The Founding Federation room did most of the talking, and most of the shipping showed up there too. People posted live sites, GitHub repos, a podcast generator, a closet organizer and a goth-godparent matcher, nearly always with a request for feedback attached. Give it. The cyberdeck class spent the month arguing about Orange Pis, and the AI rooms passed around papers, a few small models and a lot of opinions about token budgets.
We shipped more on the school side than I can list, so I grouped it below. This is a catch-up issue — the whole month in one go.
This issue was assembled by AI from what was shared in Multiverse chat rooms and the school's changelog. Want your piece changed or taken down? Email [email protected] and it's done.
Saga built a local model tuned for coding and reasoning, and scored it on seconds-per-correct-answer, not accuracy alone. The model card has the benchmark details.
GGUF
MLX
benchmarked on SWE Bench Live
“my little Nail, running on 25GB RAM in Pi coding agent, beats Opus and Sonnet on real code base debugging”
A zero-dependency JS and Python library that attaches a source and a confidence to a value and carries both through everything derived from it — so mock data stays marked as mock. Version 0.9.0 added an adopt skill that scans your project and tells you whether you need any of it.
A Claude Code skill for writing and running behavioral regression tests on other skills. It measures skill lift against no-skill baselines and compares models and harnesses.
Now a self-study platform for SRE practice in Rust, with a sibling repo, go-crucible, that got a trial Wheel of Misfortune exercise. Feedback and pull requests invited.
A training tool built for in-person mesh networking demos, shared with an offer to run a mesh study hall. A beginner newsletter on building, downloading and navigating the network is planned.
A live podcast generator, with a class demo. He also made a podcast episode from a Raising Intelligences playthrough using his homemade NotebookLM clone, and open-sourced a database agent harness called cato-3-librarian.
A site that pairs you with goth godparents. Shipped overnight, 74 visits in its first week, and next up are merch, a speculative fiction series and artist collaborations.
A kimono closet organizer, now a live demo with a one-minute quiz and email signup ahead of the full offer page. Claude pointed out the framework could carry over to five other kimono-adjacent communities.
Thomas posted the benchmark report for the team's agentic memory system, then ran a 72-hour research sprint with nine agents and three humans. All submissions are in a public repo.
I was vibing too close to the sun and burnt up the token pool that runs the stargazer demo
What we launched
August was our heaviest month of shipping on the website. The short version, grouped:
Benches. About fifteen new station-based workbenches, each tied to a class. Threat Model Bench, Cyberdeck Build Planner, Home Network Defense, Software Freedom Bench, Story Shape Bench, AI Literacy Bench, Device Rescue. Finish a bench and you get a packet that can count as exercise evidence.
Model benchmarks. An Omni Model Benchmarks page with recommend, leaderboard and atlas tabs, a catalog of 51 benchmarks, and a daily sync. Several benches now pull live model lists and pricing from it.
Daily games. Code Semantle, Debug Detective and AI or Not.
Classes and classrooms. One permanent classroom link per class, recordings with chapter lists, video embedded in lesson pages, and a mobile screen share built for thumbs.
Campus. Buck, a helper bot that answers handbook questions in chat rooms, a campus space created automatically for each class, and a calendar view of the eight-week cohort.
Every session in one place, indexed by topic instead of cohort number.
Cyberdeck corner
The Build a Cyberdeck room spent August on parts lists. Two builds, as posted.
No. 01HardwareBuild a Cyberdeck
Orange Pi 5 Max desktop deck
A weird little laptop that mostly works — an experiment, a learning tool and a conversation piece. Reland's tip for fellow Armbian users: WiFi would not connect while the router was set to WPA2/WPA3 Personal.
Orange Pi 5 Max 16GB
SunFounder 10.1" touch screen
Apache 2800 case
MX Keys Mini
Reland
No. 02HardwareBuild a Cyberdeck
Arctic comms deck
An outdoorsy, robust build for exploring communication in an arctic climate, with a Meshtastic LoRa node, salvaged thermal cooling and a custom battery setup.
dashAIOpen-source platform from the University of Chile for training and evaluating models locally, no code needed. Shared by Sandra-Acevedology.
StrudelLive-coded music in the browser. neek recommended it in Music Praxis and used it for the Doobies soundtrack.
AppropediaKT spotted it on the solarpunk subreddit and posted it to the solarpunk room.
Fae propaganda, Royal Society Open ScienceI posted this in the interactive fiction room: "this just in: Fae successfully publish fae propaganda to The Royal Society Open Science"
In the solarpunk room
The solarpunk room spent early August on a hard question — can you build solar power without leaning on a supply chain you wouldn't defend? The answers ran from salvaged panels and better insulation to making less electricity go further. Later in the month the room turned to thermal storage (Sunamp's phase-change hot water batteries came up) and a long, friendly argument about whether a regenerative heat loop counts as free energy. The Solarpunk Automation class met on Aug 22.
Built and shared, continued
Four more from August, from Agentic SDLC, Cool AI Tools and the Books room.
Separate from Nail, Saga published chat templates that stop Qwen overthinking. There is a concise-answer prompt too, benchmarked at 20% and 60% fewer tokens.
“I have written a popular chat template for Qwen that fixes their over thinking issues”
wombat83 OCR'd a Black's Law dictionary into an indexed, browsable resource.
wombat83
Two more decks
From Build a Cyberdeck and Cyberdeck Beta.
No. 01HardwareBuild a Cyberdeck
Ready for Lancer
estm8ben posted a photo of his finished deck.
“My cyberdeck is ready for Lancer”
estm8ben
No. 02HardwareCyberdeck Beta
A deck in a vintage Lego box
jim is building his cyberdeck into an empty vintage Lego box.
jim
these conversations are incredibly valuable and it's impossible to have them in level-headedness elsewhere on the internet
A client contract, in a fraction of the time
Out of Agentic SDLC, sailor.seashell is building a harness, a memory architecture and a "cost per useful output" benchmark. The basic automation has already delivered a client contract. "I already used the basic automation from this class to deliver a client contract in like a fraction of the time and in a language I don't program in for real."
Angie, helping everyone boot
Angie (@greenwithgrogru) got her deck to first boot in Cyberdeck Beta, then kept helping classmates: thrift options, re-posted links, and a calm walkthrough for someone separating work and journalist devices. "I hope you stick around and learn with us."
I'm new to linux but so far it is making my old school heart happy. I've never been a techie but I've been tech-adjacent for almost 50 years. It is time.
Reland, mentoring
Alongside the Orange Pi deck in this issue, Reland mentored beginners on hardware and documented the Armbian Wi-Fi fix. "It's an experiment, a learning tool, and a conversation piece."
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.
