Hilary Mason

@hilarymason.com

7867 Followers 971 Following

Co-founder & CEO of Hidden Door. I <3 cheeseburgers and making beautiful things. I know a thing or two about AI, but it's people who matter. I am interested in many things. NYC

Chalk letters on the sidewalk that spell SPRED JOY
A large amount of lawn with a robot lawnmower in the background and a few pigeons nearby. Behind the lawn are a bunch of people enjoying the park. The buildings of 40th St are visible behind the park.
A screenshot of the Hidden Door slack where the conversation is: Hilary shouts: Github is having big feelings today Hattie response: Maybe it just needs a githug
Four giant butts wearing thongs as sculpture outside of Madison Square Park in Manhattan
A screenshot of a github pull request I made that puts party hats on our character cards for April Fools Day, just to make my teammates laugh The hat floats an awkward distance above the character's head. It's very annoying.
A visual from the blog post that shows region encoding with a Google Map and an overlaid colorful grid, on the left side of the SF bay area and on the right Manhattan (New York City)
A 2012 Jenny Holzer art piece with 7 LED scrolling displays installed in a corner with swiftly moving phrases from Truisms, Inflammatory Essays, and Survival and Arno, backlit with blue and green.
A game character card depicting a woman with a strong face and flowing brown hair wearing a purple sparkling dress and a tiara with stars, named Claude
Three colorful bright orange, yelllow, and red portraits on a blue wall. From left to right: A man looks to the right, with the words PROTECT OUR ELDERS. Middle: A woman looks left and up. WE BELONG HERE. On the right: A woman wearing a head scarf looks left. WE TOO ARE AMERICA.
The model is in the background, with an artist quote in the foreground: "When I was growing up in Middle Village, Queens in the early 1970s-I was around eight years old-I used to sit on my radiator with my covers before I got dressed for school to warm up. I would look out the window, and in the wintertime, when all the leaves were off the trees, you could see the World Trade Center being built from my bedroom window." (The quote is then repeated in Spanish.)
A 50 foot by 27 foot model of the city of New York, including Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and parts of the Bronx and Staten Island and a slice of New Jersey. Photo is taken from the perspective of Staten Island.
A photo of Dorothy and the Lion reacting in fear as flying monkeys come towards them, while a flying monkey drone flies in front of the screen.
A statue of Gort, from The Day the Earth Stood Still, between the escalators at The Sphere.
A picture of the ending screen of The Wizard of Oz at The Sphere; it looks like a promo image, but I promise, it's a picture of the screen. The picture shows the title alongside an image of Dorothy, the Lion, The Tin Man, and the Scarecrow walking down the yellow brick road to the Emerland City.
A prompt for the phrase “feminist music” which Spotify says “I can’t help you with that topic.”
an animated gif clip of a Futurama scene where Fry writes an alien brain into leaving Earth "for no raisin"
A screenshot of a LinkedIn post by me (Hilary Mason) which says: I’m angry, and it's hard to put this into words. Sexual demeaning and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) are not inevitable consequences of technology. It's a deliberate product strategy by X and Elon Musk. The environment that allows this to flourish has been around for some time. AI amplifies these existing flaws in the system and exacerbates the harms. This is a well-known, and pretty obvious if you think about it for a bit. We've had a disregard for safety on social media, general lack of attention and legal enforcement for sexual crimes against women and children, the absence of business ethics, a lack of product sense, a subjugation of empathy to misogynistic status incentives for tech folks. And now a leader who is taking advantage of that with no regards for the harms caused. If you post on X, please stop. If you have power or a position where you can keep these harms from being normalized, please do it.
A 1956 photo of the same building on Atlantic Ave, with large lettering that says HOME OF EX-LAX * THE CHOCOLATE LAXATIVE
An arched building entryway that says EX LAX INC in large metal letters above an art deco-style "423 - 443" sign on a regular building door
