first place, $10,000, fireworks: deploy, san francisco.the live demo on stage, on hackersquad's youtube (5:04).the demo, with my voice (1:49).a race on one wrist joint. the classic optimizer needs 493 physical tests, gpt-6.1 terra gets it on the 1st after 23 s of thinking, joint tuner on the 5th, in about a second each.a motor + gearbox. the orange output shaft runs joint tuner's gains in mujoco and settles inside the spec. real time.a robot arm's elbow, driven by joint tuner's gains, meeting its spec. 37x speed.a humanoid ankle that can't balance on its own. joint tuner's gains hold it steady. real time.a drone's roll axis, with the lag of real rotors, settling on joint tuner's gains. 2x speed.how it works: a small model fine-tuned on fireworks proposes 8 gain sets, a simulator throws out the bad ones before any hardware moves, and an optimizer repairs the rest if needed.on 100 held-out tasks, joint tuner solves 90, the same as gpt-6.1 terra (89) and kimi k3 thinking (90), at a fraction of the model time.fine-tuning on fireworks for $5.11 took the 35b model from 20 to 50 right on its first answer, and from 53 to 81 with best of 8.every tuning job leaves labeled tests behind; feeding them back into training means the next joint needs fewer tests.fireworks: deploy, nov 2 in san francisco, with fireworks, microsoft and nvidia.
xtribe, inglewood.opening molten.on stage.figuring out where everything goes.a warehouse full of builders.wires and breadboards.a refreshable braille tablet.headsets on.building in the headset.testing in vr.good company.datafeel helping a team.lunch.a talk from sidefx.listening in.motion capture, live.demos.a vr demo on stage.another team up.closing.awards: crowdcast, overall winner.the winners.
fort mason, the morning of.the stage before doors opened.hardware tables: pupil labs eye trackers.digilent boards, ready to borrow.me and iana, just before kickoff.opening the hackathon.iana serving lunch.me introducing the bambu lab 3d printers.a full room by afternoon.heads down.a team mid-build.trying datafeel's haptics.sponsor demos all day.demos: talk to a robot.everyone watching demos.demos: a playdate for the walk home.me, saying thank you.awards: spidey sense.awards: haptic ride.everyone who stayed to the end.
the demo on loom (1:45): it learns from my own messages, then a little bubble offers 3 replies in my voice in any text box.the room at yc (photo: compiled)everyone on stage at the end (photo: compiled)
it speaks minionese, sings songs, loves bananas, recognizes people and hands you a banana if it wants to make friends with you.
grand (silliest) prize
me and iana with bobot.bobot at home on the table: goggle eyes, a robot arm, and its bananas.on stage at the silly robots contest, fort mason, sept 10.
the in-person demo (4:38): a quick improvised pitch in the first round, streamed from rednote.the demo on loom (5:10): a technician starts a live call and says what's wrong; offshore listens, looks things up, writes the work order and emails everyone.one issue report becomes coordinated action: understand, draft, act.one inbox per asset, one agent behind it.offshore.
predict how people's brains react to your content before you post it, using meta tribe v2.
first place, most creative computer workflow
the demo video (1:51, on google drive): upload a clip, watch the brain react, get suggestions.the brain watching along: as the clip plays, the predicted cortex lights up next to it, every 2 seconds.drop in a video or picture, pick the platform, press predict.the whole cortex from four sides, and nine feelings over time.an emotional radar, and the perplexity agent explaining what the brain data means.suggestions to make it land better, each with the feeling it targets.
field-lab.org: onto intelligence.the same thinking task recorded by two headsets: 64 channels vs 3.what the head looks like with 64 electrodes, and with 3. rich detail vs almost blind.scalpfieldnet: 8 electrodes in, the full 64-channel field back out.masking channels and filling them back in: original, sparse input, reconstructed.one 4-second window after eegforge's preprocessing: 64 channels, 1024 samples, z-scored, ready for training.how much eeg we'd gathered (in channel-hours) vs the full dataset and zuna's 2,000,000 channel-hour scale.replicating zuna: filling in dropped channels. our fine-tuned model beats spline interpolation at every dropout rate.
cellquest running again, 10 months later, on overworld's waypoint world model and a rented gpu. every frame is generated live as the drug molecule swims through the tissue; 13 hits clear the abnormal cells (40 s).anna and me after we won, at kindred ventures.
the puzzle: block-sparse causal attention, three ways.how usagi walks one row: non-diagonal blocks in a fast loop, the diagonal last.eight warps, two jobs: the biggest single win.1.238 → 0.660 ms in a day, and what didn't make it.
presenting stageready on stage, live.the demo on youtube (2:37): an ai audience chats back to what you're saying, raises hands to ask questions, and can join as a voice co-host.presenting it at the hackathon, filmed from the crowd (a youtube short).
human brain cells in a dish learn to play cartpole, with neurotech@berkeley
our poster: building a virtual dishbrain.running brian 2! my notebook for the simulation.how the virtual dish works, start to finish.run 1: no learning, and 88% of moves were 'right'.run 3, after the bug fixes: both hemispheres finally firing.spike raster: all 30 neurons per side, firing together.last try, with stdp and a dopamine-like reward: the weights hit the floor.
welcome 欢迎
a moving installation about how children with dyslexia see chinese characters.
the strokes drift on motor rails until, for a moment, they line up into 欢迎.the whole piece, 3m × 2m × 2m, nanshan, shenzhen.the moment the strokes fall into place.one of five ways dyslexic kids read characters: missing parts.
the trunks glow with what they hear: blue for low sounds, red for high.pvc, ws2812b leds, arduino, acrylic, diffuser sheet, aluminium wire."i feel like a green, symmetrical elephant."