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The Multiverse School

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The Multiverse ZineNo. 07December 10, 2023

Portland landing, hacker houses incoming

Hacker Houses, Portland

Liz landed in Portland and started organizing Hacker Houses, while student tech talks got a fixed Friday slot.

See upcoming classes

This issue is dressed as Pacific Punk Wave

Liz landed in Portland and, as described in a pair of TikTok videos, began organizing Hacker Houses for community members who are housing insecure. Spring in Pennsylvania was floated as a possible time and place. She also planned a Friday meetup for anyone in Portland.

Student tech talks were given a fixed window on Fridays from 11 to 1 Pacific to encourage attendance and cut prep anxiety. Learn to Code covered logging into sites with Hero, finding site APIs, and respecting robots.txt.

The AI class planned to run scheduled swarms with low-code tools and to look at the MMLU benchmark, with an AI Safety Fundamentals group dive coming in January. A Generative Tarot session using Midjourney and Dall-e was announced.

Hey Multiverse Crew,

I’ve safely landed in Portland, and as mentioned, we’re organizing some Hacker Houses because there are far, far too many of us who are housing-insecure. We’re looking into the possibility, it looks like Spring is ideal for us to potentially spend in Pennsylvania together. Let me know if this is your jam.

Here’s what’s happening:

Cool Videos

I’m catching up with many things:

Artificial Intelligence

Hacking

AI Industry Drama

Remember, Networks become Audiences fairly quickly.

Liz

Content Creators: Create an Influencer Interview Guest List

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

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.

AI Class (Prompt Engineering & Autonomous Agents)

This week we’ll use some low-code and no-code tools with swarms we’ve created to do something on a schedule. We’ll also send a recording of a meeting to ChatGPT to summarize into meeting notes and outline a plan of action, then use the tool swarm to dissect a plan into a series of tools a swarm might need. Given the right tools, a swarm can follow a plan of action. 

We’ll also discuss the MMLU Benchmark and how to run prompt engineering benchmark experiments yourself over the break.

In January, we’ll add a group dive into the AI Safety Fundamentals course from Blue Dot Impact, so AI & Agents will be a total of 90 minutes officially. (I know we digress and it usually lasts 90 minutes anyway, but I’m making it official.)

CyberSecurity

Everyone was out including me last week, so this week, we’ll be doing the plan from last week.

Your assignment was 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?

This 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).

Job Search Stand-Up

Sign up here. This last week of the year, we’re definitely doing more polish work on our portfolios, profiles, and pitches than we are trying to land a job, and talking a little bit deeper about the fundamentals of networking, and how to keep networks alive. Remember, Networks become Audiences fairly quickly. 

Most jobs posted right now are either panic hires, or are fake.

Student Tech Talks

We’ve constrained the time frame during which students give tech talks to encourage more attendance and less anxiety around prepping materials. Now student-led tech talks will occur on Fridays, from 11-1pm Pacific. If you are a nights-and-weekends student instead of a daytime student, stay tuned for your tech talk time slots. 

Machine Learning in January

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. 

Generative Tarot

On Friday, 10am Pacific, 1 Eastern, we’ll be doing Tarot decks with Midjourney, Dall-e, and more. Bring your own cultural influences, from whatever ancestors you want to affiliate with.**

Learn to Code Class

This week we’ll talk a little more about HTML & CSS, and show you how to use Hero to log into a website (and even use 2fa). We’ll also talk about how to find the API to your favorite websites and use these to get data as well. Remember: robots.txt will help you stay on the right side of history and not get your IP address perma-banned from your favorite website.

By the way, if you’re learning Object Oriented Programming, this philosophical digression may interest you and this book will help you with the patterns.

Are You In Portland?

Let’s do something! Next week I’m going to do a Friday meetup, if anyone has suggestions, email me!

From this issue

Tool

MMLU Benchmark

Leaderboard the AI class used for benchmark experiments.

Important Links

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  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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