🚀 1/7 Multiverse School Weekly Newsletter 🚀

Happy New Year for Some Cultures On Earth! 🎆

The multiverse is big but some of your human calendars appear to have changed their most significant digits! Hooray!

I’ve slightly recovered from my trauma coma, and now I have the energy to resume writing newsletters again! Yay! I’ve also landed in Portland and I have an indefinite sublet with some friends from tangential burning man camps. My roommate was a community organizer for Greenpeace so we have swapped many tales of Nonprofit Nonsense and I’m enjoying myself. Still planning on making Wizard Castle Hype House happen. Give me some time to get on my feet and fix all the other issues that need fixing.

Here’s what’s happening:

Job Search Stand-Up

Starts again next week! (1/8) Job Search will be weird next week. I’ll be doing it at 8am Pacific on Monday and Tuesday, because I have a corporate client who’s covering scholarships in January with these two days. I might need to occasionally take these gigs to be able to offer stuff at low cost and give needs-based scholarships.

I’ll also be giving different advice than usual! January-February is different. If you haven’t yet- take the Job Hunt Template and find 150 companies you really want to work for (yes that many, you’ll apply for them over the next 2 months).

The Calendar: So Many Changes!

I fixed the calendar, sorry it had some misleading stuff around the holidays, largely this is due to Liz’s operational bandwidth being completely taken up with other nonsense! Here’s some of the explanations around the changes:

New Multiverse Cohort, & unified rolling cohort start dates

Alright, it’s gotten to the point rather quickly that we have enough folks starting that we need to unify the onboarding phase. We’ll be doing an onboarding kickoff January 16th where new Multiverse students meet existing students. At 11am that day, you’ll introduce yourselves to the rest of the new cohort. We’ll also do a round of introductions at 5pm Pacific to accommodate the nights-and-weekends crowd. The first two weeks joining The Multiverse can be confusing to acclimate to, so we’ll separate onboarding scrum meetings from project scrum meetings, and keep those distinct from Lecture/Lab times. We made some additional changes to how standups work below.

Changes to Multiverse Schedule

Group Project Phase

We’re about to have a ton of projects happening all at once, so a big unified scrum meeting has become unwieldy. We also want to help everyone get basic training in Project Management and not have it all fall on the shoulders of one person. For these reasons, students in a project group will do a round-robin Scrum Leader, who will run a Project Scrum Meeting (in 15 min or less!) prior to The Scrum of Scrums meeting at a time that works for your group. Only the Scrum Leader from your group will attend The Scrum of Scrums at 10:30 Pacific, to give a brief project update & have the opportunity to raise any needs the group might have (if you need help from faculty or mentors this is the place to get time on their calendars to resolve blockers). This is the primary area where cross-pollination between projects will occur, and in lecture/lab time.

Personal Project Phase

You’ll attend the Scrum-of-Scrums at 10:30 Pacific, and be your own Scrum Leader. This will help you to get some practice participating in Scrums before you have to be the Scrum Leader for your group.

Onboarding Phase

Liz or Staff will still check in with people doing Onboarding who are in the pre-project phase just after Job Search Standup, at 10:15 Pacific. After you’ve onboarded, you’ll begin to attend the scrum-of-scrums and listen, to get an idea of how projects progress and what other people are working on.

After the Scrum-of-Scrums you’ll briefly break out into groups and get on each others’ calendars for pairing and help. We’re still working on the exact timings, so stay alert for announcements around fine-tuning on the schedule.

As of 1/10 I’m moving Lecture/Lab times up to 11am Pacific / 2 Eastern to accommodate getting to check-in with onboarding folks.

New Classes

Storytelling

Monday from 6:00 - 7:30pm Pacific, Francina Simone is good enough to lend us her writing and storytelling skills in this multi-class series where you’ll learn to plan a story, articulate characters, and build yourself a sustainable schedule to write.

