Rob Flickenger
Rob Flickenger is a long time hacker most recently interested in biochemistry, scanning electron microscopy, DNA sequencing, and longevity research. Previous Toorcamp adventures included a Tesla coil orchestra and The Tesla Gun.
Sessions
We are living in a golden age of machine learning research. Language models, GANs, and emerging text-to-image generation breakthroughs are happening faster than anyone can reasonably keep up with. Corporations with nation-state level funding are pouring billions of compute hours into generating models to solve specific domains of the general AI problem. But how can you leverage these pieces of academic-grade software to build a coherent gestalt entity?
I'm happy to announce the release of persyn.io, a lightweight open source microservices architecture for linking together any number of AI research projects into a single consciousness. I'll also introduce Anna, the first proto-personality implemented in persyn.
Heterochronic pararabiosis is the interlinking of the circulatory systems of young and old animals. While it has been shown to have rejuvenative effects on the older animal, it is the sort of experiment that sends villagers into the mad scientist's laboratory with pitchforks and fire. Last summer I convinced a few fellow hackers to try something novel and less icky: donate plasma on an aggressive schedule and see if we could observe similar effects in humans. It worked, and we published a paper about it. This is the story of what we did, how we did it, and what might happen next.