is round one of a raw AI brainstorm, here's what I did with it after." That gap between what I intended to communicate and what actually read is on me. I should have been clearer, review the AI output more diligently and perhaps reordered things to start with the finished design rather than the raw references. @nonperformant, I'm sorry i put out a reel with an AI hero section that echoed your work, and I didn't catch it. I don't think many of you read this far, but if you did, thanks; it likely means you're a designer interested in how we use visual references, remixing and AI-assisted first drafts, and where the accountability lines should sit. I'm up for that conversation. I'll keep working from moodboards, and I'll keep using AI in my process to explore wider and automate boring things. but I'll def take more care with how the process is sequenced and presented, so the context isn't buried under the part that gets clipped and shared.

Are you interested in decarbonization, sustainability and climate change and want to do something about it? I need help allocating a few $B into these areas over the next 2-3 years so...I am turning to you for help. In return, you can work with me to implement it. Read on...