I'm looking for a good functional medicine doctor in San Francisco. If you have anyone to recommend, could you email me daveey [at] gmail? Much appreciated!
Unix sydadmin / programmer / person who can work on other people's perl code / welder / machinist / general fabrication / mechanic / former EMT / commercial truck driver (yeah, it's an eclectic list) currently based in Albuquerque and willing to relocate to Dallas. (Or work remotely, of course, but my goal is to live in one place.) If that sounds like something that your company could use, drop an email to sandro (dot) rettinger [at] protonmail dotcom asking for a copy of my resume and I'll get you one.
I'm a college student working on a startup 3D printing hydroponic towers. Trying to scale, outsourcing experience and wisdom is hard. Words of advice/inquiries: sechernbiw3000@protonmail.com
I'm working on an analog synthesizer and would love to partner up with someone to design and sell affordable analog audio gear. Harass me at greg dot lorincz 79 at gmail.
Check out my blog for misc. musings on various meta-issues, including good, evil, and how to live a good life. Sometimes, begrudgingly, I touch base with the real world and give some Takes.
I'm the CTO of Coral (owncoral.com) and seeking talented software engineers and UX designers. Our mission is to democratize real estate investing, making it simple for anyone to own a share of a rental property. Coral insulates you from hassle and complexity—you just collect the rent check.
Do you have a passion for real estate, design, or application development? If so, you would make a great teammate. We're fully remote and (rather unusually for a startup) already profitable.
Would depend on fit and level of experience (we don't work via fixed salary bands). We're very aware of industry comp and have gotten feedback that our offers were competitive.
I blog some thoughts I have about libertarianism, anthropics, AI alignment, computation, culture, and other rationalist-adjacent things that interest me at <https://carado.moe/>.
Topics include
• What does wolfram physics imply for long-term ethics and AI alignment
• What axiomatic values can be behind liking art
• Should we keep a paperclip AI ready to fire in case a timeline looks like it's headed for S-risks
• How can we combat intellectual property law
• Why is unicode oppresive by nature of being centralized
I'd hope and expect many amongst the ACT cabal to be interested in the decades worth of material, mostly in interactive PDF eBook formats, up on our primary website... <https://cultivateunderstanding.com> devoted to archiving, interpreting, and conserving ecological and cultural assets (primarily in South and Southeast Asia)... with your critical feedback most appreciated.
I've been working on a series of short stories and one short novel, all set at various points up and down the next thousand years or so of a future history. I suspect that ACX readers would find them interesting, and many of my ideas were inspired by things I first found out about here. If out-there high-concept sci fi is your thing, I'd suggest Seeker (https://ascentuniverse.wordpress.com/2018/08/30/seeker/), and if you want something more straightforward that introduces the world, there's Threshold (https://ascentuniverse.wordpress.com/2021/02/12/threshold/). My longest piece, Ascent, starts here (https://ascentuniverse.wordpress.com/)
I have published three novels, all available on Amazon in print and kindle. One complaint I get about them is that the characters are too rational, so rationalists might enjoy them. _Harald_ is also available as an audiobook read by me (on Audible and, less conveniently but free, on my web page), and _Salamander_ is available on Audible read by someone else, I think very well. The first and second are unrelated, _Brothers_, the third, is a sequel to _Salamander_.
It would be helpful of a classified thread had some internal structure, so that one could find the things one was interested in without going through lots of other stuff. The simplest way would be for Scott start with a series of posts, each a category: "Employment Opportunities," "Mate Search," ... Then posters could make their posts responses to the appropriate category post.
I'm a mid-20's rational-ish male software dev and in all respects probably pretty typical SSC-er, looking for housing in the SF Bay area (ideally east bay). If you're looking for a roommate, whether you have a place already or not, I can be reached at rot13 ubhfvat@nagbacndh.va
I have a DeviantArt page (https://www.deviantart.com/concavenator/gallery) where I sometimes post artwork and short stories mostly concerning life on other worlds, in the deep past and far future, and in alternate universes. The most popular single post seems to be my Gods of Salt (https://tinyurl.com/zr9dhzps), which is about a hypothetical version of the origin of our species involving elephants and the drying of the Mediterranean.
Sometimes I also draw real-science infographics (https://tinyurl.com/63kjeser), the one of which I'm proudest being a summary of human evolution from the origin of life.
Thought it might be interesting to some people around here -- I did meet a couple last time :)
Pretty cool! I'm stuck at some levels, though, and "x" button from the instruction doesn't work for me. And the game also doesn't seems to be able to save my progress within a block :< I want to continue playing but so far I'm stuck pretty soon after the tutorial
As it is now, it saves what level you are on when you leave, but not within each section (which would be better, we'll fix that at some point). Also, we intended to remove the skip feature, but its still there if you use shift-x
I'm ex-Coinbase and started a crypto company Goldfinch (https://goldfinch.finance/). Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, we're bringing crypto to the real world by connecting crypto capital with fintechs throughout the world (starting with emerging markets). We're hiring! If you are a software engineer, ops, or credit person, check out our jobs at careers.goldfinch.finance . We'd love to chat!
We are mere mortals so it takes seven of us to get near the quantity of posts that Tyler and Alex do; I'll let you judge the quality. Several of us were students of theirs, and the blog recently won an Emergent Ventures prize. Recent posts have covered Covid, beer prices, and more and less successful ways to pay employees with things other than money.
I’m a financial advisor and I work on a 4 person team managing investments (~ half a billion dollars) for high net worth families. If you are thinking about a major financial move, just inherited some money, sold a business, are approaching retirement, or just have questions about investing or money issues, I’m available to talk. Focused on tech, ESG, impact investing, effective altruism and philanthropy. I will develop a basic financial plan with no fees or strings attached for SSC community members. We get paid around 1% a year on assets we manage if you bring in an account.
I'm looking for a job in the broader DC/Baltimore area, starting as soon as you need me--it could be something as basic as an administrative assistantship, but I need something that will put food on the table. My BA is in a humanities subject (Classical Languages and Linguistics, with a Russian minor), but I have a good head for numbers (perfect score on the math SAT back in 2012) and was poached to a big state school in the Midwest as a National Merit Scholar. I speak proficient (B2-C1) German and Portuguese and passable but improving Russian (B1); I can also read French, Spanish, Latin and Greek. I can code Python to a scripting level, but I think this is improvable (I recently got on ADHD medication for the first time since high school and it's improved things a *lot*.) I write quickly in a concise and elegant manner and have some experience teaching English abroad, so my customer service skills are not lacking.
If you think you might have a generic white-collar opening in the area for me, feel free to drop me a line at eateriesofub@gmail.com (that's my throwaway email; I'll respond from my real-name one.)
Do you enjoy recreational programming challenges? Check out Code Golf, https://codegolf.codidact.com, one of the communities on the Codidact network. Codidact is a community-driven, open-source project; our motto is "by the community, for the community". We're taking what we've learned from years of participation on other platforms and trying to build the next great thing. Or ok, the next good thing. I wrote about our goals in this blog post: https://meta.codidact.com/posts/276296 .
We've got communities on other topics too, from software development to religion to cooking to math. We -- our communities and our network -- are small but aspiring to grow. The development team, too, is small but growing. We welcome and appreciate any help, from new community members to new communities to people interested in helping to build things. Most of us came from a place that put profits above people, and we don't want to be like that, so we're non-profit, open-source, community-driven.
There are links to all our communities and to our GitHub repo at https://codidact.org.
If you want to follow news about effective altruism on Twitter, there is a bot that regularly tweets new top posts from the EA Forum (twitter.com/EAForumPosts) and another one that (re-)tweets high-impact job offers (twitter.com/effective_jobs) relevant to the EA community
I write a webfiction called Headcase about a psychic superhero doing entertaining superhero things. Give it a look if you want. Or don't. It's all up to you, of course. There's no pressure.
I'm also a decent artist who sometimes takes commissions. You can check out my twitter and let me know how I'm doing at this whole creative polymath thing. I really should take up music to round it out, I know, but the earlier parts of the learning curve are always the most boring.
And finally if you just want to chat, my discord ID is Shaeor#7214 and my interests are biologism, spirituality, and often moreover the unholy mixture of the two. I am single and ready to mingle if you happen to be female. 21, 6'4, 145 IQ, into fitness, but with only mediocre prospects. IE: prime rib.
Do you like giving advice? I want to know what you think about how I can do the most good in the world. I have experience in communications; am interested in data science, public policy, sociology, and linguistics; am starting college this fall and majoring in math. What projects, job opportunities, and areas of study should I prioritize?
I'd like to push back against the other suggestions. Instead of jumping straight to acquiring skills, I would start by figuring out which problems in the world you think are most pressing, and then work backwards to figure out the skills that will best position you to have an impact there.
It's important to carefully pick the problems you want to work on, because the opportunities for having an impact vary HUGELY between them—perhaps 1000x or more.
The organization 80,000 Hours has done a lot of research into how to use your career to do the most good in the world. I recommend checking out their framework for prioritizing problems (which ones are the most important, neglected, and tractable?). And if you want to work on one of the problems they identify as most pressing—including AI safety, biosecurity, global priorities research, etc.—they've got lots of advice on how to prepare for those careers.
Contrary to other commenters, if you don't have a clear idea of what specifically you want to work on, I'd encourage you to focus on mathematics, since it's a great jumping-off point for many kinds of impactful work.
Hi Hannah, I would prioritize data science. If you're good at analytics, and the communication of that analytics, then that can lead to high paying job offers or influential positions. Either of those situations would be helpful to bettering the world.
Communications + public policy + data science should position you well for public-good proejcts/nonprofits. You won't make tons of money but you can help do good in the world. Pick your favorite area of advocacy and look for the non-profits trying to do much with little. Maybe you can get some internship projects while you're in school. I learned the most about how software works in the real world, as opposed to tidy classroom exercises, from my internships.
I write weird fiction action-adventure RPG adventures, weird fiction action-adventure stories, and am in the process of writing a weird fiction action-adventure poem (that doubles as an RPG adventure)
I suspect that this is because the science that I write about - superforecasting and memetics - is inherently political. There is nothing in my Reddit account that violates the terms of service - I do not advocate for violate, nor do I use any slurs - so the only possible reason for my shadowbanning is my political views. You are welcome to look through my profile yourselves to confirm this: https://www.reddit.com/user/SocratesScissors
I am looking for somebody based out of Florida who would be willing to occasionally post links to my blog posts to a few subs. The reason I need them to be based out of Florida is because of robust free speech protections that fine social media companies $100k per day if they ban somebody from posting based on their political views. I want to make it very expensive for social media companies to silence people simply because they disagree with their opinions.
I presume you know that you were probably shadowbanned for some random algorithmic reason, and not politically? And that you’re rather unlikely to succeed in your action? It’s be really funny if you did, but I’d bet a lot of money that it wouldn’t, especially if there’s no precedent of that law being applied.
Promoting two groups that do counter-racialization work for the workplace:
Chloe Valdary (@cvaldary) runs Theory of Enchantment, which does workplace training that is aimed at inclusion and not grievance. https://theoryofenchantment.com/
Counterweight (@counter_weight_) offers counseling & scripts for people facing CRT-supported bias in the workplace.
Another workplace culture program, not just aimed at identity-focused issues, is Arbinger. https://arbinger.com/ Aimed at breaking down interpersonal barriers, and seeing strengths of other people while tackling your own challenges.
We are a brand new erotic literature platform - specifically for women by women. We're launching with an erotic literature writing competition with a cash prize of £100 for the winner. Our content is very short form - most of our stories are only a few pages. Check us out at https://tellingeros.com/
If you and your partner have an issue that might need help from a third person to figure out, I can offer to be that third person. I'm just a rando on the internet so my comparative advantage is with shameful shit that you can't discuss with friends.
My qualifications are that I've been happily married for seven years to a couples therapist, lots of friends like to turn to me for relationship advice, I speak fluent SSCish and I do it for free so I don't even need to know your names. My condition is that I need to spak to both of you at the same time - no venting about your partner while s/he isn't there.
If you want to have a call (video optional), email me at ritmag@gmail.com with "SSC Classifieds Offer" in the email title, before August 17.
I want to start a service for the self-employed, 1099, etc, that does two things. A) Invests your earnings in low-risk stuff to claw back a couple percent before the quarterly taxes kick in and B) Does this "behind the scenes", and just pays you monthly or biweekly as if you were W-2. Then helps with your taxes for you at the end of the year.
I am looking for an accountant to kick around some ideas with and potentially collaborate with. Please message me at derek@fulton.consulting.
Some quick feedback: ICE and STM are already taken as cryptoasset ticker abbreviations, although H2O isn't taken yet. You'll need to be a *lot* more creative with naming things.
That having been written, I do find your idea (stabilizing currency by comparing it to its future value) is pretty smart.
Long time lurker (started reading SSC when Tyler Cowen linked a post years ago), first time poster.
I'm a process (chemical) engineer with twenty years of experience (mostly in natural gas processing, but looking to diversify) who is looking for work. Currently based in Calgary, Alberta, but will relocate as necessary.
Send an e-mail to jmvarty@hotmail.com if you would like to take a look at my resume.
I'm building a no-code builder for blockchain apps (on Ethereum) https://buildship.dev. The vision is that web3.js + solidity is quite complicated even for and we need to aggressively push down the entry barrier into *building* on blockchain.
Now I have a set of developer tools that helps with development and deployment of any blockchain app (still in private) and a plugin for publishing your own NFT collection on your website
I also have a small Telegram group, not very active right now, but if you have questions, you can ask them here: https://t.me/buildship
Basically remote members can move their audio around the room itself, so they'll have a better vocal presence instead of everyone being squashed behind a TV.
And also, they can talk at the same time and have different conversations with people.
It's not out yet to the public though because we still have to fine tune the architecture/audio but you can sign up for a quick demo.
Our early adopters are intellectual, creative, or entrepreneurial children who are unhappy with a conventional schooling experience. At the secondary level, our program includes two hours of conversation, one of which is more informal and focused on personal growth issues (How do we learn from our mistakes? How do we deal with annoying people? How do we think about what we want to do in life?) and another hour that is based on mostly classic texts from diverse world cultures along with some contemporary texts (our faculty is reading and discussing a chapter from Henrich's "The Secret of Our Success" tomorrow).
Students enjoy our Socratic discussions so much that they asked us to continue them over the summer. I've had students create their own groups on evenings and weekends. It turns out that discussing ideas (and reading idea-rich texts to do so) is an enjoyable activity if one is enculturated in the right way and the participants are mutually respectful. I literally wrote the book on enculturating students to discuss ideas constructively,
(available more cheaply from me than through Amazon)
Writing is based on the arguments students become engaged in during Socratics, with no teacher-assigned prompts but an overall orientation towards learning to organize one's thoughts, typically in essay format.
Math is largely self-paced using adaptive software and small coaching groups so that students can advance at their own pace, with mathematically capable students encouraged to go as fast as they can. The adaptive software days alternate with problem solving days using diverse resources, including group math competition problem sets with problem solving strategies discussed as a group so that students develop a much broader repertoire of problem solving techniques.
We straddle the boundary between "school" and "self-directed learning." Students opt in to almost everything. We offer both accredited and unaccredited high school options so that those who want grades and standard credits can get them and those that don't want them are not obliged to do so. This means that courses do not include students who hate being there. Our admissions process filters for students who want to take greater ownership over their own education. Because everything is so personalized, we can accommodate a very wide range of learners. Parents and students who want traditional structures and traditional teaching should run away.
The daily Socratic discussions on difficult texts lead to higher than average SAT verbal gains. We provide optional SAT administrations in high school using free Khan Academy practice tests three times per year starting in grade 9, so that students who are working towards selective college admissions have plenty of time to crank up their scores if they choose to do so. Because we tend to attract creatives and humanists (80%) more than STEM geeks, often they find that their verbal scores are much higher than their math scores - and then they decide to work hard to crank up their math scores.
Although we offer some cool science courses internally ("The science of video games," taught by a math ABD, "Self Optimization" based in part on the Quantified Self movement) we also support students in taking courses from the immense world of MOOCS and other virtual providers. Likewise with history, foreign language, etc.
All students are expected to be working on projects based on their interests. In middle school, the projects are modest and simply fun for students to do and share with their peers. By senior year, however, they are expected to do substantial real world projects. Stossel did a good video showing some of the projects at one of my pre-COVID bricks-and-morter schools,
The weekly mentoring sessions are often focused on helping students develop more substantial projects over time. This is a long, slow process. Cal Newport's perspective on how to get into Stanford with Bs on your transcript, based on the psychology of impressiveness, is very similar to how I think of great projects and college admissions,
The program is based on my thirty-five years in education starting with Mortimer Adler's Paideia project, moving on through Montessori education (including founding the high school model for the largest Montessori chain in the US), creating a school for highly gifted children at which middle school students passed AP exams, and creating a charter school in Angel Fire, NM, that was ranked the 36th best public high school in the U.S. on Newsweek's Challenge Index.
