Ugo Coppola

Product @withopal - Riding bike, baking pizza and building apps that stick

[Ugo Coppola @coppoUx]

@adulong Agree

[Ugo Coppola @coppoUx]

@jahirfiquitiva @opalapp @Barbapapapps @a_cucos Hey @jahirfiquitiva don’t worry they will be back very very soon! We release step by step! Btw if you have any feedbacks I’m all ears 🙏

[Ugo Coppola @coppoUx]

If you say so

[jasper @jasperdevs]

opal is genuinely the best designed piece of software in the history of computers

[Ugo Coppola @coppoUx]

@nbaschez For people shipping only

[Ugo Coppola @coppoUx]

We keep talking about AI like the hard part is learning it. The hard part was never learning it. The hard part is staying focused long enough for it to matter.

[Kenneth Schlenker @kschlenker]

Today we're announcing the new Opal to build the operating system for attention.

1 million people already use Opal every single day. We raised $10M.

Personal AGI is coming.  The bottleneck won't be access to intelligence.

It will be attention.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Ages 5 to 10 is the only window in human development where the brain's recording system is fully online but the filtering system hasn't been installed yet.

The hippocampus, the brain structure responsible for encoding episodic memories, reaches functional maturity around age 5. Before that, you're in what neuroscientists call childhood amnesia. The average human can't retrieve a single episodic memory from before age 4.7. Your brain was recording, but in a format it would later overwrite.

Around 5, the dentate gyrus finishes pruning to adult-level synaptic density and the trisynaptic circuit that links hippocampal subfields goes fully operational. You can now encode a scene, bind it to a time and place, and store it for decades.

But here's what makes 5 to 10 different from every age that follows. The prefrontal cortex, which handles habituation and novelty filtering, won't reach maturity until your early twenties. So for roughly five years, you have an adult-grade memory encoder paired with zero ability to tune anything out. Every hotel lobby, every ocean wave, every airport terminal is arriving at full sensory bandwidth with no compression algorithm.

Vacations stack every variable that strengthens memory encoding. Novel environment. Emotional arousal. Multi-sensory input. Spatial navigation through unfamiliar terrain. A 7-year-old on a beach trip is running all five at maximum intensity simultaneously, writing to a hard drive that just came online.

After 10, prefrontal maturation starts filtering. By adulthood, you need increasingly extreme novelty to generate the same encoding strength. That's why your twentieth vacation blurs but the one trip your parents took you on at age 8 plays back in full resolution forty years later.

The brain wasn't designed to remember vacations. It was designed to map novel environments during a critical learning window. Family trips just happen to be the most concentrated dose of novelty most children in developed countries will ever receive.

[Ugo Coppola @coppoUx]

Shifting the mental health score of 50 million teens by 3% means hundreds of thousands of additional kids crossing the threshold into clinical depression or anxiety.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The evidence is in. Social media is harming kids' mental health.

JAMA just completed the largest longitudinal meta-analysis ever assembled. 363,000 kids across 153 studies. Up to 22 years of follow-up.

The finding? Social media is bad for kids' mental health. Video gaming is not.

Samantha Teague's team at James Cook University screened nearly 19,000 papers to get to the 153 that met the bar for longitudinal evidence. They tracked 26 developmental outcomes across ages 2 to 19.

Video gaming was associated with higher aggression but better attention and executive function. Social media was associated with behavioral problems, self-injury, lower self-perception, lower academic achievement, and higher substance use. Across every domain measured.

The strongest relationship in the meta-analysis: social media use predicted media addiction later. Bigger than the link to depression. Bigger than every other outcome they tracked. The platform's primary product is the addiction. Everything else cascades from there.

Pediatricians like Jason Nagata at UCSF now see the same diagnostic profile used to identify substance use disorder showing up in young adolescents. Cravings. Withdrawal.

Look at the temporal cut. Effects got more intense in studies conducted after 2012, when smartphones became ubiquitous and platforms shifted to algorithmic feeds and infinite scroll. Same kids. Same screens. The product mechanic changed and the damage scaled.

Per-study effect sizes are small. Kate Blocker at Children and Screens does the population math: shifting the mental health score of 50 million teens by 3% means hundreds of thousands of additional kids crossing the threshold into clinical depression or anxiety.

In March, juries found Meta and Google liable for intentionally building addictive platforms that cause mental health harms. The product liability framing now has peer-reviewed quantitative backing.

Video games end. Feeds don't.

[Michał Podlewski @trajektoriePL]

Terence Tao proposes what he calls a "Copernican view of intelligence".

Instead of buying into the common, one-dimensional narrative that artificial intelligence will simply evolve from "subhuman" to "superhuman" and ultimately make humanity entirely redundant, Tao urges us to look at the bigger picture.

Much like the Copernican revolution proved the Earth is not the center of the universe, Tao suggests we need to realize that human intelligence isn't the only, or necessarily the highest, form of intellect. Historically, we have treated other forms of storing or creating knowledge—like animals, books, and computers—as secondary. However, we actually exist within a much richer universe of intelligence.

Both human intelligence and computer intelligence possess their own distinct strengths and weaknesses. The true potential lies not in viewing them as direct competitors, but rather in focusing on collaboration. By working together, humans and computers can achieve additional things that neither could accomplish on their own, requiring us to think in much wider terms than just what humans or computers can do alone.

[Ugo Coppola @coppoUx]

Few things around durability in AI era
1) owning a scarce asset (license, unique regulatory insight)
2) controlling a key interaction point for money or data
3) having hard-to-replace hardware
4) being embedded in an essential workflow
5) building strong network effects
G.Rajaram

[Ugo Coppola @coppoUx]

@abavcilar shoooot

[Ugo Coppola @coppoUx]

@dogudenizugur @jacoblcoyne @rork 🧐

[Ugo Coppola @coppoUx]

@khan_kilo @jacoblcoyne @rork Actually you can't

[Ugo Coppola @coppoUx]

@jackfriks @jacoblcoyne @rork Quick friendly heads up though: you might want to remove references to “Opal” in your keywords. Apple tends to be pretty strict about that and so we are, and it would be a shame to risk any issues or get the app taken down over something avoidable.

[Cartes du Monde @CartesDuMonde]

Juste... C'est juste ultra classe à regarder ❤️

[Ugo Coppola @coppoUx]

@rom1trs Arcads

[a16z @a16z]

Worldwide app revenues now exceed game revenues.

More mobile charts: https://t.co/9ymqxFTXL0

[Ugo Coppola @coppoUx]

Sleep better, Live longer

[Opal @opalapp]

Next week, we're helping you rest easy. Stay tuned 💤

[Ugo Coppola @coppoUx]

Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid

[Opal @opalapp]

How bad was it? #januaryreceipt

[sam @samdape]

checking social media

[Kenneth Schlenker @kschlenker]

In a 2020 research project code-named “Project Mercury,” Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook and Instagram.

To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.

Rather than publishing those findings or pursuing additional research, the filing states, Meta called off further work and internally declared that the negative study findings were tainted by the “existing media narrative” around the company.
https://t.co/VcFU229htf