I’m the founder of an AI companion start-up based in Tokyo that melds various generative AI technologies with game industry and Japanese pop culture knowledge.
We’re currently looking for a lead engineer to help take our Unity designed game to the App Store and Google Play. The position is expected to be remote for now. Japanese skills are not strictly necessary but preferred.
I'm a Dublin based researcher looking for a Software Engineer to come on board a spin out company and build inhouse software. Also looking for Remote Sensing and Life Cycle Assessment people.
The company, CarbonHarvesters https://carbonharvesters.com/ , is building out tools to monitor the sustainability of agri-food supply chains - focused on carbon and nature. On the carbon side, we would be connecting to ~ 5 farming databases using APIs or FTP per region, and on the nature side we are building out an API to connect to the satellite imagery provider (Airbus). We've hired software houses to get the first iteration of these services developed but want to bring development in house, and combine into one front end. We're looking for a full stack developer, preferably with sql, python, Azure and react experience.
Remote suits us, and we can pay for the work, and ultimately we're looking for someone to come on board fulltime and be the CTO. We're gearing up for VC funding in 2024, and having a CTO on board will be critical. We're looking for someone who is willing to really give this a go for ~ a year on not great pay by San Francisco standards, but with the upside being potential equity and ground floor of a start up.
Background on team - I'm Irish, PhD in Ecology, post doc in supply chain sustainability focusing on developing a scalable remote sensing tool in python to monitor nature in supply chains. Co-founded company with Alejandro, Ecuadorian, Phd in Life Cycle Assessment and the carbon expert. We're reasonably techy, but have no cs background, so can only bring the services so far, hence need for in-house developer/CTO.
Send any inquiries and CVs to cian (at) carbonharvesters (dot) com.
Particularly looking for demonstrations of projects developed yourself that demonstrate full stack experience.
I'm a Berlin (Germany) based freelance IT Consultant & Software Engineer with a background in Mathematics. I'm looking for innovative and impactful projects. My work so far has mostly been with German clients, but I'd like to change that.
I'm fully available right now.
Top skills: C# .NET, Azure DevOps, Oracle SQL, Angular, msg.PM (bet you've never heard of that).
I'm a little late because of Strange Loop, but in case there are other stragglers: I'm a software engineer[ing manager] at Antithesis and we are always looking to grow our ranks.
If you love solving problems, know your way around a computer, and are open to an in-person role in Northern Virginia (Washington DC metro area), shoot me an email at: brian (dot) lagoda (at) antithesis (dot) com
About Antithesis: we're a five year old company revolutionizing software testing. We come from a bunch of different backgrounds and have several ACX readers including me and someone hired through these very classifieds. We tend not to hire for particular programming competencies, but have projects in typescript, c++, rust, nix, python, and c (so far).
Looking for an english teaching job in Lviv, Ukraine. I don't have a degree, but I'm a native speaker and I have some experience hosting an english speaking club at an english school.
Hey all, I'm Juan Pablo. I've just graduated from a web dev bootcamp with focus on the MERN stack. Rehab in 2017, a Psychology bachelors right after that, and various roles in customer service since 2021 have had me develop soft-skills which I intend to leverage as part of a team. I'm relocating to Berlin soon and I want to consolidate and expand on my toolkit (Typescript is my first next step, and I'm also looking at a project management certification after that). Check out my work on github.com/churrundo and if you feel like it hit me up on https://www.linkedin.com/in/juan-pablo-maurer-developer/.
I'm a pharmacist living and working in California, half-looking for something nontraditional for a pharmacist but also anything non-retail. If you think you could use a pharmacist feel free to reach out here.
In a nutshell, little bit of hospital experience as a student, mostly (chain) retail post-graduate. Presently under contract with California Correctional Healthcare Services which is a mutant monster mix of both. Willing to at least consider anything that's not retail.
Recommend me to your parent or grandparent who asks you for Tech Support. 😉
I offer compassionate support solutions and consulting for individuals and small businesses. Have worked with Authentic Revolution, Garden Jane, Dr. Hazel-Grace Yates, and many other clients over the past several years. Websites, custom workflows, AI, esoteric software/hardware troubleshooting and training, I do it all. Tech generalist with a heart.
Hi, my middle-aged parents are always struggling with writing down passwords and keeping track of them. They use windows and android mostly. What do you think I should set up for them so they won't have this problem anymore?
If they use Chrome on Android and Windows, probably Google Passwords is the best way to go. Something like Bitwarden or LastPass would be too confusing.
Hi folks! I've been working as a software developer for the past fifteen years (Clojure, Python, various others; full-stack or back-end; lots of domains), and a week from today I'm starting a sabbatical to shift my career toward AI safety; I've become convinced that it's critically important for reasons that won't surprise anyone here. I've only ever trained one model, but have spent all of this year building a retrieval-augmented-generation / tree-of-thought based app on top of LLMs. I'm planning to spend the sabbatical time diving deeper into the core of ML, studying and reproducing papers in the field.
My goal is to end up working remotely on safety work that won't contribute disproportionately to capabilities. If you have pointers to such a situation, I'd love to hear about it! I'm open to focusing on specific learning that would prepare me for a specific position or team, if that position/team seems like a good fit.
I'd also love to hear suggestions for specific areas study that would equip me well for technical alignment work (you can assume I'm at least somewhat familiar with the major approaches that are discussed in the rationalist community, on the AI Alignment Forum, etc).
** Medical doctor with law & social sciences background seeks career advice / counselling **
Hi! I am a medical doctor about to enter my second year of residency in a surgical discipline at a teaching hospital in Germany. Besides medicine, I studied law (LLB) and politics (BSc) at top universities in England and France. I miss the more long-term/macro and creative approach from my time in the social sciences and would love to find a way to combine my clinical practice with work that impacts society more effectively.
So far, I haven’t found a career path that fully aligns with my skills and interest among the conventional options and am exploring the feasibility of working in medicine _and_ health technology/public health/politics/consulting/law/.../.
I am of course familiar with the excellent content of 80,000 hours as well as with most of the EA resources, but I am sure there are humans out there with atypical careers and/or ideas that I haven’t come across. If you would like to know more or think you can help me figure this out, please get in touch at joesldssc (at) gmail (dot) com. I would love to hear from you and appreciate any kind of input!
I'm a legal-writing coach, and I'd love to work with you, whether on a specific piece of writing or on legal writing in general. Reach me at gataloca @ pm . me.
Putting feelers out for a programmer / software engineer to collaborate with. I work in Geosciences (not a programmer) and there doesn't seem to be any good software that does what I want, so I thought i'd try collaborating with someone and making it ourselves. Info below:
-Our clients send us monitoring data via API or FTP from instrumentation installed in remote locations, say 30 instruments sending data every 30 mins. It is our job to receive, collate/manage, convert, interpret, and monitor this data.
-The data comprises a device ID, timestamp, plus two other measurements. I envisage a database being created to store the history of readings, whereas now it is all done in excel by manually appending the new batches of data.
-The software needs to look at a directory where all this raw data is, run some very simple conversions and some basic calcs and then display the results in a GUI as time-series graphs. These graphs will have some interactivity, e.g. axis sliders, trendline tools, export to .csv functionality, etc.
-allow threshold values which trigger an alert notification (sent to an email distribution list) if the data exceeds some user-defined value
This is it in a nutshell. Currently it is all done in excel and is a total mess. At this early stage what i'm hoping for is a 'proof-of-concept' programme that I can show to management and then make refinements from there.
Some potentially relevant constraints:
-I don't have heaps of money to throw at this, since at the moment it is purely my own project. However depending on the outcomes of the demo version, it may turn out to pay quite well during development.
-Given the above, this kind of thing may be more suited to someone looking to develop a portfolio or for a capstone project or something?
-I have plenty of sample data, exemplar interfaces of similar-ish programmes, and am very willing/able to provide detailed guidance without being annoying. I am not a programmer and have only limited coding experience, but I do take pride in being a very straightforward and satisfying person to work with, and since this is a passion project I will go out of my way to make good things happen.
Reply to me on here with any follow-up queries or thoughts. Thanks for reading.
'Our clients send us monitoring data via API or FTP from instrumentation installed in remote locations, say 30 instruments sending data every 30 mins. It is our job to receive, collate/manage, convert, interpret, and monitor this data.'
Re the interpretation piece, assuming those 30 instruments (or subsets of them) are providing observations of the same ground truth, I've done similar work with in situ climate data, and ended up reinventing wheels because I didn't find the relevant body of literature until later. In case you're similarly unaware, the main term of art you'll want to look into is 'sensor fusion'.
Im a developer looking for portfolio projects. Sounds like a great opportunity. Email me at edcomeau@vt.edu and I'll build a demo free or even collaborate with others if you want to put together a rag-tag group of programmers lol
Hi! My previous job involved working with generating time series data out of observed events. And I have some experience with it. Depending on the scale needed you have a number of options, from a simple circular log of events (RrdTool) so your footprint stays the same to heavy weights like OpenTSDB and InfluxDB. Though I would go with something like Prometheus that has established patterns for scale, easy to deploy and a huge ecosystem.
I'd be happy to work with you on this (even if only for portfolio purposes). Please do email me at aW5zdWZmZXJhYmxlamFrZUBnbWFpbC5jb20=
Have you thought about using a cloud-monitoring solution for this? There's a ton of good software that's designed to take arbitrary tagged metrics from clients and then display those metrics in an easy-to-explore way. These cloud-monitoring tools can let you set up decently complex formulae, create alerts, and make nice charts that you can embed in other applications. The one drawback with these tools is that they're not designed to handle incrementing metrics more than 1 hour in the past, so you wouldn't be able to backfill data.
DataDog (https://www.datadoghq.com/) is the tool I'm most familiar with & it has a nice free tier. It's a fantastic tool, but it does get expensive as the number of metrics goes up.
(I suspect that your numbers will be so low that it won't be a problem)
Other similar tools that I have less familiarity with are Librato, NewRelic, Prometheus, and HoneyComb.
Rather than a cloud-monitoring tool, you could also look at "business intelligence" tools that are designed to take in information about a user (in your case, a client) and then make that data explorable. Getting your data stored in a SQL database in a simple single-table format could let you connect any business-intelligence tool you'd like and set up alerts, dashboards, and anything else you'd like.
- https://www.metabase.com/ is open-source, but running it yourself is probably not what you're looking for.
- https://www.tableau.com/pricing/individual is stupidly expensive, but people really seem to like it. I think there's a free trial where you could see if it's something that meets your needs
I'm sure there's a ton more great software out there that does similar graphing, alerting, and charting things! Best of luck with your project.
Hey thanks for all those! I'll sift through them and see if there's something useful for my needs. Some of it I feel I might need an IT degree to get my head around but thanks anyway!
Oh, for sure! I think you'd still want to work with a programmer for this. I'd just try to work with someone to integrate with an existing tool rather than doing the "fun" thing of building something completely custom.
I teach at an Engineering college in Jerusalem where the 4th year software engineering students have a year-long final project. What you described sounds like exactly the kind of thing that our students do. I would love to chat about this more and see if we can make a connection. My email is zluria@gmail.com
I’m a professional futurist looking to take on a few new clients. I specialize in forecasting trends and helping entrepreneurs understand and engineer the emerging cultural landscape. You can email me at theculturalfuturist@gmail.com.
I am a novelist / journalist living in West Virginia and looking for remote work, full or part time. I have experience in research, was an assistant to an agent at CAA, and am currently employed in news media. Buffering these jobs I have worked as a landscaper, a kindergarten teacher and an Uber driver; all to say that I am no stranger to hard work.
I moved to West Virginia to be able to write full time, and since finishing my book have been looking to find an alternate source of income. The local news industry is hard to stomach, and I would love to find a space that is more intellectually stimulating. I am excellent with research, and would be a fine aide to any working writer.
Please find my work online at [https://ryanmatera.substack.com/] and reach out if you would like to discuss the possibility of employment. I can be reached at [first name].[last name]1[at]gmail.com or [two]03-[seven]33-[eight]377.
I'm hiring! I'm the engineering manager at Anrok, a Sequoia-backed series A startup with product market fit solving sales tax and VAT compliance for SaaS businesses.
I'm directly hiring software engineers, and other managers have roles open for a solutions engineer, an account executive, and a tax associate. Details on open roles, the company, and how to apply on our website: https://www.anrok.com/careers#open-roles
The benefits? Aside from all the regular stuff like pay, equity, and insurance, you get to work with smart people that include regular readers of this blog! :-D
Hi, I am a engineer, both physical and software, looking for work. Email me – my email is the same as my github account, linked below, at gmail. Living in LA but not tied down and will move almost anywhere (even outside the US). I am a bit of a jack of all trades, master of none, so am probably most valuable to a smaller company where you need each employee to wear multiple hats at once. I am pretty decent at CNC machining, for instance, but probably not quite at a full-time/professional level. I also have experience with prototyping; designing, building, and commissioning industrial equipment; electrical engineering; optic design; CAD; engineering data management and organization.
