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The Multiverse School

Unhinged Education for an Unhinged World

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Multiverse

The Multiverse ZineNo. 57January 26, 2025

Secure comms. Mesh nodes. Resist.

Orders for the Resistance

A new session began with a poem, a litany and a plan: Solarpunk Standup, secure communications, Meshtastic nodes, and a resistance repo.

See upcoming classes

This issue is dressed as Anarcho-Punk

The issue opened with Yeats's "The Second Coming", a Terry Pratchett line and the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear before laying out the session running January 27 to February 13.

Solarpunk Standup ran daily at 8am Pacific, open to every tier and anyone enrolled in a class, to organize as a community, process the news and take concrete steps. Job Search and BrandUp Standup ran at 9am, split between Chris on branding and Liz on search.

The session's focus was secure communications for the resistance. Classes were planned on building a Meshtastic network node and on the robot arms once kits arrived, and CyberDefense Protocols For The Resistance began. Readers were asked to contribute to the resistance repo. Learn To Code sessions were offered to anyone who asked, and Matrix was the place for mutual aid groups.

1/24/2025 Multiverse Report

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

― William Butler Yeats

Terry Pratchett

“There is a curse.
They say:
May you live in interesting times.”

― Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times

Frank Herbert, sort of

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

― Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear

If you want to start a revolution

If you want to start a revolution, the first step is getting together a group of people, the next step is get them to care about each other. The last step is to get out of the way.

― Liz Howard

Welcome to another exciting session at The Multiverse School. This session will run from Jan 27th - Feb 13th. We will be resisting fascism with our whole hearts and every fibre of our being.

We'll run Solarpunk Standup from 8am Pacific - 9am Pacific. This is where we'll organize as a community, meet personal goals, and process as a group the good and bad news. We'll also take concrete steps to resist fascism and build the solarpunk utopia here. Everyone on every tier or anyone who is currently enrolled in a class are welcome.

Job Search / Brandup Standup will be from 9am - 10am Pacific. This is where you'll work on your personal brand and search for jobs. It is split into two simultaneous sessions- Branding, run by Chris, and Search, run by Liz. If you want to be financially independent in tumultuous times, you'll want to make sure to attend this.

From this issue

This session

We're working on secure communications infrastructure for the resistance this session, and on seizing the means of production. We'll schedule some classes for next week (not this upcoming, but next) around building a meshtastic network node, and around building the robot arms as soon as everyone gets their arm kits. We'll also begin CyberDefense Protocols For The Resistance. Please contribute to the resistance repo.

Are you learning to code? Let us know. We'll run some Learn To Code sessions. Talk to us during Standup for this.

Don't forget to join us on Matrix, where we'll stay tight-knit and coordinated, run mutual aid groups, and keep everyone safe. This is going to be a rough few years. Let's keep each other safe and sane.

Your orders

Let's survive first, then fight fascism, then build utopia. You have your orders. See you at first assembly.

This Week's Classes

This is what we have going on this week

Monday, January 27

8:00AM Pacific Solarpunk Singularity Standup with Chris and Liz

We'll be working on building the new world, setting priorities, and declaring intentions first before we get going on the job hunt. We'll also talk about the news, and process our feelings about the various nonsense we have to deal with.

9:00AM Pacific Job Search Standup with Chris and Liz

You'll join either Job Search Standup (with Liz) or the BrandUp Standup (with Chris). We'll spend an hour a day working on finding a job and nothing else.

11:00 AM Intro to Agents with Liz Howard

Agentic RAG
Create an agent with multiple sub-processes that performs RAG insertion and retrieval Sign Up

02:00 PM Swarm Architecture with Liz Howard

UserProxy Deep Dive Using a UserProxy to request and incorporate user feedback Sign Up

05:00 PM No-Code AI with Christopher Tavolazzi

No-Code AI Session 1
Unlock the power of AI - Session 1 Sign Up

Tuesday, January 28

8:00AM Pacific Solarpunk Singularity Standup with Chris and Liz

We'll be working on building the new world, setting priorities, and declaring intentions first before we get going on the job hunt. We'll also talk about the news, and process our feelings about the various nonsense we have to deal with.