A screenshot of an article in The Canberra Times with the title "How sitting down to write her memoir led to a debut novel" by Paula McClean with the first sentence "Paula McClean's debut novel, The One Remaining, is the fictitious memoir of a fictitious novelist named Hilary Mason." The last line is fading to unreadable white, as I have not paid for access to the full article.
A printed sign taped to a door with blue tape that says "X, DO NOT USE"
A pile of paper street posters in bright pink and orange that say WHERE FANFIC MEETS ROLEPLAY in a handwritten font. The bottom has a bunch of tearaways that are each a different trope. There's a hand and a scissor cutting them up.
A photo of a toilet, above it is a shelf with extra toilet paper and an inexplicable VHS tape
A view of lower Manhattan and the Tribute in Light in remembrance of Sep 11th. The skies are perfectly clear the light doesn't end.
A screenshot from a Google News search for "Hidden Door" showing articles about the company Hidden Door at the top and bottom. Between them are three articles about a Colorado coroner hiding bodies behind a "hidden door" in a funeral home. Words are hard.
A photograph of a neon sign of the Hidden Door Narrator, against a black wall. There is a croissant on a plinth in front of her, as if an offering, and a large white candle next to her.
The east river. In the foreground there’s a pink inflatable bull (maybe?) on top of another white animal on a pink inflated raft all on a small barge, the background is the Brooklyn Bridge and Empire State Building and Manhattan skyline
An excerpt from The Atlantic which says "The upshot is that an octogenarian Air Force retiree who spent half a century in his nation's service was not allowed to attend a party for a dog he essentially donated to the government and named after his dead wife."
Mysterious fliers photocopied onto bright yellow paper. One is in some kind of code. Titles of others are “vampire prank weekend” and “endurance karaoke at club scintilla” and “pika season is coming are you prepared?”
A screenshot of an email subject line that says "Media coverage for {[companyName}}" (which has an obvious bracket mismatch error)
A photo of the statue of liberty at dusk. It's peaceful, and there are several small boats in the water.
The opening ceremonies at Phantom Peak, a large crowd gathered in a western-ish town around a man in purple with a microphone.
A poor quality photo of a garden gnome flipping you off in a hardware store window display
The Error 500 page for MoMA, showing Edward Runscha's Various Small Fires and Milk, 1964
A screenshot of the announcement that says Bracket City has "taken its rightful place alongside Emerson and Longefellow in the hallowed (digital) pages of The Atlantic"
A view of the General Society's library
A knit word bubble saying “resist”
The book cover for Morisco, A novel of naked passion and exotic adventure by Hilary Mason
An old sign saying PERSONS THROWING STONES AT THE TELEGRAPHS WILL BE PROSECUTED
John Sloan's painting "Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street" from 1928. It depicts the turning point of an elevated train with the sun setting over the city (and the Jefferson Market Library in the background), with several women holding hands and others crossing the street that seem drunk and happy.
An apple pie with about 30% missing
A closed door of a NYC subway card with an upside-down paper sign that says R211 TEST TRAIN NO PASSENGERS
A packed audience for a book release talk for Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots, in conversation with Helen Rosner
NYC subway status showing delays on almost all subway lines
A photo of two feet wearing very fuzzy warm socks
A Graphviz diagram of vampire novel influence
A red jello concoction made in a bundt pan filled with fruit and stuff. It's very good.
A four image collage of different light sculptures
Code for a function called "parse_xmlish_response" in the Python programming language The code reads: def parse_xmlish_response(text) -> list[dict]: """ Parses distinct XML-ish tags, e.g. <scenario1>...</scenario1><scenario2>...</scenario2> Put the internal XML guts into a JSON dict, and return a list of those dicts. """ parsed_options = [] for match in re.finditer(r"<([^>]+)>(.*?)</\1>", text): tag, content = match.groups() parsed_options.append({tag: content}) return parsed_options
An AI generated picture of a white man surrounded by busts of Roman generals. His desk has a mechanical keyboard and a pencil jar full of paintbrushes. There's an analog clock here, and some weird random trees.