I have been putting a lot of thought and research into motion control/robotics, and associated electrical equipment/control hardware, so would particularly love to find a position in this area.
I am also a pretty decent programmer. Mostly self-taught, though I took a handful of classes in university. Originally learned C/C++, though am so rusty with them I could barely use them at all these days. Highly proficient with Python, and very familiar with TensorFlow, Numpy, and PyQt. I have been focusing recently on getting better at using threads / multiprocessing, and asynchronous programming.
Several years back I got interested in machine learning. I found that it made a lot of sense to me. Most people talk about machine learning like some mysterious black box that nobody understands how it works, but I feel like I have good intuitions for it. I played with it for a while, and came up with a handful of neat and weird tricks and techniques that that worked really well and enabled me to train what I thought were unusually deep networks at the time. I had never heard about anybody using these ideas (though it isn’t like I did a lot of in-depth research, I am certainly not an expert in the field). But before I made any ML systems that were particularly interesting, I got the idea to try using TensorFlow based optimization on physics problems instead. I ended up spending several years writing a ray tracer inside TensorFlow which can be used to design/optimize lenses and so do optical design. I tried spinning this into a startup, but gave up pretty quickly as I am not good as business stuff. Ended up leveraging it to get a position at an LED lighting company instead. Current state of my optical design software is that it has undergone a full re-write to clean it up, it has a UI and the ability to network to a remote AWS instance and run across multiple GPUs. I have used it to design several optics that are currently being sold at the company I work for.
So while I have some pretty good coding skills, since I am self-taught I also have big gaps in my knowledge, and am fairly certain I have a lot of bad habits that would probably grate on many professional programmers. Given this I am not sure if I could actually land a decent job as a programmer, which is why I have mostly been focusing on physical engineering jobs, even though I could potentially earn more in software. I would love some feedback about this, even from people that aren’t hiring. Is the above paragraph actually impressive? Do I sound like a competent programmer, or not? My optical design software is available on my github: https://github.com/ecpoppenheimer. TensorFlowRayTrace is the older initial build, and TFRT2 is the newer re-build. Does this code look reasonably well organized, or is it rookie stuff?
Also, I am sitting on some pretty powerful optical design software that is particularly suited to designing LED optics. (Yes, I made it open source, so you can go grab it and use it yourself, but… the optical design problem is very difficult so despite my best efforts the tool is pretty difficult to use. So good luck using it yourself!) I have some really performant LED lens designs available. But unfortunately the company I currently work for doesn’t have the resources to really take advantage of what I have to offer. If you or someone you know happens to work at Signify, Acuity, GE, or any other company in the lighting industry with enough available resources to actually manufacture some revolutionary new products I might be able to blow your mind and generate some serious value for you. Also… automotive – I think I might be able to improve automobile headlights quite a bit. Unfortunately my optical design software isn’t particularly suited for imaging optics (at least it has no competitive advantage over Zemax or similar tools) so I probably wouldn’t be so valuable to a camera or company or the like.
Just moved to bay area for work, can wife you up and pop out some tiny gremlins somewhere between asap and AGI, 30yo. https://quinnd.net/date/
- there probably exists a "match so good that I'd sacrifice poly" condition, so if you're super monog you should check if you're that by getting to know me.
- handsy should be a big part of your love language. I tried dating a couple people who aren't like that and it was super difficult.
- sometimes my voice sits loud and I love when people tell me to calm down instead of quietly/passively taking damage.
Female, straight, 43, Seattle, no kids, and most comfortable with someone who's either child-free or has older children (8 and up). I'm looking for a single, monogam-ish, vaguely peer-aged man who is wise enough to not rush into a commitment but nevertheless actively wants a serious girlfriend / main "person" / life partner situation. That doesn't have to look like a traditional nuclear family and cohabitation (I enjoy living alone and it's ideal if he does, too!).
I'm employed full-time, own a condo and a car, and am mostly pretty responsible. I care very deeply about my loved ones, but between being rational-minded and most of my closest friends being men, I'm caring in a straightforward, no-nonsense, let's-fix-it way that tends to be more common in men and can be disconcerting for people expecting stereotypical feminine displays of intense emotional expression.
I like to debate ideas but hate genuine interpersonal conflict and drama. I'm difficult to offend, slow to anger, and quick to forgive. I'm a huge fan of advice columns because it's better to learn from other people's mistakes than one's own.
I'm terrific at picking out both restaurants and media and talking about them! I love sour beers and aside from a couple of quirks like an inexplicable hatred of pho, I have a broad, foodie-ish palate, ranging from probably-not-to-code taco trucks to micro gastronomy. Recent media I've hugely enjoyed includes Taylor Sheridan's pulply, remarkably-feminist-but-not-Woke Special Ops: Lioness and the Empire storyline of Foundation (but not the rest of it!).
I can be emailed at my username here @ gmail.
My main dating profile is on Fetlife under my username here minus the "Christina," though I should note I'm currently drafting a rebrand as a "solo matriarch." That might kind of be a weird, potentially misleading phrase due to my childfree status, but I'm attempting to describe my tendency to assume leadership if no one better is stepping up to a particular task, while avoiding the male fantasy associations that tend to go with "femme-dom/dominant/female-led/etc." Or put another way, I like exercising good judgment and giving advice to men; but I'm not at all interested in spanking them/etc if they don't follow it.
Looking for a smart, honest & attractive companion paragraph summarizing mind-body exercise to mate with, er, mix with paper that goes by 'Being Human.' Must be concise in expression (~125 words) and friendly to all.
Introverted but social, like to read non-fiction and visit museums (where I proceed to compulsively read everything and take pictures of memorable artefacts and plaques).
Classic romantic, in the sense of having passion in work, friendships and relationships.
Work as an AI researcher for a government research institute.
I'm an IT consultant looking for a long-term relationship. I like science fiction, D&D, video games...you know the drill. I prefer someone who speaks English as a first language.
Considerate, shy (33 / M / Los Angeles) looking for F. Interested in monogamous relationship with goal of marriage and kids. I am an engineer (both physical and software). I enjoy cooking, hiking and whitewater kayaking.
Also looking for platonic friends of any gender (would love to join something like a board-game night), and especially hiking partners (pretty strong hiker, looking to climb difficult peaks in San Gabriels).
24/m/states, seeking hetero LDR. See below for specs.
Pros: emotionally stable, smart, my last date made sure to tell me I was 'very attractive', diverse interests, creative to the point of being professional in multiple unrelated creative domains. Health conscious and fit. Not an ideologue.
Cons: I have an anxiety condition that causes me sickness when I date IRL (manageable in every other circumstance). Some women have been willing to pursue me anyway (did I mention I'm 6'4?) but it has generally been hellish, and I break it off if they don't.
I would prefer to make an emotional/intellectual connection first and get comfortable, then progress from there. On your part? I'd love to get to know you if you're any kind of interesting person, but realistically our long-term prospects will be constrained if you're significantly older than me (10+yrs) or disinterested in your own health. I'm just now coming to accept that I can't willpower my way forward, and I expect to sort out some medication shortly. So, if this thing doesn't pan out I'm sure I'll make my way in the cold, ugly world of app dating. I'd still prefer this, though. Drop me a line @ dirgewriter(at)gmail .com and I would be happy to exchange more information/show my face. My ultimate ideal is a committed, monogamous relationship of zero drama and plenty romance.
Since I'm in under Other and Employment might as well go for it. This whole thing feels like a meat market, because it is. I think there's a certain dignity, then, in just being upfront and clinical. Don't worry, I'm much more romantic in person.
Located in Sydney, I'm a gay 35 Year old in the final year of writing a PhD thesis in the philosophy of economics. I'm 6'3'', both quite muscular and bit over weight making me overall enormous. I'm looking for a boyfriend. I feel like a tool saying this, but we all know the rules of the game- my facial attractiveness is at least above median. Picture available on request. Most of my personality can be extracted from my blog (here's a politically and philosophically representative article: https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/the-green-eyed-monster-philosophical ). Intelligent, but frankly hopeless. Big spoon.
Friends and family are key to my life- I know everyone says that, but I try to socialize 4-5 times a week which is well above average going by the stats. Any partner would probably have to be within driving distance of Sydney, but if you think you're the exception, feel free to have a go. Reply to this and we'll work out some way to share contact details. I'll want to see a pic of you during our first exchange when I send you mine. I wouldn't say I'm shallow, but I have strange and hard to describe preferences re: faces.
I'm not expecting a proposal in the first three months or anything like that but at 35 I'm looking for something with at least the potential to be serious. There's no problem with just playing the field, and I can definitely imagine having a casual fling, but that's not what I'm primarily looking for. I am, this cold description aside, quite a romantic person.
I'm located in San Francisco, so we're probably not a match, but if you'd like to chat with a like-minded gay man and see where that leads us, let me know. Certainly, I'd be interested based on your blog. I'm 30 and a little spoon for the most part.
Hey Philosophy Bear and others writing pretty frank self-descriptions: I'm sending your dating posts (with your contact info and identifying info stripped off)to someone I know who is kind, extremely smart, and funny, and perfectly OK in appearance, but can't believe his actual self is sparkly enough to attract a woman. I think it will do him a lot of good.
And by the way, I hope all of you find a wonderful honey. If I wasn't a complete mismatch in gender, age, and sexual orientation *I* would want to date you.
I'm located in San Francisco, so we're probably not a match, but if you'd like to chat with a like-minded gay man and see where that leads us, let me know. Certainly, I'd be interested based on your blog. I'm 30 and a little spoon for the most part.
Hey, you meant to respond to big-spoon Philosophy Bear, right? I'm a straight middle-aged woman who is not dating or datable. Move your post to make sure Philosophy Bear sees it.
Bright, shy, old-fashioned girl seeks bright, interesting boy. Purpose: matrimony. (Or rather, courting hopefully, if compatible, leading to matrimony.) Not poly, not interested in casual sex, very interested in having kids. For more information, see OKCupid profile (https://www.okcupid.com/profile/17435752182960911079/) or email rebeccaanne3 at gmail dot com.
Rebecca is a wonderful person who does many exciting and interesting things: my path sadly wound away from hers, but she is very much someone people should heavily consider dating if compatible.
Have (not quite "relationship" but a couple full weekend sleepover dates and a premortem google doc about what would go wrong if we married/procreated)
Oh yeah I also asked out a friend because she posted on manifold.markets/date-docs, idk how much tougher it would've been for us to know that we should give it a shot without reading eachothers' docs but the docs certainly nudged
They can be a godsend for highly intentional folks who seek and offer a niche fit. People in multiple oddball categories at once (e.g. queer, neurodivergent, polyamorous, super-smart, trauma survivor…) have few/no other spaces and platforms that serve their needs, and they benefit very much from the longform intro and the less crowded, more humanizing context.
I've written a short story that's been praised by Legit Professional SFF Author Elizabeth Hand. It's a humorous piece about an AI that's allllllllmost aligned, but not quite. It's titled "The Real Fanfic Is The Friends We Made Along The Way."
The largest subfield of modern physics (as measured by number of practicing professionals) is also the least known - condensed matter physics. This is the physics of emergence - understanding how complex phenomena arise in systems with many constituent parts. Until recently there hasn't been a popular exposition of this topic. Now there is. I've made a Coursera course intended to introduce the essential ideas of condensed matter physics to interested laypeople, and I hope this will be of interest to some members of the ACX community. See https://www.coursera.org/specializations/the-physics-of-emergence-introduction-to-condensed-matter/
I write Risk Musings, which means essays on risk management (including AI risk among other topics), often through a system dynamics lens. I'm a former regulator of IT risk in finance. Some posts you may like:
Building Resilience into the Core of Systems (latest!):
Woah. This looks awesome, and I had no idea you were floating around... you should do a couple lesswrong cross posts, I'm worried that others would love to read you but don't know about you yet
I'm starting a Substack in advance of a book I'm writing. The objective is to try and approach social problems and ideas in as mathematical an approach as possible, which includes exploring which problems we know we can't understand and what to do about that. I use a lot of examples from engineering, because I find that easier to visualize; I hope others do, too. I've had a pretty interrupted start, between writing the book, school starting (I mentor a local FIRST Tech Challenge team), work, and being a basketcase (I found out almost two years ago I have ADHD and I'm still learning coping strategies). But I think it's worth a look for flexible minded people. I'm personally pretty partisan, but not ideological, and I try to confine the blog to how I understand the world works, not politics. https://jonathancard.substack.com
Book about how we tell the difference between necessary and contingent truths, touching also on philosophy of language and philosophical methodology, also various papers: https://sites.google.com/site/tristanhaze/
I think he may have posted about it in the classifieds before, but I haven’t yet. He mostly writes about AI these days, and I largely write about ethics, with occasional forays into politics and discourse, especially of EA and rationalist interest. We both occasionally write about media. My most popular blog posts are probably “Weyl Versus the Rationalists”:
I'm a member of the rationalist community, but instead of using rationalist principles to help others, I use rationalist principles to hurt people I dislike. I view this as effective altruism because not everybody in the world has positive value: a lot of people have negative value, and it's just a mathematical fact that just as adding positive numbers increases total net value, subtracting negative numbers also increases total net value. The same thing applies to people. If hurting bad people isn't a GOOD thing, then why do we have a military? As a mild sadist, I enjoy hurting people, but I prefer to use my aptitude for the good of society, so I limit myself to hurting BAD people.