More on my background and perspective here (somewhat dated),
In addition to students from like minded families. I'm also raising more capital from aligned investors. Ping me at michael@socraticexperience.com if you have a child who may be a good fit or if you are interested in partnering as an investor.
I am a self-taught novice data scientist with a sideline in machine learning. I'm about at the level where I can put together crude computer vision systems. I will take on small-scale, interesting projects for free; all I ask for is the right to use those projects as part of my portfolio when I look for a new job.
I made and sell a debating card game on the side, to have (usually entertainingly ridiculous) discussions with assorted fallacies, biases and shoddy reasoning - currently available in German only, though the English version is ready for production and I'm only stalling because I don't want to use Amazon for distribution (suggestions for this are welcome).
(this thread comes at the inopportune moment where I am on holiday, my hoster renewed certificates and did something wrong, and so https isn't working - hopefully this has been fixed by the time you read this)
I'm looking for a job and would love to work with someone in this community, especially in the impact world or around topics relevant to the rationalist community.
I write copy and content in the medical / pharma spaces but have written across blockchain and biotech. I've worked with top brands like Colgate and have direct clinical experience, along with a publication record in professional pharmaceutical research.
For anyone looking to reduce household plastic waste, it can be difficult to find high quality, convenient plastic replacements. Shopzebo.com is a zero waste subscription box that packages several plastic-free everyday essentials, such as toothpaste, soap, and detergent pods, in one convenient quarterly box. Unlike other subscription boxes, you can choose exactly what goes into your box so you don't waste stuff you don't need.
I'm interested, but some of these prices seem really high. I'm not sure this is within scope for your project, but I'd like to see a cheap, low-plastic middle ground (e.g. selling normal floss with just the spool, no box.) Also, I wish the prices were easier to find, and you might want to put the cheapest items front and center in order to combat sticker shock.
I'm a traditionally published novelist whose work often involves a character's rational understanding of a situation butting heads against her irrational instincts about how to react in that situation, and I always strive to be aware of cognitive biases (my own and my characters') in my writing. I'm posting here because, anecdotally, people who are drawn to rationality seem to enjoy my work.
My first novel, The Last One, is about a woman who is on a reality TV show when the world ends, and she thinks it's all just part of the show. The book was published in 25 languages, selected as a Seattle Times Best Book of 2016, and was a finalist for the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards (in the science-fiction category).
My second novel, Forget Me Not, just came out a few months ago and is about a woman who shouldn't exist--she was born to replace a dead older sister she never knew about and then essentially abandoned to raise herself on an isolated, rural property. Upon escaping this property at the age of twelve, she became a social media sensation (in all the worst ways), and now, as an adult, she's an anxious, agoraphobic recluse who lives in complete terror of being recognized. The story starts with her hesitantly striking up a friendship with a new neighbor, a charismatic data scientist who introduces her to the escapism and wonder of VR. Then there is a mysterious fire at her childhood home, which draws her back into the public eye, and everything kinda takes off from there...
Anyway, I'm a big fan of the site. If either of my books sound like they're up your alley, you can check them out here:
I occasionally blog here: https://www.tbbakker.nl/#posts on topics relating machine learning and Bayesian probability theory. I'm a PhD student in machine learning, with a background in physics.
Current posts contain musings on Bayesian probability theory as 'the one true way of doing inference', and how to get to modern-day ML from there. Writing these really helped me get a good sense of how those two disparate islands of knowledge relate, so I thought I'd share.
I own a small company that makes custom coins/belt buckles/poker chips/bottle openers, etc. - Most of our customers are military or police, but if anyone here needs something custom like this, please reach out to me. www.kiddercorp.com
These seem really cool, but I'm having trouble understanding what the ballpark price would be. If I wanted to get, say 50 coins with the effective altruism symbol on them, would that cost 50$? 5000$?
One of the issues with dealing with small runs of custom goods is that there are very few typical cases. That said, my company quotes projects upfront and gives final all-inclusive pricing before an order is placed in production (giving you the final say if the numbers work for you). The most common coins are 1.75" or 2" and they run about $550 for 100 or $5.50/each. But "typical" isn't why most of my customers come to us - we specialize in high relief 3D and projects with moving parts (hinges/doors/etc). I've done MTG counters, custom metal fidget spinners, and coins that have holograms embedded in them. I can provide more information (without needlessly boring people here) if you want.
I'm a recently retired scientist: PhD in theoretical physics, worked in machine learning and statistics. For the last 20 or so years, I've worked in cancer research (which gene to target, in which disease, in which patients, and how to construct a biomarker that predicts response to therapy).
It's one of those weird blogs actually hosted at GitHub, with pages generated from a repository of (mostly) markdown. That part was actually kind of fun, though I'm still figuring it out. So the layout is... "rudimentary".
We cover the news from the last 2 weeks from a rationalist perspective. Co-hosted by Eneasz Brodski (of the Bayesian Conspiracy and the Methods of Rationality podcast) and David from the Bayesian Conspiracy Discord server.
Every year, state and local economic development agencies hand out an estimated $95 billion in tax abatements, grants and other forms of targeted economic development subsidies. For context, that's enough to fund the 11 smallest state budgets, combined.
The nonprofit organization I lead, the Center for Economic Accountability (www.economicaccountability.org), works to bring transparency, accountability and market-based reforms to state and local economic development programs across the country. We base our education and advocacy efforts on a growing body of research from across the ideological spectrum that finds these subsidies to be ineffective at best and harmful at worst at "creating jobs" or fostering economic prosperity.
We've collected a selection of the research here for anyone interested: https://economicaccountability.org/research-resources/, and are always happy to talk to researchers working in this space or local activists interested in addressing what's going on in their community. You can follow us on Twitter at @accountableecon.
Special offer to fellow ACT readers: email me your mailing address at info@economicaccountability.org and I'll send you a free "PAY FOR YOUR OWN DAMN STADIUM" sticker. Currently available in Oakland A's, Washington Football Team and generic red-white-n-blue colors.
Are you narrowly against tax subsidies or do you have a broader philosophical platform (such as new urbanism, etc) that can help me understand your overall goals?
We do have an organizational vision, which is "a future where free markets and the rule of law create economic opportunity for all, and in which American state and municipal governments efficiently provide essential public services while forswearing corporate welfare and central planning." Our starting point is that libertarian, limited-government worldview. However, we work closely and regularly with allies from across the ideological spectrum who have very different visions for the ideal future yet have reached the same conclusion about the damage these subsidy programs do to our communities. (For instance, I've worked with a chapter leader of Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network who once told me, "I don't agree with you on much, but I'm on your side with this.")
So yes, we're focused narrowly on the need to reform these subsidy programs, and we largely let others with more specific expertise talk about what other things cities and states could be doing to improve economic opportunity. There's plenty of smart people out there discussing those issues, and we've got our hands full simply trying to stop the bleeding. In this regard, you can think of us like anti-smoking advocates: We'd like you to be healthier and we'll happily point you in the direction of others who can help you with things like diet or exercise if you're open to more fundamental life improvements, but if all you do is just quit smoking then we've achieved our mission.
If we're in a situation where Saul Alinsky's "The price of a successful attack is a viable alternative" puts us in the position of making policy prescriptions, then we tend to suggest that communities start by addressing basic quality of life issues, which even the site selection industry's own research regularly calls out as a critical factor in site selection. You can see an example of that in a piece I wrote for the Manhattan Institute's City Journal earlier this year: https://www.city-journal.org/ny-economic-development-focus-on-quality-of-life-not-subsidies.
Hi, I'm a rising Junior in computer science looking for an internship for this fall or next summer. I've built a couple really cool projects including an optimized interpreter for (most of) prolog and a script that solves the 8-puzzle using a pattern database. This summer I'm building a React/Typescript project for SoftBank's Masason AI incubator. Let me know if you have anything!
Out of curiosity, would you expect this to be a paid internship ? I ask because we do need a React/Typescript person, but we don't have any money :-( The work is bound to be exciting, though.
I'm working on a product called Runbooks (https://runbooks.app). It's a team productivity website/app that combines a user manual with a checklist. I created it based upon years of experience running software / DevOps teams where it's common to have detailed technical processes that greatly benefit from using checklists both to ensure correctness and repeatability. The product also provides a nice dashboard to know what everyone is working on, and email notifications as work progresses to coordinate between people working on the same task.
As Kenny says, a runbook is very different from the various kinds of documents you can create in BaseCamp. In essence, my product lets you create a step-by-step manual for how to perform some complex task. Then, when it's time to perform the task, it will create a checklist from that manual which allows you to both track the results (e.g., for audit purposes) and share them with the rest of your team. It's possible to get pieces of that functionality with various other products (e.g., MediaWiki MS Word, BaseCamp), but none of those understand what a runbook is or why you want the dynamic tracking piece. Not to mention, my product has a lot of other useful features (e.g., assigning steps to individual team members, due dates, etc.).
I do something similar with (private) GitLab projects. I create 'issue templates' as 'runbooks' and then create an issue to serve as a 'runlog'.
With my 'potential customer' hat on, I'd be worried about the limits on the number of runbooks available at each pricing tier, but that may just be because I'm totally sold on the value of runbooks already and I'd want to 'runbook all of the things' for any business or operation I was managing.
Very cool! I've been tinkering with something like this as a hobby project. Our core use cases and approaches to UI/UX are pretty different, but the "run book" / "run list" distinction is a core similarity (and, I think, an important one).
I look forward to trying out Runbooks. Happy to chat more about this offline if you're interested.
Just to scale down your expectations, this is a low-level tool aimed at biologists; it cannot tell you what diseases you're likely to have or where your ancestors came from or which medicine is best for your condition. But it will let you zoom in smoothly from bird's-eye view of multiple chromosomes down into individual nucleotides, without having to wait several minutes between mouse wheel clicks. It can also run BLAST in real time, either to show local alignment or to perform a search across multiple genomes; plus a lot of other useful things.
Here's a video tutorial to get you started (narrated by my boss):
Before you ask, yes, I do realize that we have some gaps in functionality; for example, we currently cannot display VCF files or QTLs. We should have those done relatively soon, along with other features such rich export and the Synteny Matrix.
If you are interested (and can afford to pay), our team will help you install and maintain the full stack in-house (really it's just a Docker container); this way, if you're working for a large corporation, you can rest assured that no proprietary data will ever leave your company firewall. We can also host it for you (and your team) in AWS, if that's what you'd prefer. You can leave us a quick message here:
Your home page says "Let's Discuss" next to "Talk to us about a license". Do you have a secure monopoly in your niche? It seems that any competitor who posts a price will be instantly and infinitely cheaper.
We do not have a monopoly, and in fact our main competitor is JBrowse, an open source product. However, IMHO their quality is nowhere close to ours, although they are a much older tool, so their features are more varied.
Basically, I'd say that if you wanted a product that is a pleasure to use, is blindingly fast, and is reasonably easy to use, then you should sign up with us. If you work for a large corporation or a large research institution, you should install our stack in-house, so that we never have to see your proprietary data (we can help you with installation). However, if you're willing to suffer a bit, and to spend a lot of your own time on installation and customization, then you can go with JBrowse or some other free option.
Good question. The short answer is, it's not, because IGV is a special-purpose tool (mainly for BAM files), whereas Persephone -- our program -- is a general genome viewer. That said, we do have multiple advantages, the chief of these being pure speed:
* Once you load a BAM file (which can admittedly take up to several minutes), you can zoom in and out smoothly in real time, from individual reads/nucs all the way out to the chromosome level. The load times are measured in fractions of a second (if any), not minutes (or more).
* You can display multiple maps on the screen at the same time, connected by orthologs or common markers; once again, you can freely scroll or zoom the maps without multi-minute load times (which is what I've come to expect from IGV). We can also align physical and genetic maps: https://web.persephonesoft.com/?bookmark=CF12FB49307CDA01A9B7683C265F71A6
* We have a real-time BLAST interface that displays its results graphically, allowing you to easily QC your hits, look for transpositions, etc. If you display two physical maps side-by-side, and zoom in closely enough, you can also display real-time alignment.
* We also have a robust and fast search UI, where you can look up annots/markers/maps by name or by any qualifier. A typical query takes less than a second. Admittedly, we are trying to improve this UI with real-time graphical preview, like the one we have in our legacy version. For a simple example, try searching for "AT3G18610*".
i bought an electric bass more or less on impulse but partially because i need a new hobby. i am looking for a teacher who can get me started. so far it's been youtube. i would prefer in person - i live in Brooklyn (near carroll street stop on the F) but could travel a little bit.
I’m a violinist/violist based in New York. (Grad student at Juilliard) I play weddings, do recordings and I teach. I have had a lot of success teaching over zoom, both children and adults of all levels. If you’re looking for a teacher/performer you can contact me at megardiner124@gmail.com
Also feel free to contact me if you’re a fellow ACT reader in the NY area looking to meet new people! I’m always interested in making new friends here.
If you know some basic Java programming, and you wonder how to get from there to actually programming *games*, my new blog has some advice for you (so far, two posts). https://kittenlord.substack.com/archive
Each post comes with a full Maven project in Git, so that you can see everything in full context, and run it on your computer.
Hi - do you need some artwork on your plain bare walls so that your space feels..well …just better? If so, check out my art at Https://www.margaretwithers.com/paintings
Looking for a psychologist/educator to chat with about a gifted 10-year-old boy. Trying to understand what good paths look like for him, and how to help him find his.
I've worked a lot with very bright students, including creating a school for highly gifted children. Email me at michael@socraticexperience.com if you'd like to set up a call.
⚡💡 UK based, created a card game about the energy mix! Looking for teachers to trial & use the game in classrooms when we finish developing the next version.
Hah - sure why not - Boston area (Cambervilleford particularly) area human / esoteric massage therapist - If you're looking for a well reviewed MT who can also discuss rationalist adjacent issues feel free to reach out -
I play a lot of board games, and it can be socially tricky to choose games that everyone is honestly happy with, especially when you split into multiple tables. So a friend and I made http://whatdoweplay.com to help. See http://whatdoweplay.com/howitworks for how it works.
I'm the director of Euler Circle (https://eulercircle.com/), which is a mathematics institute dedicated to teaching college-level mathematics classes to high-school students. Traditionally, classes have been held in person in Palo Alto, California, but we're temporarily online while COVID case numbers remain very high, so students from around the world are welcome. In the fall, we'll have classes on proofs in number theory, linear and abstract algebra, and generating functions.
Hey I'm a former college lecturer now big tech person who has also done work with high schoolers. I have been scouring the area for teaching jobs, both part time or full time. Do you need people? I just got done teaching an online Discrete Math course for University of Maryland.
Thanks so much, glad you enjoy it! Check out Seeds of Science (if you didn't already) - theseedsofscience.org - would love to have you as a gardener or author.
Seeds of Science - theseedsofscience.org - is a new open access peer-reviewed journal and community aimed at publishing short speculative articles and commentaries in a non-traditional format. Peer review is crowdsourced voting and commenting from our diverse network of "Gardeners" from across science. Become an author or gardener (free to join) today!
Wave (https://www.wave.com/en/) is currently hiring software engineers and product managers. Come work with us to improve the lives of people in sub-Saharan Africa by making payments dramatically cheaper and faster. If you're reading this blog chances are good that you'll fit right in!
Hey, which list are you looking at? I think we are currently working on being able to employ people from almost any country in the world (in UTC +5 to -4), but it might not be quite ready yet. If you're unsure I would say: send in an application anyway and we'll either figure something or get back to you when we're set up to employ people in your country.
> You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -5 and +4) with reliable Internet access in the following countries: US, Canada, Belgium, Germany, UK, Ghana, Cote D'Ivoire, Kenya, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Uganda or Senegal.
Oh, yeah sorry I was looking at the wrong job description. Turns out we don't have that limitation for some positions.
Yeah that's currently accurate but we're working on removing that limitation right now. I asked our hiring team and they said you should apply anyway and they can discuss it with you or get back to you when we're able to hire from anywhere.
They also asked for your name so that they can watch for your application and make sure that they handle it properly. I said they could watch for an application with "Astral Codex Ten" in the the "where you heard about Wave" box. But if you want to send me your name (e.g. to david [at] wave.com) then I can forward it to them to make sure, up to you :)
I really like this classifieds thread. ACT is such a marvelous community. I need to dig deeper because I can see so many things to follow up with. (Yes I also have ADHD!) I also wanted to invite anyone who has a deep interest in technology investing and evaluating companies that might be looking to work with me I'd love to hear from you. I had a career at IBM and one on Wall Street as a research analyst and left all that to work on my own years ago. We run a service called IPO Candy which we have expanded to include SPAC IPO names (SPACvest) and we are launching a few more in other areas. I have done most of the work myself but have a small support team that helps. I've run it a bit like a "lifestyle" business but with two kids looking at private colleges I am working on ramping it up into a more "real" business. It would be more fun to do with new collaborators or partners. If the plan works out it would generate a decent income and most importantly be fun and create lots of value for investors looking for the best ideas in emerging growth areas. You can email me at kris at ipocandy.com if you'd like to.