Machine Learning Starts in January

Everyone wants to do machine learning, so this will begin January 25th at 2 Pacific, taught primarily by Liz. We’ll train Transformer-based Deep Neural Networks but we’ll build to them from a basic understanding of Python. You’ll probably need a google colab subscription by the second month. Plan on having completed the Introduction to Problem Solving For New Coders sequence in order to participate or just have somehow met the Core Python Standards.

You will also need to have a good understanding of statistics, this playlist will help.

Product, Design, & UX

On Tuesday January 9th at 5PM, Kellyn Von Arx will cover Intro to Canva, beginning at 5pm Pacific. You can use Canva to design websites, print media, and more! Bring your wireframes, and get ready to turn them into actual mockups. If you’re working on a project that needs any design (literally everyone) you should attend!

Operational Automation for Community Organizers

On Thursday, January 11th, Tag Brown will be teaching us how to do automation- targeted at community organizing! Tag did organizing around housing projects, and will lend their knowledge and walk you through creating some automations around gathering leads, communicating with your community, and nurturing a pipeline. Community organizing is full of tiny tasks that eat up your time, and automation is the only way to survive a grassroots community organizing time in your life without burning all the way out.

Existing Classes

Learn to Code Class

We’ll be back this week, 1/11!

There’s also now a Python Nook over in the kitchen, for people explicitly working on Python to pair program. Hang out there when you’re in the mood to code and someone will get online at some point and help out. Otherwise, normal sequenced content returns next week.

If you’re new to The Multiverse School and you haven’t yet done pair programming because you feel like you’re “too new to even contribute at all”, you’re an ideal candidate. Literally the act of having to tell you what exactly to type is an incredible help for those who have been on the receiving end of this until now- being walked through the operation exactly, then being asked to recall and problem solve the same solution is incredibly helpful for your learning.

AI & Agents

We’re still running with this and constantly exploring new technologies. We’ll be back next week on January 9th but we’ll start an hour later than normal, at 6pm. We’re finally exploring Llama Hub and working with data extraction. We’ll build something that can download pdf papers from Arxiv and PapersWithCode and summarize & explain them. Papers are fairly regularly structured but their media and annotations aren’t so we can deal with some data problems, which will be a great demonstration of the many many problems that always come up with real data in the wild. We’ll build a RAG system based off of these papers that takes actions on a timer.

CyberSecurity - Blue Team Common Certification

Won’t run again until the 22nd due to various factors. Make sure you have your disaster recovery plans made by then!

We’re kicking around a plan around some red team classes around ARM reverse engineering, stay tuned for more.

Important Links

Feel free to decline any class invites if you can't attend, but make sure to let us know if you haven't received invites to all classes.

The Best Part: Cool Videos

Oh I watched a lot of youtube over the break

AI and Issues Related To It

Uhh… Maybe all the jobs are going away?

The Dark Forest

I for one, welcome our new robot overlords

The NYT is trying to have ChatGPT Deleted

We Might Be In The Endgame

Cool AI Tutorials & Developments

Autogen Agents

Autogen UI

SuperAlignment

CrewAI is like Autogen but… easier? Kinda?

Sometimes hallucinations are productive (I knew it)

I deeply disagree with this man and his organization’s philosophy on intelligence, their practice of psychometrics, their methods of measurement and cross validation conflate categorical levels of effort across disciplines that are not cardinally equivalent in scope, and their slavish worship of the bell curve completely ignores contextual performance, and that most people have a skill in which they can be measured at field-peak performance because that’s just how neural networks work (but effort towards some skills and mental models are maladaptive), but I guess his perspective on AI is ok, their “Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) IQ test” seems suspect but ok when considered in context with many other general benchmarks but seem to be tests for the capacity for tendentious reasoning and yes I felt the need to add all these caveats on this single link because these people are just the worst

How Mamba Works

Llamafiles seem useful

AI Jason’s AI Research Team Evolution

Mixtral is Cool

Get Your AI To Write To Obsidian

CyberSecurity

They’re definitely listening to the microphone

The iPhone Backdoor the Feds Have Been Using

There’s A Fine-Tuned HackingGPT Now

Yes, Tor Has Been Compromised (I’ve been saying this)

Coding

10 weird algorithms