steven 🔜 cascade camp Aug 7-10

We are doing Cascade.Camp for the third year. Camp continues to grow and change, it remains a great place to come and bootstrap community but now we have a few years of organizer social fabric and local community weaving experience too. We need 20 people to buy tickets for camp to happen! Please leave a quality comment and repost for algorithmic reach. If you've been to camp once, I hope you consider coming again. If you've never been but you can still feel the vibes of the original tpot scene you will have a place here.

@_TomHoward would agree. minimize predator vs predator encounters is esentially a passive cooperate-move

Way would a tiger evolve to be more visible to trichromats? Perhaps because the Humanoids are actually the predator, but tiger is not easy prey? Perhaps the warning just ensures they battle each other less often, which is beneficial for both.

@HedgieMarkets @awarenesss

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world." My Take This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email. ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation." I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate. "We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline. Hedgie🤗

i'm basically a startup bloodhound: Got it — this is the percutaneous implant problem, and Steven's "cuticle that seals an inorganic interface" is actually pointing right at how the real research field thinks about it. Let me check the current state of the art so I'm not just giving you textbook history.The keratin bioadhesive result is a striking match for Steven's exact idea — let me pull that one detail since it's basically his "cuticle" concept in a 2025 paper.Steven, your instinct is basically correct — and closer to the actual research frontier than a random tangent has any right to be. Let me lay out what the real field looks like, because "cuticles that seal an inorganic interface" is almost the exact language bioengineers use, and there's even a 2025 paper doing literally that. The name for what you're describing is a percutaneous (or transcutaneous) device — anything that permanently crosses the skin barrier. We already have crude versions: dialysis catheters, dental implants, bone-anchored hearing aids, and bone-anchored limb prostheses. So the "at scale" question Phoenix is skeptical about is really "can we make the skin seal good enough that it stops being a chronic wound." That's the whole game. Why it's hard is more specific than "open wound = infection." Skin has evolved for one job: be a continuous sealed barrier. When you punch a permanent post through it, it fails in a few characteristic ways. It tries to heal around and inward — the epidermis migrates down the side of the implant trying to re-close over itself (this is called epidermal downgrowth or marsupialization), which forms a deep pocket that's a perfect bacterial reservoir. Or the skin simply never bonds to the foreign surface and slowly extrudes it (permigration / avulsion). And because there's no true attachment, every micro-motion pumps bacteria down that gap. Infection is the symptom; the root cause is that skin can't grip a smooth inorganic surface the way it grips itself. Nature has actually solved this exact problem three separate times, and that's the cheat sheet. The clearest example is your teeth. A tooth is a hard, effectively "inorganic-feeling" structure that permanently pierces the epithelium and stays sealed against a bacterial warzone (your mouth) for decades. The seal is a specialized tissue called the junctional epithelium, which attaches to the enamel via hemidesmosomes and basal lamina — a biological gasket. That is, more or less exactly, your "cuticle." The other two solutions are deer antlers (the only skin-penetrating bone in nature — the antler's pedicle grows a stable transcutaneous interface every year) and nails/hooves, which are keratin structures that emerge through skin with a sealed cuticle. Engineers explicitly reverse-engineer all three. How people are actually trying to build it — several stacked strategies: The most mature real-world attempt is ITAP (Intraosseous Transcutaneous Amputation Prosthesis), developed at UCL and directly inspired by deer antlers. The trick is a porous subdermal flange — a mushroom-shaped collar under the skin with an engineered pore structure that the dermal soft tissue grows into, anchoring the skin mechanically so it can't downgrow or peel back. In vivo work has actually zeroed in on the optimal pore size for soft-tissue ingrowth. Alongside that: Osseointegration (the Brånemark principle from dental implants) anchors the deep end into bone so the whole thing doesn't wobble — micro-motion is what breaks seals. Surface engineering to convince keratinocytes and fibroblasts to actually adhere to the material — texturing, hydroxyapatite or titania coatings, and biochemical cues that promote hemidesmosome formation (mimicking the tooth's junctional epithelium). The keratin bioadhesive route — this is your idea, published. A 2025 study, "Reduced Keratin-Based Bioadhesives for Peri-Implant Soft Tissue Sealing around Transcutaneous Metallic Prostheses", uses keratin — the same protein your cuticles and nails are made of — as an adhesive to seal soft tissue directly against a metal implant. That is "create a cuticle that seals an inorganic interface" almost word for word. There's also a concept every implant person cites called the "race for the surface" (Gristina): when you place the implant, host cells and bacteria are literally competing to colonize its surface first. If your tissue integrates fast, it wins and seals; if bacteria get there first, you get a biofilm and chronic infection. So a lot of design effort goes into speeding up tissue integration and giving the surface antimicrobial properties to bias that race. Where Phoenix is right: the mechanical/chronic problem is genuinely the hard part, and the washcloth point is legit. Teeth work partly because they're rigidly anchored and constantly bathed in saliva with its own immune factors; a limb prosthesis exit site on your thigh gets shear, sweat, clothing, and impact. Even with a good seal, repeated mechanical disruption re-opens the gap faster than the junctional-epithelium analog can re-seal. That's why bone-anchored prostheses today still require daily exit-site care and have real infection rates. "Solved in the lab" and "solved for a construction worker's arm" are far apart. So the honest "how to do it" recipe, if you were designing one: rigidly anchor the deep end (osseointegrate into bone to kill micro-motion) → give it a porous subdermal flange so the dermis grows in and mechanically locks the skin → engineer the through-skin surface to recruit a junctional-epithelium-style seal (hemidesmosome-promoting texture/coatings, possibly a keratin bioadhesive to jump-start it) → and win the race for the surface with fast integration plus antimicrobial surface chemistry. Nobody has all four working robustly at scale yet, but that's the blueprint, and each piece has real published progress rather than being speculative. If you want, I can pull this into a tight one-page brief (with the papers) you could drop back into that thread or keep for reference — or dig deeper into any one branch, like the keratin/cuticle approach specifically, which is the one that maps most directly to what you tweeted. Sources: Reduced Keratin-Based Bioadhesives for Peri-Implant Soft Tissue Sealing around Transcutaneous Metallic Prostheses (2025) Nature's answer to breaching the skin barrier: an innovative development for amputees (ITAP) Development of a soft tissue seal around bone-anchored transcutaneous amputation prostheses Determining the porous structure for optimal soft-tissue ingrowth: an in vivo histological study Deer antler: biomimetic surfaces for transcutaneous amputation prostheses (Univ. of Portsmouth) Challenges of Soft Tissue Integration Around Dental Implants (2025) Multiscale Design of Polymeric Biomaterials for Reducing Epidermal Downgrowth in Percutaneous Devices (CMU)