If you have founded or lead a post series A, high-growth tech startup and are committed to fulfilling your vision, let's talk. I provide
a scenario-based approach to developing a cause and effect strategy-- and to articulating it on a one-page map. We'll help you share it throughout your organization for the most holistic and effective execution.
Our second focus is on helping you and your leadership team to grow and expand your capacity as fast as your company is growing. You don't have time for a 20-year learning trajectory. Our executive coaching produces extraordinary leadership through the lens of both ontology and integrity. Great leaders cultivate extraordinary teams and they produce unprecedented results.
Contact me for an abbreviated, complimentary coaching session, or strategy advisory conversation.
I blog at https://BeyondBetter.io Its distribution is currently about 7,500. I hope you'll subscribe.
Perhaps you can tell me in a few words what is good about crypto currencies.
The biggest negative I see is that Bitcoin (for example) has no intrinsic value. Neither does the US dollar. But it is ridiculously easy to buy stuff with US dollars. It is my impression that it is relatively difficult to buy things with Bitcoins.
The biggest negative has to be the lack of regulation, no?
Bitcoin has enabled a new type of crime (ransomware) and made getting paid for kidnappings etc. much, much easier. Feels like practically all use of crypto is either speculation or crime.
For those of us in first world countries where banking is more or less free and reliable, bitcoin seems like a solution to a non problem. For people in authoritarian regimes, or those with dangerous political instability, it can be life altering. Of course, we don't need to worry about political instability in the first world ...
Investment (in the strict sense) is buying something for its value production (e.g. buying a property to rent it out, or to avoid paying rent yourself; buying a solar panel so you can power your house).
Speculation is buying something because you expect to be able to sell it for a greater price later (buying a property because you expect the value of land to increase; buying gold because you expect the value of gold to increase; short-selling shares because you expect the share price to go down).
Connotation? Speculation is what people who don't like investing call investing, afaik. Maybe also an assumption of greater risk and possibly predation. You'll here land speculation talked about where there seems to be an implicit assumption that the speculator isn't just taking a risk, he's also doing something wrong.
If you think the current financial system is more or less fair, then it’s likely impossible to persuade you to buy into bitcoin.
If you are open to the possibility that the current financial system is unfair, then the argument for bitcoin is stamped into the genesis block: when money can be created by political authorities, it distorts the entire economy.
Though arguably the solution is not to remove the ability to create money, but to give it to everyone.
Monopolies are bad.
(Just to be clear: I don't want everyone to be able to print counterfeit USD. I want people to be able to come up with their own alternatives, like eg bitcoin, and let the market sort it out.
Stable-coins are especially interesting, because they are the equivalent of privately issued currency redeemable in some common base money.
Historically, that arrangement worked out really well in the right (ie light) regulatory framework, like in Canada or Scotland.)
Always on the lookout for people in Dublin or the surrounding counties who are interested in SSC/rationalism. I attend a recurring SSC meetup - if you're interested in coming along, give me a shout and I'll add you to our Telegram group.
This is a sort of thing I've wanted to do for a while, but had always found excuses not to - probably partly out of a certain fear of cyber-ridicule. Well, no more. Ridiculous or not, it's out there.
Do you know me? If you do, I have this to say for it: it contains thoughts of mine, ostensibly about physics, Portugal (of course), and poetry; but possibly about other topics too. If you like these topics, or generally think there is interest in the thoughts I air or my perspective on things, this may be for you. If you don't know me, how do you know I'm not a super interesting person whose thoughts on random stuff you'd like to read? Check it out and see for yourself.
I hope you check it out - and if you do, I hope you like it.
See you around! (New posts come in roughly monthly, except for times of particularly tough workload - and holidays.)
My cofounder and I have been working on a platform that lets you build your own online game, with a minimal coding experience necessary. We provide a drag&drop interface and handle all the server stuff; you bring the game idea. Want to try it out? Reach out to austin@oneword.games (or sign up for updates at http://oneword.games/platform)!
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman seeking ultra-Orthodox Jewish man. I'm a software engineer by trade, curious, and love to learn. I'm yeshivish and have been lurking in the SSC and rationalist community for years.
I post Data Science/Data Analysis challenges/games on LessWrong; the handful of people who play them seem to really like them, and I'm hoping to get a wider audience by posting here.
This is a really long shot ... but I'll mention this anyway!
Are there any senior doctors, nurses, health professionals here who have a worry about the safety aspects of Handover (aka 'handoff' in the US) and transitions of care?
We have developed an clever system to replace and enhance handover sheets (also called rounding sheets or sign-out sheets in the US)
Hey Jeremy - Thanks for your message. I have written straight back but google initially blocked one of my attachments - so I've tried again with a dropbox link. Let me know if it arrives. Best wishes.
Are you interested in note-taking for something like classes? Or something more general? I use a variety of different apps/'strategies' loosely based/inspired-by GTD (Getting Things Done) and various other things I've read.
Looking to date in London. Looking for a woman who is clever, kind and poly. I'm tall, like organising events and EAish. Message me @nathanpmyoung on Twitter
Readers may enjoy my blog: https://samenright.com/. I write in-depth book reviews, as well as posts about jazz, philosophy, and economics. The blog is funded by Emergent Ventures and I'm in the MR links sometimes. Thanks!
I am from Slovakia and my partner used to work in Samuel's company. (The company is Vacuumlabs as you find out in the replies and Samuel's second name is Hapak). So I can confirm they are a normal IT company, kind of ambitious. Later I was in brief online contact with Samuel due to covid testing his company was offering to his employees, where non-employees were allowed on request. So I know they are normal. Do not know about this investment opportunity.
As a long-term SSC/ACX commenter, I hereby confirm that:
* There is a company called VacuumLabs, just like described on LinkedIn. The company is completely legit. Their web domain really is "vacuumlabs (dot) com".
* There is a former CEO of VacuumLabs called Samuel Hapák, just like described at LinkedIn. His e-mail address really is "samuel (at) vacuumlabs (dot) com".
I don't know what exactly that investment opportunity is, so no comment on that. Just wanted to vouch for this *not* being... well, the thing most people probably think when looking at that comment (and if I hadn't known Samuel and VacuumLabs, I admit that would be my first reaction, too).
My comment is hopefully a red flag for potentially more gullible readers that they will have to do their due diligence very thoroughly.
You give no details on what you are offering, and have no company or description on your account. You say you can double peoples investment yearly, but say nothing of the risks involved.
There are risky leveraged positions that can be taken that give these kinds of return, sometimes - with an almost equally likely chance to lose everything. -This can be done openly with no reason for secrecy or private postings without information.
Your comment reg. risky leveraged positions is fair, it's nothing of that kind. I don't want to share details publicly because I might break some regulation by doing so. Also, I don't really expect getting much interest this way, but felt it would be nice to share the opportunity with the community I've been watching for years.
There are regulatory aspects that allow me to share detailed information only on per request basis. And frankly, I don’t really have high expectations from this. Just wanted to share this opportunity with like minded people.
Tailoring/dressmaking services available. Based in London but can ship worldwide.
Having an item custom-made for you is more expensive than buying off the rack, but it allows you to get exactly what you want - even if that item doesn't exist yet. For example, my latest custom order is a sleeveless cross between a judo gi and zapp brannigan's uniform made from psychedelic-patterned silk: funky leisurewear for hot days.
Good question, it's a challenge! The latest evolution of the process is:
A) if you already own something similar to the garment you desire which fits in the way you want, measure that and send photos (showing garment plus measuring device) to avoid miscommunications.
B) If you want something dissimilar from what you already own (which is obviously often the case with a tailored garment) then we will provide clear instructions for how to measure your body, and again ask for photographs of the measurement taking place.
I have been writing a blog for the past 4 months - https://ilearned.substack.com, where I archive interesting things that I discovered from blogs, books and podcasts. I started this for myself to better retain the things that I am learning, I hope some of you find it useful too.
There is no limitation per se on the topics, though so far, I have mostly written about finance/investments, business strategy, psychology (in consumer choices, or within organizations) or philosophy.
www.susanhunterpsychotherapy.com - U.K. based and work internationally. Reminding people (we know how, many have just forgotten due to their conditioning) how to be a good friend to themselves and more, to cherish and celebrate ourselves (without becoming narcissists). It’s the magic switch that makes us automatically more loving and towards others, more appreciative of everything, end self sabotage, and we end up dumping all that is bunk and often earning more too as we feel more confident and deserving of it. What’s not to like :-)
On second thoughts I also host a weekly science-based acoustic gig / singalong/ chat on Zoom - Super Blurry Astronaut LIVE - usually Wednesday or Thursday 8pm UK time. I post details of each week’s theme and crowdsource suggestions for songs on Monday via various science comms networks and on FB eg https://facebook.com/events/s/super-blurry-astronaut-live-la/2956979244545641/ (yesterday’s gig on lachrymosity).
I am a would-be editor. I have a general idea of what those categories encompass. It would be beneficial for me if you would define them in more detail. To whatever depth you prefer.
I'm looking for someone with experience and expertise in dealing with long-running anhedonia.
I've had long-running anhedonia (about 11 years) that's done a great job ignoring everything I've thrown at it, from diet to exercise, medication to meditation. The objective aspects of my life are in good shape (social life, career, family, physical health), but like a light switch 11 years ago, pleasure and joy just kinda disappeared. I've got a therapist and psychiatrist, and am looking for either:
- Your experiences overcoming anhedonia
- Recommended reading on how anhedonia operates
- Pointers to bizarre treatments or out-of-the-way experts in anhedonia
My email address is hixgrigby@gmail.com -- Thanks for anything you decide to offer!
I am looking for Platonic Friends. I am not lonely. I'm already in a committed, monogamous relationship. I am also probably already too busy anyway. However, I can always use to add more people to my friend group, or mix things up further with more types of stimulation.
Location: Dallas-Fort Worth (but I am open to pen-pals)
Career: Analytics
My interests include philosophy, social sciences(especially economics), religious studies, business, technology(especially data/analytics). I also like video games(specifically RPGs) and anime.
To flesh this out, I mentally came of age to GMU economists, early Less Wrong, as well as Calvinistic Christianity, and the new atheists. I am an atheist, but have a reasonably strong understanding of Protestant theology, as well as philosophy of religion. In my free-time, I run discussions on various topics in religion and philosophy. Honestly, I tend to see religious studies as something like a discussion of weird garbage, but sometimes it can be interesting or illuminating. (Also, I think 80% of the Bible is badly written. Paul is a good author, and Ecclesiastes is well-written, but Augustine is probably smarter than both)
Additionally, I was an economics student in college because I find the social sciences fascinating. Over time, I have molded this interest in the social sciences to an interest in business studies. (Think Peter Drucker, Clay Christensen, and HBR) Additionally, I have developed a strong professional interest in technology. I also organize events to discuss business and technology concepts in my area.
What I am seeking is just more interesting people to bounce ideas off of, ideally in a less confrontational setting. I'm also ~90% less pretentious than I'm coming off here, and hopefully 25-75% more competent.
My email is ryanwagen@yahoo.com. If you're interested, then I look forward to hearing from you.
Published my book today on the 50th anniversary of the end of the gold standard and the birth of fiat money in August 1971 https://www.zvi.net/money. The book explores money, how it drives the economy, and why since 2008 trillions of dollars, euros, yen have been printed but not spent.
I just published a memoir about my wife's project to build a house after being diagnosed with advanced colon cancer: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09BV8MSKR.
Reverse Classifieds possibly an open dev post: daytime babycare
With COVID-19 scares and a lot of lower wage folk on the sidelines due to all the handouts, how would you recommend finding what amounts to a day time nanny in San Antonio (don't like these nanny websites) who will feed and change a 3 month to 1 year old from say 7am to 3pm?
Issue being MIL fearful of abusive childcare providers or deriliction of duty, etc.
At least where I live, if you post something like this, you're likely to get a few neighbors saying "oh my aged mother could use work like this" or "I recommend so-and-so." Might work.
Imagining a reverse daycare situation where childless remote tech workers pay for the company of a cute and cuddly baby while they do their soulless software job. Not gonna happen, but funny
I'm a life coach. First session free. Take it as an opportunity for me to orient you towards various kinds of interior work you could be doing to be more awesome and no obligation to work with me.
You can find my blog here: www.bearlamp.com.au or just email me at redeliot at gmail to make a time. Mention acx to help me know who you are.
I overlap with the operational effect of therapists, with a bit more freedom because I'm not actually a therapist. I moved my identity through rationality, meditation, post-rationality, therapy of various kinds and ended up pretty damn good at solving problems both on the explicit, deliberate, coaching level and on the embodied, somatic, field-of-awareness level.
I specifically work across an embarrassingly large number of models, systems and theories because I couldn't make myself specialise. These include: Internal Family Systems therapy, directly working with emotions (fear, anger, sadness), meditative practices (including awareness, embodiment, noting, somatics, jhana and more), developmental systems (keegan, stages, spiral dynamics, integral), weird energy systems (like chakras, meridians, somatics), shadow work, and more that I haven't called to mind just now.
As an example of the kind of work I do. I recently talked to someone who had trouble organising their reactions to a psychedelic trip and helped to place their capacity to approach the "scary" phenomena and permit them to reprocess things.
I talked to someone a week ago who found himself in a drama triangle with a work colleague and his boss. We talked about the aspects of the triangle and the healthy triangle and how it deeply connects to his upbringing with his sibling, the compelling nature of drama and how he had a role to play in perpetuating the drama because he was just so fascinated by it, and also how it's up to him what he wants to do now that he's found himself here, if he wants to continue the job or not, and that it is salvageable but may require some effort.
I talked to someone a few weeks ago running a startup and caught in unworthiness procrastination loops. We examined where they came from and found them in highschool, we sat with them emotionally and they softened in a way that the situation is workable and there is not as much procrastination as before.
I talked to someone who kept finding friends boring, we talked about the conditions being set up in judging friends which made them accidentally show up as boring and how to facilitate more interestingness in the people being met.
I talked to someone with 10 years of chronic pain. We processed each of fear, anger and sadness until they were less of a restriction on her. We talked about how the chronic pain is at least partially a deliberate defence mechanism for her because the exterior world is "bad" and "scary". Since then there's been less pain and she's enjoying life more.
I talked to a guy who I sensed had heaps of capacity but wasn't stepping up. I told him to "be more awesome", which he knew, he did on the spot by "stepping into the spotlight" per-se. within a month he had gotten a new job, moved city, and was having an awesome time. (he had done a great deal of personal work but hadn't realised how much he could just be more awesome).
Everyone's story is different and yet there's something of a universal human pattern to the stories. I love to see the humanity in all of us and to undo the knots of the mind.
I'm interested! You might wanna hire one of the people advertising copyediting for your website though 😂. Hell, I could do it; it would only be like 15 mins work.
As a side note, you may want to specify on your "Coaching" page whether your prices are in Australian dollars (inferred from the domain) or USD (for better or worse, the default assumption for things aimed at an international audience).
I wrote a book on personal finance for absolute beginners on modest incomes, starting from basics like debt, emergency funds and budgeting, leading up to investing in index funds and getting good advice.
The preview available for free on Amazon contains a comprehensive chapter summary so you can see whether this book suits your needs, or perhaps the needs of your profligate nephew:
Check out my curated progressive/intellectual aggregator, LeftTimes -- sources range from ACX to Marxists in all media formats. There's also iOS and Android apps. https://lefttimes.org/
I enjoyed the intro to chaos, it filled in some gaps for me. I’d suggest though adding links to the next at the bottom of each part to avoid having to scroll back up and find the table of contents. And the intro text doesn’t need to be on each page. Otherwise nice use of images and clear explanations. SCIENCE!
Looking for remote devs to work on a platform for ML code, fellow digital nomad asx readers to meet, MRI or ETI technicians with track record of publishing novel imaging work, anyone that has a stronger than random opinion about ideal BF pct target once you get bellow 15, someone that enjoys Asimov and wants to illustrate a fiction book. george at cerebralab.com
I perform part-time outsourced CFO services and advise multiple startups, and I absolutely love it. If you are looking for FP&A help, I’d be happy to have a chat.
I mainly focus on consumer products and technology, but finance is finance, and I’m flexible on industry.
If you have a psych MA and can do analytics, you’ll be a good bet for a “people data analyst” job and there’s decent demand for it right now (I’m a DS in that field). 2 years of excel and intuition about behavior should be enough to get you in the door. If you want to chat you can reach out at <firstname>.<lastname>@gmail.com (to be upfront, I’m not hiring right now)
Thanks for the suggestion Will! I wasn't aware of the People Analytics job title before and this has helped me narrow my search and have a little more focus in the thousands of remote jobs.