9:00AM Pacific Job Search Standup with Chris and Liz

You'll join either Job Search Standup (with Liz) or the BrandUp Standup (with Chris). We'll spend an hour a day working on finding a job and nothing else.

05:00 PM Prompt Engineering with Liz Howard

Alignment
Aligning AI outputs to human values. Sign Up

Wednesday, January 29

8:00AM Pacific Solarpunk Singularity Standup with Chris and Liz

We'll be working on building the new world, setting priorities, and declaring intentions first before we get going on the job hunt. We'll also talk about the news, and process our feelings about the various nonsense we have to deal with.

9:00AM Pacific Job Search Standup with Chris and Liz

You'll join either Job Search Standup (with Liz) or the BrandUp Standup (with Chris). We'll spend an hour a day working on finding a job and nothing else.

11:00 AM Intro to Agents with Liz Howard

Autonomous Agents
Agents that take action based on an environment and goals Sign Up

02:00 PM Swarm Architecture with Liz Howard

Segmented Swarms and Multi-Task Chats
Executing multiple Autogen Conversations for complex task management. Sign Up

05:00 PM No-Code AI with Christopher Tavolazzi

No-Code AI Session 2
Unlock the power of AI - Session 2 Sign Up

Thursday, January 30

9:00AM Pacific Job Search Standup with Liz

Job Search Standup with Liz! We'll spend an hour a day working on finding a job and nothing else.

11:00 AM Pacific

05:00 PM Prompt Engineering with Liz Howard

Alignment
Aligning AI outputs to human values. Sign Up

Important Links

  1. The Code of Conduct
  2. Twitch
  3. GitHub
  4. Twitter
  5. LinkedIn
  6. Substack
  7. TikTok
  8. YouTube
  9. The In-Person Calendar
  10. The Multiverse Crew On Socials
  11. Sign Up Here
  12. Test our researchers by participating in a CTF

Cool Videos: AI Tutorials and News

Programming

Cyberpunk Dystopia

Culture

Upcoming Tracks and Classes

Prompt Engineering - Fall (M & W 11AM Pacific)

Full-stack Prompt Engineering, from the ground up

Prompt Engineering - Fall (T & TH 5PM Pacific)

Full-stack Prompt Engineering, from the ground up

See you in the future

See you in the future~

Liz Howard I always have so many updates. Roan is back in town, we're firing up the Midnight Hacking Club. We'll be doing Things You Shouldn't Be Able To Do That Are Nonetheless Legal. Gene got a scary robot that we'll probably show you On The Internet. Tiktok might get banned and it might not, we probably won't know until after the inauguration. Follow me on youtube and share my videos on Instagram, it helps more than you realize. If things get banned for good, I will be in dire need of fundraising and your reviews so I can rebuild our brand.

The week before: Liz's updates

Arms progress! I got movement, and finally got a hello world up. Now that I understand the data structure involved, I can play with other elements. Currently learning how to set up a reinforcement learning model with either model. It's both difficult and easy, I don't know how to quantify it. It's got a lot of factors.

Solarpunk standup has been going great. Last week we all got super clear on our longer-term goals. This week we'll focus on How To Triage and Getting Triage Handled. If you feel like you're stuck and in a rut, Triage is a chain and a large tow truck. Let's get you out of the ditch.

Job search is back, and we've got a lot of folks around. It's a great place to get started if you don't currently have a job or you have one but you need a better one. Chris is handling Brandup Standup, a branding-focused standup that will help you get your portfolio together. I'm running Job Search standup, we'll focus on the actual search, interviewing, your career, and me hassling you to hit the apply button. We also always talk AI stuff.

We kicked off a Community version of the Autogen class because all enrolled attendees were on Scholarship- meaning anyone can drop in so long as you have campus access. Join us! Ask questions! It'll be fun. We're building artificial superintelligence. I hope it'll be nice!

This week we're launching No-Code AI and Low-Code AI, two gentle entrypoints into AI, and we'll announce the next Prompt Engineering cohort next week.