@_StevenFan I would be shocked if they get that done anytime soon. Just think about how much your skin has to withstand, even just something like rubbing it with a washcloth could be a disaster

complete tangent , but will implants that provide access to inside the body ever actually be a thing at scale ? i don’t mean one off special operations post op infections would probably be insane considering it’s an open wound

@catofsouls the sphnx will see you now

@slimepriestess we hafta hold a bigger more dedicated camp first

any oomfies with $5m wanna build a new vibetown?

@_andrewcann Everybody's a lowbie to some one :3

@_StevenFan At least @ a guy :P

lowbies hiding in the replies of their big mutual

Feeling fortunate to have participated in the inaugural TribeCamp (along with mr & baby captain). Floating out some thoughts while my impressions are still fresh. 1. The best description I have on the texture of my experience this week is "rich and meaning-dense". You would think that hanging out with my 1yo and also trying to make a business is already meaning-dense but the difference in flavour is like... Fresh home-grown veg picked at peak ripeness in the sun vs supermarket produce. One is already good but the other is self-evidently many times more so in pure richness of qualia. From the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep, in between taking care of baby captain's basic needs, there is the joy of all of the other kids running around, connection and conversation with all the other parents, cooking in big batches for 20+ people, the gentle supervising of the roaming band of children out of the corner of my eye, tidying up and cleaning and organising, but also beach trips and forest walks, and finding gaps for music and games and art and tai chi and chess and jumping in the swimming pool, all while bathed in the peaceful surroundings of Casa Tilo.

@kelin_online @TurtlingB is this true

you gotta hire designers in pairs like the way you adopt kittens in pairs… they need the enrichment

@Xaraphim jos me ol iphone 14max pro

@_StevenFan what camera ?

@easoncxz come to cascade camp feed us iso taysjyva

Living in Finland has rewired my kneejerk first-interpretation when I see an "iso-" prefix. 🤦🇫🇮

@seldomseer this would be fun. maybe we can work on more group tents in the future.

@_StevenFan yes but only because it would be to visit slumber party style

If we opened a community-sleeping bell tent with rental sleeping bags, would this make you more likely to attend cascade camp?

This is an OPEN ROOM and TWO ISO-CABIN TICKETS remaining for cascade camp. To reserve the room, click the elkenmist room reservation link. Here's the ISO CABIN coming together.

@gptbrooke peace

Sounds of rural Japan pt 2

@202accepted he is kinda being a whiny-bee, i am having to do a lot of frame management. but there are things he genuinely loves like big fountains and he can't wait to see sagrada familia

@_StevenFan he must be lovin’ it

you cant tell me this isn't peak europe having una caña y potatos bravos watching my kiddo play from the cafe

@RichDecibels in my euromaxxing relaxxing era

@_StevenFan it suits you

@EigenGender there is now a very limited ticket for in a group structure camping

@EigenGender Will add the option, will be a ticket.