I wrote a speculative novel. Sent out thirteen query letters - got rejected by seven so far. Six more to go. Wish me luck! If I don't find an agent, I'll self-publish.
Just read your most recent post on BCIs and enjoyed it! It's such a speculative subject currently but I thought you provided a nice overview of the current state of imaging technologies. Looking forward to part 2.
I work as a privacy lawyer in Canada (https://www.frankprivacy.com/). If you work for a business operating in Canada (or thinking of expanding), I would love to help.
I'm organizing a techno-optimist short story writing competition! Would love to get submissions from any Astral Codex 10 readers interested in creative writing, and I would greatly appreciate you subscribing if you're interested in reading the top submissions. https://myrielmedia.substack.com/p/call-for-short-stories
My company is currently hiring for a ton of new positions. Early stage AI startup in the transactions space, open to remote work, keen to learn culture. If interested, please contact me at thomas dot stearns26 at gmail dot com
Are you a rationalist running for office? $1 gets you your first hour of campaign consulting; you'll be glad you did. JRM, longtime resident o' these comment pages and recently elected judge, can give a reference. I've been doing campaign consulting for more than a decade and been point on over a dozen small-time campaigns, and this is me doing my part to raise the sanity waterline.
Written a book or other major work that you're proud enough of to wish it were typo-free? My previous hats include law review editor, newspaper editor, medical devices technical writer and project manager and current hats include fiction editor and English-translation polisher. If you're small-time and flexible about when I get around to your work, my low-end rate is competitive for the quality I offer: $40/hr. If you need a turnaround measured in days or weeks, my rates are industry competitive.
Email me at k*h*meck at gmail, except remove the asterisks.
I've written a pair of posts on fundamental ideas in biochemistry/biophysics, starting from classic papers. They're aimed at a basic college-level physics & chemistry background. I'm looking for feedback on the tone & style before I write more.
The tone is fine, but I don't think they're accurately aimed at a basic background. In style, yes, but there are important background ideas I think you should bolster at bit if you really want to reach people with something like a freshman-sophomore level of understanding of physics and chemistry and biology.
For example, in the first article you don't define viscosity at all, even conceptually, and this is a very important concept which is often not studied in detail until an upper-division or graduate fluid mechanics class. You could even do something as simple as draw a picture of a sphere falling through liquid, and point out viscosity is just the quality of the liquid that tells you how fast it falls -- in a low viscosity fluid (water) it falls fast, while in a high viscosity fluid (thick oil) it falls slowly. That's probably enough for most people, but I think you probably need to say something so they feel comfortable they understand what you mean.
You don't really talk about *why* Reynolds number is the key metric, either, and I feel that might be worth discussing at least a little. There are plenty of hand-wavy conceptual explanations of why Re encapsulates so much about hydrodynamics, maybe a little sketch or few sentences paraphrased from a basic textbook would help. Not that many people at the freshman/sophomore physics level are used to thinking in terms of dimensionless constants and scale factors, you kind of have to get to an upper division if not graduate level to start thinking that way. (Mind you, the engineers might be, but you didn't say you were aiming this at engineers, although some would be quite interested I think.)
The other big thing I noticed is that you didn't talk about why diffusion "slows down" over long distances, in the sense that it takes increasingly longer than ballistic motion, and that will be somewhat non-intuitive to anyone who isn't very familiar with diffusion already. I think an illustration of a random walk, or a graph comparing diffusive motion versus ballistic might be helpful, since this is key to why there is a characteristic distance over which the (ballistic) motion of the E. coli eventually outperforms mere diffusion, which explains the Berg diagram nicely and all that weird zig-zaggy motion you can see protozoans execute under a microscope.
On the second article: I would highlight the alpha carbon in the AA because unless people remember their basic biochemistry well they might not know which it is.
I would at least write down the Michaelis-Menten equation and define the terms, since that is really not something with which generic underclassmen will be on intimate terms. It will also help with some of your later equations, which sort of come out of the blue otherwise. I would still prove with a little algebra that f is the ratio of the binding constants.
You might point out that the binding forces are all intermolecular, because otherwise, to the typical chemistry student, 23 kJ/mol is a *small* not large amount of energy, but if they understand you're talking about a handful of H bonds it makes more sense.
Again, I would derive that the net f with two steps is the product of the ratios of binding constants. A few lines of algebra here will really help someone who isn't very familiar with the ideas already.
It's an admirable effort, and I bet not a few people will be happy to read it, especially if you help as above with some of the places where their pre-existing knowledge might have minor holes. Good luck!
Thank you very much for the detailed feedback! You've correctly pointed out a few shortcomings with balancing concision with background. I'll focus more on how to do that clearly both in these two posts and in the future.
I've read the original 'Life at low Reynolds number' transcript, and I have to say your summary post is great. I'm a bit confused though by the necessity of footnote #4 (for "blue whales are big") -- I thought this was lay background knowledge?
I'm a data analyst looking for startups or similar high-growth organizations. I've analyzed spreadsheets for 3+ years, and I've practiced daily to broaden my skillset to include programming (Python, R, SQL), case studies, and (recently) contributing to open-source projects, like Kaggle competitions.
Currently located near Huntsville, but open to relocation (and remote, of course). Full-time work is preferred, but part-time / flexible hours aren't entirely off the table.
1. I've been having a lot of fun doing photography, and I'm interested in excuses to travel. If you have projects such as photo journalism or wildlife research (ideally with only moderate amounts of hiking), I would be very interested in helping out with that sort of thing.
2. I'm single, and looking for a long-term partner. I'm heteroflexible but mostly into women, live in Madison Wisconsin, and am open to having kids.
3. I'm interested in start-up investing, particularly at the angel stage, and I'm always happy to read pitches.
A mini-portfolio and contact info can be found on drethelin.com
Great northern owls have a tendency to stay in relatively small areas, and They frequently hoot early in the night, so what you can do is go around in the evening around sunset in or near the woods and listen. They also seem to have habitual trees they like to spend time in. So most of the owl photos that I have are of like, 2-3 (probably? not exactly sure since I can't distinguish them that well) owls that live and hunt a short distance from where I live, where I know some of the trees that they spend a lot of time in for whatever reason.
Once you've started spotting them, they get a lot easier to spot, as in my experience are most birds.
I'm a freshly minted PGY-1 Psychiatry resident in the US looking to make friends with other psych residents (or just psychiatrists) who frequent blogs like this. I am writing this post spontaneously, but I think it might be cool to form a small group that can trade/discuss research papers in the field, bitch about residency, share experiences/advice while we learn how to become independent physicians, and maybe even meet up at conferences.
If this sounds like a thing you might be into, drop me a line at: nilskwendel@gmail.com
Torchship: A hard SF adventure story. An undercover agent joins the crew of a interstellar freighter to deliver cargo in a galaxy scarred by AI rebellions. Pilots are forced to use slide rules to navigate their ships while gamers face death if they evade the restrictions on their computers. Finalist for the Prometheus Award for best libertarian SF novel.
I tutor math and physics, mostly at the high school/AP/IB/introductory college level. Online or in person. Occasionally I will take a middle school student, especially if they are an ACX fan. Subjects include algebra, geometry, triginometry, precalculus, calculus, algebra-based physics and calculus-based physics, and all AP and IB physics and math exams. I will also occasionally take a computer science student. I used to be a high school AP computer science teacher, my students averaged 4.0 on the AP exam.
Would love to discuss tutoring my boys. One starting grade 11, and the other just starting high school. The last year and a half in Toronto have been devastating.
We began to assign and assist with "math sheets" last autumn, but it really hasn't been enough to make up for the schooling they've lost.
Once a week I share a newsletter (RSS or email, it's hosted on Ghost) that's a brief overview with follow-up references about a particular topic I'm researching that week. For example: obscure facts about scurvy, the history of hats around the world, and the plausibility of herding giant spiders for their silk.
My main blog -- https://www.eleanorkonik.com -- is mostly focused on how archaeology and history can help speculative fiction writers; some of my articles have been published by outlets like SFWA and Tor. Occasionally I talk about notetaking (I'm a moderator for the community around personal knowledge management software called Obsidian) & politics or do book reviews.
Obsidian is great and the community does an amazing job of teaching good notetaking skills for a variety of use-cases, which I feel like a lot of successful people missed out on in school because we didn't need it then.
I have a blog! It's called the Questioner and it's about superforecasting, memetics, and psychedelics.
What makes my blog more interesting that the typical superforecasting/memetics/psychedelics blog is that I talk about the practical applications a lot more. For example, using memes to influence elections, using superforecasting to clean up in the stock market, etc. I also talk about a few experiments of mine in which I've done exactly that.
I'm working on an investigative horror tabletop RPG. I haven't come up with a final name for it yet, so it's currently called Untitled Cosmic Horror Project. It's pretty far along in the playtest process, and I'm running at least one game of it a week online.
I really like them! They seem very low-priced – and the shipping costs are (expectedly) pretty high. It'd be nice to have some details about the sizes of the pieces.
Did you intend to link to the Australia listings? The details on my favorite piece claim "Dispatches from United States".
That's a good point about the sizes, I passed that along to my wife. As for the shipping yeah I think she picked whatever Etsy's default option was and that must include them shipping internationally (we're in the USA) but at a high price. Wish it could be lower but I'm not sure if there's anything we can do about that :/
I'm on the job hunt, and the SSC classified thread produced some good leads a while ago, so hopefully the ACX one will as well!
I'm a graduate of Carnegie Mellon's privacy engineering master's program, and also got my bachelor's from there undergrad in computer science and mathematics. Before I went back for grad school, I worked as a programmer at Microsoft and Booz Allen, and more recently I've served as a UN expert on child online protection and taught for Art of Problem Solving. Some personal programming projects I'm proud of include a mod for Slay the Spire and several automated logic puzzle generators. I'm a skilled writer and presenter, with a knack for finding memorable examples of technical concepts, such as a magic-trick-based cryptography lesson or a parapsychology experiment for a class on experimental design and statistics.
I'm most interested in privacy-related work, but I'm flexible. I really enjoy teaching, I'm quite practiced at coding, and I pick up new domains of policy very readily. If you know of any job openings I might be a match for, please let me know here or contact me at euclid11 (at) gmail.com.
I write collections of nanofiction/metafiction science fiction in an empire of postsophont libertarian space elves that have been quite well received. And cited in the comments back on SSC a few times, as I recall. If this sounds like it might be your thing, books and reviews are available here:
I'm working on an AI assisted language learning thing for intermediate to advanced users. I'm looking for some early feedback. You get to use it for free during the alpha in exchange. https://forms.gle/7iJaAwTHX1nA6WRNA
I found this by accident, and use it for my random hacking/making snippet & release announcement blog. Useful, but somehow I have to discover how to make it work again every time; documentation, or even a button in the editor, would be very much appreciated.
(Oh, and since this is a classifieds thread, here's the link to said random snippet blog:
I work for an always-hiring software startup in the NLP and AI space, more or less: balto.ai. It's a real-time conversation guidance platform, it does what it says on the tin, and does it really well.
We are not Bay-based, have a remarkably positive and extremely low-ego culture, and need talent in engineering, implementation, sales and account management (and also we could use a CFO with SaaS experience). Series B will close very soon.
WE WILL HIRE YOU WITH NO RELEVANT EXPERIENCE IF YOU ARE WILLING TO LEARN. Many of our best people came to us from bartending, construction, and even straight out of liberal arts programs at tiny colleges.
I would love to learn how you trained your AI - I’m looking into something in a very different field and trying to gauge how much effort/money it will take
Hello I’m a UX/UI designer from London. Im between jobs atm so if you’ve got a project you’d like an app designed or any feedback on I’d be happy to help, wouldn’t necessary need to be for £$€. I’ve a portfolio at dyniol.com
Hi - if you're interested in the crypto space - have a need right now for a mobile app to complement a pretty successful web experience. Mail [at] liulily.com
I'm Amy Alkon, and I write "science-help" - research-based advice. My current book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence," explains the *actions* to take to transform yourself to live with confidence. http://amzn.to/2fFdl2c
*Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases #ad
Request for shilling: what are good products for sleep? I’ve tried various doses of melatonin, blue light blocking glasses, white noise generators, and CBT but none of them seem to have much of an effect, positive or negative. I don’t really have a huge sleep problem, but I really like good nights of sleep
CBD tinctures have worked for me like they did other respondents. I would recommend Lazarus Naturals as A) they're wonderful people with excellent customer service B) their prices are the best C) they always post assay results. I can also endorse theanine and sleep masks.
Something I have found helpful that I haven't seen elsewhere: SAD lights. You can string a bunch of 1600 lumen bulbs to a dimmer switch and counteract lack of light exposure.
I had a prolonged day-night cycle as a side-effect of ADHD medication (Concerta) and was basically forced to live on a 28-hours day schedule. Then I've only changed my light regime, opening my blackout curtains immediately after I wake up and turning off all overhead lights after 9 pm, and it fixed my schedule in like two days, totally overcoming any stimulant side-effects. I should also note that I live in Tel Aviv where we have a lot of sunlight, people in other places might need to actually go outside in the morning to get the required light dosage or even use bright artificial lights, especially in winter.
5-HTP. I find if you take too much, however, it can make you drowsy the following morning. I have tried everything under the sun, and this is the only one that has worked without also being addictive in some form.
Some people are weirdly sensitive to caffeine's effects on sleep. If you are like me, you might find that even a small coffee or tea in the morning will severely impact your sleep quality.
For me, it's a combination of a not too hot room (~20°C at most), a white noise machine, melatonin, no stimulants after 10 AM and no alcohol. So I would suggest trying stimulants timing, cutting alcohol and temperature control.
"In handwringers, self is a half-baked hope gleaned from various media, populating page after page with chattering anxiety circling identity, authenticity, religion, and culture.This collection of short stories revolves around Jewish identity and the schlemiel -- a figure in Jewish folklore described as "one who handles a situation in the worst possible manner or is dogged by an ill luck that is more or less due to his own ineptness." The schlemiel is not always apparent in the pages, but is continually evoked as a guiding concept, a tribute, an homage, and a narrative identity. The length and arrangement of the stories approximate a chaotic media experience: clips, soundbites, advertisements, shows, films, photographs, the all-at-once internet; a disembodied head spins like a top in green and black holographic space -- is this the likeness of a far-flung psyche or just a forgotten Much Music commercial? Collectively, moments of epiphany and/or crisis suggest fragments of self deliriously trying to assemble, clinging to would-be wisdoms and TV tag-lines, while failing to locate its/their misplaced community."
I wanted to let you all know about my paid Anki alternative, 21st Night: get21stnight.com . It was designed to solve a few issues I had with Anki:
1) Full integration with notes and pdfs: it always bothered me that the flashcards I made from my notes were in a separate place/unattached to the notes themselves. 21st Night integrates them tightly in one place.
2) Ease of use: Anki has a lot of features, but it's really difficult to use, and forces you into its own paradigm. I wanted something that had all the features of Anki, but was easier and more flexible to use (e.g. you didn't have to review your cards with spaced repetition if you didn't want to)
3) Stickiness: somewhat tied to ease of use, Anki is really hard to stick with. I wanted a studying app that was easier to stick with than Anki.
21st Night has full import/export with Anki, Quizlet, and CSV/PDF (for flashcards/notes). It has a 2 week free trial, and you can also try out the demo on the website without creating an account. Check it out at get21stnight.com !
FWIW, my biggest issue with Anki was upgrades that changed the format of my decks. Sometimes changes went from A to B and then back to something like A again, but the automatic upgrading of existing decks added extra complexity, rather than restoring something that looked like the way I'd designed them. And I couldn't both stick with the old way (i.e. refuse the upgrade to Anki) and use their only synchronization mechanism between multiple devices, which is to sync via their site (no peer to peer syncing).
I help people start folding origami tessellations by explaining the basic building blocks and underlying principles. I'm currently running a 5-week live series on the foundations, with recordings available to catch up or review previous sessions. You can sign up at https://gatheringfolds.com/signup and the second session will be Friday, August 13th.
I have been designing and manufacturing tactical shotgun accessories for police and non-police for 18 years now, after an earlier career in high tech: https://www.mesatactical.com/
They just started not long ago. The main product right now is a set of cool rugs. If you're not interested in rugs but like their style/want to follow them because you *also* think the rugs are cool, they're on instagram as @_citrastudio .
An inquiry into this-worldly redemption; essentially an extension and refinement of the "self-actualization" discourse running through figures like Jung, Nietzsche and those associated with the Esalen Institute in the 60's and 70's
I recently had an idea about Olympic type voting. So if you’re in a group and want to pick say who you thought played the best in a team sports game, you vote for your top 3. Gold 3 points, silver 2, bronze 1 etc. And then the app/site adds up the votes and determines the winner
How difficult do you think something like this to build?
This would be pretty easy from a calculation standpoint. As you mentioned in the other post, it would reuse a lot of the Borda Count logic.
