Wednesday in Taipei started with a short call with a mentor, mostly scheduling follow-ups. I told my agent to send the message as is. Around 4pm, someone opened my Arca Ring web card on an iPhone and left nothing. I had trimmed the demo an hour earlier, so a tap shows only the web card. Later, an attendee at the hackathon opened it and tapped through to LinkedIn. A third tap came in the evening, and again nothing was left. Three taps in one day is a start. I got to the c0mpiled-18 venue on Nanjing East Road at 17:35. It's the YC Startup School Hackathon. The power failed for a while during orientation, and there are 15 judges, some here and some in the US. The clock started at 18:00, and submission is at 22:45. At 20:00 I started building with parallel agents: one for my own voice data, one for training, one for the web demo, one for the paper. The idea is an AI that writes like a specific human, trained on his real context.
AI has words.
It doesn’t have a world.
Dasein — being-in-the-world
01 The problem
AI writing sounds like nobody.
Six people. One sentence.
02 Where it comes from
It learned the average
of the internet.
- Pretraining learns what most people write.
- Sampling cuts the tails, where individuality lives.
- Post-training rewards the polished assistant. RL for code ignores voice.
And it has no world.
No memories, no people, no stakes, no days of its own.
03 The fix
Give it yours.
Your world
An Arca ring and your phone capture real conversations, notifications and the people you meet.
dasein-score
A reward model that pays only for writing that is human and grounded in your real life.
An open model
Post-trained against that reward, so it writes from your days instead of everyone’s.
04 Same prompt
“Write a short blog post about my day today.”
Both given the same day. Right: Claude Code + Dasein brief · facts: real context · rhythm: an essayist I admire.
Around three in the afternoon I trimmed the Arca Ring demo. Now a tap opens only the web card, with no App Clip on top. An hour later a stranger tapped the ring with an iPhone, opened the card, and left without doing anything. That was the first tap of the day. At 17:35 I reached the venue for c0mpiled-18, the YC Startup School Hackathon in Taipei. YC's CEO spoke, and I ran Arca on my phone during the talk. The transcript came out as garbled Korean because the model expected Korean and the audio was English. It was a little embarrassing, but it is useful to see the product fail on a real recording. He talked about using Claude Code and Codex on your own file system, about chasing revenue instead of stories, and about a startup that pivoted from B2C to B2B to knowledge management. The ring got two more taps at the event. One person went through to my LinkedIn, and the other opened the card and left. Out of three taps, one person went further. That is the number I care about. The power went out for a while during orientation. At 20:00 I started our project with parallel agents: one for my voice data, one for training, one for the web demo, and one for the paper. We are building an AI that writes like a specific person, grounded in that person's real context. Submission is at 22:45.
Only one of them was there.
Dasein, Heidegger’s word for being-in-the-world.
Built at c0mpiled-18, Taipei. Part of Arca.