Obviously this blog won't appeal to people who enjoy our modern hugbox, or people who loathe conflict, but if you're curious about what a less friendly and more aggressive rationalist philosophy looks like, you may enjoy my work. Here are a few curated posts that the rationalist community may find interesting. I hope you enjoy them!
How social media algorithms are kickstarting a civil war:
I had this meta thought about 3rd wirld dictators, but was never quite sure that hurting them wouldn't do more harm than good to the country they rule.
In my opinion, it wouldn't. Our politicians and ruling class are too gutless to take these people out and annex their countries, but they pretend that the reason they don't use this simple fix is prudence rather than cowardice. That way the rest of us don't question their competence or legitimacy.
Hello all. Snippet Finance is a curation of what I think are the most interesting snippets on finance, investing and beyond - delivered in a short east to digest format. These are curated through the eyes of someone who has spent well over a decade as an investor. Do check it out and subscribe - https://www.snippet.finance
I lurk pretty hard here because I always feel like the dumbest guy in the room.
I'm Jaybird on the group blog Ordinary Times. It's a somewhat centrist group blog with a bunch of pinkos in the comments and a handful of people who would have been solidly on the left in the early 90's who are now pretty much reactionary because they haven't changed a whole lot since then.
I tend to blog about video games and culture war stuff (but I try not to mix the two because, jeez, we're trying to have fun here). I also have a weekly thread dedicated to "what are you doing this weekend?" because, seriously, I want people to talk about being a human and doing human things from time to time.
If you want to show up in comments, that'd be great.
If you want to read my essay about going to Iceland, it's here:
I'm a dork who likes Magic cards, so I wrote posts about Magic cards at https://sanguimon.substack.com/. Give it a read! It's nice to have something at Substack that isn't super serious and isn't trying to make money (both totally fair ventures).
It's not my writing style, but I've also enjoyed https://thisisbullshitandsocanyou.substack.com/. I read it on occasion and recommend it for people who enjoy their comedy on the bluer side (contra myself, the author is looking to make money on Substack). It's offensive at times, fair warning.
I am a compose/musician who released my sixth album recently. I make cinematic ambient music (e.g. soundtracks for game and film). You can listen on basically any music service, but it's free on spotify:
Featuring Surrealism-inspired lore, stable diffusion-generated patterns, and a verifiable unit-level sustainability tool I built that tells you the impact of your particular garment (if you buy one!)
Also, I'm taking a limited number of commissions where I design and make one-off garments based on your personality/tastes, see more details here, and the application form link is at the bottom if that sounds interesting!: https://affale.myshopify.com/pages/atelier
I also write a Substack on the behind-the-scenes of building and running the brand (https://affale.substack.com), covering a lot of the technology I'm developing to make this brand something the fashion world has truly never seen before, and bits on my artistic process and philosophy of personal style!
I really enjoyed wandering through your site and the accompanying substack. You might want to consider advertising in other spaces (i've seen makers do very well from instagram) just for greater reach.
I co-designed a tactical tabletop roleplaying game called Cyberrats. The biggest influences are XCOM, TMNT, and Shadowrun (with a fraction of the complexity). Next month we're doing an expansion that's full of pirates, drones, and undersea fun. Check it out: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2018387307/cyberrats-rise-of-the-briny-bastards
I’m currently working on a card game designed in such a way to empower couples to open up their inhibitions and spark private life. If you’re interested in testing my 1st prototype with your partner and give me some feedback please drop a DM. Thanks.
Hi everyone--I'm one of the co-founders at Groma (www.groma.com), a real estate/fintech startup that is working on developing a real-estate backed cryptocurrency. For more information on that long-term vision, ping me at chris@groma.com and I'll send you our whitepaper (currently password-protected given where we are in the regulatory approval process).
My co-founders and I are looking for an early stage partner. We are an AI/Software startup interested in implementing the latest ML tech in businesses. Our background is in experimental science (physics, biochemistry and materials science) and software. We are looking for technical problems that could theoretically be solved with current "AI", but that require someone to actually implement.
Examples of the types of problems we might be able to solve for you include training and fine tuning language models on internal company data and creating systems to automatically update and improve models over time.
Mantic Monday readers were previously interested in https://fatebook.io so I'll mention it here too: it's the fastest way to track your predictions, private by default, you can share with specific people or publicly (https://fatebook.io/public), and over time you build up a track record. Spiritual successor to https://predictionbook.com/
I make soundtracks, musical themes and do sound-design for short films, student visual media projects, and indie games. It's my passion project, not my fulltime gig, and I only take on one or two jobs a year. If you would like something made for you along these lines feel free to drop me a line. Some guidance / details:
-I have access to guitars, synths, and drum-machines. I don't do string or orchestral stuff, or any realistic-sounding percussion. No vocals.
-Specialty is dark ambient, industrial, dark/minimal techno, noise, etc.
-Because of the above, I am most at-home working on horror / thriller / spacey and psychedelic stuff. Having said that I am a classically-trained guitarist and can walk that line if need be.
-I will be more affordable than going to a professional studio, and what I send you will be very thoughtfully made based on your brief and our discussions. It will be mixed and mastered to a standard somewhere between "high-level amateur" and "mid-range professional". The compromise will be TIME. If your project is time-critical, perhaps seek a pro instead.
-If at any point you don't like what i've given you, you want to pull the pin, or the brief needs to significantly changed, I promise not to be a total pain in the ass. This has never happened before but it's worth noting.
I can be contacted at this email but without the spaces - vile media (at) proton mail (dot) com
My project went from the best year ever (in 2022) to the worst year ever (in 2023). What is my project? I create portraits (or other paintings) in exchange for donations to The Against Malaria Foundation. You can learn more about it here: https://art4effectivedonations.wordpress.com/
I'm not sure if this downturn is due to economic instability or the proliferation of AI-generated images, but I also haven't put in my best effort to publicize the project. I hope you like the idea and consider getting a portrait or gifting one to someone you love (it's like giving two gifts in one—a portrait and a donation in their name). Thank you!
I am creating two products that I had really wanted, as a programmer that tries to get a lot done:
1. Amplenote (at amplenote.com) is a note taking/todo list/calendar app with a feature set similar to Obsidian (https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/amplenote-vs-obsidian) but more focus on helping to decide what to work on every morning. Specifically, I believe that almost everyone who keeps a to-do list has a problem with accumulating hundreds or thousands of tasks without knowing which ones merit attention. We invented a heuristic called "Task Score" that considers questions like "How many times have I considered working on this?", "Does this task align with my long-term goals?", and "Will this be quick to get done?" to recommend which tasks a person should tackle first.
2. GitClear (at gitclear.com) expedites code review by automatically grouping similar commits together so small dev teams can keep abreast of what others are working on without meetings or a PR-for-everything requirement. It's also nice to contextualize how much meaningful change is happening within each repo over months or years.
I run a subscription-based, online, 1:1 personal productivity coaching service for teens at kazivu.com. The idea is to help younger populations get off cheap dopamine (or limit it at the least) and start using their time more productively. Subscribers will have access to a human coach who will work with them to build habits and skills that enable productivity e.g. a healthy sleep routine.
If there are any interested parents of teens here or you know a teen that you'd like to sign up, please get in touch from the contact section on the website (kazivu.com).
I'm a freelance editor specializing in science fiction and fantasy; I've worked with a number of other fiction genres, and occasionally interesting non-fiction, but that's my core specialty. I have a slightly odd pricing pattern: I don't charge for hours, I charge for (500-word) pages ($2-$8/page, depending on how much editing is required - $2 is "a little polishing", $8 is "one page took me half an hour"), so it's easy for me to tell you the exact price as soon as I've received the document, and you can estimate the range of prices in advance.
I have a five-free-pages offer; if you have never hired me before, send me the first five pages (2,500 words) of whatever you want edited, and I will edit and return them for free. This also allows me to tell you what pricing category the work falls into. Second and later passes are half price. For more information please see my website (http://arpistaediting.com/).
CITCON started as the Continuous Integration & Testing Conference in 2006. Being an open space / unconference there is no agenda before we create one on Friday night. Over the years the topics have evolved as the industry as evolved and topics range widely. The big attraction is spending time talking with other people who take ideas seriously.
Is this a meetup? Kind of. Think of it as a meetup that meets annually in various locations.
If you're reading this, you're invited. We'll provide snacks and interesting conversations.
There's also an unclaimed bounty from around the time of the "Lying for Money" book review. Whoever convinces me of the biggest lie during an ACX meetup wins a prize worth at least $10. Good luck!
We had our Meetups Everywhere earlier this month, where Andrew Willsen from Sacramento recorded a podcast. Episode 1, featuring Robin Hanson, just dropped. Episode 2, featuring Bryan Caplan, coming soon. RSS Feed is here: https://feeds.captivate.fm/acx-and-adjacent/ , should be on other podcast platforms shortly, possibly later today.
Hi all- I am starting a biosecurity book club through EA Virtual Programs. The first round is a small pilot, so if you're interested, sign up quickly! Applications close October 2nd- please also share with anyone you know who might want to read and discuss Biosecurity Dilemmas as well as work on a tangible biosec project together. You can read more on the EA forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZmpEZgi5cQMuf7b2p/announcing-ea-virtual-programs-pilot-biosecurity-book-club
Hello! :) I'm looking for other Roman Catholic ACX readers that would be potentially interested in 1x1 discussions on spirituality and theology. Preferred mode of communication would be some chat platform that we would agree upon or simply email. Meeting f2f would also be an option if we happen to live within driving distance from each other. You can reach me at my email address at "proton.me" domain, user "third.aqueduct".
I have nearly a gallon of dichloromethane. (I intended to use it as paint stripper.) I don't need it anymore but it seems like a waste to just dispose of it, so I'm offering it for free to any amateur chemists in NYC.
Are you active on Discord? Are you a rat or postrat (or even a probabilistic predictor, AI alignment researcher, and/or effective altruist)? Do you want to help revive and grow a tiny, barely alive online community?
If so, join celestecord (or “discord” as it’s now officially known)! Even though there are ~270 users who have access to the server, most of the activity there comes from a tiny core of ~5-10 people (including yours truly).
hi i'm celeste of celestecord. i haven't been active there for months and i'm not sure i've even opened the server in weeks. i am sure it is still a fun and vibrant community for some people
i was scrolling through these classifieds just now and i come across someone promoting my abandoned discord server here. wtf, weird feeling. the world is so small
I have rooms available to rent if anyone is looking for housing near Denver/Boulder. I just had another rationalist move out because of a job in another city, so I have open space available if anyone is looking for housing in driving distance from Denver/Boulder.
This is also a good opportunity if someone wanted to try to put together a rationalist group home in the area.
I have a few options for which rent would range from $700-$1200 per month. If you are interested or would want more information, email at Y2FsZWI1OTUzNTM5QGdtYWlsLmNvbQ== (use base64decode.org to decode)
(semi-crosspost from Employment, no need to read this if you've read that)
Hi folks! I'm a software developer of fifteen years, and a week from today I'm starting a sabbatical to shift my career toward AI safety; I've become convinced that it's critically important for reasons that won't surprise anyone here. I've only ever trained one model, but have spent all of this year building a retrieval-augmented-generation / tree-of-thought based app on top of LLMs. I'm planning to spend the sabbatical time diving deeper into the core of ML, studying and reproducing papers in the field.
If you have suggestions on specific areas of study that would equip me well for working on technical alignment, I'd very much love to hear them! You can assume I'm at least somewhat familiar with the major approaches that are discussed in the rationalist community, on the AI Alignment Forum, etc.
I would love to collaborate with someone (amateur/hobbyist) in making music. Experience has taught me that I'm pretty bad at making music alone and that my best efforts have always been with other people. I play guitar/bass (nothing technical or flashy) but focus mostly on electronic styles, such as dub techno and Berlin School. Most interested in trying long, meandering pieces at present. Here's where I put some things I've done, or am working on. Check out Children-on-Steroids (surprise_locale) on #SoundCloud
This is a long shot but what the hell. I have a large (400+) lot of vacuum tubes all of which are suitable for audio. Most lots contain a bunch of useless junk but all of these could be used as voltage amplifiers. Granted, a lot of them are really only good for DIY but I have a bunch of regular audio tubes like Sylvania 6sn7, 6sl7, Mullard ecc31, 807, 6v6, and more. Mostly NOS but some used as well. I have a spreadsheet with most of the tubes listed. I’m hoping to sell the whole lot at once for $2500. Lots of Sylvania, Mullard, RCA, GEC etc. I don’t have a good idea of how messaging works on here or of it does at all. If you have any interest let me know and we’ll figure out some way of getting it done.
Sorry, I was way too premature in offering the tubes. I’m way less organized than I thought I was. It will take some time for me to assemble everything sand get it in a sellable state. So no tubes for from me just yet.
