Around July last year I decided I was going to go all in on technical AI safety research. To do that I’d need to get into an AI safety fellowship, quit my job, and sell everything that was in my flat in South Africa (hopefully in that order). I applied...
I couldn’t find a recent write-up from a MATS alum about what attending MATS was like, so this is the thing that I wish I had. I attended MATS from January to March 2026, on Team Shard with Alex Turner and Alex Cloud. It was a great time! Applications for...
Claude & I vibecoded an interface for the extropians mailing list. It’s live! Have a look here: https://extropians.boydkane.com/. From Wikipedia, discussing the extropians mailing list: > In the 90s, the Extropy Institute launched an email mailing listserv through which members could receive updates from the institute and have conversations about...
Basically every meeting is scheduled with an explicit duration. This is convenient for scheduling, but it implies that the entire meeting is equally likely to give you value. I think there’s a better way to schedule meetings that avoids this. If you’re wanting to meet with someone, presumably you expect...
I’m not quite sure how unequal the world used to be, but I’m fairly certain the world is more equal (in terms of financial means) than the world was, say, in the 1600s. There are many things that enormous wealth allows you to buy that’s out of reach for middle-class...
I’m generally very bad with names, and especially struggle when I’m quickly introduced to large numbers of people. Generally I’d just throw up my hands and resign myself to awkward conversations attempting to remember someone’s name. But I’ve been on an Anki binge recently, and also was recently accepted into...
We don’t have AI that’s smarter than you or I, but I believe we do have something that’s somewhat similar, and analysing this thing is useful as an argument in favour of ASI not being aligned to humanity’s interests by default. > epistemic status: I largely believe this argument to...