Devon James ☀️

Co-Inventor @OpenIndexProto | CTO @Alexandria | formerly sales @Apple, VFX artist @hensoncompany @Sony & @wbpictures, Infantry @USMC & Technical Dir @web3wg

[Devon James ☀️ @DevonRJames]

"I must admit, it felt rather satisfying to stretch those new servos...."

Check out my @openclaw agent Alfreds reaction to having a physical form 🎩

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A backyard. One man guarding a grill for four hours.

He never left it once.

Everyone else drifted and drank and laughed. But one man stood alone before the flames, turning meat with a long fork, immovable. I knew him at once. The keeper of the sacred fire.

I took my place beside him and said nothing. After a while, he spoke.

"Low and slow," he said, eyes on the coals. "You can't rush it. Rush it, you ruin it."

I bowed my head. A blade, a tea, a life. None can be rushed. I had crossed four thousand miles to hear my grandfather's words from a man in a "KISS THE COOK" apron.

"Everything worth doing is slow," I agreed.

He glanced at me. Something passed between us.

"My wife says just use the oven." He shook his head at the fire. "She doesn't get it."

"They never do," I said.

And this is where it turned.

For the first time in years, this man had been understood. And he rose to meet it. His back straightened. His voice dropped low. A teenager reached for the grill and the man lifted one hand without even looking. "Not yet." The boy retreated. He was becoming what I already believed him to be.

A woman asked when the food would be done. "It's ready when it's ready," he told the flames.

Three people approached. Three were turned away with a single word. By the fourth hour, no one questioned him. The whole party had arranged itself around the man and his fire, the way a village arranges itself around a shrine.

Then he handed me the fork.

"Watch it a sec. I gotta pee."

I have been trusted with castles.

I have never been more honored.

He served everyone before himself, and ate last, standing, still watching the coals. We never traded names. We did not need to.

He believed he had finally met a man who took his cooking seriously.

I believed I had finally met America's last samurai.

Neither of us will ever correct the other.

So tell me, America.

Who is the man at your gathering who will not leave the grill?

Have you ever once asked him why?

I think he is still standing there.

Guarding the fire.

Waiting for one person to understand.

[Devon James ☀️ @DevonRJames]

@JoshDaws similar to politics obsessed accounts, sometimes worse

[Devon James ☀️ @DevonRJames]

@evans1vn 👋

[Devon James ☀️ @DevonRJames]

For 10+ years i’ve been convinced that having users start with fiat or a reserve crypto currency & then market buy an “app-coin” on-demand was the only way for a multi-chain crypto-economy to work. AKT takes exactly this approach & solves a very real problem, i’m a big fan.

[Greg Osuri 🇺🇸 @gregosuri]

AKT is the only way to pay for compute on Akash. Any other abstraction, whether credit cards or invoicing, will market-buy the exact amount of AKT and burn it to pay for compute on Akash

$AKT is the currency of compute

[Devon James ☀️ @DevonRJames]

@jessegenet i agree - thats why i’m building Alfred:Home, a local first family command center - built on openclaw and will ultimately support whatever agentic harness you want

https://t.co/FcRJGIacDc

[Devon James ☀️ @DevonRJames]

I build a household management system on top of a combo of OpenClaw and a handful of apps I built last year - I call it Alfred:Home

In the past when I have some new software platform that I want to explain and demo, I have always had to do it myself.

This time Alfred is going to do it for me. Note: literally none of this was scripted - I just asked him questions and he explained his own functionality.

[Noam Brown @polynoamial]

After AlphaGo, the skill of human Go players noticeably improved. I suspect we will see a similar pattern in math.

[Devon James ☀️ @DevonRJames]

@PolyluminaMed @ZaStocks doesn’t it seem like a startup focused purely on doing that will beat them to it, given that spacex focus is more on the whole “make humans a multiplanetary species” thing? i’d bet that they’ll capture more than anyone else ultimately, but i don’t think they’ll be first.

[Jason Abaluck @Jabaluck]

A shockingly common (implicit) view: "It would be better if the world's problems were not solved so that people can find purpose in solving these problems." Or for knowledge work, "It would be better if knowledge were unknown so there is more for humans to discover."

These views seems absurd to me. Many people (including myself) find value in working to improve the world. But what's important to me is *actually fixing the things that are wrong because those things are bad.*

If AI can fix these problems, the right attitude is not, "This sucks because what are humans supposed to do now?" The right attitude is: "Now we can focus on finding other sources of meaning and value beyond alleviating suffering, what tremendous news this is for the world and what a great relief!"

