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matznerd

HN member
Joined
Tue, Nov 29, 2011, 3:48 AM UTC
HN karma
1,250
Public activity
481 items

About matznerd

I am a futurist & biohacker, but since 2019 have been working to help counteract climate change by developing large-scale carbon removal projects and companies.

I currently run Metalplant, where we use hyperaccumulator plants to mine soil for nickel, while removing carbon dioxide through enhanced rock weathering.

Enhanced weathering works by crushing magnesium-silicate minerals and spreading them into fields to generate alkalinity that forces CO2 to become stored as bicarbonate for 10,000+ years. Olivine is one of the most efficient minerals at this process, but contains trace nickel ~0.3%.

Nickel hyperaccumulator plants grow natively in nickel-bearing soils and draw nickel up from the soil and store it in their biomass as a natural defense against predators. The plants are harvested and processed to pure nickel products. With optimized plants, hundreds of kilograms of nickel can be recovered per hectare per year.

Normally phytomining is as phytoremediation and the soil nickel level depletes, but by utilizing olivine weathering on these soils already containing nickel, we can resupply the nickel as the olivine weathers, stoichemetrically removing gross 300 tonnes of carbon for every tonne of nickel we replenish into the field.

The company was originally developed as a way to demonstrate how to create an economically viable carbon removal technology that creates valuable and important co-products that can drive the upscaling of the process.

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In 2017, I started Climigitation a non-profit think tank dedicated to promoting technologies and techniques to mitigate climate change and remove atmospheric carbon dioxide. Started as a non-profit, it was known as Project Vesta and the idea was to use tropical beaches to speed up Earth's natural long-term carbon-silicate cycle. In early 2021, I left Project Vesta after that, it was split into a non-profit and a for-profit PBC. Vesta has successfully deployed olivine onto beaches in Southhampton New York, and Duck, North Carolina and now focuses on beach nourishment.

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In the biohacking space, I was a "nootropics historian" and started and ran the nootropics company, Nootroo. I helped drive the adoption and acceptance of nootropics and in some ways biohacking in general. You can read a profile of me that is a snapshot from that time of my life in The Atlantic - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/10/the-brain-bro/497546/ And this is one of the last interviews I did on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwYfsknlWHI You can also find interviews from that time in GQ, Men's Health, ABC Nightline News, NPR, The Guardian, among others. You can see the most accurate definition of nootropics at https://Nootroo.com

MeditationBattleLeague.com - "head-to-head" competitive meditation with EEG headsets.

*This is a personal account and posts here are opinions and do not represent the views of my company/orgs unless otherwise stated.*

Recent public activity

  1. comment
    Comment #48997833

    Is there any way to make it so that when you plug new things in, the power doesn't renegotiate causing other things plugged in to reconnect/flicker/interrupt. Looking for high powe…

  2. comment
    Comment #48654107

    Great that it was available, but compared to Peter's version this one is inferior. It didn't have draft email as a default and asking it to write a draft would just send the email,…

  3. comment
    Comment #47800476

    have enough sessions going that you just cycled through them and by the time you get back that chat is ready to go again. Easier sometimes staying in same project, sometimes easier…

  4. comment
    Comment #47745524

    I thought this post was going to be a metaphor about how most people can barely handle 1 project, while some people need to multiple projects for it to feel natural...

  5. comment
    Comment #45344197

    I do writing with RAG and it can be implemented to suprisingly good if you already have your own writing that the text is being generated from. FAQs etc can be pretty easy when you…

  6. comment
    Comment #45344121

    Dear Notion employees, please, if you're advertise mail and calendar as features, add them into your app and do not make them open in new tabs. I want an all in one thing, why is t…

  7. comment
    Comment #45236863

    okay but what about "c" being nearly the same as "z", neither of which look like the character and are nearly(?) identical. Is our brain supposed to just be able to figure it out?

  8. comment
    Comment #45217566

    "A large new study published in the International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health provides evidence that exposure to certain workplace chemicals among parents may influ…

  9. comment
    Comment #45191090

    hard disagree

  10. comment
    Comment #44818272

    These are 8bit versions On mac, use LM Studio to download it, just search "oss mlx", and note there is an mlx toggle box on search. Link for the 120B version: https://huggingface.c…

  11. story
  12. comment
    Comment #44816585

    Also, these small models are meant to be run local so not going to appear on openrouter...

  13. comment
    Comment #44814869

    Here are the LM Studio MLX models: LM Studio community: 20b: b https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/gpt-oss-20b-MLX-8b... 120b: https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/gpt-o…

  14. comment
    Comment #44802963

    thanks openai for being open ;) Surprised there are no official MLX versions and only one mention of MLX in this thread. MLX basically converst the models to take advntage of mac u…

  15. comment
    Comment #44747689

    Love the work you're doing at Unsloth!

  16. comment
    Comment #44747671

    If you're on Mac you can download LM Studio and get the MLX version (edit - links below). I am running it on 64 gb M1 and it takes about ~30 gb ram. I've been on the hunt for a loc…

  17. comment
    Comment #44719110

    go to chrome://flags , follow these instructions https://youtu.be/q7dnkGdndNo?t=220 then load extension in developer mode

  18. comment
    Comment #44358517

    I think what you're missing is that this is likely in preparation for some sort of AR glasses and something smaller form factor than the Vision Pro that will require transparency s…

  19. comment
    Comment #44053498

    There is a reason that longevists, longevity researchers, and biohackers focus on mitochondrial enhancement through various means, supplementing NAD/NR, Ubiquinol, PQQ, ALCAR, phot…

  20. comment
    Comment #43969241

    What about "fast apps" as in apps you build with AI to quickly fill a niche knowing it won't be a long term viable business, but build to just for that moment?

  21. comment
    Comment #43855468

    You're missing that Claude desktop has MCP servers, which can extend it to do a lot more, including much better real life "out of the box" uses. You can do things like use Obsidian…

  22. comment
    Comment #43560381

    This is one of the ways we get all of the secondary metabolites from plants, most of the compounds in supplements and drugs that are active in humans. They come from mutations of t…

  23. comment
    Comment #43511951

    How can we trust a human to run the study, isn't there a bias? Needs an AI prompted to be a research scientist as a co-author for it to be balanced.

  24. comment
    Comment #43259547

    A better question is how do we not have a dark mode/system settings for HN?

  25. comment
    Comment #43163733

    Hi Boris et al, can you comment on increased conversation lengths or limits through the UI? I didn't see that mentioned in the blog post, but it is a continued major concern of $20…