I think the trickier part on my end would be integrating it into the user interface nicely. I guess it could just be a checkbox in Poll Options to include this new type of calculation and then a number input to count only the top N choices and zero out everything else. I wonder if this has an official name? - Then poll takes would still have too rank everything for the other poll types.
I'll definitely think about this next time I get back into the code (which is quite sporadic as this is a side project).
I suppose it’s a bit like Borda Count but only the top 3 get points. So even if there’s 15 voters you can only get 3 outs for being someone’s first choice, 2 for second and 1 for bronze. I’m sure there’s some basic Java to work it out but I don’t know how to do it lol
IMO you should allow users to choose one result type from the get-go. Otherwise people might argue post-factum on whether or not IRV is better than Burda, rather than choosing one method in advance.
In seriousness, my impression is that the SSC community seems (slightly) more open-minded towards theism than other online rationalist (or pseudo-rationalist) communities! And there is at least one high-profile SSC theist reader, in the person of Ross Douthat. So take that as you will!
The 2019 SSC survey (to take a random example) says 10% of 13,000+ respondents describe themselves as 'committed theists', and perhaps half of that (the pie chart doesn't say) as 'lukewarm theists'. 80% are atheist/agnostic, to round out the picture. https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/2019%20SSC%20Survey.html
If you don't believe all that much in the efficient market hypothesis and appreciate brief write-ups about forgotten stocks. And/or if you have an interest in political science on a more abstract level (more posts on that coming soon):
A few years ago I wrote, programmed, scored, and did most of the art for a video game called Manna For Our Malices. The pitch is "groundhog day meets the x files, as an anime".
I tried it; interesting idea! A few suggestions/complaints (hopefully constructive if you do something similar in the future?):
(SPOILERS AHEAD)
- We need a "skip to new text" option: right now in a new loop, the only options seem to be to click through all dialogs again manually (most of which is unchanged and thus boring), or skip everything using the Skip button (and then miss any text which has changed since last loop)
- The fact that the PC gets killed the same way every evening makes no sense (and is thus rather immersion-breaking). Like my character remembers enough to make a bunch of new choices all throughout the day, but then decides to walk down the same dark street and get stabbed from behind again? At least bring a flashlight and turn around; she could solve the mystery very quickly. Given that there is some kind of magic going on anyway, perhaps you could at least partially resolve this issue by signaling that it's part of the magic at work ("As night falls, I feel a strange compulsion to retrace my steps...")
The 'skip' button actually skips only already-read text (unless you change that behavior in the configuration menu). This is a pretty standard thing for VNs, and came built-into the engine, but I could have made the behavior a little more clear (particularly since skipping is very important to this game & much less important for other, more linear games).
Regarding the PC getting killed every night -- I agree that it's a bit forced. There's an in-universe excuse for it (specifically, that the two consciousnesses inhabiting the PC have to negotiate handling various events, and so a habitual thing like going home is harder to avoid -- you have double the behavioral inertia), and there are parts of the game later on where this fate can be avoided, but it's the kind of thing I couldn't figure out how to circumvent totally in this game. In the currently-in-development sequels, this kind of thing is being avoided (in part because they aren't keeping the same time loop mechanics).
Oh huh, I must have messed with the config by accident or something; sorry for maligning your skip button :) (First time with VNs so I don't know anything about standards.)
So far I have written about FDA reform, connectomics, and AI for COVID-19 diagnosis. It's been on a 3 month hiatus since I moved and changed jobs but I have a new post on FDA reform in the works (focus on regenerative medicine / stem cells). In the future there will be less on the FDA and more on AI Safety and Progress Studies.
Also related to FDA reform - check out this panel I organized which has high information density:
For longevity fans -- this isn't going to launch officially until early September, but I've been given permission from the founder (Dylan Livingston) to share it among "transhumanist communities and mailing lists online". What I'm talking about is The Alliance for Longevity Initiatives, a new 501c4 organization that is the first of its kind. Unlike other longevity nonprofits, they can (and will) engage in lobbying and political activities. I'm really proud to be their first member and I encourage others to join early for similar bragging rights. Check it out here : https://www.a4li.org/ . Dylan worked on the Biden campaign and he's been working full time on this for several months, laying out a very strong foundation, putting together a really stellar advisory board and board of directors which will be announced in September.
We're writing Dolt, a SQL database with git versioning features. It's a SQL database you can branch and merge, fork and clone, push and pull, just like a git repository. It's like git and MySQL had a baby. The people here are smart enough to see the possibilities with that, so go check it out:
I'm guessing this is more for 'static' databases, e.g. databases that, 'in production', are mostly read-only, and NOT say high-volume OTP kinds of uses.
I'm also not a fan of MySQL and have mostly avoided it, particularly professionally. Did you pick it because it's something like the most commonly used RDBMS?
Definitely not only for static DBs, although certain patterns of branch and merge do work best like that. If you just want a high-throughput OLTP server with no versioning, MySQL is better, for now. But we're closing the gap on performance pretty quick, down from 20x slower a few months ago to 4x now. The idea is that eventually you would use Dolt anywhere you use MySQL now, it's just a better MySQL that has versioning built in. But there are lots of ways you can use branch and merge in a non-static way. Some of our customers are giving each of their customers their own branch for isolation, for example.
We indeed picked MySQL because of its install base. A lot of people have expressed a desire for Postgres instead, but none of them have agreed to pay us to build it, which we would definitely do. We'll add additional dialects, starting with Postgres, after we hit 1.0 late this year.
The goal for Dolt is to be a general purpose SQL database with version control baked in, which is a very new concept. Lots of DBs do revisions or time travel, but nobody else can do branch and merge. In the short term these capabilities enable new patterns of application development and operations which we find very interesting. In the long term, we hope Dolt will enable two-sided data marketplaces with many producers and buyers.
It's a very intriguing concept! I'm sure I'll think of some novel uses over time.
I think my concerns about considering it, as a substitute for a "general purpose SQL database" would be about ongoing operations, e.g. administration and maintenance. For example, I'd _assume_ that there's some way to 'truncate' the history of a database, as that would be my initial worry in terms of (financial) costs of adopting this over MySQL.
> Some of our customers are giving each of their customers their own branch for isolation, for example.
I'm struggling to think how that would work in a 'typical multi-tenant' application database. If the branches provide isolation, why not just give each customer their own instance of the database? Are the customers 'pushing' from their branches to a common 'remote' database? What's an example of the value of that from either your customer's perspective, or your customer's customer's perspective? (Obviously the customer's customers have their own version history just in their own branches.)
For operations, the idea is that Dolt is actually easier. Every commit can be a backup, and you can verify they're working on DoltHub. Restoring from a backup is just a `dolt checkout` command, no downtime. Other admin tools, like truncating the history, are a work in progress. But Dolt isn't much more storage intensive than other versioned DBs, storage grows with diff sizes.
You can give each client their own DB, running on the same box or different boxes, and that's isomorphic to giving them their own branch. Just different trade offs for operational stuff. The main advantage is you can do live schema + data migrations of domain (common) tables by making edits upstream (master) and then merging them downstream on some schedule you control. The use case is that each customer has a branch where it appears (on that branch) that all the data in the entire database is theirs, no need to bake customer numbers into your schemas and indexes. And of course each customer branch can be the parent to many other branches (local to that customer), which lets each customer experiment with different datasets without messing with their "prod" branch. This happens a lot in machine learning, for example.
Perhaps a stupid question, but the git features would be for DDL level stuff right? I wouldn't need to merge for an INSERT statement back the the master branch for others to see it would I?
You might be interested in DB Ghost if you're using (Microsoft) SQL Server. I still kinda prefer their 'sync' model over typical migrations for, e.g. deploying (mostly DDL) changes to databases. Maintaining migrations (for both DDL changes and 'code data' or 'seed data') in version control is a big win, but I liked the model whereby you can 'see' (read) in one place the current 'state' of some 'schema objects' (e.g. tables, indexes, stored procedures) without having to either trust your local 'dev' instance of a database (or re-run all of the migrations from scratch each time).
It versions both data and schema. So if you are working on your own branch and insert rows, nobody on other branches will see it until you merge it back.
You can also just all connect to the same branch and edit it together with normal SQL transactions. Everybody chooses which branch to come up to at connection time, and of course you can create new branches or switch branches in your session, and merge branches into each other. You only work on an independent branch when you want to keep it isolated for a while for whatever reason.
Following up on my free podcast audiobook of Scott Alexander's "UNSONG", I'm narrating the works of David Chapman, starting with "Meaningness". https://fluidity.libsyn.com
New, free, values-based, video-only dating app where you pre-filter based on dealbreakers & dealmakers (crowd-sourced; no "expert" algorithms): https://drom.date/astralcodexten
It's hard to find a short name that isn't already taken :) We feel that "dream" (in Swedish) represents our purpose very well. We do hope to expand globally including Sweden as we grow.
We're early stage so not many users yet. We're focused mostly on English speaking countries but we're open globally. We don't have translations for the app yet, though.
I blog at benjiwheeler.medium.com . I write about politics, education, books and technology. I'd say my tone is intellectual but accessible, skeptical but not overly smug about it :) I think ACX readers would find my writing worth reading!
Do you miss the good old days when Slate Star Codex had a side bar with many wonderful products? Relive those halcyon days every time you bite into Mealsquares: https://mealsquares.com/. We're kind of hoping you mostly taste the nostalgia since we're so low sugar.
Thanks for the reminder. I've checked out your product many times in the past trying to find a good way to eat predictably and lazily while minimizing the kitchen work I need to do, and can't really remember why I've always chosen to not go with mealsquares. I'm ordering the sample box.
Who do you use for shipping? I'm actually fairly happy with my current meal service in terms of the food itself, but am very likely to cancel because UPS keeps delivering late or never, often lets food sit in the truck until it's spoiled, and is constantly destroying the boxes. If I switch, I'm not switching to another vendor that uses UPS.
Also, does your application interface allowing changing an email address? One of the other annoying things about my current service is it doesn't, so I'm forced to stick forever with the crap spambox address I use before I trust you.
Hah. Forgot about you guys. Last time I ordered was years ago. Going to place an order now. I am new fan of Huel : Hot and Savory which I view as an innovative product in the nutritionally complete meal replacement space (don't care for Huel the drink though). Here's my Huel referral code where you can get 15% off : https://huel.mention-me.com/m/ol/wk4vr-9e6bd37203 You also get a free t-shirt on your first order which is actually really high quality and not all cotton so it dries quickly if you get sweaty.
Free Black Thought (FBT) combats racial essentialism and the politics of racial authenticity by promoting public awareness of the great diversity of thought among black writers and artists. In so doing, we seek to highlight the unique contributions to public debates made by heterodox black voices from across the political spectrum. FBT is non-partisan: we pursue no political agenda other than a commitment to free speech, civil rights, and a conviction that a pluralistic society committed to liberal democracy is nourished by the entire spectrum of black thinking on matters of politics, society, and culture.
FBT’s Compendium of Free Black Thought contains topically arranged bibliographies of heterodox writing by black authors: https://bit.ly/Compendium_of_FBT
The FBT website features a curated list of heterodox black podcasters and YouTubers, arranged into broad categories by political ideology (“Liberal,” “Centrist,” “Conservative”): www.freeblackthought.com
A dating ad, why not: Compared to the average ACT reader, I am athletic, extroverted, offline, low in neuroticism, and interested in aesthetics. Hobbies include cycling, wilderness backpacking, climbing, music, and dance. The dream is to build a household glowing with love, music, and community. That could include building the physical house — and definitely includes unschooling, free-range parenting, or something along those lines. Looking for competence, judgement, and flow. On a date I can take you to the mountains or to the Met, your choice.
My basic information: M seeking F, aged 33, truly 6'0" (189 cm), income ~$400k with upward potential, working remotely.
Location: US West or Southwest, open to travel and snow-birding. I spent the pandemic taking a COVID-safe road trip around the West, which I'm still on. Give me a reason to move to a place.
I'm convinced. Admittedly I'm a straight man in the UK already happily in a relationship so not much use to you. Still, you might be the most eligible bachelor I've come across in a while! Best of luck with your search.
Use the Zoomcorder video robot (which I built!) to record your next webinar or meeting WITHOUT you attending. (It's ideal for video meetings where you mainly listen.) Immediately after the meeting a recording will be sent to you to watch anytime. Try it out at: https://Zoomcorder.com
I'll look for people through more traditional channels soon, but wanted to throw up something here to cast a wider net. In the meantime, if you'd like more information, please shoot me an email at memeticwarfarin at gmail.com.
Can you talk more on the scope of the 2-3 month project?
Do you plan for any deliverables, besides a paper?
If your research is successful, how much of it will be published?
It is not clear to me that we have a good framework for researching defense against these tools, however there may be no major blockers to the creation of the tools themselves.
My concern is that it may be counter productive to explore this space in the wrong order, we should want a broader understanding of AI alignment rooted in more innocuous applications of AI before we specifically research memetic tools.
The only deliverable would be a paper, to be published if and only if the benefits to doing so clearly outweigh any potential hazards. The primary goal would be to generate a framework for thinking about potential dangers in this space and identify areas of concern for further investigation. This is an area that generally worries me, but it's way outside of my field of expertise, and I don't know how to go about evaluating its importance or tractability given that almost nothing has been written on it. Beyond personal interest, the research agenda might be used to apply for funding for further rounds of investigation via an appropriate, aligned funding organization.
If I could set policy for the world, I'd much prefer that no one research memetic tools, but there are such enormous and I think obvious financial and political incentives for doing so that I think waiting entails an unacceptably high likelihood of very bad outcomes.
I write a funny literature / book blog at http://dreicafe.com. The shtik is to take "serious literature" and present it to a layman reader (I pretend I'm writing for a tradie mate); I occasionally stretch the definition of "literature" to e.g. TalkBass forum posts. It's framed as letters to friends. I am going for short & highly funny articles, but with meat on the bone for each one.
There's Melbourne Australia 'Lockdown Experience Blog' content in the older issues (mostly complaints about "pick up yr dog poo") signs, for anyone into that sort of stuff!
I’ve worked with Capitalists, Communists, and Catholics in Asia, Europe, and North America and have set up an executive coaching practice for potential / current leaders in business, government, and nonprofit. john@bahsuh84.com
As a youngster first getting interested in programming and reading the Jargon File, I assumed I'd go through a "larval stage" and write lots of open source... but never did. I appreciate this notice, and hopefully will check it out.
Please elaborate. This seems like it would be right up the alley of many people in my circle but that github link is SUPER intimidating and doesn't have an obvious entry point.
There are a bunch of issues labeled as "good first issue". If you're interested in working on an issue, you can express interest and ask clarification questions. They're welcoming and pretty responsive!
If you want your kids to learn coding, you could do worse than to try the relatively new live classes we do on top of our game-based-learning coding platform: https://codecombat.com/parents (self-paced options also available). Works best for kids 8-14, but can serve well as soon as they can type, and plenty of adults learn coding with us, too.
I write law review articles about First Amendment protections for free inquiry (including freedom to experiment, to collect/analyze data, and to make scientific claims that fall short of current FDA/FTC requirements of proof.) Perhaps of interest to this group.
Mortality, public finance, and public pensions -- I have a substack (link next to my name, but for convenience: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/ )
I'm a life actuary and I'm really into explaining mortality trends right now. Tax policy and stressed public pensions are also tops for topics for me.
I am replying just to recommend checking it out - I've found Mary Pat's writing on many topics well worth reading over the years. (Sadly, most of what I read is on the much-missed Actuarial Outpost/Rebel Forum).
Astranis is hiring for all kinds of engineering and non-engineer positions. We're a team in San Francisco, recently raised a 250m series C, building small geostationary communications satellites.
Looking for anyone to collaborate with and share thoughts on the following topics:
- practical applied human longevity (basically slowing aging via any biological mechanisms, but more so the practical side of things we can actually do, rather than just funding $50M 5 year-long studies)
- using machine learning and related emerging tech to provide novel classes of experiences, particularly with relevance to music, voice, VR, and anime (two example projects from this year: https://thisanimedoesnotexist.ai/ and https://koe.ai)
Bonus points if you're in Austin TX and/or are into other topics I love such as music, infosec, finance, Japanese, and many others (see website). If any of this sounds interesting to you, read more about me and get in contact with me via https://nearcyan.com/, thanks!
thanks! I had drafts for so many more posts but I got very out of the habit of wanting to write for a few reasons, so although I'm a bit disappointed that I only have a few posts up, I'm glad you enjoyed them!
A minor factoid in one post was “inflation may be necessary to increase spending”. I don’t think that’s particularly true, as cash sitting at real -2% vs investments sitting at 5-7% real and bonds at 0% real doesn’t actually present that different long term incentives (you still would rather invest your savings and get a higher growth rate) and most people spend because they have reason to - consumers probably won’t buy a car or fridge next year because deflation. Inflation is rather considered good because it gives the fed monetary policy flexibility (or something like that). And a google suggests at least one expert agrees with me on that https://www.marketplace.org/2019/09/12/why-is-inflation-necessary/
Wikipedia has a similar problem to Firefox in terms of the org spending little on development and useful stuff vs lots on nonsense. The WMF budget and spending keeps increasing every year and it’s not clear why. I used ungoogled-chromium for a while for the best of both.
