brian 🪴

many marketers will tell you the best storytelling revolves around founders, not brands. on @CambrianNetwork's first product launch day, i'd like to share some lore on how *this* founder is built different when i started talking to @0xsamgreen in 2022 it became immediately clear to me he had a special prescience only attainable through a genuine love for lifelong learning it's this attribute that has led to many firsts in his life - like co-leading the first reinforcement learning course at UCSB, or developing the first agentic copilot in DeFi when Sam first discussed working on @CambrianNetwork, it sounded less like a job and more like a seat at a prestigious university. and brother, do i love to learn. it was a privilege to join the team. his conviction in agentic finance was the strongest signal of where the future was headed. and since Cambrian was founded in 2024, he's been spot on. prescient. as Cambrian's marketer and brand builder, i deliberately chose to embed Sam's love for academia, science, natural history, and techno-optimist futurism into the Cambrian brand - going so far as to work with plant molecular biologist @NickDesnoyer on early artwork. you can see this DNA all over cambrian.org and the video below fast forward to product launch planning time. i knew it'd be more compelling to hear from the founder himself than an abstract brand account, so we planned Sam's first-ever launch video. i hope his conviction is as clear to you as it is to the rest of our team!

opus 5.5 + remotion is a killer combo for motion graphics explainer videos. here are 5 things that surprised me while i learned how to cook with this stack (btw anyone saying you can 1-shot something like this is lying): >you can feed all sorts of visual inspo to claude. it'll say it "can't watch videos" but what it does is snapshot frame-by-frame to analyze motion graphics and then replicates them pretty well >claude is a decent co-director and co-storyboarder, but my advice is to be extremely detailed with what you are trying to accomplish, and ask it to pitch several execution styles that you have to manually review so it doesn't just take the sloppiest path of least resistance. i echo what @second_bassoon wrote here the other day: write prompts "like essays" >like all llms, claude tends to engage in defensive compliance, meaning most initial output will be full of detail to cover all sorts of edge cases that could result in misconstrued meaning, so you often end up with comically information-dense visuals. it's your duty as an orchestrator to recognize this hedging behavior and simplify, simplify, simplify >claude made the music and sound fx too! it's not a bad composer either. i gave it .wav files of nightcall by kavinsky and clubbed to death by rob dougan and asked it to make a cool trip hop beat with elements inspired by both. it analyzed the waveforms and found some common themes. it generated synths that do sound kinda amateurish but in a way i found quite charming. i did have to go back-and-forth on synth choice and track mixing, but the result really fits for the video, plus custom length and no copyright takedowns to worry about >also re: music, i was impressed at how specific and vague you can be with instructions to revise a soundtrack. in this exercise i both prompted "the sound fx are in A major, make them F minor to match the soundtrack scale" and also "make the bass fatter and filthier" and "make the record scratches sound less cheap, less like yelping dogs" honestly, even though i'm happy with this result there's still so much room for me to improve here. next challenge - need to try hooking it up to blender to see how well it does with 3d. stay tuned for more learnings!

i suspect people will gradually begin doubting their own digital/financial idiosyncrasies as large-scale exploits become more common i predict the eventual emergence of an annoying but helpful ai “are you sure you want to do that” assistant, kind of like navi from zelda, first for sensitive online activities, then later as something you wear to protect against irl social engineering

social engineering is the new programming if claude/codex can crack p much anything and no one really codes by hand anymore, it must be infinitely more interesting (for hackers at least) to “crack” the code of human behavior

on-demand lucid dreaming is some pretty sci-fi shit

music producers: what’s the best DAW these days where i can mostly do things manually but still prompt stuff like “sidechain the kicks to the bassline”?

i’ve been making fermented hot sauce for 10+ years and only learned a few weeks ago the vacuum sealing method a buddy of mine saw my setup and said “you know, you can get a lot cleaner of a flavor if you ditch the 3% brine and just vacuum seal your peppers with 3% salt by weight” i tried it on my latest batch of piri-piri peppers from the garden and the resulting (pictured) sauce was divine. you get the pleasant tanginess of the lacto ferment without the brininess that typically goes with it next up: Peruvian ají verde sauce, let’s see how it goes after these green peppas ferment

i submit myself to the Argentinian authorities for the great crime of making chocotorta into a high-protein, low-sugar “healthy” food with unspeakable ingredients

decent flight tip: ask gemini which gate [your flight number] historically departs from. saved me from running across the airport 30 mins before the gate was listed on the screens (it was right)

madrid food report. top 4 bites on this trip in no particular order 1) zamburiña, baby scallop. served with a garlic and olive oil emulsion, garnished with some parsley and crispy shallot. divine bite. chef should have separated the meat from the shell tho 2) presa de ibérico, grilled pork shoulder. the cool thing about ibérico is you can eat it medium or medium rare like a steak. i normally don’t eat pork but will make an exception for what is essentially the wagyu of pork. nice demi-glace and paper-thin zucchini w lemon 3) focaccia sandwich w thin-ass mortadella, stracciatella and pistachio pesto. the crackly, wispy crust really put the bread on another plane of existence. not greasy at all like most focach’. it ain’t spanish food but the small chain was created in spain. probably best sandwich of this style of my life 4) pistachio chocolate croissant. i was prepared to take one bite and cringe because so many bakeries make these cloyingly sweet. but not this one. the pistachio was salted and super roasty. the chocolate was velvety and dark, not palm oil sugar slop. gud cronch. made by a serbian pâtissier who’s lived the last 13 years in spain, nice dude

gmail's ai spellcheck will arbitrarily underline random strings of text in the email you're drafting only to suggest substitutions that completely remove any semblance of a personality in your words

made a wifeguy macchiato, for my wife

every day at least 1 person somewhere in the world forces AI Will Smith to eat a bowl of AI spaghetti and i think this must weigh heavy on the real Will’s soul

jason is a must-follow to stay on the bleeding edge of futuristic finance