Update: I talked to my friends, and they have expressed lukewarm interest -- but they'd like to see a parts list. Can you email it to me at (bugmaster) (at) (gmail) ?
I’ll send along a spreadsheet on Sunday. I’m not sure how much this will cost to ship or even how I’ll do it. We’ll start by seeing if you’re interested and go from there. Thanks!
I have to admit that I myself build nothing vacuum-tube related; but I have friends (with birthdays) who build amps and nixie clocks, as well as simply appreciate vacuum tubes for the nostalgia (seeing as vacuum tubes used to be their primary tools/materials back in the day). As I said though, I'm hoping that other people will respond to this message, so that we could go in together.
I should add that I wrote some firmware for a nixie clock a while ago, and while it was a fun project, it kind of irked me to do it -- what kind of a nixie clock uses a modern microcontroller ? A clock built on vacuum tubes top to bottom would be much more fun and authentic... also much bigger and power-hungry, but hey, that's history for you :-)
scrolling through here pretty late, but--I'm in northern New Mexico. Big state. Where are you located? I'm not a stereotypical ACX reader, but would love to hike and talk about bringing rationality to new-agey NNM.
Though I may be moving to waay upstate NY in the next year (northern Adirondacks). Most people mean an hour north of the city when they say upstate... how far up are you?
I'm about six hours from the city but towards the west near Rochester unfortunately. Northern Adirondacks sounds like a crazy but awesome place to live. Good luck on your move if you end up going through with it! Pack warm ;)
I'm a philosophy PhD student at Sydney University about to submit my thesis on the 31st of December. I run a Substack which is reasonably popular around these parts:
Relevant skills and experience include: Philosophy, AI policy, writing, Political Economy (maybe translates to Economic sociology in a US context) and an undergraduate degree in psychology. I have three papers under review, and will soon have a fourth (philosophy publishing takes a long time).
I'm looking for two things (and so will be posting this in two sections):
1. Philosophers and economists (graduate students or professors, or others with experience writing journal articles) interested in collaborating on papers.
2. A job.
If I had to sum up good reasons for working with me briefly, it would be my highly unusual profile of strengths and weaknesses. I usually write two thousand words a day, but have trouble completing basic tasks! Why is this a strength? Well much of the value in working with conventionally smart people has already been snapped up, what you need is someone who thinks differently.
I'm a graphics programmer by day, hobbyist game maker by night. Looking for someone to partner with to make a game for fun (with maybe a loose goal of releasing it for like $1 on steam). I'd like to program much of it from scratch (I have my own toy renderer) but have some experience with commercial engines.
Contact me if you have cool ideas for games and would like to try making them a reality. Not offering a job or money here, just a friend who know who to 3D program.
I noticed that you've received some decent response to this. We might have an opportunity here to start a Discord or similar group for this and similar projects. I'm a software engineer with some hobbyist experience and would probably be interested in contributing.
Send me an email at df158xh2k [the usual symbol] mozmail.com (not encoded, just a disposable address) and let's see if we can get something going.
Oh, I am just graduated from a web dev bootcamp but I really want to develop a game. For my first module in bootcamp I turned in this clone of Quarto https://churrundo.github.io/quarto-game-app/ and I also have an unfinished CLI mancala built on Rust (my attempt at project-based-learning) https://github.com/churrundo/mancala.
What about exceedingly lame ideas? I've had a lingering idea for a Final Fantasy 2 homage (you know, the one people dislike) in which the world is run by various bird gods and you're playing Horus the Phoenix trying to recover its stolen fire from Prometheus and various famous resurrection personalities. It's been stymied by me not having even the barest programming ability.
I don't have a specific idea, but I am interested. "dmlsaWFtQGJ1ci5zaw==" (base64)
I am better at *reacting* to other people's ideas than making my own from scratch. Like, if you have a game, I would probably have an idea of a bonus level that uses the existing features in a very unusual way. I might also be useful by providing technical ideas (though not about 3D).
Also, see my blog, but also notice the large time intervals between the articles.
EDIT: Okay, now I have a specific idea of a game. Maybe more will come.
Looking like it's not going to make it, currently 4/5ths through the cycle and only 1/2 funded, $60,000 still needed. Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is one of my favorite games and I want to see a follow-up get made.
I'm looking for someone to help me with some informal research (potentially formal at some future date) in the economic development space. I'm working on understanding oligarchic land ownership models around the world, how they can transition to individual ownership models, and how that might impact individuals and communities.
To date, this is a lone operation, but I'd welcome anyone who wants to get involved. Eventually, I want to raise funds for interventional/experimental research. Let me know if you're interested or want more information.
There's a free Slack-based group, sponsored by SF-based Intention, that features active discussions on that topic, along with occasional AMAs with interesting folks in that arena. Here's the 'join' link:
It currently has 520 members, including founders and other execs, tech folks (in all sorts of fields, not just computing), finance types, and even ordinary people (like moi).
There's also an online resource recently posted by the group's moderator:
This might belong in the employment thread; if so, let me know and I'll move it there. I'm a new BA graduate working in computational biology. I had hoped this would be my field, but I have had a much more difficult time of it than I anticipated – largely due to social isolation, lack of support, lack of variety, and lack of interest (it turns out the 'computational' reigns over the 'biology', and the actual research I'm doing is in a field I don't care that much about). I know this is not just me (the person before me left the job for essentially the same reasons) but it has made me concerned for my career. If these sound like familiar problems, I would love to talk to you and get some career guidance.
I'm a programmer who works on some bioinformatics-adjacent software. From what I've seen, yeah, a lot of the code involved is like an explosion at a spaghetti factory; but this is changing rapidly, as people begin organizing their code into well-managed open-source projects. That said, speaking as a programmer and not a biologist, I do find the field exciting, assuming you're in it for the long term.
Sure, you could click a few buttons, hack a few scripts, and get a one-off answer to some biological question. But if you want to build software that does this reliably and efficiently, you're going to need to solve puzzles that have no canned answers yet. Your first attempt is going to consume terabytes of RAM and take months to run (theoretically, that is); converting that to something that runs in seconds in a laptop is not a task that just anyone can accomplish.
On the flip side of this equation, the state of visualization in the industry is IMO appalling (in the interest of full disclosure, I'm biased, since my company sells a genome viewer). Yes, anyone can throw together some R script to display a graph, but people shouldn't have to. There are many interactive programs that attempt to bridge that gap, but their focus is inevitably on "display something, anything at all" or "cloud AI blockchain buzzword" and not on "make it actually pleasurable for the user to explore his data" or "display informative insights". Even relatively small efforts in this area can yield huge gains.
I haven't mentioned much about actual biological research, because AFAICT it's all data science and biochemistry, not programming; and I confess that I don't know much biochemistry. Still, as a programmer, I do enjoy working in the field.
I don't know if I've got great career advice, but I'm a programmer who's been very curious about comp bio but I have only a very conceptual bio background. When I've looked at comp bio info, my thoughts have been "All these pathways are the world's deepest pile of spaghetti code! How could you work on this without being always someplace far down in the weeds of a specific molecule/gene-expression/cell-cycle?". If you've got some perspective on the discipline, I'd be grateful for the conversation.
Unfortunately, I'm very new in the field, and I have absolutely no idea what's going on. I can try for an answer for my case, though: I work with genetic, population-level data, and it is data science, not software. Your code doesn't have to be right every time, just better at predicting what's going to happen than whoever published last.
---------------------------------EMPLOYMENT---------------------------------
Hi,
I’m the founder of an AI companion start-up based in Tokyo that melds various generative AI technologies with game industry and Japanese pop culture knowledge.
We’re currently looking for a lead engineer to help take our Unity designed game to the App Store and Google Play. The position is expected to be remote for now. Japanese skills are not strictly necessary but preferred.
A demo of our product is available here - https://www.sunemotion.co.jp/
Please contact me via the web form if interested!
Hi all,
I'm a Dublin based researcher looking for a Software Engineer to come on board a spin out company and build inhouse software. Also looking for Remote Sensing and Life Cycle Assessment people.
The company, CarbonHarvesters https://carbonharvesters.com/ , is building out tools to monitor the sustainability of agri-food supply chains - focused on carbon and nature. On the carbon side, we would be connecting to ~ 5 farming databases using APIs or FTP per region, and on the nature side we are building out an API to connect to the satellite imagery provider (Airbus). We've hired software houses to get the first iteration of these services developed but want to bring development in house, and combine into one front end. We're looking for a full stack developer, preferably with sql, python, Azure and react experience.
Remote suits us, and we can pay for the work, and ultimately we're looking for someone to come on board fulltime and be the CTO. We're gearing up for VC funding in 2024, and having a CTO on board will be critical. We're looking for someone who is willing to really give this a go for ~ a year on not great pay by San Francisco standards, but with the upside being potential equity and ground floor of a start up.
Background on team - I'm Irish, PhD in Ecology, post doc in supply chain sustainability focusing on developing a scalable remote sensing tool in python to monitor nature in supply chains. Co-founded company with Alejandro, Ecuadorian, Phd in Life Cycle Assessment and the carbon expert. We're reasonably techy, but have no cs background, so can only bring the services so far, hence need for in-house developer/CTO.
Send any inquiries and CVs to cian (at) carbonharvesters (dot) com.
Particularly looking for demonstrations of projects developed yourself that demonstrate full stack experience.
Hey everyone,
I'm a Berlin (Germany) based freelance IT Consultant & Software Engineer with a background in Mathematics. I'm looking for innovative and impactful projects. My work so far has mostly been with German clients, but I'd like to change that.
I'm fully available right now.
Top skills: C# .NET, Azure DevOps, Oracle SQL, Angular, msg.PM (bet you've never heard of that).
Feel free to contact me here or on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-milbradt/.
CV / Profile: https://cv.martinmilbradt.de/
I'm a little late because of Strange Loop, but in case there are other stragglers: I'm a software engineer[ing manager] at Antithesis and we are always looking to grow our ranks.
If you love solving problems, know your way around a computer, and are open to an in-person role in Northern Virginia (Washington DC metro area), shoot me an email at: brian (dot) lagoda (at) antithesis (dot) com
About Antithesis: we're a five year old company revolutionizing software testing. We come from a bunch of different backgrounds and have several ACX readers including me and someone hired through these very classifieds. We tend not to hire for particular programming competencies, but have projects in typescript, c++, rust, nix, python, and c (so far).
Looking for an english teaching job in Lviv, Ukraine. I don't have a degree, but I'm a native speaker and I have some experience hosting an english speaking club at an english school.
Hey all, I'm Juan Pablo. I've just graduated from a web dev bootcamp with focus on the MERN stack. Rehab in 2017, a Psychology bachelors right after that, and various roles in customer service since 2021 have had me develop soft-skills which I intend to leverage as part of a team. I'm relocating to Berlin soon and I want to consolidate and expand on my toolkit (Typescript is my first next step, and I'm also looking at a project management certification after that). Check out my work on github.com/churrundo and if you feel like it hit me up on https://www.linkedin.com/in/juan-pablo-maurer-developer/.
I'm a pharmacist living and working in California, half-looking for something nontraditional for a pharmacist but also anything non-retail. If you think you could use a pharmacist feel free to reach out here.
My sort-of long form resume/why you might want to consider hiring a pharmacist if you are, say, an MD (see the bottom of part II) here: https://scpantera.substack.com/p/navigating-retail-pharmacy-post-covid
In a nutshell, little bit of hospital experience as a student, mostly (chain) retail post-graduate. Presently under contract with California Correctional Healthcare Services which is a mutant monster mix of both. Willing to at least consider anything that's not retail.
Recommend me to your parent or grandparent who asks you for Tech Support. 😉
I offer compassionate support solutions and consulting for individuals and small businesses. Have worked with Authentic Revolution, Garden Jane, Dr. Hazel-Grace Yates, and many other clients over the past several years. Websites, custom workflows, AI, esoteric software/hardware troubleshooting and training, I do it all. Tech generalist with a heart.
HMU ❤️ https://ecotexan.mystrikingly.com/
Hi, my middle-aged parents are always struggling with writing down passwords and keeping track of them. They use windows and android mostly. What do you think I should set up for them so they won't have this problem anymore?
If they use Chrome on Android and Windows, probably Google Passwords is the best way to go. Something like Bitwarden or LastPass would be too confusing.
What's your secret for not getting very frustrated when assisting older people with tech?
Lots of meditation and relational practice. Good tech support with older folks is 5% know-how and 95% nervous system co-regulation.
Hi folks! I've been working as a software developer for the past fifteen years (Clojure, Python, various others; full-stack or back-end; lots of domains), and a week from today I'm starting a sabbatical to shift my career toward AI safety; I've become convinced that it's critically important for reasons that won't surprise anyone here. I've only ever trained one model, but have spent all of this year building a retrieval-augmented-generation / tree-of-thought based app on top of LLMs. I'm planning to spend the sabbatical time diving deeper into the core of ML, studying and reproducing papers in the field.