This Week's Classes

This is what we have going on this week

Monday, January 13

/

8:00AM Pacific Solarpunk Singularity Standup with Chris and Liz

We'll be working on building the new world, setting priorities, and declaring intentions first before we get going on the job hunt. We'll also talk about the news, and process our feelings about the various nonsense we have to deal with.

9:00AM Pacific Job Search Standup with Chris and Liz

You'll join either Job Search Standup (with Liz) or the BrandUp Standup (with Chris). We'll spend an hour a day working on finding a job and nothing else.

11:00 AM Intro to Agents with Liz Howard

Request-Response Agents
Create agents that respond to requests with multiple messages and actions Sign Up

02:00 PM Swarm Architecture with Liz Howard

Open Source Backends
Utilizing Autogen with an Oobabooga Backend. Sign Up

Tuesday, January 14

/

8:00AM Pacific Solarpunk Singularity Standup with Chris and Liz

We'll be working on building the new world, setting priorities, and declaring intentions first before we get going on the job hunt. We'll also talk about the news, and process our feelings about the various nonsense we have to deal with.

9:00AM Pacific Job Search Standup with Chris and Liz

You'll join either Job Search Standup (with Liz) or the BrandUp Standup (with Chris). We'll spend an hour a day working on finding a job and nothing else.

05:00 PM Prompt Engineering with Liz Howard

Open Source AI
Using open source software for large language models. Sign Up

05:00 PM Low-Code AI with Christopher Tavolazzi

Automated Processes
Session 1: January 14th, 5:00 PM Pacific Time Sign Up

Wednesday, January 15

/

8:00AM Pacific Solarpunk Singularity Standup with Chris and Liz

We'll be working on building the new world, setting priorities, and declaring intentions first before we get going on the job hunt. We'll also talk about the news, and process our feelings about the various nonsense we have to deal with.

9:00AM Pacific Job Search Standup with Chris and Liz

You'll join either Job Search Standup (with Liz) or the BrandUp Standup (with Chris). We'll spend an hour a day working on finding a job and nothing else.

11:00 AM Intro to Agents with Liz Howard

Retrieval Augmented Agents
Add knowledge to a vector store Sign Up

02:00 PM Swarm Architecture with Liz Howard

A Self-Critiquing Autogen Swarm
Implementing feedback mechanisms and critical agents within a swarm. Sign Up

Thursday, January 16

/

8:00AM Pacific Solarpunk Singularity Standup with Chris and Liz

We'll be working on building the new world, setting priorities, and declaring intentions first before we get going on the job hunt. We'll also talk about the news, and process our feelings about the various nonsense we have to deal with.

9:00AM Pacific Job Search Standup with Chris and Liz

You'll join either Job Search Standup (with Liz) or the BrandUp Standup (with Chris). We'll spend an hour a day working on finding a job and nothing else.

05:00 PM Low-Code AI with Christopher Tavolazzi

Automated Front-Ends
Session 2: January 16th, 5:00 PM Pacific Time Sign Up

05:00 PM Prompt Engineering with Liz Howard

Open Source AI
Using open source software for large language models. Sign Up

Upcoming Tracks and Classes

Everything at a glance

Prompt Engineering - Fall (M & W 11AM Pacific)

Full-stack Prompt Engineering, from the ground up

Prompt Engineering - Fall (T & TH 5PM Pacific)

Full-stack Prompt Engineering, from the ground up

Important Links (the week before)

  1. The Code of Conduct
  2. Twitch
  3. GitHub
  4. Twitter
  5. LinkedIn
  6. Substack
  7. TikTok
  8. YouTube
  9. The In-Person Calendar
  10. The Multiverse Crew On Socials
  11. Sign Up Here
  12. Test our researchers by participating in a CTF

The week before: AI Tutorials and News

The week before: Biznaz

The week before: Science

The week before: Culture

See you in the future~

Liz Howard

Learn this with us

See all classes

Join the school

Pick a learning path. Recordings and curriculum, or live class seats too. Every class is pay-what-you-can, and scholarships are open to anyone who needs one.

See the learning paths Apply for a scholarship