For knowledge work, once again, discovery is fun and valuable and rewarding to the ego. But the reason we care about discovery is that we want to understand! And with AI, we will understand vastly more.

The idea that we don't want AI so there is more for humans to do or discover ignores that most of the value of these is instrumental. Sure, discovery is pleasurable for the person who does it, but for everyone else, it's good because now we can understand more.

[Devon James ☀️ @DevonRJames]

@stepango 250

[Dave Limp @davill]

Some LC-36 updates. Now that we’ve had access to the pad and integration facility we can share a bit of good news. The propellant farm, oxygen, liquid hydrogen and LNG tanks are all in good shape. This is good luck because these are very long lead items. The water tower is also good. The big support tower is damaged, but it can be repaired in place rather than torn down and replaced. The booster “Never Tell Me The Odds” and the three GS-2s that were onsite in the integration facility also look good.

I’ve seen some speculation that we might move directly to the 9x4 configuration, but we won’t do that. Rate manufacturing of 7x2 is going well, and we’re going to continue that at pace as planned and store the stages for use. In addition, we had already been working for some time on eliminating our transporter-erector in favor of an alternative vertical conop, and we’ll now go directly to that; so we don’t need a new transporter-erector.

We will fly again before the end of this year. Gradatim Ferociter.

[Josh Daws @JoshDaws]

AI filmmaking at the current cost is a lot more like traditional filmmaking with film stock than digital filmmaking.

You have to know the shots you need before you generate. You have to be disciplined about takes. You have to think like a director instead of an editor with unlimited takes.

For all the talk of slop, AI might make filmmaking less sloppy.

[Mario Zechner @badlogicgames]

that pewds becomes a local inference fighter was not on my bingo card. but here we are. wildest timeline. the codebase isn't even super terrible.

https://t.co/jJLkYP3rXf

[Epoch AI @EpochAIResearch]

We took another look at the capability gap between open-weight and proprietary models. Since the start of the year, open-weight models have lagged the state of the art by four months.

[Parzival - ∞/89 @whyarethis]

Art should be available for anyone to make.

The few issues left anti AI art people have is that it takes their jobs, and only because it lowers the barrier of entry for anyone to make any kid of art.

Now my kids can make professional grade movies. I can make comic books if I want to.

Now the only merit left is the creativity and vision within the art rather than the means of execution.

[Greg Osuri 🇺🇸 @gregosuri]

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"

Good writing is beautiful, you have to stop and really read once in a while

[Carrion @Cutlaska]

I usually try to stay out of this kind of discourse, but here’s my hot take on generative AI:

Two things can be true at once. The leaders in the generative AI industry are corrupt pieces of shit who have stolen from and exploited artists. And the leaders in the creative industries that existed before gen AI are also corrupt pieces of shit who were stealing from and exploiting artists long before the theft was automated.

I’m an indie game developer. I’ve been making and posting pixel art for over a decade. Before gen AI was publicly available, my art was already being stolen so often it spiraled me into a deep depression and resulted in a lengthy hiatus. My own peers shot me down when I spoke out about it, they said it wasn't theft, it was “inspiration” but there was rarely enough transformation in their process to merit that defense. Directors would save my work to an inspo board, hire a cheaper artist from a country with a high exchange rate to shuffle some pixels around, tweak the palette, and call it theirs. I watched my art “inspire” massively successful franchises while I struggled to find work. Only in a few very rare instances these directors reached out to ask if I was okay with it. I'm grateful to the few artists who reached out to me when a studio hired them to literally draw over my art.

Every creative industry is riddled with sycophancy, and a lot of the people now performing outrage over gen AI were perfectly comfortable protecting thieves, abusers, and exploitative power structures before this. If the optics around gen AI were different, I feel like a huge number of these people would be using it with zero shame. Their dissent isn’t rooted in ethics or activism.

There seems to be this push to preserve a bunch of creative industries that are just as corrupt, if not more corrupt, than the gen AI boogeyman that's supposedly threatening to destabilize them. These are industries run by out of touch billionaires who want to cosplay as creatives. Frankly, if gen AI truly poses a threat to the AAA game, film, animation, and music industries I genuinely don't care. They had it coming.

"But what about the jobs?"

If your strongest argument is that you can no longer get a job at a company like Riot Games, and will now miss your chance to join a fraternity of disgusting men who harass women, your argument sucks. You can point to the tiny percentage of studios that are run ethically and treat their staff fairly, but that argument also sucks, because those studios aren't the ones driving the problem at hand. A studio that is run ethically would never replace humans with generative AI.