My goal is to end up working remotely on safety work that won't contribute disproportionately to capabilities. If you have pointers to such a situation, I'd love to hear about it! I'm open to focusing on specific learning that would prepare me for a specific position or team, if that position/team seems like a good fit.
I'd also love to hear suggestions for specific areas study that would equip me well for technical alignment work (you can assume I'm at least somewhat familiar with the major approaches that are discussed in the rationalist community, on the AI Alignment Forum, etc).
I'm at https://github.com/eggsyntax ; you can reach me at that same username at gmail.
Thanks!
** Medical doctor with law & social sciences background seeks career advice / counselling **
Hi! I am a medical doctor about to enter my second year of residency in a surgical discipline at a teaching hospital in Germany. Besides medicine, I studied law (LLB) and politics (BSc) at top universities in England and France. I miss the more long-term/macro and creative approach from my time in the social sciences and would love to find a way to combine my clinical practice with work that impacts society more effectively.
So far, I haven’t found a career path that fully aligns with my skills and interest among the conventional options and am exploring the feasibility of working in medicine _and_ health technology/public health/politics/consulting/law/.../.
I am of course familiar with the excellent content of 80,000 hours as well as with most of the EA resources, but I am sure there are humans out there with atypical careers and/or ideas that I haven’t come across. If you would like to know more or think you can help me figure this out, please get in touch at joesldssc (at) gmail (dot) com. I would love to hear from you and appreciate any kind of input!
I'm a legal-writing coach, and I'd love to work with you, whether on a specific piece of writing or on legal writing in general. Reach me at gataloca @ pm . me.
Putting feelers out for a programmer / software engineer to collaborate with. I work in Geosciences (not a programmer) and there doesn't seem to be any good software that does what I want, so I thought i'd try collaborating with someone and making it ourselves. Info below:
-Our clients send us monitoring data via API or FTP from instrumentation installed in remote locations, say 30 instruments sending data every 30 mins. It is our job to receive, collate/manage, convert, interpret, and monitor this data.
-The data comprises a device ID, timestamp, plus two other measurements. I envisage a database being created to store the history of readings, whereas now it is all done in excel by manually appending the new batches of data.
-The software needs to look at a directory where all this raw data is, run some very simple conversions and some basic calcs and then display the results in a GUI as time-series graphs. These graphs will have some interactivity, e.g. axis sliders, trendline tools, export to .csv functionality, etc.
-allow threshold values which trigger an alert notification (sent to an email distribution list) if the data exceeds some user-defined value
This is it in a nutshell. Currently it is all done in excel and is a total mess. At this early stage what i'm hoping for is a 'proof-of-concept' programme that I can show to management and then make refinements from there.
Some potentially relevant constraints:
-I don't have heaps of money to throw at this, since at the moment it is purely my own project. However depending on the outcomes of the demo version, it may turn out to pay quite well during development.
-Given the above, this kind of thing may be more suited to someone looking to develop a portfolio or for a capstone project or something?
-I have plenty of sample data, exemplar interfaces of similar-ish programmes, and am very willing/able to provide detailed guidance without being annoying. I am not a programmer and have only limited coding experience, but I do take pride in being a very straightforward and satisfying person to work with, and since this is a passion project I will go out of my way to make good things happen.
Reply to me on here with any follow-up queries or thoughts. Thanks for reading.
'Our clients send us monitoring data via API or FTP from instrumentation installed in remote locations, say 30 instruments sending data every 30 mins. It is our job to receive, collate/manage, convert, interpret, and monitor this data.'
Re the interpretation piece, assuming those 30 instruments (or subsets of them) are providing observations of the same ground truth, I've done similar work with in situ climate data, and ended up reinventing wheels because I didn't find the relevant body of literature until later. In case you're similarly unaware, the main term of art you'll want to look into is 'sensor fusion'.
Im a developer looking for portfolio projects. Sounds like a great opportunity. Email me at edcomeau@vt.edu and I'll build a demo free or even collaborate with others if you want to put together a rag-tag group of programmers lol
Hi! My previous job involved working with generating time series data out of observed events. And I have some experience with it. Depending on the scale needed you have a number of options, from a simple circular log of events (RrdTool) so your footprint stays the same to heavy weights like OpenTSDB and InfluxDB. Though I would go with something like Prometheus that has established patterns for scale, easy to deploy and a huge ecosystem.
I'd be happy to work with you on this (even if only for portfolio purposes). Please do email me at aW5zdWZmZXJhYmxlamFrZUBnbWFpbC5jb20=
(You can decode that b64 at https://www.base64decode.org/)
Have you thought about using a cloud-monitoring solution for this? There's a ton of good software that's designed to take arbitrary tagged metrics from clients and then display those metrics in an easy-to-explore way. These cloud-monitoring tools can let you set up decently complex formulae, create alerts, and make nice charts that you can embed in other applications. The one drawback with these tools is that they're not designed to handle incrementing metrics more than 1 hour in the past, so you wouldn't be able to backfill data.
DataDog (https://www.datadoghq.com/) is the tool I'm most familiar with & it has a nice free tier. It's a fantastic tool, but it does get expensive as the number of metrics goes up.
(I suspect that your numbers will be so low that it won't be a problem)
Other similar tools that I have less familiarity with are Librato, NewRelic, Prometheus, and HoneyComb.
Rather than a cloud-monitoring tool, you could also look at "business intelligence" tools that are designed to take in information about a user (in your case, a client) and then make that data explorable. Getting your data stored in a SQL database in a simple single-table format could let you connect any business-intelligence tool you'd like and set up alerts, dashboards, and anything else you'd like.
- https://www.metabase.com/ is open-source, but running it yourself is probably not what you're looking for.
- https://superset.apache.org/ is another open-source option with a ton of cool visualizations.
- https://www.tableau.com/pricing/individual is stupidly expensive, but people really seem to like it. I think there's a free trial where you could see if it's something that meets your needs
I'm sure there's a ton more great software out there that does similar graphing, alerting, and charting things! Best of luck with your project.
Hey thanks for all those! I'll sift through them and see if there's something useful for my needs. Some of it I feel I might need an IT degree to get my head around but thanks anyway!
Oh, for sure! I think you'd still want to work with a programmer for this. I'd just try to work with someone to integrate with an existing tool rather than doing the "fun" thing of building something completely custom.
I would be very happy to work with you on this for portfolio purposes. You can reach me at collapsinghrung@gmail.com
Hi,
I teach at an Engineering college in Jerusalem where the 4th year software engineering students have a year-long final project. What you described sounds like exactly the kind of thing that our students do. I would love to chat about this more and see if we can make a connection. My email is zluria@gmail.com
I’m a professional futurist looking to take on a few new clients. I specialize in forecasting trends and helping entrepreneurs understand and engineer the emerging cultural landscape. You can email me at theculturalfuturist@gmail.com.
Here is a recent prediction blog of mine:
https://culturalfuturist.substack.com/p/my-predictions-for-the-near-future
I am a novelist / journalist living in West Virginia and looking for remote work, full or part time. I have experience in research, was an assistant to an agent at CAA, and am currently employed in news media. Buffering these jobs I have worked as a landscaper, a kindergarten teacher and an Uber driver; all to say that I am no stranger to hard work.
I moved to West Virginia to be able to write full time, and since finishing my book have been looking to find an alternate source of income. The local news industry is hard to stomach, and I would love to find a space that is more intellectually stimulating. I am excellent with research, and would be a fine aide to any working writer.
Please find my work online at [https://ryanmatera.substack.com/] and reach out if you would like to discuss the possibility of employment. I can be reached at [first name].[last name]1[at]gmail.com or [two]03-[seven]33-[eight]377.
Cheers.
I'm hiring! I'm the engineering manager at Anrok, a Sequoia-backed series A startup with product market fit solving sales tax and VAT compliance for SaaS businesses.
I'm directly hiring software engineers, and other managers have roles open for a solutions engineer, an account executive, and a tax associate. Details on open roles, the company, and how to apply on our website: https://www.anrok.com/careers#open-roles
The benefits? Aside from all the regular stuff like pay, equity, and insurance, you get to work with smart people that include regular readers of this blog! :-D
Hi, I am a engineer, both physical and software, looking for work. Email me – my email is the same as my github account, linked below, at gmail. Living in LA but not tied down and will move almost anywhere (even outside the US). I am a bit of a jack of all trades, master of none, so am probably most valuable to a smaller company where you need each employee to wear multiple hats at once. I am pretty decent at CNC machining, for instance, but probably not quite at a full-time/professional level. I also have experience with prototyping; designing, building, and commissioning industrial equipment; electrical engineering; optic design; CAD; engineering data management and organization.
I have been putting a lot of thought and research into motion control/robotics, and associated electrical equipment/control hardware, so would particularly love to find a position in this area.
I am also a pretty decent programmer. Mostly self-taught, though I took a handful of classes in university. Originally learned C/C++, though am so rusty with them I could barely use them at all these days. Highly proficient with Python, and very familiar with TensorFlow, Numpy, and PyQt. I have been focusing recently on getting better at using threads / multiprocessing, and asynchronous programming.
Several years back I got interested in machine learning. I found that it made a lot of sense to me. Most people talk about machine learning like some mysterious black box that nobody understands how it works, but I feel like I have good intuitions for it. I played with it for a while, and came up with a handful of neat and weird tricks and techniques that that worked really well and enabled me to train what I thought were unusually deep networks at the time. I had never heard about anybody using these ideas (though it isn’t like I did a lot of in-depth research, I am certainly not an expert in the field). But before I made any ML systems that were particularly interesting, I got the idea to try using TensorFlow based optimization on physics problems instead. I ended up spending several years writing a ray tracer inside TensorFlow which can be used to design/optimize lenses and so do optical design. I tried spinning this into a startup, but gave up pretty quickly as I am not good as business stuff. Ended up leveraging it to get a position at an LED lighting company instead. Current state of my optical design software is that it has undergone a full re-write to clean it up, it has a UI and the ability to network to a remote AWS instance and run across multiple GPUs. I have used it to design several optics that are currently being sold at the company I work for.
So while I have some pretty good coding skills, since I am self-taught I also have big gaps in my knowledge, and am fairly certain I have a lot of bad habits that would probably grate on many professional programmers. Given this I am not sure if I could actually land a decent job as a programmer, which is why I have mostly been focusing on physical engineering jobs, even though I could potentially earn more in software. I would love some feedback about this, even from people that aren’t hiring. Is the above paragraph actually impressive? Do I sound like a competent programmer, or not? My optical design software is available on my github: https://github.com/ecpoppenheimer. TensorFlowRayTrace is the older initial build, and TFRT2 is the newer re-build. Does this code look reasonably well organized, or is it rookie stuff?
Also, I am sitting on some pretty powerful optical design software that is particularly suited to designing LED optics. (Yes, I made it open source, so you can go grab it and use it yourself, but… the optical design problem is very difficult so despite my best efforts the tool is pretty difficult to use. So good luck using it yourself!) I have some really performant LED lens designs available. But unfortunately the company I currently work for doesn’t have the resources to really take advantage of what I have to offer. If you or someone you know happens to work at Signify, Acuity, GE, or any other company in the lighting industry with enough available resources to actually manufacture some revolutionary new products I might be able to blow your mind and generate some serious value for you. Also… automotive – I think I might be able to improve automobile headlights quite a bit. Unfortunately my optical design software isn’t particularly suited for imaging optics (at least it has no competitive advantage over Zemax or similar tools) so I probably wouldn’t be so valuable to a camera or company or the like.
---------------------------------DATING---------------------------------
Eight days late, but here is https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YWUBkeC5FN0Tl3zshKT8RW6XQTIV2ErSFz3nbvmi34E/edit?usp=sharing
Please say hi, even if you just want to be friends
Just moved to bay area for work, can wife you up and pop out some tiny gremlins somewhere between asap and AGI, 30yo. https://quinnd.net/date/
- there probably exists a "match so good that I'd sacrifice poly" condition, so if you're super monog you should check if you're that by getting to know me.
- handsy should be a big part of your love language. I tried dating a couple people who aren't like that and it was super difficult.
- sometimes my voice sits loud and I love when people tell me to calm down instead of quietly/passively taking damage.
Etc., low bar to reach out, say hi.
Female, straight, 43, Seattle, no kids, and most comfortable with someone who's either child-free or has older children (8 and up). I'm looking for a single, monogam-ish, vaguely peer-aged man who is wise enough to not rush into a commitment but nevertheless actively wants a serious girlfriend / main "person" / life partner situation. That doesn't have to look like a traditional nuclear family and cohabitation (I enjoy living alone and it's ideal if he does, too!).
I'm employed full-time, own a condo and a car, and am mostly pretty responsible. I care very deeply about my loved ones, but between being rational-minded and most of my closest friends being men, I'm caring in a straightforward, no-nonsense, let's-fix-it way that tends to be more common in men and can be disconcerting for people expecting stereotypical feminine displays of intense emotional expression.
I like to debate ideas but hate genuine interpersonal conflict and drama. I'm difficult to offend, slow to anger, and quick to forgive. I'm a huge fan of advice columns because it's better to learn from other people's mistakes than one's own.