(And some stuff about my diet that the supplement post brought up) I’m more skeptical of the longevity studies and other perceived benefits of some of the non vitamin compounds in the supplement list. A combination of publication bias on both base error rate and methodological variation means I don’t take individual or even ten studies showing some trend in animal or humans super seriously. Also there’s just so many people and groups doing so many studies like that, and there don’t seem to be too many negative results of any form floating around. I also don’t think the current though around cholesterol and health is quite right, at at least certainly not the full picture, but have no clue as to what would be quite right. So for instance I don’t see the garlic and simile as useful, and a combination of randomly eating during the day and a very unusual diet probably means I won’t get whatever potential benefit there is from the insulin and glucose related compounds.
I generally don’t take supplements. I just eat a variety of animal products (buying organs, bones, and whatever random stuff is available, cracking bones open for marrow, and just buying whole small animals and eating every edible part, crunching softer cartilage, etc) and a large quantity of fruit and assorted plants, and based on some tests on the variation across different organs in animals, natural products like spermidine and glycine I probably get enough of from meat and and Fisetin and other stuff from fruit. I maybe should eat more fish though, probably tbh, but idk how to balance the heavy metal and other ocean pollutant risk.(seems fish oil is low on mercury from google scholar, but I wonder if it just concentrated the organic mercury (which is fat soluble)... idk). And that did remind me that I probably really should get blood work to check for deficiencies...
On chocolate - for a bit I ate a lot of chocolate (no sugar), and it seemed to have a rather strong caffeine like effect to me, and theobromine is off by one methyl from caffeine.
Appreciate the comments a lot, some of those posts I never linked anywhere so it still comes as a surprise to me that they've been read, but I'm glad at least someone enjoyed them!
Inflation: Reasonable, I think it'd be better to state what I had said in terms of when there's two competing currencies; e.g. if you have USD and BTC, and you expect the BTC to go up, you'd want to hold onto your BTC and spend your USD for what you need instead, so there'd be less BTC spent in comparison.
Wikipedia: My Wikipedia experience is generally still very pleasant, although I'm aware of some categories of issues they face, I definitely have a more enjoyable time using Wikipedia on average than using Firefox. I still plan to continue using FF or forks of it, but Chrome has a lot of very nice performance advantages too.
Diet: Skepticism is great to have with anything related to diet and supplements; the science is not only very hard, but there are insanely large profit motives for most parties involved, so that's always reasonable imo. On lipids/cholesterol, Peter Attia has some great podcasts on it (and on a ton of other things) that I mostly agree with his thoughts on, but it's safe to say that the mainstream consensus is very lacking there. Your diet sounds pretty interesting and potentially really nice, it's probably better to get what you want without needding supplementation if possible, I mostly am just being lazy with mine right now. You should definitely get tested from things though, it can't hurt (besides costing a bit). The last time I was tested for heavy metals the result was too low to be detected by the test, so I don't worry about them personally.
Thanks for the response, happy to chat about this or any other topic any time.
I'm looking for new female friends in my area (I live in Ramat Gan, Israel). I'm 38yo, divorced, engaged, have two children and a cat. My job is saving the world from the AI apocalypse. I'm a long time Scott Alexander fangirl, LessWronger, and a regular in the local effective altruism group. Approximately vegan. I love reading science fiction and fantasy, especially romance (but not only). Enjoy most types of music besides extreme metal. On the normie side, I like shopping, cafes/restaurants, cinema and dancing (although I rarely get to do the last two). Contact me at rot13 (https://rot13.com/) of uvtucevrfgrffbsryhn@tznvy.pbz.
Not a direct response, but I've been thinking about moving back to Israel recently - is there an interesting way/rat scene? Are there people actually working on AI safety stuff there?
For the ea group, it's interesting that the people I know on the Facebook group aren't who I'd have expected - they're mostly moderately-nerdy-but-mostly-normy girls I went to high school with, rather than the types of people I typically expect in ea/rat space.
https://onlinecounsellingtherapist.com/
A Twitter bot I built to share rationalist and effective alturism type posts from a range of sources.
https://twitter.com/RationalReads
I have a new blog and my first post is about what I learned from forecasting the fourth wave of Covid in Georgia the country: https://nealzupancic.substack.com/p/peak-predictions
I'm looking for a good functional medicine doctor in San Francisco. If you have anyone to recommend, could you email me daveey [at] gmail? Much appreciated!
Unix sydadmin / programmer / person who can work on other people's perl code / welder / machinist / general fabrication / mechanic / former EMT / commercial truck driver (yeah, it's an eclectic list) currently based in Albuquerque and willing to relocate to Dallas. (Or work remotely, of course, but my goal is to live in one place.) If that sounds like something that your company could use, drop an email to sandro (dot) rettinger [at] protonmail dotcom asking for a copy of my resume and I'll get you one.
I write some meaningless posts about the funny thing called life, and all of them are just ... I don't know, you can call them whatever you want. https://salahuddin-ob.wixsite.com/salahuddin-cave
I'm a college student working on a startup 3D printing hydroponic towers. Trying to scale, outsourcing experience and wisdom is hard. Words of advice/inquiries: sechernbiw3000@protonmail.com
This sounds really cool! I've been looking into Hydroponics for years but haven't had the space. Can you say any more about what you have in mind?
I'm working on an analog synthesizer and would love to partner up with someone to design and sell affordable analog audio gear. Harass me at greg dot lorincz 79 at gmail.
(Eh why not?)
Check out my blog for misc. musings on various meta-issues, including good, evil, and how to live a good life. Sometimes, begrudgingly, I touch base with the real world and give some Takes.
https://www.metalevelup.com
My most popular series of posts by far was an attempted meta-analysis of takes on Scott's sort-of-battle with the NYT; see part 1 here https://www.metalevelup.com/post/scott-alexander-vs-nyt-meta-analysis-part-1.
I'm the CTO of Coral (owncoral.com) and seeking talented software engineers and UX designers. Our mission is to democratize real estate investing, making it simple for anyone to own a share of a rental property. Coral insulates you from hassle and complexity—you just collect the rent check.
Do you have a passion for real estate, design, or application development? If so, you would make a great teammate. We're fully remote and (rather unusually for a startup) already profitable.
Interested? Please reply below, or apply at owncoral.com/careers
Hello, could you give a compensation band for the remote senior eng position?
Would depend on fit and level of experience (we don't work via fixed salary bands). We're very aware of industry comp and have gotten feedback that our offers were competitive.
I blog some thoughts I have about libertarianism, anthropics, AI alignment, computation, culture, and other rationalist-adjacent things that interest me at <https://carado.moe/>.
Topics include
• What does wolfram physics imply for long-term ethics and AI alignment
• What axiomatic values can be behind liking art
• Should we keep a paperclip AI ready to fire in case a timeline looks like it's headed for S-risks
• How can we combat intellectual property law
• Why is unicode oppresive by nature of being centralized
https://twitter.com/carad0 is a twitter dedicated solely to linking new posts on that blog.
I'd hope and expect many amongst the ACT cabal to be interested in the decades worth of material, mostly in interactive PDF eBook formats, up on our primary website... <https://cultivateunderstanding.com> devoted to archiving, interpreting, and conserving ecological and cultural assets (primarily in South and Southeast Asia)... with your critical feedback most appreciated.
I've been working on a series of short stories and one short novel, all set at various points up and down the next thousand years or so of a future history. I suspect that ACX readers would find them interesting, and many of my ideas were inspired by things I first found out about here. If out-there high-concept sci fi is your thing, I'd suggest Seeker (https://ascentuniverse.wordpress.com/2018/08/30/seeker/), and if you want something more straightforward that introduces the world, there's Threshold (https://ascentuniverse.wordpress.com/2021/02/12/threshold/). My longest piece, Ascent, starts here (https://ascentuniverse.wordpress.com/)
I have published three novels, all available on Amazon in print and kindle. One complaint I get about them is that the characters are too rational, so rationalists might enjoy them. _Harald_ is also available as an audiobook read by me (on Audible and, less conveniently but free, on my web page), and _Salamander_ is available on Audible read by someone else, I think very well. The first and second are unrelated, _Brothers_, the third, is a sequel to _Salamander_.
Also, I'm in the process of turning the ideas in fifteen years of my blog into one or more books, posting sections as a finish drafts, and would be glad of comments: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Ideas%20I/Ideas%20I_%20A%20Book%20from%20Blogs.html
It would be helpful of a classified thread had some internal structure, so that one could find the things one was interested in without going through lots of other stuff. The simplest way would be for Scott start with a series of posts, each a category: "Employment Opportunities," "Mate Search," ... Then posters could make their posts responses to the appropriate category post.
Good point, I might try something like that next time.
Meet relevant professionals over games; build your network and have fun! camaraderous.com
I'm a mid-20's rational-ish male software dev and in all respects probably pretty typical SSC-er, looking for housing in the SF Bay area (ideally east bay). If you're looking for a roommate, whether you have a place already or not, I can be reached at rot13 ubhfvat@nagbacndh.va
I have a DeviantArt page (https://www.deviantart.com/concavenator/gallery) where I sometimes post artwork and short stories mostly concerning life on other worlds, in the deep past and far future, and in alternate universes. The most popular single post seems to be my Gods of Salt (https://tinyurl.com/zr9dhzps), which is about a hypothetical version of the origin of our species involving elephants and the drying of the Mediterranean.
Ongoing projects include Tagra (https://tinyurl.com/nyuhch28, https://tagra.pinkgothic.com/) (a doomed civilization of dinosaurs in pre-glacial Antarctica) and Planet Ea (https://tinyurl.com/nat2zpbn, https://specevo.jcink.net/index.php?showtopic=2786) (life on an alien planet, colonized by humans who broke into factions according to political ideologies).
Sometimes I also draw real-science infographics (https://tinyurl.com/63kjeser), the one of which I'm proudest being a summary of human evolution from the origin of life.
Thought it might be interesting to some people around here -- I did meet a couple last time :)
Gods of Salt is probably my favorite cracked prehistory theory. Props.
A friend and I made a fun little JavaScript puzzle game with a unique mechanic, check it out at hardestmaze.com (works on mobile, too!)
This is great! It reminds me a little bit of 'Baba is You', but it explores the space really well.
Tutorial level 10 is literally impossible.
Go over the green square on your way to the coin! The green square cannot turn to lava.
Pretty cool! I'm stuck at some levels, though, and "x" button from the instruction doesn't work for me. And the game also doesn't seems to be able to save my progress within a block :< I want to continue playing but so far I'm stuck pretty soon after the tutorial
As it is now, it saves what level you are on when you leave, but not within each section (which would be better, we'll fix that at some point). Also, we intended to remove the skip feature, but its still there if you use shift-x
I'm ex-Coinbase and started a crypto company Goldfinch (https://goldfinch.finance/). Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, we're bringing crypto to the real world by connecting crypto capital with fintechs throughout the world (starting with emerging markets). We're hiring! If you are a software engineer, ops, or credit person, check out our jobs at careers.goldfinch.finance . We'd love to chat!
We are trying to be the next generation of Marginal Revolution at EconomistWritingEveryDay.com
We are mere mortals so it takes seven of us to get near the quantity of posts that Tyler and Alex do; I'll let you judge the quality. Several of us were students of theirs, and the blog recently won an Emergent Ventures prize. Recent posts have covered Covid, beer prices, and more and less successful ways to pay employees with things other than money.
I’m a financial advisor and I work on a 4 person team managing investments (~ half a billion dollars) for high net worth families. If you are thinking about a major financial move, just inherited some money, sold a business, are approaching retirement, or just have questions about investing or money issues, I’m available to talk. Focused on tech, ESG, impact investing, effective altruism and philanthropy. I will develop a basic financial plan with no fees or strings attached for SSC community members. We get paid around 1% a year on assets we manage if you bring in an account.
Clay@wealthmanagement.anonaddy.me
Do you mean that a potential customer needs ~ half a billion dollars or is that your total Assets Under Management?
I'm looking for a job in the broader DC/Baltimore area, starting as soon as you need me--it could be something as basic as an administrative assistantship, but I need something that will put food on the table. My BA is in a humanities subject (Classical Languages and Linguistics, with a Russian minor), but I have a good head for numbers (perfect score on the math SAT back in 2012) and was poached to a big state school in the Midwest as a National Merit Scholar. I speak proficient (B2-C1) German and Portuguese and passable but improving Russian (B1); I can also read French, Spanish, Latin and Greek. I can code Python to a scripting level, but I think this is improvable (I recently got on ADHD medication for the first time since high school and it's improved things a *lot*.) I write quickly in a concise and elegant manner and have some experience teaching English abroad, so my customer service skills are not lacking.
If you think you might have a generic white-collar opening in the area for me, feel free to drop me a line at eateriesofub@gmail.com (that's my throwaway email; I'll respond from my real-name one.)
Are you willing to relocate? Feel free to say "Yes, if you throw money at me" or "no, not for all the utilions in the world."
Do you enjoy recreational programming challenges? Check out Code Golf, https://codegolf.codidact.com, one of the communities on the Codidact network. Codidact is a community-driven, open-source project; our motto is "by the community, for the community". We're taking what we've learned from years of participation on other platforms and trying to build the next great thing. Or ok, the next good thing. I wrote about our goals in this blog post: https://meta.codidact.com/posts/276296 .
We've got communities on other topics too, from software development to religion to cooking to math. We -- our communities and our network -- are small but aspiring to grow. The development team, too, is small but growing. We welcome and appreciate any help, from new community members to new communities to people interested in helping to build things. Most of us came from a place that put profits above people, and we don't want to be like that, so we're non-profit, open-source, community-driven.
There are links to all our communities and to our GitHub repo at https://codidact.org.
I am interested in finding out about the Rationalist community in Boston. Do they have a mailing list or online group?
Here you go! https://m.facebook.com/groups/1023018131571906/?ref=group_browse
Or, alternately: https://www.meetup.com/boston-astral-codex-meetup/?fbclid=IwAR0pXoR3p-B4a4WddgPjL3UA8p2Vn36Mi2R7jJTQrHtkNewAvcrxBan5Ln0
There’s also a not-very-active Discord, you can message in the Facebook group for an invite
What I did to find a group in my area was go back to the 2019 meetup thread and send an email there. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/28/meetups-everywhere-2019/
The one for Boston had this info
199 Harvard St Apt 2
Cambridge, MA 02139
(about 8 minutes walk from Central MBTA station)
Contact: boston-lw-organizers at googlegroups dot com
I have no idea about what kind of coordinating thingimajigs rationalish people in the Boston area have, but I happen to be one such person. (Are you?)
I write about science/metascience and other topics : www.youneskamel.com
If you want to follow news about effective altruism on Twitter, there is a bot that regularly tweets new top posts from the EA Forum (twitter.com/EAForumPosts) and another one that (re-)tweets high-impact job offers (twitter.com/effective_jobs) relevant to the EA community
I write a webfiction called Headcase about a psychic superhero doing entertaining superhero things. Give it a look if you want. Or don't. It's all up to you, of course. There's no pressure.
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/43792/headcase
I'm also a decent artist who sometimes takes commissions. You can check out my twitter and let me know how I'm doing at this whole creative polymath thing. I really should take up music to round it out, I know, but the earlier parts of the learning curve are always the most boring.
https://twitter.com/Shaeor1
And finally if you just want to chat, my discord ID is Shaeor#7214 and my interests are biologism, spirituality, and often moreover the unholy mixture of the two. I am single and ready to mingle if you happen to be female. 21, 6'4, 145 IQ, into fitness, but with only mediocre prospects. IE: prime rib.
Do you like giving advice? I want to know what you think about how I can do the most good in the world. I have experience in communications; am interested in data science, public policy, sociology, and linguistics; am starting college this fall and majoring in math. What projects, job opportunities, and areas of study should I prioritize?
t [dot] amarchana640 [at] gmail [dot] com
I'd like to push back against the other suggestions. Instead of jumping straight to acquiring skills, I would start by figuring out which problems in the world you think are most pressing, and then work backwards to figure out the skills that will best position you to have an impact there.
It's important to carefully pick the problems you want to work on, because the opportunities for having an impact vary HUGELY between them—perhaps 1000x or more.
The organization 80,000 Hours has done a lot of research into how to use your career to do the most good in the world. I recommend checking out their framework for prioritizing problems (which ones are the most important, neglected, and tractable?). And if you want to work on one of the problems they identify as most pressing—including AI safety, biosecurity, global priorities research, etc.—they've got lots of advice on how to prepare for those careers.
Contrary to other commenters, if you don't have a clear idea of what specifically you want to work on, I'd encourage you to focus on mathematics, since it's a great jumping-off point for many kinds of impactful work.
