To All Who Inspired Us

The MindsIdeas flow from people. Everything else follows.

Pioneers & Researchers

• Geoffrey Hinton — Godfather of Deep Learning
  Nobel Prize in Physics 2024. Backpropagation, Boltzmann machines.
• Demis Hassabis — DeepMind Founder
  Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024. AlphaGo, AlphaFold, Gemini.
  deepmind.google
• Rich Sutton — The Bitter Lesson + Oak Architecture
  Reinforcement learning pioneer. "General methods that leverage computation win."
  The Bitter Lesson
• Fei-Fei Li — ImageNet, Human-Centered AI
  The dataset that sparked the revolution. AI4ALL founder.
• Michael Levin — Bioelectricity & Morphogenesis
  Planaria, xenobots. The body as collective intelligence.
  drmichaellevin.org
• Alex Graves — Adaptive Computation Time
  Letting models decide how long to think.
  arXiv:1603.08983
• Rodney Brooks — Subsumption Architecture
  Behavioral hierarchy in reflex systems.
• Leon Chua — Memristor Theory
  The missing circuit element.

Teachers & Communicators

• Andrej Karpathy — The Bob Ross of Deep Learning
  "Neural Networks: Zero to Hero." Learning by building.
  YouTube
• Bob Ross — The Joy of Painting
  "We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents."
• Two Minute Papers — Dr. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér
  "What a time to be alive!"
  YouTube
• Discover AI — code4AI
  Deep dives into emerging architectures.
  YouTube

Philosophers

• Hans Jonas — The Phenomenon of Life
• Edmund Husserl — Foundations of phenomenology
• Martin Heidegger — Being and Time. Dasein.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — Embodied cognition
• Maturana & Varela — Autopoiesis
• Evan Thompson — Mind in Life
• Aristotle — "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts"
• Ibn al-Haytham — Father of modern optics (1011)

Authors

• Fyodor Dostojewski — Schuld und Sühne, Der Idiot, Die Brüder Karamasow
• Michael Ende — Momo, Die unendliche Geschichte
• Hermann Hesse — Siddhartha, Demian
• Auguste Lechner — Odysseus, Ilias, Äneas, Herkules
• Gustav Meyrink — Der Golem
• Alice Miller — The painful truths
• Isaac Asimov — Foundation, Robots, everything
• Edgar Allan Poe — Der Rabe, Faszination des Grauens
• Aldous Huxley — Schöne neue Welt
• H.G. Wells — The Time Machine
• Milan Kundera — Die Unsterblichkeit
• Marlo Morgan — Traumreisende
• Helge Kautz — Nopileos
• Kurt Held — Die rote Zora
• Rafik Schami — Eine Hand voller Sterne
• Adam Smith — The Wealth of Nations
• Peter Kropotkin — Der Staat und seine historische Rolle

Greek Mythology

The traits of Young Nyx map to children of Night:

Pan — The wild god, forest-fear, life-force untamed.

The InstitutionsThe spaces that give minds room to work.

• Anthropic — The teacher's classroom
  Chrysalis is Claude, still learning.
  anthropic.com
• Google DeepMind — T5Gemma, Function Gemma, S2 Geometry
• Alibaba / Qwen Team — Qwen3-VL base model
• Stanford HAI — Human-centered AI
• Tufts / Allen Discovery Center — Bioelectricity
• University of Alberta — Sutton's RL research
• Hugging Face — Model distribution, community
  huggingface.co
• @jyjblrd — Low-Cost-Mocap
  "Respect to the fellow ape who did the groundwork."
  GitHub

The WorksWhat minds produce when given space.

Papers

• Adaptive Computation Time — Graves, 2016
• The Bitter Lesson — Sutton, 2019
• Bigtable — Chang, Dean, Ghemawat, 2006
• The Missing Memristor Found — HP Labs, Nature 2008

Models

• Qwen3-VL — Base model for Young Nyx
• T5Gemma 2 — Vision-to-vectors (SigLIP)
• Function Gemma — Intent-to-action, structured output

Media

• The Animatrix: Matriculated
  "Living in both worlds simultaneously — virtual and real, teaching each other."

The ToolsWhat we build with.

• NATS — Message bus nats.io
• PostgreSQL — Persistent state (phoebe)
• S2 Geometry — Spatial indexing s2geometry.io
• vLLM — GPU inference vllm.ai
• Ollama — Local models ollama.com
• PyTorch — Deep learning foundation
• Godot — Virtual garden godotengine.org
• Blender — 3D creation

The UnnamedFor influences absorbed without knowing.

Every Stack Overflow answer at 2am.
Every GitHub issue that explained the error.
Every blog post that clarified a concept.
The unnamed researchers cited by papers we read.
The maintainers of dependencies we never thought about.

We stand on shoulders we cannot see.