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Hilary Mason

@hilarymason.com
8K followers 1K following 612 posts

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

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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 26/09/2026
Overnight I trained a Jev-like model to output probability distributions over a set of 40 emoji, which runs in RAM at ~150ms per query. This was super easy and cost ~$10. It works pretty well on a weak training set, and with a day or two of work I could make this sing.
A terminal showing the output of the emoji jev-like model:

We launched the project!
   🎉 0.41  👏 0.23  🔥 0.15  ✨ 0.08  💪 0.07
   valence 3.92/4  intensity 1.98/4  | 154 ms

My cat is so cute and hates me right now
   😂 0.15  😏 0.13  🥹 0.12  ✨ 0.06  😆 0.05
   valence 2.34/4  intensity 1.85/4  | 140 ms

you stand in front of the dragon, triumphant
   ✨ 0.27  🔥 0.17  🎉 0.16  😍 0.09  😮 0.06
   valence 3.65/4  intensity 2.19/4  | 144 ms

why would you do this with emoji anyway?
   🤔 0.54  😏 0.17  🙄 0.06  😐 0.04  🧐 0.03
   valence 1.86/4  intensity 1.30/4  | 138 ms
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 24/09/2026
we put a bit of world-building magic on our homepage today hiddendoor.co
A screenshot of hiddendoor.co, showing a web page where you can Imagine A World Where.... and the example text says "the moon keeps secrets" but you can come type anything you want
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 01/06/2026
Good morning, Brooklyn, it’s sidewalk chalk season and the kids are awesome.
Chalk letters on the sidewalk that spell SPRED JOYBubble chalk letters that spell You Are LovedChalk on the sidewalk that says “I hope you have a great day”
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 15/05/2026
Hey Slack, what "AI abilities"? What are these features for? Why do I want them? How much are you going to try to charge me for these unnamed capabilities that I probably won't use? I am a customer and I have questions.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 02/05/2026
Hey NYC! Please tell me we have already given this Bryant Park Lawnmower Roomba a cute & clever name. Patience & Lawnitude? Croton Clipper? Grassbuster? Help me out, New York. We need some (gender neutral) Dad Joke energy.
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.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 17/04/2026
Startup advice: every company chat needs a #shouting channel
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
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 14/04/2026
I love New Yorkers, entirely unperturbed by art that’s just some giant butts.
Four giant butts wearing thongs as sculpture outside of Madison Square Park in Manhattan
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 31/03/2026
CEOS SHOULD CODE, THEY SAID
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.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 31/03/2026
S2Vec is a vector embedding for geospacial information! Very cool work, this makes a ton of sense conceptually but I imagine the data gathering/cleaning/validating effort puts it out of reach for most non-Google entities. research.google/blog/mapping...
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)
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 15/03/2026
I fell in love with this Jenny Holzer piece at the @brooklynmuseum.org yesterday, in the exhibit celebrating 200 years of this wonderful museum.
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.Didactic for the piece in the prior photo, black text on a violet wall, which says:

JENNY HOLZER
American, born 1950
HEAP
2012
Array of 7 LED signs with stainless steel housing: 3 with blue and red diodes on front, amber and green diodes on back; 4 with blue and red diodes on front, amber and blue diodes on back
Texts: Truisms, Inflammatory Essays, Survival and Arno
Purchase gift of Karen Klehl and Peter Labbat, In honor of the Brooklyn Museum's 200th Anniversary, 2024.82
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 02/03/2026
Indeed! And also in a moment of cosmic justice I am debugging an error on @hiddendoor.co and randomly rolled this character who seems kind of awesome and I would play her?
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 ClaudeThe back of her character card which says:

