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In an attempt to get myself to write more here is my own shortform feed. Ideally I would write something daily, but we will see how it goes.
Lightcone is doing another fundraiser this year[1]! I am still working on our big fundraising post, but figured I would throw up something quick in case people are thinking about their charitable giving today.
Short summary of our funding situation: We are fundraising for $2M this year. Most of that goes into LessWrong and adjacent projects. Lighthaven got pretty close to breaking even this year (though isn't fully there). We also worked on AI 2027 which of course sure had a lot of effects. We do kind of have to raise around this much if we don't want to shut down since most of our expenses are fixed costs (my guess is the absolute minimum we could handle is something like $1.4M).
Donors above $2,000 can continue to get things at Lighthaven dedicated to them.
(I also just added a fundraising banner. I expect that to be temporary as I don't generally like having ad-like content on post pages, but we happen to be getting a very enormous amount of incoming traffic to Claude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document, and so a banner seemed particularly valuable for a day or two.)
I am working on the final financials for it as part the fundraising post! We ended up spending more like $3M instead of $2.6M, but a lot of it is on property tax which we are applying for an exemption for and will get back if the application succeeds, which makes the accounting a bit confusing.
My current guess is Lighthaven will have ended up netting around -$500k if you include the property tax, and -$200k if you exclude the property tax. But these numbers are quite provisional and could easily change by 50% either way until I've done the full math.
In an attempt to get myself to write more here is my own shortform feed. Ideally I would write something daily, but we will see how it goes.