I'm terrific at picking out both restaurants and media and talking about them! I love sour beers and aside from a couple of quirks like an inexplicable hatred of pho, I have a broad, foodie-ish palate, ranging from probably-not-to-code taco trucks to micro gastronomy. Recent media I've hugely enjoyed includes Taylor Sheridan's pulply, remarkably-feminist-but-not-Woke Special Ops: Lioness and the Empire storyline of Foundation (but not the rest of it!).
I can be emailed at my username here @ gmail.
My main dating profile is on Fetlife under my username here minus the "Christina," though I should note I'm currently drafting a rebrand as a "solo matriarch." That might kind of be a weird, potentially misleading phrase due to my childfree status, but I'm attempting to describe my tendency to assume leadership if no one better is stepping up to a particular task, while avoiding the male fantasy associations that tend to go with "femme-dom/dominant/female-led/etc." Or put another way, I like exercising good judgment and giving advice to men; but I'm not at all interested in spanking them/etc if they don't follow it.
I'm a 26 year old straight man, looking for a girl in Lviv, Ukraine.
Looking for a smart, honest & attractive companion paragraph summarizing mind-body exercise to mate with, er, mix with paper that goes by 'Being Human.' Must be concise in expression (~125 words) and friendly to all.
30/M/London
Introverted but social, like to read non-fiction and visit museums (where I proceed to compulsively read everything and take pictures of memorable artefacts and plaques).
Classic romantic, in the sense of having passion in work, friendships and relationships.
Work as an AI researcher for a government research institute.
Email: isaacfranklin1706@gmail.com
33/M/NJ
Straight
Cisgender
Monogamous
I'm an IT consultant looking for a long-term relationship. I like science fiction, D&D, video games...you know the drill. I prefer someone who speaks English as a first language.
brendansblatherings@gmail.com
Hi, I'm Chris! 25/M/Seattle seeking woman for monogamous relationship. More info here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QVDnzSnFWgeuDT4IGLRd6_WFZMFJoI5YSTU5FzFK4uY/edit?usp=sharing
I'm 19 male and HOT and I'm a computer science major and a McDonalds manager and I read Camus, Dostoevsky, and Scott Alexander on the reg
add my snap: maverick5669
and join my minecraft server: sandwichclub.mc.gg
thank you have a good day
Hi! I'm Jose (30/M/ SF), the author of nintil.com for those blog oriented.
leaving my date-me doc here with more details!
https://jlricon.notion.site/Date-Jos-9976b3b2047c41329a23952921712dbb?pvs=4
Considerate, shy (33 / M / Los Angeles) looking for F. Interested in monogamous relationship with goal of marriage and kids. I am an engineer (both physical and software). I enjoy cooking, hiking and whitewater kayaking.
Also looking for platonic friends of any gender (would love to join something like a board-game night), and especially hiking partners (pretty strong hiker, looking to climb difficult peaks in San Gabriels).
Email at ecpoppenheimer@gmail.com
24/m/states, seeking hetero LDR. See below for specs.
Pros: emotionally stable, smart, my last date made sure to tell me I was 'very attractive', diverse interests, creative to the point of being professional in multiple unrelated creative domains. Health conscious and fit. Not an ideologue.
Cons: I have an anxiety condition that causes me sickness when I date IRL (manageable in every other circumstance). Some women have been willing to pursue me anyway (did I mention I'm 6'4?) but it has generally been hellish, and I break it off if they don't.
I would prefer to make an emotional/intellectual connection first and get comfortable, then progress from there. On your part? I'd love to get to know you if you're any kind of interesting person, but realistically our long-term prospects will be constrained if you're significantly older than me (10+yrs) or disinterested in your own health. I'm just now coming to accept that I can't willpower my way forward, and I expect to sort out some medication shortly. So, if this thing doesn't pan out I'm sure I'll make my way in the cold, ugly world of app dating. I'd still prefer this, though. Drop me a line @ dirgewriter(at)gmail .com and I would be happy to exchange more information/show my face. My ultimate ideal is a committed, monogamous relationship of zero drama and plenty romance.
Since I'm in under Other and Employment might as well go for it. This whole thing feels like a meat market, because it is. I think there's a certain dignity, then, in just being upfront and clinical. Don't worry, I'm much more romantic in person.
Located in Sydney, I'm a gay 35 Year old in the final year of writing a PhD thesis in the philosophy of economics. I'm 6'3'', both quite muscular and bit over weight making me overall enormous. I'm looking for a boyfriend. I feel like a tool saying this, but we all know the rules of the game- my facial attractiveness is at least above median. Picture available on request. Most of my personality can be extracted from my blog (here's a politically and philosophically representative article: https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/the-green-eyed-monster-philosophical ). Intelligent, but frankly hopeless. Big spoon.
Friends and family are key to my life- I know everyone says that, but I try to socialize 4-5 times a week which is well above average going by the stats. Any partner would probably have to be within driving distance of Sydney, but if you think you're the exception, feel free to have a go. Reply to this and we'll work out some way to share contact details. I'll want to see a pic of you during our first exchange when I send you mine. I wouldn't say I'm shallow, but I have strange and hard to describe preferences re: faces.
I'm not expecting a proposal in the first three months or anything like that but at 35 I'm looking for something with at least the potential to be serious. There's no problem with just playing the field, and I can definitely imagine having a casual fling, but that's not what I'm primarily looking for. I am, this cold description aside, quite a romantic person.
I'm located in San Francisco, so we're probably not a match, but if you'd like to chat with a like-minded gay man and see where that leads us, let me know. Certainly, I'd be interested based on your blog. I'm 30 and a little spoon for the most part.
Hey Philosophy Bear and others writing pretty frank self-descriptions: I'm sending your dating posts (with your contact info and identifying info stripped off)to someone I know who is kind, extremely smart, and funny, and perfectly OK in appearance, but can't believe his actual self is sparkly enough to attract a woman. I think it will do him a lot of good.
And by the way, I hope all of you find a wonderful honey. If I wasn't a complete mismatch in gender, age, and sexual orientation *I* would want to date you.
I'm located in San Francisco, so we're probably not a match, but if you'd like to chat with a like-minded gay man and see where that leads us, let me know. Certainly, I'd be interested based on your blog. I'm 30 and a little spoon for the most part.
Hey, you meant to respond to big-spoon Philosophy Bear, right? I'm a straight middle-aged woman who is not dating or datable. Move your post to make sure Philosophy Bear sees it.
Bright, shy, old-fashioned girl seeks bright, interesting boy. Purpose: matrimony. (Or rather, courting hopefully, if compatible, leading to matrimony.) Not poly, not interested in casual sex, very interested in having kids. For more information, see OKCupid profile (https://www.okcupid.com/profile/17435752182960911079/) or email rebeccaanne3 at gmail dot com.
Rebecca is a wonderful person who does many exciting and interesting things: my path sadly wound away from hers, but she is very much someone people should heavily consider dating if compatible.
Orthodox Jewish woman from NYC seeking Orthodox Jewish man. If interested, text me at 12345 [gematria of my first name] [taryag].
Purely out of curiosity, have you ever heard of people starting a relationship through these threads?
Have (not quite "relationship" but a couple full weekend sleepover dates and a premortem google doc about what would go wrong if we married/procreated)
Oh yeah I also asked out a friend because she posted on manifold.markets/date-docs, idk how much tougher it would've been for us to know that we should give it a shot without reading eachothers' docs but the docs certainly nudged
I have not started a longterm relationship but I did go on like 6 dates with someone because of a previous post.
Interesting - this kind of stuff feels way too awkward for me but I guess other people are different
They can be a godsend for highly intentional folks who seek and offer a niche fit. People in multiple oddball categories at once (e.g. queer, neurodivergent, polyamorous, super-smart, trauma survivor…) have few/no other spaces and platforms that serve their needs, and they benefit very much from the longform intro and the less crowded, more humanizing context.
---------------------------------READ MY BLOG---------------------------------
I've written a short story that's been praised by Legit Professional SFF Author Elizabeth Hand. It's a humorous piece about an AI that's allllllllmost aligned, but not quite. It's titled "The Real Fanfic Is The Friends We Made Along The Way."
https://deathisbad.substack.com/p/the-real-fanfic-is-the-friends-we
The largest subfield of modern physics (as measured by number of practicing professionals) is also the least known - condensed matter physics. This is the physics of emergence - understanding how complex phenomena arise in systems with many constituent parts. Until recently there hasn't been a popular exposition of this topic. Now there is. I've made a Coursera course intended to introduce the essential ideas of condensed matter physics to interested laypeople, and I hope this will be of interest to some members of the ACX community. See https://www.coursera.org/specializations/the-physics-of-emergence-introduction-to-condensed-matter/
I write Risk Musings, which means essays on risk management (including AI risk among other topics), often through a system dynamics lens. I'm a former regulator of IT risk in finance. Some posts you may like:
Building Resilience into the Core of Systems (latest!):
https://riskmusings.substack.com/p/building-resilience-into-the-core
Tackling Organizational Risk with Structure and Function:
https://riskmusings.substack.com/p/tackling-organizational-risk-with
AGI Existential Risk Persists Despite Controls That Buy Time:
https://riskmusings.substack.com/p/agi-existential-risk-persists-despite
Anatomy of a Regulation - Case Study:
https://riskmusings.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-regulation-case-study
System Dynamics and AI Regulation:
https://riskmusings.substack.com/p/system-dynamics-and-ai-regulation
Recession Tug-of-War: Downside versus Brightside:
https://riskmusings.substack.com/p/recession-tug-of-war-downside-versus
Woah. This looks awesome, and I had no idea you were floating around... you should do a couple lesswrong cross posts, I'm worried that others would love to read you but don't know about you yet
My NYC party blog/clubbing chronicles, which had its origins in a book review I wrote for last year's ACT Book Review Contest!
Probably best to start with the prologue: https://onthespectrumontheguestlist.substack.com/p/prologue
I'm starting a Substack in advance of a book I'm writing. The objective is to try and approach social problems and ideas in as mathematical an approach as possible, which includes exploring which problems we know we can't understand and what to do about that. I use a lot of examples from engineering, because I find that easier to visualize; I hope others do, too. I've had a pretty interrupted start, between writing the book, school starting (I mentor a local FIRST Tech Challenge team), work, and being a basketcase (I found out almost two years ago I have ADHD and I'm still learning coping strategies). But I think it's worth a look for flexible minded people. I'm personally pretty partisan, but not ideological, and I try to confine the blog to how I understand the world works, not politics. https://jonathancard.substack.com
Book about how we tell the difference between necessary and contingent truths, touching also on philosophy of language and philosophical methodology, also various papers: https://sites.google.com/site/tristanhaze/
I’m Devin, I co-write the blog Thinking Much Better with Nicholas Kross:
https://www.thinkingmuchbetter.com
I think he may have posted about it in the classifieds before, but I haven’t yet. He mostly writes about AI these days, and I largely write about ethics, with occasional forays into politics and discourse, especially of EA and rationalist interest. We both occasionally write about media. My most popular blog posts are probably “Weyl Versus the Rationalists”:
https://www.thinkingmuchbetter.com/main/weyl-vs-the-rationalists/
“The Bioethicists are (Mostly) Alright”:
https://www.thinkingmuchbetter.com/main/the-bioethicists-are-mostly-alright/
And “Some Observations on Alcoholism”:
https://www.thinkingmuchbetter.com/main/alcoholism/
Nick’s are probably “Quick Thoughts on A.I. Governance”:
https://www.thinkingmuchbetter.com/main/quick-thoughts-on-ai-governance/
And “I am a Memoryless System”:
https://www.thinkingmuchbetter.com/main/i-am-a-memoryless-system/
We also sometimes post on the EA Forum and Nick sometimes posts to LessWrong.
I'm a member of the rationalist community, but instead of using rationalist principles to help others, I use rationalist principles to hurt people I dislike. I view this as effective altruism because not everybody in the world has positive value: a lot of people have negative value, and it's just a mathematical fact that just as adding positive numbers increases total net value, subtracting negative numbers also increases total net value. The same thing applies to people. If hurting bad people isn't a GOOD thing, then why do we have a military? As a mild sadist, I enjoy hurting people, but I prefer to use my aptitude for the good of society, so I limit myself to hurting BAD people.
Obviously this blog won't appeal to people who enjoy our modern hugbox, or people who loathe conflict, but if you're curious about what a less friendly and more aggressive rationalist philosophy looks like, you may enjoy my work. Here are a few curated posts that the rationalist community may find interesting. I hope you enjoy them!
How social media algorithms are kickstarting a civil war:
https://questioner.substack.com/p/our-violent-era
How to use rationalist principles to make money on the stock market:
https://questioner.substack.com/p/reality-plus
How to distinguish between real science and politicized science (what I call "scientism"):
https://questioner.substack.com/p/trust-the-experts
How to use misinformation to gaslight people into living in alternate realities:
https://questioner.substack.com/p/the-mandela-effect
How to stage a coup in our modern society:
https://questioner.substack.com/p/fun-with-fascism
Why many rationalists are not respected by normies:
https://questioner.substack.com/p/utilitarianism-vs-consequentialism
I had this meta thought about 3rd wirld dictators, but was never quite sure that hurting them wouldn't do more harm than good to the country they rule.
