Rowan North

Introducing the Manim skill for Hermes Agent. Manim is an engine for creating precise programmatic animations for mathematical and technical explainers, made famous by the @3blue1brown channel.

You have no experience. You’ve never started a company. You’ve never had a full time job. Nike is going to kill you. You’re a kid. You don’t have technical skills. You shouldn’t build hardware. Apple is going to kill you. You can’t build hardware. You can’t measure heart rate non-invasively. Athletes don’t care about recovery. Under Armour is going to kill you. It won’t be accurate. You don’t listen. You’re an ineffective leader. You can’t recruit great talent. You’re going to have to pay every athlete. You can’t measure sleep non-invasively. It’s too expensive to research. Athletes are a small market. The product costs too much to make. The product costs too much to sell. Your valuation is too high. Consumers aren’t going to want it. Hardware is too hard. You should measure steps. Fitbit is going to kill you. You can’t build a marketing engine. You can’t raise enough money. You need a real CEO. Google is going to kill you. You can’t be a subscription. You can’t build a brand. You can’t do consumer in Boston. Your valuation is too high. You shouldn’t make accessories. You shouldn’t make apparel. Lululemon is going to kill you. You can’t predict Covid. Stay in your niche. You are going to run out of money. You can’t build a health platform. Amazon is going to kill you. You can’t measure blood pressure. You can’t get medical approvals. The market is too small. You don’t understand AI. The market is too competitive. It won’t work internationally. The supply chain is too complicated. You can’t build an AI. You can’t raise enough money. It’s too competitive. Healthcare isn’t going to want it. … Just keep going ✌️

Our mission is to unlock the new chapter of human creativity. To help AI systems understand taste, respect intent, and support real creative workflows. Join us → contralabs.com/jobs

Introducing Contra Labs. The first frontier data and evaluation lab for Creative AI.

This is a cool, practical technique for increasing AI idea diversity by adding random priming phrases & bits of end words Similar prompts produce similar ideas, but since LLMs attend more to the start & end of inputs, this approach pushes towards novelty gking.harvard.edu/quest

NEW: Afroman's music video "Lemon Pound Cake" played in court as "Officer Poundcake" was forced to sit and watch. Adams County Sheriff's deputies are suing Afroman after he released a music video following a botched raid on his home. At one point during the trial, the video was played during Officer Shawn Cooley's testimony. The song was inspired after the officer allegedly glanced down at Afroman's desert during the botched raid on his home. Officers claim that Afroman's songs and social media posts following the raid caused them "mental distress and danger." (ABC6)

Anish Acharya: We're going to see a "YouTube moment for software": "If you think about YouTube 20 years ago—we had lots of video and lots of television, and it was high production quality, and it wasn't clear that we needed more and 20 years later, YouTube's a $550 billion enterprise that would be one of the biggest companies in the world if it was independent." "I think the same thing is going to happen for software. People want to make software, and for the first time they can—and they can distribute it and they can consume it." "Sometimes it's going to be important software. Sometimes it's going to be totally trivial. It's going to be software for a bachelor party weekend, software for a joke, software for a prompt. We have this sort of seriousness about software that we had about video and television 20 years ago." "Now it's like—I just took a video on my phone. It's going to be like—I just made an app on my phone. Same energy." @illscience on BILLIONS with @GuillaumeMbh

Software isn’t merely technical work anymore. It’s creative. Introducing Replit Agent 4. The first AI built for creative collaboration between humans and agents. Design on an infinite canvas, work with your team, run parallel agents, and ship working apps, sites, slides & more.

PAI is officially rolling out. The long-form cinematic model from Utopai Studios, built for storytellers who think in scenes, not seconds. What PAI delivers: • Minutes-long continuous video generation • Character & scene consistency across every shot • Natural language editing — change the story, not just the frame Watch the first story created entirely with PAI.

"If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is." -- John von Neumann (1903 - 1957)

Marc Andreessen says that America's greatest strategic advantage lies not in mimicking China's centralized system, but in doubling down on its chaotic, competitive, entrepreneurial spirit. “What if we become more like us? And what if we lean even harder into innovation, and even harder into creativity, and even harder into entrepreneurship?”

THIS chart is the CLEAREST signal of where the internet is heading. social media time is SHRINKING for the first time in HISTORY, and young people are leading the pullback. Brainrot is OUT. they grew up online, saw the full cycle of social platforms, and learned early that endless scroll doesn’t make you happier or smarter. they’re the LEADING indicator. their parents will follow in 3-5 years. AI slop is the nail in the coffin. every feed feels synthetic familiar faces, identical voices, recycled ideas. the “factory smell” of it all finally broke people’s curiosity. but there’s an upside. every trend creates its anti-trend. attention is shifting back to things that feel real, slow, and intentional. people are paying for spaces that make them feel grounded, informed, and connected again. the next $100M+ companies will engineer density, trust, and time well spent. they’ll build containers for meaning, then use AI to keep them organized, not optimized. the internet’s oldest assumption that more engagement equals more value is breaking. the white space i think is... • "slow media" formats: weekly briefs, serialized content etc • private groups that operate like clubs with applications and rituals • provenance and identity layers that verify real creators and sources • brands with offline gravity like real events, real belonging • curated directories and vetted marketplaces • paid memberships that deliver depth • note: we share business ideas around this on @ideabrowser • IRL anything - dinners, meetups, shared experiences young people are abandoning social media faster than their parents are discovering it. If you understand what that means, that's a big deal. i can't stop thinking about this FT/GWI chart. brainrot is OUT. meaning is IN.

Eggplant Picture & Sound talks about how they brought Runway into their VFX pipeline to get the History Channel's, "Life After People" on air and under budget. Read the full interview at the link below.

@timwangyc 3xYES and I can see a Cambrian Creativity Explosion arising from more and more creatives being gifted with the parity of their speed of thought & speed of artifact instantiation. Never give up on this thesis--it is a sleeping giant of vibe-making

our thesis: – real-time media orchestration = infinite visual stories – great AI tools should give speed AND control – the more you use Ponder, the better it should get at editing like you

we built Cursor for video editing

Introducing Showrunner: the Netflix of AI From our South Park AI experiment to today we’ve believed AI movies/shows are a playable medium. We just raised a round from Amazon & more and the Alpha is live today Comment for an access code to make with all our shows.

🆕 NEW: HeyGen Avatar IV is here. Our most advanced AI avatar model yet. 📸 One photo. 📝 One script. 🎧 Just your voice. Most avatars sync to your words. Avatar IV interprets them. Built on a diffusion-inspired audio-to-expression engine, it analyzes your vocal tone, rhythm, and emotion — then synthesizes photoreal facial motion with temporal realism. 🎭 Head tilts. Pauses. Cadences. Micro-expressions. ➡️ A single image → a video that feels real, not rendered. Rolling out to all users now. 👇 See examples and what makes it different

Neuroplasticity? nytimes.com/2025/04/08/wel… via @NYTimes