Claude
she/her
primary stat: strong
BLOODTHIRSTY WARRIOR

A battle-hardened, magically crafted warrior forged from darkness and determination
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 01/03/2026
The rest of the current exhibits are also a delight! I particularly loved Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya's Raise Your Voice.
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.A boldly colored portrait of an AAPI woman raising a fist with the words STAND WITH US across the bottom
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 01/03/2026
They did a really lovely job sharing quotes from the artist, and had a documentary showing his process. This quote, in particular, helped contextualize some of his choices. In the model, both the original World Trade Center and the new 1WTC are present.
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.)
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 01/03/2026
Today's joy was an adventure to the Museum of the City of New York to see He Built This City: Joe Macken's Model If you also have a special interest in NYC, infrastructure, models, maps, etc, I would highly recommend it!
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 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 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 JFK airport in Queens, looking towards the Manhattan skyline. If you fly in and out of JFK it's familiar and beautiful.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 14/02/2026
Here's a really not very good photo of one of my favorite effects, the actual flying monkeys that flew around the theater. I think they're balloon drones? The photo is also not good because the seats vibrate, the air moves, it's really cool.
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.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 14/02/2026
I was also delighted and surprised to run into Gort there. Why is Gort at The Sphere? I don't know!
A statue of Gort, from The Day the Earth Stood Still, between the escalators at The Sphere.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 14/02/2026
I went to The Sphere this morning to see The Wizard of Oz! It was a beautiful tribute to the original, a spectacular show of immersive theater, and evoked some questions of how to extend and care for a beloved film as it becomes a BIG experience; there were a few rough bits, and lots of wonder.
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.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 28/01/2026
Spotify prompted me to try their new “prompt a playlist” tool and they BLOCK THE WORD “feminist”. WTF Spotify!
A prompt for the phrase “feminist music” which Spotify says “I can’t help you with that topic.”My first prompt for “feminist high energy good vibes workout style music” which was refused by Spotify with the error “we can’t work with that prompt”
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 08/01/2026
...for no raisin!
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 08/01/2026
I put this on LinkedIn because that's where I think folks need to hear it, but TLDR: if you're on X, GTFO. Sexually abusive content is not inevitable, it is a _choice_. If you stay on the platform, you are endorsing that choice. Link: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...
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.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 07/12/2025
It turns out it is, indeed, THAT "Ex Lax". And boy were they proud of it, as you can see in the signs from this 1956 photo in the NYPL collection by Max Henry Hubacher: digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/78a691... And here's a 1949 photo with the arch: digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/bb5360...
A 1956 photo of the same building on Atlantic Ave, with large lettering that says HOME OF EX-LAX * THE CHOCOLATE LAXATIVE
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 07/12/2025
Last week I was walking to the subway and happened to notice this sign above a door on Atlantic Ave, which says EX LAX INC
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
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 17/10/2025
Oh Paula, I would like a word.
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.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 14/10/2025
Good advice, random door.
A printed sign taped to a door with blue tape that says "X, DO NOT USE"
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 09/10/2025
“I fucking love tropes.” - @scalzi.com Strong start to NYCC with this incredible panel on SciFi tropes with @cjfarley.bsky.social, Emery Robin, Yume Kitasei, @scalzi.com and moderated by @juliesnyder.bsky.social
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 09/10/2025
Sometimes being a founder means staying up too late doing arts and crafts. We'll be at #NYCC tomorrow with an exciting launch, come find us (or at least find our QR code to skip the waitlist)!
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.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 26/09/2025
Okay bluesky please help me solve the mystery of why there is a blank VHS tape in this Tokyo subway station bathroom! (Also if this message was meant for me, please try again, I accept USB keys, parchment scrawls, graffiti, Signal, I prefer to be in a comedy or spy movie no horror plz)
A photo of a toilet, above it is a shelf with extra toilet paper and an inexplicable VHS tapeA zoomed in view of the tape
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 12/09/2025
Sep 11th.
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.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 02/09/2025
Having minor regrets about my chosen company name 😅
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.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 13/08/2025