In my opinion, it wouldn't. Our politicians and ruling class are too gutless to take these people out and annex their countries, but they pretend that the reason they don't use this simple fix is prudence rather than cowardice. That way the rest of us don't question their competence or legitimacy.
I write a blog that touches on a lot of rationalist concepts.
Here's an example essay https://michaeldruggan.substack.com/p/protecting-your-life-range
Hello all. Snippet Finance is a curation of what I think are the most interesting snippets on finance, investing and beyond - delivered in a short east to digest format. These are curated through the eyes of someone who has spent well over a decade as an investor. Do check it out and subscribe - https://www.snippet.finance
I blog at affablyevil.substack.com. Rationalist-adjacent musings, with the occasional maniacal laugh.
Most recent post: https://affablyevil.substack.com/p/autonomic-sanity
Some writing on forecasting research (http://niplav.site/forecasters.html), cryonics (http://niplav.site/considerations_on_cryonics.html), QS experiments (http://niplav.site/nootropics.html), attention spans (http://niplav.site/spans.html) and more
http://niplav.site
I lurk pretty hard here because I always feel like the dumbest guy in the room.
I'm Jaybird on the group blog Ordinary Times. It's a somewhat centrist group blog with a bunch of pinkos in the comments and a handful of people who would have been solidly on the left in the early 90's who are now pretty much reactionary because they haven't changed a whole lot since then.
I tend to blog about video games and culture war stuff (but I try not to mix the two because, jeez, we're trying to have fun here). I also have a weekly thread dedicated to "what are you doing this weekend?" because, seriously, I want people to talk about being a human and doing human things from time to time.
If you want to show up in comments, that'd be great.
If you want to read my essay about going to Iceland, it's here:
https://ordinary-times.com/2022/05/12/on-iceland/
Recently started blog, first post on hindrances in effective animal advocacy, a proposal: https://open.substack.com/pub/dylanrichardson/p/vegans-as-an-interest-group?r=rj6jj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I'm a dork who likes Magic cards, so I wrote posts about Magic cards at https://sanguimon.substack.com/. Give it a read! It's nice to have something at Substack that isn't super serious and isn't trying to make money (both totally fair ventures).
It's not my writing style, but I've also enjoyed https://thisisbullshitandsocanyou.substack.com/. I read it on occasion and recommend it for people who enjoy their comedy on the bluer side (contra myself, the author is looking to make money on Substack). It's offensive at times, fair warning.
Happened to scroll by here and I guess this is as good a spot as any to toss out a link to my retail pharmacy explainer one more time: https://scpantera.substack.com/p/navigating-retail-pharmacy-post-covid
+/- the rest of the blog, but that's the crown jewel
---------------------------------CONSUME MY PRODUCT/SERVICE---------------------------------
I am a compose/musician who released my sixth album recently. I make cinematic ambient music (e.g. soundtracks for game and film). You can listen on basically any music service, but it's free on spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/1dBZj96pUZpC2WVze2q3Kq
I'm also available for collaborations on future projects, so feel free to reach out if that's something you're interested in.
I just launched my fashion brand, AFFALÉ, last month!
Link: https://affale.myshopify.com
Featuring Surrealism-inspired lore, stable diffusion-generated patterns, and a verifiable unit-level sustainability tool I built that tells you the impact of your particular garment (if you buy one!)
Also, I'm taking a limited number of commissions where I design and make one-off garments based on your personality/tastes, see more details here, and the application form link is at the bottom if that sounds interesting!: https://affale.myshopify.com/pages/atelier
I also write a Substack on the behind-the-scenes of building and running the brand (https://affale.substack.com), covering a lot of the technology I'm developing to make this brand something the fashion world has truly never seen before, and bits on my artistic process and philosophy of personal style!
I really enjoyed wandering through your site and the accompanying substack. You might want to consider advertising in other spaces (i've seen makers do very well from instagram) just for greater reach.
actual gorgeous site
thanks!! ✨
I co-designed a tactical tabletop roleplaying game called Cyberrats. The biggest influences are XCOM, TMNT, and Shadowrun (with a fraction of the complexity). Next month we're doing an expansion that's full of pirates, drones, and undersea fun. Check it out: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2018387307/cyberrats-rise-of-the-briny-bastards
I’m currently working on a card game designed in such a way to empower couples to open up their inhibitions and spark private life. If you’re interested in testing my 1st prototype with your partner and give me some feedback please drop a DM. Thanks.
Substance doesn't have Direct Messages:
https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/10551066288404-Can-I-direct-message-another-Substack-writer-or-reader-with-Chat-#:~:text=Substack%20Chat%20is%20available%20on,thread%20with%20all%20your%20subscribers.
You should provide a different way to contact you.
Hi everyone--I'm one of the co-founders at Groma (www.groma.com), a real estate/fintech startup that is working on developing a real-estate backed cryptocurrency. For more information on that long-term vision, ping me at chris@groma.com and I'll send you our whitepaper (currently password-protected given where we are in the regulatory approval process).
In the short-term, and as a building block towards that ultimate goal, we've developed novel proptech to improve the performance of small multifamily rental properties and are soliciting investment in our REIT from accredited investors. We'll be going live on Republic (https://republic.com/) in a few weeks, but in the meantime, if you're curious, feel free to check out our PPM here: https://storage.googleapis.com/groma-public-assets/documents/GromaREIT%20PPM%20v1.16_Updated_052223.pdf
I'm also happy to answer any questions about the broader Groma project, either here or via email.
Best,
Chris
I DM/GM roleplaying games as a side gig. I have a couple open seats at the moment.
https://startplaying.games/gm/scottv
My co-founders and I are looking for an early stage partner. We are an AI/Software startup interested in implementing the latest ML tech in businesses. Our background is in experimental science (physics, biochemistry and materials science) and software. We are looking for technical problems that could theoretically be solved with current "AI", but that require someone to actually implement.
Examples of the types of problems we might be able to solve for you include training and fine tuning language models on internal company data and creating systems to automatically update and improve models over time.
email me directly: info@loreley.one
The Base Rate Times - news through prediction markets:
www.baseratetimes.com
Love this. Do you plan to support other languages too eventually?
Mantic Monday readers were previously interested in https://fatebook.io so I'll mention it here too: it's the fastest way to track your predictions, private by default, you can share with specific people or publicly (https://fatebook.io/public), and over time you build up a track record. Spiritual successor to https://predictionbook.com/
I make soundtracks, musical themes and do sound-design for short films, student visual media projects, and indie games. It's my passion project, not my fulltime gig, and I only take on one or two jobs a year. If you would like something made for you along these lines feel free to drop me a line. Some guidance / details:
-I have access to guitars, synths, and drum-machines. I don't do string or orchestral stuff, or any realistic-sounding percussion. No vocals.
-Specialty is dark ambient, industrial, dark/minimal techno, noise, etc.
-Because of the above, I am most at-home working on horror / thriller / spacey and psychedelic stuff. Having said that I am a classically-trained guitarist and can walk that line if need be.
-I will be more affordable than going to a professional studio, and what I send you will be very thoughtfully made based on your brief and our discussions. It will be mixed and mastered to a standard somewhere between "high-level amateur" and "mid-range professional". The compromise will be TIME. If your project is time-critical, perhaps seek a pro instead.
-If at any point you don't like what i've given you, you want to pull the pin, or the brief needs to significantly changed, I promise not to be a total pain in the ass. This has never happened before but it's worth noting.
I can be contacted at this email but without the spaces - vile media (at) proton mail (dot) com
My project went from the best year ever (in 2022) to the worst year ever (in 2023). What is my project? I create portraits (or other paintings) in exchange for donations to The Against Malaria Foundation. You can learn more about it here: https://art4effectivedonations.wordpress.com/
I'm not sure if this downturn is due to economic instability or the proliferation of AI-generated images, but I also haven't put in my best effort to publicize the project. I hope you like the idea and consider getting a portrait or gifting one to someone you love (it's like giving two gifts in one—a portrait and a donation in their name). Thank you!
I am creating two products that I had really wanted, as a programmer that tries to get a lot done:
1. Amplenote (at amplenote.com) is a note taking/todo list/calendar app with a feature set similar to Obsidian (https://noteapps.info/note_apps/disambiguate/amplenote-vs-obsidian) but more focus on helping to decide what to work on every morning. Specifically, I believe that almost everyone who keeps a to-do list has a problem with accumulating hundreds or thousands of tasks without knowing which ones merit attention. We invented a heuristic called "Task Score" that considers questions like "How many times have I considered working on this?", "Does this task align with my long-term goals?", and "Will this be quick to get done?" to recommend which tasks a person should tackle first.
2. GitClear (at gitclear.com) expedites code review by automatically grouping similar commits together so small dev teams can keep abreast of what others are working on without meetings or a PR-for-everything requirement. It's also nice to contextualize how much meaningful change is happening within each repo over months or years.
I run a subscription-based, online, 1:1 personal productivity coaching service for teens at kazivu.com. The idea is to help younger populations get off cheap dopamine (or limit it at the least) and start using their time more productively. Subscribers will have access to a human coach who will work with them to build habits and skills that enable productivity e.g. a healthy sleep routine.
If there are any interested parents of teens here or you know a teen that you'd like to sign up, please get in touch from the contact section on the website (kazivu.com).
I'm a freelance editor specializing in science fiction and fantasy; I've worked with a number of other fiction genres, and occasionally interesting non-fiction, but that's my core specialty. I have a slightly odd pricing pattern: I don't charge for hours, I charge for (500-word) pages ($2-$8/page, depending on how much editing is required - $2 is "a little polishing", $8 is "one page took me half an hour"), so it's easy for me to tell you the exact price as soon as I've received the document, and you can estimate the range of prices in advance.
I have a five-free-pages offer; if you have never hired me before, send me the first five pages (2,500 words) of whatever you want edited, and I will edit and return them for free. This also allows me to tell you what pricing category the work falls into. Second and later passes are half price. For more information please see my website (http://arpistaediting.com/).
I have a typing game for parents to play with children on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1807640/Alpha_Zoo/
I made milkyboard, a keyboard synth with the milkdrop visualizer: https://milkyboard.com/
---------------------------------MEETUP---------------------------------
Is anyone around Lausanne, CH, and would be interested in a small, informal meet-up this month?
For those in Massachusetts, there'll be a Petrov Day celebration in Cambridge on Tuesday September 26: https://www.facebook.com/events/851855996157455/
Tangentially, there's *also* a meetup for Wikipedia editors in the area on Saturday September 30 at MIT. Please RSVP at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Boston/Casual_Meetup (and no, you don't need to already be a Wikipedia editor in order to stop by)
AI Safety Tokyo https://aisafety.tokyo. We run a weekly reading group to keep pace with the fast-moving safety literature. Email someone@aisafety.tokyo if you're interested!
"I've been to reading groups in the bay area, london, australia and Japan. The AI Safety Tokyo benkyōkai is the best in the world."
– anonymous independent safety researcher, 2023
CITCON. Free open space conference on software development, October 13 & 14 in Berlin.
https://citconf.com/berlin2023/
CITCON started as the Continuous Integration & Testing Conference in 2006. Being an open space / unconference there is no agenda before we create one on Friday night. Over the years the topics have evolved as the industry as evolved and topics range widely. The big attraction is spending time talking with other people who take ideas seriously.
Is this a meetup? Kind of. Think of it as a meetup that meets annually in various locations.
Any readers based in the East Midlands of the UK?
I've given up hosting meetups because no one ever shows up, but I'm curious how many people are even out there in the first place.
I'm in Nottingham 3/4 weekends a year.
Out here repping Nottingham.
I'm running the big ACX meetup this weekend in New York City. It's Sunday at 4pm in Pumphouse Park.
https://www.lesswrong.com/events/SomE2xtvaewnAqG53/manhattan-new-york-usa-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2023
If you're reading this, you're invited. We'll provide snacks and interesting conversations.
There's also an unclaimed bounty from around the time of the "Lying for Money" book review. Whoever convinces me of the biggest lie during an ACX meetup wins a prize worth at least $10. Good luck!
Is this outdoors? Supposed to rain all day with remnants of the hurricane.
Rain location is inside the mall immediately adjacent to the park.
Join us for ACX and Rationality Meetups in and around Washington DC:
https://dcacxrationalitymeetups.beehiiv.com/
We had our Meetups Everywhere earlier this month, where Andrew Willsen from Sacramento recorded a podcast. Episode 1, featuring Robin Hanson, just dropped. Episode 2, featuring Bryan Caplan, coming soon. RSS Feed is here: https://feeds.captivate.fm/acx-and-adjacent/ , should be on other podcast platforms shortly, possibly later today.