Introduction to 80,000 Hours' ideas: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas/
Hi Hannah, I would prioritize data science. If you're good at analytics, and the communication of that analytics, then that can lead to high paying job offers or influential positions. Either of those situations would be helpful to bettering the world.
Communications + public policy + data science should position you well for public-good proejcts/nonprofits. You won't make tons of money but you can help do good in the world. Pick your favorite area of advocacy and look for the non-profits trying to do much with little. Maybe you can get some internship projects while you're in school. I learned the most about how software works in the real world, as opposed to tidy classroom exercises, from my internships.
Sounds like you're very well-positioned to do a lot of good! I'll bet you've read 80,000 Hours' advice (https://80000hours.org/key-ideas/) already?
Atomic Libertarianism: Apartheid South Africa. Read my MSc thesis! 6 months of nonstop shtick. Submission in a week. I would love some thoughts/advice/edits. Also features some novel econometrics! Doc: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KdLNEBw09TKfcNeS7mVNFb95lqVdqq7j/view?usp=sharing
Email me at: peter.courtney (at) wur (dot)nl
I write weird fiction action-adventure RPG adventures, weird fiction action-adventure stories, and am in the process of writing a weird fiction action-adventure poem (that doubles as an RPG adventure)
https://grandcommodore.blogspot.com/
Hi, I have just been shadowbanned from Reddit for the contents of my science blog:
https://questioner.substack.com/
I suspect that this is because the science that I write about - superforecasting and memetics - is inherently political. There is nothing in my Reddit account that violates the terms of service - I do not advocate for violate, nor do I use any slurs - so the only possible reason for my shadowbanning is my political views. You are welcome to look through my profile yourselves to confirm this: https://www.reddit.com/user/SocratesScissors
I am looking for somebody based out of Florida who would be willing to occasionally post links to my blog posts to a few subs. The reason I need them to be based out of Florida is because of robust free speech protections that fine social media companies $100k per day if they ban somebody from posting based on their political views. I want to make it very expensive for social media companies to silence people simply because they disagree with their opinions.
Please reach out to me at flint.baldirk@gmail.com if interested.
Lmao
I presume you know that you were probably shadowbanned for some random algorithmic reason, and not politically? And that you’re rather unlikely to succeed in your action? It’s be really funny if you did, but I’d bet a lot of money that it wouldn’t, especially if there’s no precedent of that law being applied.
Sorry, I misinterpreted the details of the law, it's not $100k per day but instead $100k total.
Promoting two groups that do counter-racialization work for the workplace:
Chloe Valdary (@cvaldary) runs Theory of Enchantment, which does workplace training that is aimed at inclusion and not grievance. https://theoryofenchantment.com/
Counterweight (@counter_weight_) offers counseling & scripts for people facing CRT-supported bias in the workplace.
Another workplace culture program, not just aimed at identity-focused issues, is Arbinger. https://arbinger.com/ Aimed at breaking down interpersonal barriers, and seeing strengths of other people while tackling your own challenges.
We are a brand new erotic literature platform - specifically for women by women. We're launching with an erotic literature writing competition with a cash prize of £100 for the winner. Our content is very short form - most of our stories are only a few pages. Check us out at https://tellingeros.com/
If you and your partner have an issue that might need help from a third person to figure out, I can offer to be that third person. I'm just a rando on the internet so my comparative advantage is with shameful shit that you can't discuss with friends.
My qualifications are that I've been happily married for seven years to a couples therapist, lots of friends like to turn to me for relationship advice, I speak fluent SSCish and I do it for free so I don't even need to know your names. My condition is that I need to spak to both of you at the same time - no venting about your partner while s/he isn't there.
If you want to have a call (video optional), email me at ritmag@gmail.com with "SSC Classifieds Offer" in the email title, before August 17.
I want to start a service for the self-employed, 1099, etc, that does two things. A) Invests your earnings in low-risk stuff to claw back a couple percent before the quarterly taxes kick in and B) Does this "behind the scenes", and just pays you monthly or biweekly as if you were W-2. Then helps with your taxes for you at the end of the year.
I am looking for an accountant to kick around some ideas with and potentially collaborate with. Please message me at derek@fulton.consulting.
I am building a stablecoin (a cryptocurrency with something like an automated central bank) that does not rely on any external oracle:
https://medium.com/icewatermoney/three-innovations-in-h2o-e6e9c0b51d58
Some quick feedback: ICE and STM are already taken as cryptoasset ticker abbreviations, although H2O isn't taken yet. You'll need to be a *lot* more creative with naming things.
That having been written, I do find your idea (stabilizing currency by comparing it to its future value) is pretty smart.
Thanks. And yeah, we’ll have to settle on tickers when we launch mainnet.
If you live in Brazil and
● are a student
● are a parent
● work at / run a school, or
● just care about education,
Have a look at https://tutormundi.com
We solve the two sigma problem
Long time lurker (started reading SSC when Tyler Cowen linked a post years ago), first time poster.
I'm a process (chemical) engineer with twenty years of experience (mostly in natural gas processing, but looking to diversify) who is looking for work. Currently based in Calgary, Alberta, but will relocate as necessary.
Send an e-mail to jmvarty@hotmail.com if you would like to take a look at my resume.
I'm building a no-code builder for blockchain apps (on Ethereum) https://buildship.dev. The vision is that web3.js + solidity is quite complicated even for and we need to aggressively push down the entry barrier into *building* on blockchain.
Now I have a set of developer tools that helps with development and deployment of any blockchain app (still in private) and a plugin for publishing your own NFT collection on your website
I also have a small Telegram group, not very active right now, but if you have questions, you can ask them here: https://t.me/buildship
If your team runs hybrid meetings (some in office, some remote) then you can check us out here:
https://between.app/
Basically remote members can move their audio around the room itself, so they'll have a better vocal presence instead of everyone being squashed behind a TV.
And also, they can talk at the same time and have different conversations with people.
It's not out yet to the public though because we still have to fine tune the architecture/audio but you can sign up for a quick demo.
How can I contact you? You're on LinkedIn but I need to pay for Premium to send messages apparently, and ugh, I hate LinkedIn.
I'm the founder and CEO of a virtual school for children ages 8-18,
www.socraticexperience.com
Our early adopters are intellectual, creative, or entrepreneurial children who are unhappy with a conventional schooling experience. At the secondary level, our program includes two hours of conversation, one of which is more informal and focused on personal growth issues (How do we learn from our mistakes? How do we deal with annoying people? How do we think about what we want to do in life?) and another hour that is based on mostly classic texts from diverse world cultures along with some contemporary texts (our faculty is reading and discussing a chapter from Henrich's "The Secret of Our Success" tomorrow).
Students enjoy our Socratic discussions so much that they asked us to continue them over the summer. I've had students create their own groups on evenings and weekends. It turns out that discussing ideas (and reading idea-rich texts to do so) is an enjoyable activity if one is enculturated in the right way and the participants are mutually respectful. I literally wrote the book on enculturating students to discuss ideas constructively,
https://www.amazon.com/Habit-Thought-Socratic-Seminars-Practice/dp/0944337392
(available more cheaply from me than through Amazon)
Writing is based on the arguments students become engaged in during Socratics, with no teacher-assigned prompts but an overall orientation towards learning to organize one's thoughts, typically in essay format.
Math is largely self-paced using adaptive software and small coaching groups so that students can advance at their own pace, with mathematically capable students encouraged to go as fast as they can. The adaptive software days alternate with problem solving days using diverse resources, including group math competition problem sets with problem solving strategies discussed as a group so that students develop a much broader repertoire of problem solving techniques.
We straddle the boundary between "school" and "self-directed learning." Students opt in to almost everything. We offer both accredited and unaccredited high school options so that those who want grades and standard credits can get them and those that don't want them are not obliged to do so. This means that courses do not include students who hate being there. Our admissions process filters for students who want to take greater ownership over their own education. Because everything is so personalized, we can accommodate a very wide range of learners. Parents and students who want traditional structures and traditional teaching should run away.
The daily Socratic discussions on difficult texts lead to higher than average SAT verbal gains. We provide optional SAT administrations in high school using free Khan Academy practice tests three times per year starting in grade 9, so that students who are working towards selective college admissions have plenty of time to crank up their scores if they choose to do so. Because we tend to attract creatives and humanists (80%) more than STEM geeks, often they find that their verbal scores are much higher than their math scores - and then they decide to work hard to crank up their math scores.
Although we offer some cool science courses internally ("The science of video games," taught by a math ABD, "Self Optimization" based in part on the Quantified Self movement) we also support students in taking courses from the immense world of MOOCS and other virtual providers. Likewise with history, foreign language, etc.
All students are expected to be working on projects based on their interests. In middle school, the projects are modest and simply fun for students to do and share with their peers. By senior year, however, they are expected to do substantial real world projects. Stossel did a good video showing some of the projects at one of my pre-COVID bricks-and-morter schools,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdL8VCcN0IE
The weekly mentoring sessions are often focused on helping students develop more substantial projects over time. This is a long, slow process. Cal Newport's perspective on how to get into Stanford with Bs on your transcript, based on the psychology of impressiveness, is very similar to how I think of great projects and college admissions,
https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2010/03/26/how-to-get-into-stanford-with-bs-on-your-transcript-failed-simulations-the-surprising-psychology-of-impressiveness/
The program is based on my thirty-five years in education starting with Mortimer Adler's Paideia project, moving on through Montessori education (including founding the high school model for the largest Montessori chain in the US), creating a school for highly gifted children at which middle school students passed AP exams, and creating a charter school in Angel Fire, NM, that was ranked the 36th best public high school in the U.S. on Newsweek's Challenge Index.
More on my background and perspective here (somewhat dated),
https://thepurposeofeducation.wordpress.com/about-michael-strong/
In addition to students from like minded families. I'm also raising more capital from aligned investors. Ping me at michael@socraticexperience.com if you have a child who may be a good fit or if you are interested in partnering as an investor.
I am a self-taught novice data scientist with a sideline in machine learning. I'm about at the level where I can put together crude computer vision systems. I will take on small-scale, interesting projects for free; all I ask for is the right to use those projects as part of my portfolio when I look for a new job.
Want a whole bunch of video game screenshots and trailers to train off of? You could work on problems like:
- This image has a character in it
- This image has text in it
- This image has <ui element> in it
- This image looks like first person perspective
- This image looks like top-down camera view
- This image looks like <art style>
Hit me up at lars.doucet@gmail.com if interested and I can share my data set.
I made and sell a debating card game on the side, to have (usually entertainingly ridiculous) discussions with assorted fallacies, biases and shoddy reasoning - currently available in German only, though the English version is ready for production and I'm only stalling because I don't want to use Amazon for distribution (suggestions for this are welcome).
https://rhetorisches-quartett.de/
(this thread comes at the inopportune moment where I am on holiday, my hoster renewed certificates and did something wrong, and so https isn't working - hopefully this has been fixed by the time you read this)
I've just started a company with a coworker and im too excited to not share it.
www.030solutions.com
Drop me a line if you are a electrical utility, have a distributed infrastructure to be mapped or like lazers or AI!
I'm looking for a job and would love to work with someone in this community, especially in the impact world or around topics relevant to the rationalist community.
I write copy and content in the medical / pharma spaces but have written across blockchain and biotech. I've worked with top brands like Colgate and have direct clinical experience, along with a publication record in professional pharmaceutical research.
nicholairoscoe.com
Thanks for reading!
For anyone looking to reduce household plastic waste, it can be difficult to find high quality, convenient plastic replacements. Shopzebo.com is a zero waste subscription box that packages several plastic-free everyday essentials, such as toothpaste, soap, and detergent pods, in one convenient quarterly box. Unlike other subscription boxes, you can choose exactly what goes into your box so you don't waste stuff you don't need.
I'm interested, but some of these prices seem really high. I'm not sure this is within scope for your project, but I'd like to see a cheap, low-plastic middle ground (e.g. selling normal floss with just the spool, no box.) Also, I wish the prices were easier to find, and you might want to put the cheapest items front and center in order to combat sticker shock.
Hello all,
I'm a traditionally published novelist whose work often involves a character's rational understanding of a situation butting heads against her irrational instincts about how to react in that situation, and I always strive to be aware of cognitive biases (my own and my characters') in my writing. I'm posting here because, anecdotally, people who are drawn to rationality seem to enjoy my work.
My first novel, The Last One, is about a woman who is on a reality TV show when the world ends, and she thinks it's all just part of the show. The book was published in 25 languages, selected as a Seattle Times Best Book of 2016, and was a finalist for the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards (in the science-fiction category).
My second novel, Forget Me Not, just came out a few months ago and is about a woman who shouldn't exist--she was born to replace a dead older sister she never knew about and then essentially abandoned to raise herself on an isolated, rural property. Upon escaping this property at the age of twelve, she became a social media sensation (in all the worst ways), and now, as an adult, she's an anxious, agoraphobic recluse who lives in complete terror of being recognized. The story starts with her hesitantly striking up a friendship with a new neighbor, a charismatic data scientist who introduces her to the escapism and wonder of VR. Then there is a mysterious fire at her childhood home, which draws her back into the public eye, and everything kinda takes off from there...
Anyway, I'm a big fan of the site. If either of my books sound like they're up your alley, you can check them out here:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/530330/the-last-one-by-alexandra-oliva/9781101966839/
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/531190/forget-me-not-by-alexandra-oliva/9781101966846/
Thanks!
I write a serial adventure novel in the Cathayan martial arts and Occidental fantasy traditions.
Li Bai, van Beethoven, Radioaktivität.
Tang Dynasty, Magna Germania, Marie Skłodowska Curie.
Gnomen, J. Alfred Prufrock, Jómsborg Vikings.
https://feikayser.substack.com/p/when-a-girl-is-seventeen
A discord about financial independence through crypto and side businesses
discord.gg/K6WfHphzBj
I occasionally blog here: https://www.tbbakker.nl/#posts on topics relating machine learning and Bayesian probability theory. I'm a PhD student in machine learning, with a background in physics.
Current posts contain musings on Bayesian probability theory as 'the one true way of doing inference', and how to get to modern-day ML from there. Writing these really helped me get a good sense of how those two disparate islands of knowledge relate, so I thought I'd share.
Side note for Scott if he reads this: Initially thought this sort of thread wouldn't be interesting; turned out it was pretty cool.
I just thought the same thing to myself.
I own a small company that makes custom coins/belt buckles/poker chips/bottle openers, etc. - Most of our customers are military or police, but if anyone here needs something custom like this, please reach out to me. www.kiddercorp.com
These seem really cool, but I'm having trouble understanding what the ballpark price would be. If I wanted to get, say 50 coins with the effective altruism symbol on them, would that cost 50$? 5000$?
One of the issues with dealing with small runs of custom goods is that there are very few typical cases. That said, my company quotes projects upfront and gives final all-inclusive pricing before an order is placed in production (giving you the final say if the numbers work for you). The most common coins are 1.75" or 2" and they run about $550 for 100 or $5.50/each. But "typical" isn't why most of my customers come to us - we specialize in high relief 3D and projects with moving parts (hinges/doors/etc). I've done MTG counters, custom metal fidget spinners, and coins that have holograms embedded in them. I can provide more information (without needlessly boring people here) if you want.
I write stuff on health care policy for the Niskanen Center:
https://www.niskanencenter.org/author/robert-orr/
I blog at: https://www.someweekendreading.blog.
I'm a recently retired scientist: PhD in theoretical physics, worked in machine learning and statistics. For the last 20 or so years, I've worked in cancer research (which gene to target, in which disease, in which patients, and how to construct a biomarker that predicts response to therapy).
I blog about a variety of things (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/about) including pharmaceutical research, what to believe about statistics in the news, random bits of physics, random quotes I've found useful over the years (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/quotes/), and some politics (if there's a quantitative angle). The tags page (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/tags/) is sort of a subject index to posts.
My blog has been consumed with COVID news, and I look forward to the day when I can write about ANYTHING else!
Some suggested entry points on:
COVID: using wastewater viral RNA as a predictive biomarker for medical loads (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/wastewater-redux/), vaccines and variants (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/variants-vs-vaccines/), reading the mRNA sequence in the vaccines (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/reading-mrna-vaccines/), the thrombosis fiasco (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/covid-vaccines-and-clots/) and other related risk rates (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/jnj-thrombosis-pause/), live-blogging the vaccine approvals (Pfizer: https://www.someweekendreading.blog/beautiful-vaccines/, their efficacy confidence interervals: https://www.someweekendreading.blog/pfizer-vaccine-efficacy-confidence-intervals/, Moderna: https://www.someweekendreading.blog/beautiful-vaccines-2/, JnJ: https://www.someweekendreading.blog/jnj-vaccine-vrbpac-review/), and why statins seem to help treating COVID-19 (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/covid-vs-statins-ace-inhibitors/).