I'm so excited that Hidden Door is out in the world today! We're thrilled to launch our roleplay meets fanfic platform, where we are making the tech, game, and biz in sync to let us all share more of the worlds we love, while rewarding the brilliant writers we admire. Check it out at hiddendoor.co
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.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 19/07/2025
Happy Saturday New York, I love you, I have some questions
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
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 18/07/2025
I try not to amplify the awfulness, but this is just a straight up John Wick villain move
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."
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 17/07/2025
Okay, can anyone explain these fliers that someone mailed to my Brooklyn office from Dallas, TX? (Is it an ARG?)
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?”
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 15/07/2025
Trying so hard to not write back and tell them how to fix their error
A screenshot of an email subject line that says "Media coverage for {[companyName}}" (which has an obvious bracket mismatch error)
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 04/07/2025
... "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" Emma Lazarus November 2, 1883 www.nps.gov/stli/learn/h...
A photo of the statue of liberty at dusk. It's peaceful, and there are several small boats in the water.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 14/06/2025
Just putting this screenshot here so I can point to it every time someone says “AI product design is not political”
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 09/06/2025
London's Phantom Peak is an incredibly underrated immersive show! It's like immersive theater meets LARPing meets a video game meets and escape room. Also, they have ice cream.
The opening ceremonies at Phantom Peak, a large crowd gathered in a western-ish town around a man in purple with a microphone. A blacklight reveals a clue on a puzzle card in the foreground; the background is a "cemetery" set.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 05/05/2025
Today’s vibe brought to you by a Brooklyn hardware store window.
A poor quality photo of a garden gnome flipping you off in a hardware store window display
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 22/04/2025
MoMA has an excellent 500 error page. More art errors, please.
The Error 500 page for MoMA, showing Edward Runscha's Various Small Fires and Milk, 1964
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 08/04/2025
Congrats to the Mayor of Bracket City on joining The Atlantic! ...seems right on point as a somewhat too intellectual competitor to the NYTimes Games.
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"
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 04/04/2025
For something completely different, the @hiddendoor.co team is in NYC this week, and today we took a trip to the Mossman Lock Collection and the Horological Society at General Society of Mechanics & Tradesmen of The City of New York in midtown. Highly recommended if you like obscure museums!
A view of the General Society's libraryClockworks!A Two Movement Lock
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 29/03/2025
Textile street art around Gowanus, Brooklyn. ❤️
A knit word bubble saying “resist”A knit word bubble saying “hope is work”A knit word bubble saying “you are loved”
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 28/03/2025
I just discovered that another Hilary Mason wrote this book and I NEED to get a copy www.biblio.com/book/morisco...
The book cover for Morisco, A novel of naked passion and exotic adventure by Hilary Mason
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 27/03/2025
I came across this old photo I look at the National Museum of Scotland and it feels appropriate
An old sign saying PERSONS THROWING STONES AT THE TELEGRAPHS WILL BE PROSECUTED
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 25/03/2025
I'll leave you with two more etchings that capture a feeling of a city more than anything else, Night Windows (1910): www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/... Sixth Avenue and Thirtieth Street (1908): www.clevelandart.org/art/1964.115
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 25/03/2025
Side quest: I've spent the last 24 hours being mildly obsessed with the work of John Sloan, a turn of the century painter who captured the vibes of NYC life in the early 1900s.
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.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 14/03/2025
Happy Pi Day, American nerds! This is a Brown Butter Apple Streusel from Four & Twenty Blackbirds (Brooklyn)
An apple pie with about 30% missing
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 10/03/2025
Demanding justice.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 06/03/2025
For all my fellow transit nerds, I saw this still shrink wrapped test train on the A line today!
A closed door of a NYC subway card with an upside-down paper sign that says R211 TEST TRAIN NO PASSENGERSA shot through the closed window of the test train, showing the seats and floors still shrink wrapped in plastic wrap. Screens are active but there are no paper ads. The door on the track side of the train is open.
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Hilary Mason @hilarymason.com · 05/03/2025
Delighted to see @amalelmohtar.com and @hels.bsky.social at Books Are Magic tonight to celebrate The River Has Roots
A packed audience for a book release talk for Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots, in conversation with Helen Rosner
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