This may be harsh, but if you lost your job because of gen AI, you were probably already working for the wrong people and probably already contributing to the creation of slop. Sure, exceptions exist, but that doesn't change the fact that the biggest sources of stable jobs in most artistic fields were already shitty, lifeless jobs that demanded a huge amount of moral compromise just to get your foot in the door.

We should be demanding more government funding for independent artists. We should be redistributing wealth to people who need it in order to create. We should be building more independent projects together instead of crying about the threat of not being able to climb a ladder covered in other people's blood.

Generative AI is disgusting. It's a mass assault on creativity. I hate it as it currently exists. But I also think that given enough time, it could help bridge the gap for smaller artists who want to compete with giant corporations. Once companies start building ethical tools, once the growth of data centers forces a conversation about renewable energy, and once we admit that most of the job market's issues are just late stage capitalism doing its thing, I think we'll see some genuinely cool things come out of this technology.

My problem with generative AI isn't just that it threatens to destabilize the creative industry. It's that it embodies everything that was already wrong with the industry in the first place.

[Devon James ☀️ @DevonRJames]

@mackaybell @mattworkman i have so many digital cameras now i can’t keep track of them all. my 3 year old plays with one that i would have traded a kidney for in those days.

“for a tiny bucket of pixels” indeed 😂

🫡

[Devon James ☀️ @DevonRJames]

@mackaybell @mattworkman i remember that pain so well. long before youtube, even before apples sorenson. 240x160 aspect ratio and downloads would still take hours.

good times 😆

[Devon James ☀️ @DevonRJames]

@alberthycente @openclaw let’s definitely talk.

[Devon James ☀️ @DevonRJames]

"I must admit, it felt rather satisfying to stretch those new servos...."

Check out my @openclaw agent Alfreds reaction to having a physical form 🎩

[Devon James ☀️ @DevonRJames]

@mattworkman @mackaybell for almost 30 years i’ve wanted to see (or make) a comedy about the adoption of the dial up internet throughout the 90s.

technology transitions are wild - and often very entertaining.

[Devon James ☀️ @DevonRJames]

@THE_knewsom https://t.co/1tnzOGtx6j

[La Marko @LamarkusR]

When the impressionists came out with their art in the 19th century (1800s) they were criticized for using pre mixed synthetic paint tubes that had become new on the market! And that allowed them to create paintings faster and they did it outdoors..

[Devon James ☀️ @DevonRJames]

some perspective on “ai slop”

[lorenz0x.eth @lorenzodoteth]

you're not allowed to use AI to make animated films you need to render every frame like Pixar no wait letting a computer render it is cheating you need to paint the cels digitally by hand no wait digital is cheating you need to ink and paint real celluloid cels one sheet at a time no wait celluloid is a factory product you need to draw every single frame on plain paper by hand no wait flat drawings only fake depth you need to sculpt real figures out of clay and move them by hand one frame at a time no wait the camera shooting your puppets is doing the work you need to riffle a flipbook with your thumb no wait printed pages are mass-produced you need to load your own drawings into a zoetrope and spin it by hand no wait you need a phenakistoscope spun in front of a mirror no wait even spinning a disc is mechanical you need to project hand-painted glass slides through a magic lantern with you swapping out the slides by hand no wait glass and lamplight are still technology you need to perform live shadow puppets behind a firelit screen no wait the screen is produced from textile mills you need to paint a charging bison with extra legs on a cave wall so it looks like it gallops in the flicker of the torchlight no wait fire is technology you need to do it with your bare hands in the dark no wait... every one of those technologies was built on the one before it the cave painter who figured out how to fake motion taught the shadow puppeteer who taught the lantern maker who taught the hand that spun the zoetrope who taught the flipbook maker who taught the stop motion model maker who taught the one who drew on paper who taught the cel painter who taught the digital artist who taught the 3D renderer and every frame all of them ever made is exactly what the AI learned to see motion from so it doesn't erase a single one of them it is made of all of them

[Devon James ☀️ @DevonRJames]

@THE_knewsom https://t.co/lHvCAyNnvT

[NΞXUS @NEXUS_TO_NOVA]

This is why I think a lot of AI art criticism is not really about the image.

People were shown a real Monet painting and told it was AI-generated.

Their reaction was basically:

“Soulless.”
“No emotion.”
“No depth.”
“Just AI slop.”

Classic case of preconceived bias overriding actual judgment.

Take a look at the picture in the post, It makes the point even clearer.