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The Multiverse ZineNo. 05November 26, 2023

Tools are just functions. Scrape accordingly.

Tools Are Just Functions

Back from vacation: web scraping, a disaster recovery assignment, swarm show-and-tell, and a tool-writer built over the weekend.

See upcoming classes

This issue is dressed as Lo-fi Art

The school came back from vacation week. Learn to Code started web scraping, climbing from the simplest level up through the complexity ladder. The cybersecurity assignment was a Disaster Recovery Plan for being locked out of every cloud account.

In the AI class, students prepared to show off swarms built from the Swarm Architect pattern. Liz described swarms as adversarial agent networks, where one agent critiques another, and built a tool-writer over the weekend for students to improve.

The content creator sequence with Blake Morse began, and the video list followed the Q* rumors and OpenAI board fallout.

From this issue

AI Class (Prompt Engineering & Autonomous Agents)

You’ve all been equipped to create swarms of AI. Build them. This Tuesday (11/28) we’ll show off swarms, and discuss the use of Tools (but you have an example there, so you can build your own tools.) Coolest swarms win me bragging about you on the internet. Let’s publish some swarm architectures in the next few weeks. Remember: Tools are just Python Functions.

Swarms are sometimes a form of Generative Adversarial Network (like StableDiffusion) known as an Adversarial Agent Network. This is because one agent “critiques” another agent and the first agent is forced to adapt the work. We have never had the technology to build Cooperative Agent Neworks, which consist of Adversarial Dynamics and Collaborative Dynamics. We’ll examine and analyze the dynamics within generated swarms on Tuesday. This is very much Level 15 and 16 complexity work, so don’t worry if it takes you a moment to follow or if you need to ask one million questions to catch up- and in fact, please do!

I made a tool-writer this weekend, but it’s not perfect yet- I bet you can tweak it from where I have it. 

🚀 11/26 Multiverse School Weekly Newsletter 🚀

Hey Multiverse Crew,

We’re back from vacation week here at The Multiverse School. I (Liz) will be back on Tuesday, November 28th, because the 27th is my birthday! I also almost forgot to send this out because time has lost all meaning. I haven’t finished scheduling all the things either, instead of doing any of that I slept all week.

Here’s what’s happening:

Content Creators: Get Started This Week!

We’ve developed a sequence for our content creator section, and have scheduled it out for an accelerated cohort series this December:

The beginning of the series (11/29) establishes your format. 

The next session (12/6) has you actually setting up your OBS & ordering the right gear for your budget. 

The last session of the year (12/13) has you do a research project- developing a list of influencer contacts you’d like to build a podcast around, and how to use other members of the list to convince each other that this is a thing, just because you made a list of names. 

By the time we break for the holidays, you'll have a game plan and be ready to record a demo or your first session.

Content creation is so much social engineering it’s not even funny, but these sessions should be because they’re with Blake.

If you’re not enrolled, you should apply and then respond to the email you got from Julie by scheduling with them.

Industry Drama Updates

Last time, on The Singularity:

tl;dr

Sam Altman got Fired, very suddenly, surprising everyone and now Everyone is Quitting because of it. 

We found out later that day that It was Backstabbing (ask yourself why Sam is communicating like Q, is this a narrative for the narrative-addicts? Are they just drumming up drama? This seems very out of character for Ilya. )

Wait, Sam’s Very Powerful, So, Now The Board’s Been Fired. OpenAI is thick with the e/a vs e/acc vision schism and Sam along with Peter Thiel used to run YCombinator.

This week:

Ok so one member of the board got fired. Allegedly this was again, some kind of throwing of a wrench into the works of OpenAI, by people with a conflict of interest in the board of OpenAI from Helen Toner, who alleged concern about the potential damages of AI. The US Attorney General and The FTC likely got very irritated at the suggestion that Microsoft should acquire OpenAI’s talent without paying a dime for it. Satya Nadella’s on their speed dial, so they probably informed him of the consequences and he backed off. It also appears most of the takes from the AI sphere are trying to pin all the evil in the world on the e/a folks instead of e/acc for some reason.

OpenAI attempted to sell to Anthropic during the fooferah.

Also there is something called Q* (why did they name it that) that might be AGI. No one knows what it is, but theories abound, and include: Q-Learning, Everything-of-Thoughts, Let’s Verify Step By Step (aka guess and check), Algorithm of Thoughts. These are the most cutting edge papers on AI, so if you have literally any better ideas at all, you are literally on the cutting edge and everything might be riding on you, no pressure. Maybe just say something, is all.

Remember: Tools are just Python Functions.

Liz

Cool Videos

Machine Learning in January

It looks like Machine Learning is one of the most popular course requests- 43 people want in! We’ve got quite a bit of Machine Learning material, but haven’t ordered it into a sequence for you because we need to know who is coming in. If you’re enrolled you should have access to this curriculum, but we’ll begin structured courses on Mondays in January (second Monday). Please try to complete your intake interview before the end of the year so we can plan for how many people want to go through this together.

If you have a specific kind of data you want to work with, please tell Julie during your Intake Interview or send me an email. I might not reply about it for awhile, it’ll help me as I put the final sequence together to figure out what the junior / senior split is. 

Job Search Stand-Up

Is back this week. I won’t be there on Monday, for the aforementioned birthday reasons, but I’ll be back on the 28th. Sign up here. Remember we’re switching things up this week to prioritize the time-to-application instead of applications-per-week because your resumes look awesome, broadly, so you’re probably hitting diminishing returns. Please feel free to show up on Monday, as some people want to hit the ground running and y’all might be good body doubles.

Learn to Code Class

This week we’ll actually get into Web Scraping. We’ll do another climb like martial arts classes do, where we start at level 8 and climb up the ladder of complexity.

Newer students don’t worry at which point you aren’t following, over time you’ll pick up the lingo. It’s ok if you don’t know HTML, CSS, or JavaScript enough to make front-end websites, we’ll cover enough that you can use it to extract data from websites, then move on to Hero (the successor to Secret Agent Scraper). Again don’t worry if you don’t know JavaScript or if you just started learning Python. Seeing the similarities so quickly will honestly help you- all programming languages have the same features, they mostly only differ in syntax.

CyberSecurity

Out, as this is on Mondays. Your assignment is to create a Disaster Recovery Plan, for what you might do if you got locked out of every cloud account you have, and lose access to your cloud images. Pretend it’s happened: what do you wish you had in this moment? Security is all about the future infinitive, what will you have wanted to have done?

Next week: Advanced Backdoors and Breaches, featuring a more complex game, with time added and trivial starting policies as a complexifying factor. Hackers take time to get the goods too, so it’s not all bad news. We’ll also run a Business Impact Analysis each time I get ya (and I will get ya). 

We’ll talk a little bit about Security Protocols, Cryptographic Algorithms (just an overview of the differences between them- don’t worry you won’t be asked to write them) and go over some Tactical Game Theory (as we always do).

Student Website Directory

We're building a directory of your personal websites to showcase your work. Even if your site isn't complete, go ahead and fill out this form. This will not only help you in job hunting but also serve as an example for other students! You can edit this form after you submit it so don’t worry about submitting incomplete work. If you want a review of your site, you have to submit it here. We won’t post it until you’re ready.

Important Links

  1. Mentorship Sign-up
  2. Student Application
  3. Multiverse.School Calendar

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.

See you in the future~

<3 Liz

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