Shingai Thornton

Introducing a new type of civic tech made possible by AI. Every citizen should have a live, systems view of their government and today we bring that to SF! Track gov entities, spending, news, and more in real time. With LLMs, we can bring this to every city. Who's next?

Was the "First Draft of the Report on the EDVAC", (Jun 1945) which intro'ed neuro-speak into computing, also the combined memo von Neumann outlines as a report out from the 4 groups at the Jan 1945 Teleology meeting (which precursored cybernetics and AI)? Time and topic match.

Introducing a new type of civic tech made possible by AI. Every citizen should have a live, systems view of their government and today we bring that to SF! Track gov entities, spending, news, and more in real time. With LLMs, we can bring this to every city. Who's next?

Cabin is winding down operations and distributing the money in the DAO's treasury proportionally to token holders. If you are a token holder: before May 13th, make sure all of your tokens are at the address where you want to receive USDC. Cabin pioneered the concept of network cities and spent the last four years looking for the combination of product and market that would allow us to sustainably grow our global network of neighborhoods. We started out as a residency program for internet people to get together in person, built a global network of rural coliving hubs for digital nomads, and are now growing an accelerator program for neighborhood builders. Throughout each phase, we’ve tried to stay true to our community-centric ethos and long-term vision while also building something that could grow with a sustainable business model. Three years ago, Cabin approved a proposal to create its current governance token and sell some of the tokens to 52 community members, angels, and venture capital firms. Almost a year later we sold more tokens to venture firms. Since then we’ve run dozens of experiments in an effort to find a business model that made sense for Cabin. In the last year alone, we rapidly iterated on a wide range of product & business models, and explored paths for building financial sustainability around our network of neighborhoods. Our conclusion from these experiments is that venture-backed businesses, DAOs, and community-driven networks serve different purposes, and that this tension is holding Cabin back. Venture-backed startups work best as small, focused teams that rapidly pivot to find hyper-growth business opportunities that are financially viable in the short-term. DAOs work best as a credibly neutral governance mechanism for distributing ecosystem grants from an existing cashflowing protocol. Community-driven networks work best when they serve as the loose connective tissue for many people to independently explore adjacent paths building what they find most interesting and valuable. We believe that Cabin should stop operating like a venture-backed startup and a DAO and continue as an informal community-driven network. As a result, last week we passed a proposal to wind down DAO operations and distribute the money in the DAO's treasury proportionally to token holders. Here's what happens next: Starting immediately, Cabin will no longer fund new governance proposals On May 13th, we will take a snapshot of ₡ABIN token holdings that will be used to distribute assets By May 15th, we will distribute the treasury proportionally to the addresses in the snapshot On May 16th, we will hold a Composting Community Gathering Over the next few weeks, we will wind down operations and legal entities Over the last four years we explored the frontiers together, planted the seeds of a network city, and created a dense web of relationships that will last a lifetime. We are incredibly proud of what we’ve dreamed of and built together, and we can’t wait to see what this community does next to build the future we all believe in. See you on the trail.

Could cellular automata be the key to AGI without neural networks? Giacomo Bocchese, a research affiliate at the Wolfram Institute, just published a bold new preprint on ResearchHub proposing Emergent Models: self-modifying systems with universal meta-learning potential.🧵

Government is going to change in 2025 and good tools can help us do it right. Introducing v2 of the SF Government Graph - a complete map of San Francisco’s government 🌉📈

Our first research article "TR01: From Institutions to Networks" details how the convergence of crypto and AI will catalyze the deinstitutionalization of science. Link in comments. 1/8