James of Ârc

132 of my @ns journey >all day work on hackathon

I met a man who is building a city before buying the land. Humans of Network School #01: James of Ârc @James_of_Arc He isn’t building another app. He’s exploring how a community layer could eventually become a city (1/n)

if you’re in @ns, come hear @James_of_Arc and @semiii yap about the Superteam World Cup track with @TXODDSOfficial tomorrow at the Arc space! we have a $2,500 prize pool specially for NS (on top of the global $50,000 prize pool) and a surprise challenge with Viber - if you’ve been to one of their hackathons before, y’all know it’s gonna be dope🔥

We have come, and we have created life. @NS is increasingly a place where anyone, from anywhere, can come and build their life. And I don't mean in some whimsical - abstract way. You come here and you get outcomes. -> your body. We may not be @bryan_johnson, but you come here and get younger. I see it in the faces of my friends, its undeniable. -> your mind. Aside from the cold plunge competitions, the number one thing people take away is the ability to harness AI. Vibe-coding, automating workflows with AI agents, and more - you learn it all here, from the community. Hundreds go from 0 to 1 every month. -> your life. Last month was our first wedding - with at least one more before the year is out. A celebration of a happy couple, but indirectly of a happy community. One of the best nights of my life. And it's flourishing. This is far from a frontier tech bro nunnery now. It's rife with life - and within a few years I can imagine this being the best place in the world to find a partner and raise a family. That's in stark contrast to a year ago: this was a ghost city. We came to a place with nothing. And we've not just created something. We've created life. Day to day it's subtle - safe, secure, friends that support. But zoom out and it's stark. Where else in the world can you be immersed in a society where every person - whether 5 or 75 - is someone you could rely on, someone who wants to win and to help you win? I wrote this because @ns over the last months has hit an inflection point. I don't think these words do it justice, or explain just how special a place has been created here. The only way for you to find out is to come. Because this is still the beginning of the @ns story - one you can help write. Come here and find hope for our future.

We have come, and we have created life. @NS is increasingly a place where anyone, from anywhere, can come and build their life. And I don't mean in some whimsical - abstract way. You come here and you get outcomes. -> your body. We may not be @bryan_johnson, but you come here and get younger. I see it in the faces of my friends, its undeniable. -> your mind. Aside from the cold plunge competitions, the number one thing people take away is the ability to harness AI. Vibe-coding, automating workflows with AI agents, and more - you learn it all here, from the community. Hundreds go from 0 to 1 every month. -> your life. Last month was our first wedding - with at least one more before the year is out. A celebration of a happy couple, but indirectly of a happy community. One of the best nights of my life. And it's flourishing. This is far from a frontier tech bro nunnery now. It's rife with life - and within a few years I can imagine this being the best place in the world to find a partner and raise a family. That's in stark contrast to a year ago: this was a ghost city. We came to a place with nothing. And we've not just created something. We've created life. Day to day it's subtle - safe, secure, friends that support. But zoom out and it's stark. Where else in the world can you be immersed in a society where every person - whether 5 or 75 - is someone you could rely on, someone who wants to win and to help you win? I wrote this because @ns over the last months has hit an inflection point. I don't think these words do it justice, or explain just how special a place has been created here. The only way for you to find out is to come. Because this is still the beginning of the @ns story - one you can help write. Come here and find hope for our future.

The purpose of Network School is to demonstrate that anyone can peacefully start new communities from the Internet. Our vision of the good is a society that's tolerant and meritocratic, affordable and ambitious, high-tech yet extremely offline. x.com/pmarca/status/…

Andy Burnham has confirmed he’ll restrict VPNs, potentially bringing Britain in line with China, Russia and Iran. Starmer’s censorship regime will be expanded and deepened. Big Burnham will be watching you, says Fraser Myers buff.ly/nlycxhq

Over the last decade, we’ve built robots that can run marathons, harvest food, and even dance. But robots still aren’t very good at the simple tasks we use our hands for, like unpacking groceries or tying a shoelace. Most rely on simple grippers that aren’t much better than a claw machine. Dexterous manipulation has long been one of the hardest unsolved problems in robotics, but humanoid robots need it to be useful in the real world, from warehouses to homes. The traditional approach to training robotic hands involves collecting data through teleoperated robots, but it’s expensive, slow, and unscalable. @_jaku_xu and @JayLiStanford Li got to know this problem well while building humanoid robots at Tesla, where they had the idea to flip the paradigm: instead of having a human control a robot via teleoperation to train AI, they wanted to get better data from actual human hands. With @proceptionAI, Jack and Jay have built the hand that robots have been waiting for: ProHand. They worked closely with hand surgeons to get the anatomy right, using the latest hardware breakthroughs like “soft,” skin-like sensors and finger actuation that mimics tendons. When they showed ProHand at Y Combinator Demo Day, everyone kept asking them whether there was a human underneath the table with their hand sticking out. They’ve also built a data layer with ProGlove, a sensorized glove that humans can wear to collect real motion data to train ProHands — because the ProHand so closely resembles a human hand, a human can wear the same glove that covers the robotic hand (no robot in the loop required). Proception is officially shipping ProHand and ProGlove to researchers and robotics companies today. I’m proud that @firstround got to lead their Seed Round, alongside BoxGroup and Y Combinator.