The weekly Vivarium for Week 1

A Big Shift is Underway

When I was a kid, Bubble Yum and Bubblicious bubble gum brands fought for the hearts and minds of fun-loving kids. If you wanted to blow bigger bubbles, you used more pieces. And one thing we learned was that blowing a big bubble took some time and patience and it helped if the wind wasn't blowing.

But while the bubble got big a little at a time, when it popped, it popped all of a sudden.

The Wall Street Journal published an article suggesting that Yann LeCun will be leaving Meta, where previously he was heading up the FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) team.

I'm not gonna go on the record stating that this is the start of the bubble popping, but one thing you learned as a kid is that it was hard to know precisely when the bubble is gonna popped, but every single one popped once it got big enough.

Nice thing about Bubblicious, though, is it didn't stick to your face and hair. Or maybe it did stick to your hair. Or maybe it was Bubble Yum that didn't stick. I think we should have a big bubble gum bubble blowing and popping party.

Maybe not as fun as all that, but we've got some posts up about how LLM hallucination is a feature not a bug, some thoughts on the ethics of AI, and a fun little thought experiment ChatGPT ran on Vivarium infrastructure ideas after I mixed a bunch of alphabets into its soup.

News Around Your Towns

Last week, I mentioned wanting to start up a weekly in-person hacking event reminiscent of some of the famous ones in history, like Seattle Ruby Brigade and LA Ruby.

So I popped (not bubble popping, different popping) over to PDX Hackerspace on Saturday and had a look around. It looks amazing. If everything goes according to plan, we'll probably start hosting there every Tuesday maybe 6-9pm. I'll post it on Calagator when it's finalized. If you're in the Portland Metro area, we'd love to see you!

If virtual is more your thing, or you just live really really far away, join the Discord (not to be confused with The Facebook) and chat with us.

Reader's Corner

Thanks to a request from long time Rubinius supporter, Shane Becker, we now have 🎉 an RSS feed 🎉.

I literally hadn't heard the words "RSS feed" in several decades, but it turns out that it's pretty cool stuff. If you haven't heard those words either, or have and are looking for a good RSS reader application, Shane says you can't beat NetNewsWire. I installed it and when I opened it, I rediscovered all the feeds I had been subscribed to all those decades ago.

How's it Tracking?

The build2 project "is a hierarchy of tools consisting of a general-purpose build system, package manager (for package consumption), and project manager (for project development)."

It's basically everything I wanted more than 15 years ago when I was wiring everything together with Rake and shell scripts, but they only started working on it about 10 years ago.

As cool as it is, it does take some wrapping your brain around it, so I spent time doing that last week to save you the trouble. I've written it up in a post with a bow to explain the new Rubinius build setup.

London Calling...

As the world-wide pivot away from LLMs accelerates, it would be fantastic to get one of these competing technologies integrated in Vivarium: Integrated Neuro-Symbolic Architecture, Bayesian Prediction / Active Inference, or one of the world models that LeCun is interested in.

If you're interested in any of these, or already have experience with one of them, drop by and let's talk.

Looking Forward to Next Week

I'm not ticking off these issues from last week yet because I want to stress-test the new Rubinius build setup with a couple package managers. One of the huge problems we had before was getting support from package maintainers because of the difficulty to them of needing things like Ruby to build Rubinius. So, I'm adding that to this list.

Have something you want to work on? It's all free and open source, so dive right in!

Have a splendid week!

Nov 16, 2025