---------------------------------OTHER---------------------------------
Hi all- I am starting a biosecurity book club through EA Virtual Programs. The first round is a small pilot, so if you're interested, sign up quickly! Applications close October 2nd- please also share with anyone you know who might want to read and discuss Biosecurity Dilemmas as well as work on a tangible biosec project together. You can read more on the EA forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZmpEZgi5cQMuf7b2p/announcing-ea-virtual-programs-pilot-biosecurity-book-club
or at the EA VP website: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/virtual-programs/pilot-biosecurity-book-club
Anyone wanna play World of Tanks Blitz with me?
Hello! :) I'm looking for other Roman Catholic ACX readers that would be potentially interested in 1x1 discussions on spirituality and theology. Preferred mode of communication would be some chat platform that we would agree upon or simply email. Meeting f2f would also be an option if we happen to live within driving distance from each other. You can reach me at my email address at "proton.me" domain, user "third.aqueduct".
I have nearly a gallon of dichloromethane. (I intended to use it as paint stripper.) I don't need it anymore but it seems like a waste to just dispose of it, so I'm offering it for free to any amateur chemists in NYC.
Are you active on Discord? Are you a rat or postrat (or even a probabilistic predictor, AI alignment researcher, and/or effective altruist)? Do you want to help revive and grow a tiny, barely alive online community?
If so, join celestecord (or “discord” as it’s now officially known)! Even though there are ~270 users who have access to the server, most of the activity there comes from a tiny core of ~5-10 people (including yours truly).
Server invite: https://discord.gg/hWTVFGH8
EDIT: removing last sentence
hi i'm celeste of celestecord. i haven't been active there for months and i'm not sure i've even opened the server in weeks. i am sure it is still a fun and vibrant community for some people
i was scrolling through these classifieds just now and i come across someone promoting my abandoned discord server here. wtf, weird feeling. the world is so small
if you would like to talk to someone named "celeste" and who you (likely) know little else about, you can add me on discord here: https://discord.com/users/140541286498304000
I have rooms available to rent if anyone is looking for housing near Denver/Boulder. I just had another rationalist move out because of a job in another city, so I have open space available if anyone is looking for housing in driving distance from Denver/Boulder.
This is also a good opportunity if someone wanted to try to put together a rationalist group home in the area.
I have a few options for which rent would range from $700-$1200 per month. If you are interested or would want more information, email at Y2FsZWI1OTUzNTM5QGdtYWlsLmNvbQ== (use base64decode.org to decode)
(semi-crosspost from Employment, no need to read this if you've read that)
Hi folks! I'm a software developer of fifteen years, and a week from today I'm starting a sabbatical to shift my career toward AI safety; I've become convinced that it's critically important for reasons that won't surprise anyone here. I've only ever trained one model, but have spent all of this year building a retrieval-augmented-generation / tree-of-thought based app on top of LLMs. I'm planning to spend the sabbatical time diving deeper into the core of ML, studying and reproducing papers in the field.
If you have suggestions on specific areas of study that would equip me well for working on technical alignment, I'd very much love to hear them! You can assume I'm at least somewhat familiar with the major approaches that are discussed in the rationalist community, on the AI Alignment Forum, etc.
I'm at https://github.com/eggsyntax ; you can reach me at that same username at gmail.
Thanks!
I would love to collaborate with someone (amateur/hobbyist) in making music. Experience has taught me that I'm pretty bad at making music alone and that my best efforts have always been with other people. I play guitar/bass (nothing technical or flashy) but focus mostly on electronic styles, such as dub techno and Berlin School. Most interested in trying long, meandering pieces at present. Here's where I put some things I've done, or am working on. Check out Children-on-Steroids (surprise_locale) on #SoundCloud
https://on.soundcloud.com/s8mRy
This is a long shot but what the hell. I have a large (400+) lot of vacuum tubes all of which are suitable for audio. Most lots contain a bunch of useless junk but all of these could be used as voltage amplifiers. Granted, a lot of them are really only good for DIY but I have a bunch of regular audio tubes like Sylvania 6sn7, 6sl7, Mullard ecc31, 807, 6v6, and more. Mostly NOS but some used as well. I have a spreadsheet with most of the tubes listed. I’m hoping to sell the whole lot at once for $2500. Lots of Sylvania, Mullard, RCA, GEC etc. I don’t have a good idea of how messaging works on here or of it does at all. If you have any interest let me know and we’ll figure out some way of getting it done.
Sorry, I was way too premature in offering the tubes. I’m way less organized than I thought I was. It will take some time for me to assemble everything sand get it in a sellable state. So no tubes for from me just yet.
I might be interested, but I definitely cannot afford $2500. Maybe someone else would like to split the inventory with me ?
Wow, I really didn’t think I’d get a response. Do you build amps? I gotta get to work but I will investigate how to get some more info to you tonight.
Update: I talked to my friends, and they have expressed lukewarm interest -- but they'd like to see a parts list. Can you email it to me at (bugmaster) (at) (gmail) ?
I’ll send along a spreadsheet on Sunday. I’m not sure how much this will cost to ship or even how I’ll do it. We’ll start by seeing if you’re interested and go from there. Thanks!
I have to admit that I myself build nothing vacuum-tube related; but I have friends (with birthdays) who build amps and nixie clocks, as well as simply appreciate vacuum tubes for the nostalgia (seeing as vacuum tubes used to be their primary tools/materials back in the day). As I said though, I'm hoping that other people will respond to this message, so that we could go in together.
I should add that I wrote some firmware for a nixie clock a while ago, and while it was a fun project, it kind of irked me to do it -- what kind of a nixie clock uses a modern microcontroller ? A clock built on vacuum tubes top to bottom would be much more fun and authentic... also much bigger and power-hungry, but hey, that's history for you :-)
If anyone in New Mexico wants to do something, build something, go for a hike, whatever... hit me up.
scrolling through here pretty late, but--I'm in northern New Mexico. Big state. Where are you located? I'm not a stereotypical ACX reader, but would love to hike and talk about bringing rationality to new-agey NNM.
I live in upstate New York but this is an awesome comment and I wish I could take you up on it. Hope you find somebody :)
Though I may be moving to waay upstate NY in the next year (northern Adirondacks). Most people mean an hour north of the city when they say upstate... how far up are you?
I'm about six hours from the city but towards the west near Rochester unfortunately. Northern Adirondacks sounds like a crazy but awesome place to live. Good luck on your move if you end up going through with it! Pack warm ;)
I'm a philosophy PhD student at Sydney University about to submit my thesis on the 31st of December. I run a Substack which is reasonably popular around these parts:
https://philosophybear.substack.com/
Relevant skills and experience include: Philosophy, AI policy, writing, Political Economy (maybe translates to Economic sociology in a US context) and an undergraduate degree in psychology. I have three papers under review, and will soon have a fourth (philosophy publishing takes a long time).
I'm looking for two things (and so will be posting this in two sections):
1. Philosophers and economists (graduate students or professors, or others with experience writing journal articles) interested in collaborating on papers.
2. A job.
If I had to sum up good reasons for working with me briefly, it would be my highly unusual profile of strengths and weaknesses. I usually write two thousand words a day, but have trouble completing basic tasks! Why is this a strength? Well much of the value in working with conventionally smart people has already been snapped up, what you need is someone who thinks differently.
I'm a graphics programmer by day, hobbyist game maker by night. Looking for someone to partner with to make a game for fun (with maybe a loose goal of releasing it for like $1 on steam). I'd like to program much of it from scratch (I have my own toy renderer) but have some experience with commercial engines.
Contact me if you have cool ideas for games and would like to try making them a reality. Not offering a job or money here, just a friend who know who to 3D program.
I noticed that you've received some decent response to this. We might have an opportunity here to start a Discord or similar group for this and similar projects. I'm a software engineer with some hobbyist experience and would probably be interested in contributing.
Send me an email at df158xh2k [the usual symbol] mozmail.com (not encoded, just a disposable address) and let's see if we can get something going.
That's a good suggestions! I've made a discord server, join here: (open to everyone interest) https://discord.gg/QBj7YuYw
Oh, I am just graduated from a web dev bootcamp but I really want to develop a game. For my first module in bootcamp I turned in this clone of Quarto https://churrundo.github.io/quarto-game-app/ and I also have an unfinished CLI mancala built on Rust (my attempt at project-based-learning) https://github.com/churrundo/mancala.
I'd love to do a game jam
>Contact me if you have cool ideas for games<
What about exceedingly lame ideas? I've had a lingering idea for a Final Fantasy 2 homage (you know, the one people dislike) in which the world is run by various bird gods and you're playing Horus the Phoenix trying to recover its stolen fire from Prometheus and various famous resurrection personalities. It's been stymied by me not having even the barest programming ability.
I though Substack has some DM mechanism... I can be reached on discord: ogteatime
I have an idea; I think it's a bit unconventional, but I'm not sure if it's "cool" -- I guess, actually making the game is one way to find out ?
I don't have a specific idea, but I am interested. "dmlsaWFtQGJ1ci5zaw==" (base64)
I am better at *reacting* to other people's ideas than making my own from scratch. Like, if you have a game, I would probably have an idea of a bonus level that uses the existing features in a very unusual way. I might also be useful by providing technical ideas (though not about 3D).
Also, see my blog, but also notice the large time intervals between the articles.
EDIT: Okay, now I have a specific idea of a game. Maybe more will come.
Hi. I have an idea. What's the best way to contact you? You can reach out to me at protopiacone at gmail.
One last plug for the Kickstarter for Hymn to the Earless God:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hymntotheearlessgod/hymn-to-the-earless-god
Looking like it's not going to make it, currently 4/5ths through the cycle and only 1/2 funded, $60,000 still needed. Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is one of my favorite games and I want to see a follow-up get made.
I'm looking for someone to help me with some informal research (potentially formal at some future date) in the economic development space. I'm working on understanding oligarchic land ownership models around the world, how they can transition to individual ownership models, and how that might impact individuals and communities.
To date, this is a lone operation, but I'd welcome anyone who wants to get involved. Eventually, I want to raise funds for interventional/experimental research. Let me know if you're interested or want more information.
Interested in investing for climate impact?
There's a free Slack-based group, sponsored by SF-based Intention, that features active discussions on that topic, along with occasional AMAs with interesting folks in that arena. Here's the 'join' link:
Climate Investing Community
https://www.investwithintention.io/cic
It currently has 520 members, including founders and other execs, tech folks (in all sorts of fields, not just computing), finance types, and even ordinary people (like moi).
There's also an online resource recently posted by the group's moderator:
Climate & Money Resource List
https://airtable.com/appa1UDwrpdGquiP0/shr8MTj0qD2pGVCfN/tblEu82XcGxHZzloK/viwPlQ7wtHu6FBzKk
This might belong in the employment thread; if so, let me know and I'll move it there. I'm a new BA graduate working in computational biology. I had hoped this would be my field, but I have had a much more difficult time of it than I anticipated – largely due to social isolation, lack of support, lack of variety, and lack of interest (it turns out the 'computational' reigns over the 'biology', and the actual research I'm doing is in a field I don't care that much about). I know this is not just me (the person before me left the job for essentially the same reasons) but it has made me concerned for my career. If these sound like familiar problems, I would love to talk to you and get some career guidance.
I'm a programmer who works on some bioinformatics-adjacent software. From what I've seen, yeah, a lot of the code involved is like an explosion at a spaghetti factory; but this is changing rapidly, as people begin organizing their code into well-managed open-source projects. That said, speaking as a programmer and not a biologist, I do find the field exciting, assuming you're in it for the long term.
Sure, you could click a few buttons, hack a few scripts, and get a one-off answer to some biological question. But if you want to build software that does this reliably and efficiently, you're going to need to solve puzzles that have no canned answers yet. Your first attempt is going to consume terabytes of RAM and take months to run (theoretically, that is); converting that to something that runs in seconds in a laptop is not a task that just anyone can accomplish.
On the flip side of this equation, the state of visualization in the industry is IMO appalling (in the interest of full disclosure, I'm biased, since my company sells a genome viewer). Yes, anyone can throw together some R script to display a graph, but people shouldn't have to. There are many interactive programs that attempt to bridge that gap, but their focus is inevitably on "display something, anything at all" or "cloud AI blockchain buzzword" and not on "make it actually pleasurable for the user to explore his data" or "display informative insights". Even relatively small efforts in this area can yield huge gains.
I haven't mentioned much about actual biological research, because AFAICT it's all data science and biochemistry, not programming; and I confess that I don't know much biochemistry. Still, as a programmer, I do enjoy working in the field.
I don't know if I've got great career advice, but I'm a programmer who's been very curious about comp bio but I have only a very conceptual bio background. When I've looked at comp bio info, my thoughts have been "All these pathways are the world's deepest pile of spaghetti code! How could you work on this without being always someplace far down in the weeds of a specific molecule/gene-expression/cell-cycle?". If you've got some perspective on the discipline, I'd be grateful for the conversation.
Unfortunately, I'm very new in the field, and I have absolutely no idea what's going on. I can try for an answer for my case, though: I work with genetic, population-level data, and it is data science, not software. Your code doesn't have to be right every time, just better at predicting what's going to happen than whoever published last.
So to be brief: statistics.