Random bits of science: the "Wow!" signal and a modern star catalog (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/wow-signal/).
Using math to think about politics: whether the Boston Police Department is racially different from Boston (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/bpd-racial-makeup/), calming my election jitters with the Beta-Binomial distribution (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/night-of-the-living-beta-binomials/), whether COVID infects one clade of politicians more than another (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/covid-loves-republicans/), factors influencing impeachment votes by Senators (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/republican-impeachment-votes/), who voted & who didn't and how sure we are about that (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/who-voted/).
Random weird or beautiful stuff: Dracula tourism in Romania and vaccines (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/dracula-vaccine/), parasailing with raptors (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/free-bird/), Pi Day and continued fractions (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/pi-day/), how Dolly Parton earned my respect somewhat to my surprise (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/i-guess-i-like-dolly-parton/), getting struck by lightning while in a clinical trial and reporting severe adverse events (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/moderna-struck-by-lightning/), some thoughts on the solstice and orbital mechanics (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/solstice-vs-dodds-day/), why my cat is the trans male reincarnation of an Egyptian cat goddess (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/le-chat-noir/), and the best video summary of the pandemic year (https://www.someweekendreading.blog/pandemic-in-retrospect/).
That's probably more than you want to know. :-)
It's one of those weird blogs actually hosted at GitHub, with pages generated from a repository of (mostly) markdown. That part was actually kind of fun, though I'm still figuring it out. So the layout is... "rudimentary".
Everything you need to know about Universal Basic Income:
https://tinyurl.com/UBIMD
Why are you hiding behind a tinyurl.com?
Because I have a morbid fear that bad men will come to my house and kill me.
Or because it is easier for people to type.
I'd guess for 'tracking', e.g. to know how many readers of this post follow the link.
I write a niche webcomic about fantasy novels and computer games, come be one of our 20 readers! http://involuntarybookclub.thecomicseries.com/
The novel is good, very atmospheric.
I write a weekly digest of things worth paying attention to across tech, finance, media and art https://gokhansahin.substack.com/p/curated-content-for-busy-folk-43
Here's my 20-year-old blog on D&D and mythological feline hybrid creatures, plus a little humor. https://cayzle.com
Check out my podcast
https://spoti.fi/3Ccb5W2
Can you give us an idea of what you speak about? I've already got sooo many tabs open from this thread ....
Listen to my podcast The Mind Killer! https://mindkiller.substack.com/
We cover the news from the last 2 weeks from a rationalist perspective. Co-hosted by Eneasz Brodski (of the Bayesian Conspiracy and the Methods of Rationality podcast) and David from the Bayesian Conspiracy Discord server.
Read my (super inactive) blog: https://artofproblemsolving.com/community/c646140
Every year, state and local economic development agencies hand out an estimated $95 billion in tax abatements, grants and other forms of targeted economic development subsidies. For context, that's enough to fund the 11 smallest state budgets, combined.
The nonprofit organization I lead, the Center for Economic Accountability (www.economicaccountability.org), works to bring transparency, accountability and market-based reforms to state and local economic development programs across the country. We base our education and advocacy efforts on a growing body of research from across the ideological spectrum that finds these subsidies to be ineffective at best and harmful at worst at "creating jobs" or fostering economic prosperity.
We've collected a selection of the research here for anyone interested: https://economicaccountability.org/research-resources/, and are always happy to talk to researchers working in this space or local activists interested in addressing what's going on in their community. You can follow us on Twitter at @accountableecon.
Special offer to fellow ACT readers: email me your mailing address at info@economicaccountability.org and I'll send you a free "PAY FOR YOUR OWN DAMN STADIUM" sticker. Currently available in Oakland A's, Washington Football Team and generic red-white-n-blue colors.
Are you narrowly against tax subsidies or do you have a broader philosophical platform (such as new urbanism, etc) that can help me understand your overall goals?
We do have an organizational vision, which is "a future where free markets and the rule of law create economic opportunity for all, and in which American state and municipal governments efficiently provide essential public services while forswearing corporate welfare and central planning." Our starting point is that libertarian, limited-government worldview. However, we work closely and regularly with allies from across the ideological spectrum who have very different visions for the ideal future yet have reached the same conclusion about the damage these subsidy programs do to our communities. (For instance, I've worked with a chapter leader of Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network who once told me, "I don't agree with you on much, but I'm on your side with this.")
So yes, we're focused narrowly on the need to reform these subsidy programs, and we largely let others with more specific expertise talk about what other things cities and states could be doing to improve economic opportunity. There's plenty of smart people out there discussing those issues, and we've got our hands full simply trying to stop the bleeding. In this regard, you can think of us like anti-smoking advocates: We'd like you to be healthier and we'll happily point you in the direction of others who can help you with things like diet or exercise if you're open to more fundamental life improvements, but if all you do is just quit smoking then we've achieved our mission.
If we're in a situation where Saul Alinsky's "The price of a successful attack is a viable alternative" puts us in the position of making policy prescriptions, then we tend to suggest that communities start by addressing basic quality of life issues, which even the site selection industry's own research regularly calls out as a critical factor in site selection. You can see an example of that in a piece I wrote for the Manhattan Institute's City Journal earlier this year: https://www.city-journal.org/ny-economic-development-focus-on-quality-of-life-not-subsidies.
Hi I've started a newsletter on drones.
You can find it at https://propwash.nihalmohan.com/
I share some news and reports on the drone space, and occasionally write some longer investigative pieces like this one - https://propwash.nihalmohan.com/issues/propwash-7-how-a-ufo-sighting-shut-down-a-major-airport-and-drones-were-blamed-691855
Hi, I'm a rising Junior in computer science looking for an internship for this fall or next summer. I've built a couple really cool projects including an optimized interpreter for (most of) prolog and a script that solves the 8-puzzle using a pattern database. This summer I'm building a React/Typescript project for SoftBank's Masason AI incubator. Let me know if you have anything!
github: github.com/leo-ware
email: leoware at minerva dot kgi dot edu
Where are you based?
Out of curiosity, would you expect this to be a paid internship ? I ask because we do need a React/Typescript person, but we don't have any money :-( The work is bound to be exciting, though.
Ahh, I do need something paid, sorry
Fair enough; to be honest, we can afford to pay *something*, but we cannot afford to pay the average American salary. At least, not at the moment.
Shall we continue the conversation over email?
Email sent.
I have started a Substack. Some posts will be free while others will be paid. Currently I plan to review the following books:
*The Cambridge History of Latin America*, Volumes 1 and 2
*Saburo Ienaga’s The Pacific War: 1931-1945*
Richard von Glahn’s *The Economic History of China: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century*
Walter Lippmann's *Public Opinion*
The Substack (Ehardingland) is linked next to my name here.
I'm working on a product called Runbooks (https://runbooks.app). It's a team productivity website/app that combines a user manual with a checklist. I created it based upon years of experience running software / DevOps teams where it's common to have detailed technical processes that greatly benefit from using checklists both to ensure correctness and repeatability. The product also provides a nice dashboard to know what everyone is working on, and email notifications as work progresses to coordinate between people working on the same task.
How are you going to keep Basecamp from demolishing your product?
As Kenny says, a runbook is very different from the various kinds of documents you can create in BaseCamp. In essence, my product lets you create a step-by-step manual for how to perform some complex task. Then, when it's time to perform the task, it will create a checklist from that manual which allows you to both track the results (e.g., for audit purposes) and share them with the rest of your team. It's possible to get pieces of that functionality with various other products (e.g., MediaWiki MS Word, BaseCamp), but none of those understand what a runbook is or why you want the dynamic tracking piece. Not to mention, my product has a lot of other useful features (e.g., assigning steps to individual team members, due dates, etc.).
Sorry, that wasn't well worded (no edit feature!). I meant to ask how you'll differentiate yourself from Basecamp's to-do list product.
I haven't even looked at Basecamp in years, but a 'runbook' is very different than a todo list. Does Basecamp have runbook features?
Awesome!
I do something similar with (private) GitLab projects. I create 'issue templates' as 'runbooks' and then create an issue to serve as a 'runlog'.
With my 'potential customer' hat on, I'd be worried about the limits on the number of runbooks available at each pricing tier, but that may just be because I'm totally sold on the value of runbooks already and I'd want to 'runbook all of the things' for any business or operation I was managing.
Very cool! I've been tinkering with something like this as a hobby project. Our core use cases and approaches to UI/UX are pretty different, but the "run book" / "run list" distinction is a core similarity (and, I think, an important one).
I look forward to trying out Runbooks. Happy to chat more about this offline if you're interested.
I guess I might as well advertise our company's product, a genome viewer:
https://web.persephonesoft.com/?bookmark=BB9B3520505E52DBA7366C0F1F2A58E4
Just to scale down your expectations, this is a low-level tool aimed at biologists; it cannot tell you what diseases you're likely to have or where your ancestors came from or which medicine is best for your condition. But it will let you zoom in smoothly from bird's-eye view of multiple chromosomes down into individual nucleotides, without having to wait several minutes between mouse wheel clicks. It can also run BLAST in real time, either to show local alignment or to perform a search across multiple genomes; plus a lot of other useful things.
Here's a video tutorial to get you started (narrated by my boss):
https://persephonesoft.com/an-18-min-video-presentation-on-web-persephone/
Before you ask, yes, I do realize that we have some gaps in functionality; for example, we currently cannot display VCF files or QTLs. We should have those done relatively soon, along with other features such rich export and the Synteny Matrix.
If you are interested (and can afford to pay), our team will help you install and maintain the full stack in-house (really it's just a Docker container); this way, if you're working for a large corporation, you can rest assured that no proprietary data will ever leave your company firewall. We can also host it for you (and your team) in AWS, if that's what you'd prefer. You can leave us a quick message here:
https://persephonesoft.com/contact/
Your home page says "Let's Discuss" next to "Talk to us about a license". Do you have a secure monopoly in your niche? It seems that any competitor who posts a price will be instantly and infinitely cheaper.
We do not have a monopoly, and in fact our main competitor is JBrowse, an open source product. However, IMHO their quality is nowhere close to ours, although they are a much older tool, so their features are more varied.
Basically, I'd say that if you wanted a product that is a pleasure to use, is blindingly fast, and is reasonably easy to use, then you should sign up with us. If you work for a large corporation or a large research institution, you should install our stack in-house, so that we never have to see your proprietary data (we can help you with installation). However, if you're willing to suffer a bit, and to spend a lot of your own time on installation and customization, then you can go with JBrowse or some other free option.
How is this better than IGV?
Good question. The short answer is, it's not, because IGV is a special-purpose tool (mainly for BAM files), whereas Persephone -- our program -- is a general genome viewer. That said, we do have multiple advantages, the chief of these being pure speed:
* Once you load a BAM file (which can admittedly take up to several minutes), you can zoom in and out smoothly in real time, from individual reads/nucs all the way out to the chromosome level. The load times are measured in fractions of a second (if any), not minutes (or more).
* You can display multiple maps on the screen at the same time, connected by orthologs or common markers; once again, you can freely scroll or zoom the maps without multi-minute load times (which is what I've come to expect from IGV). We can also align physical and genetic maps: https://web.persephonesoft.com/?bookmark=CF12FB49307CDA01A9B7683C265F71A6
* We have a real-time BLAST interface that displays its results graphically, allowing you to easily QC your hits, look for transpositions, etc. If you display two physical maps side-by-side, and zoom in closely enough, you can also display real-time alignment.
* We also have a robust and fast search UI, where you can look up annots/markers/maps by name or by any qualifier. A typical query takes less than a second. Admittedly, we are trying to improve this UI with real-time graphical preview, like the one we have in our legacy version. For a simple example, try searching for "AT3G18610*".
Edit:
...try searching for "AT3G18610*" or "kinase"
i bought an electric bass more or less on impulse but partially because i need a new hobby. i am looking for a teacher who can get me started. so far it's been youtube. i would prefer in person - i live in Brooklyn (near carroll street stop on the F) but could travel a little bit.
I’m a violinist/violist based in New York. (Grad student at Juilliard) I play weddings, do recordings and I teach. I have had a lot of success teaching over zoom, both children and adults of all levels. If you’re looking for a teacher/performer you can contact me at megardiner124@gmail.com
Also feel free to contact me if you’re a fellow ACT reader in the NY area looking to meet new people! I’m always interested in making new friends here.
If you know some basic Java programming, and you wonder how to get from there to actually programming *games*, my new blog has some advice for you (so far, two posts). https://kittenlord.substack.com/archive
Each post comes with a full Maven project in Git, so that you can see everything in full context, and run it on your computer.
Hi - do you need some artwork on your plain bare walls so that your space feels..well …just better? If so, check out my art at Https://www.margaretwithers.com/paintings
Check out whynotparliamentarism.com
A case for the most successful "-ism" in history, which unfortunately has too few advocates.
^ endorsed as convincingly well-argued and well-evidenced. The book can be read in about a day.
Looking for a psychologist/educator to chat with about a gifted 10-year-old boy. Trying to understand what good paths look like for him, and how to help him find his.
I'm not really who you're interested in talking about this with but I am super intrigued about it.
I've worked a lot with very bright students, including creating a school for highly gifted children. Email me at michael@socraticexperience.com if you'd like to set up a call.
Did you mean to reply to the parent comment (of the comment to which you did reply)?
I replied to that one and connected, and thought it worth posting separately as well with a fuller description. Thanks for checking.
⚡💡 UK based, created a card game about the energy mix! Looking for teachers to trial & use the game in classrooms when we finish developing the next version.
https://www.curieus.games/ - e-mail us: team@curieus.games 🌟
Hah - sure why not - Boston area (Cambervilleford particularly) area human / esoteric massage therapist - If you're looking for a well reviewed MT who can also discuss rationalist adjacent issues feel free to reach out -
http://thaitherapybymary.com
Though also potentially interested in ACT interested people who are also nature-outdoors-foraging-etc. interested!
I play a lot of board games, and it can be socially tricky to choose games that everyone is honestly happy with, especially when you split into multiple tables. So a friend and I made http://whatdoweplay.com to help. See http://whatdoweplay.com/howitworks for how it works.
HOLY CRAP I WAS TRYING TO BOOTSTRAP SOMETHING LIKE THIS THE OTHER DAY
I'm the director of Euler Circle (https://eulercircle.com/), which is a mathematics institute dedicated to teaching college-level mathematics classes to high-school students. Traditionally, classes have been held in person in Palo Alto, California, but we're temporarily online while COVID case numbers remain very high, so students from around the world are welcome. In the fall, we'll have classes on proofs in number theory, linear and abstract algebra, and generating functions.
Hey I'm a former college lecturer now big tech person who has also done work with high schoolers. I have been scouring the area for teaching jobs, both part time or full time. Do you need people? I just got done teaching an online Discrete Math course for University of Maryland.
Perhaps! Send me an email.
Secretum Secretorum substack - https://rogersbacon.substack.com
Scientific and Philosophical Absurdities - Proposed, Considered, Rejected.
I just discovered your blog this morning (vis a post you made on Less Wrong). It's excellent!
Thanks so much, glad you enjoy it! Check out Seeds of Science (if you didn't already) - theseedsofscience.org - would love to have you as a gardener or author.
Seeds of Science - theseedsofscience.org - is a new open access peer-reviewed journal and community aimed at publishing short speculative articles and commentaries in a non-traditional format. Peer review is crowdsourced voting and commenting from our diverse network of "Gardeners" from across science. Become an author or gardener (free to join) today!
https://RelationshipHero.com
I made a pretty popular service for conveniently booking relationship coaching sessions
https://BloatedMVP.com
I made a website talking about how most startups fail the same way
Wave (https://www.wave.com/en/) is currently hiring software engineers and product managers. Come work with us to improve the lives of people in sub-Saharan Africa by making payments dramatically cheaper and faster. If you're reading this blog chances are good that you'll fit right in!
Check out https://www.wave.com/en/blog/world/, or reply here if you're interested.
Are you open to hiring in other EU countries as well? Or just the ones you have in your list?
Hey, which list are you looking at? I think we are currently working on being able to employ people from almost any country in the world (in UTC +5 to -4), but it might not be quite ready yet. If you're unsure I would say: send in an application anyway and we'll either figure something or get back to you when we're set up to employ people in your country.
From your page:
> You can work remotely from anywhere (between UTC -5 and +4) with reliable Internet access in the following countries: US, Canada, Belgium, Germany, UK, Ghana, Cote D'Ivoire, Kenya, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Uganda or Senegal.
https://www.wave.com/en/careers/job/4278511002/
Is this correct?
Oh, yeah sorry I was looking at the wrong job description. Turns out we don't have that limitation for some positions.
Yeah that's currently accurate but we're working on removing that limitation right now. I asked our hiring team and they said you should apply anyway and they can discuss it with you or get back to you when we're able to hire from anywhere.
They also asked for your name so that they can watch for your application and make sure that they handle it properly. I said they could watch for an application with "Astral Codex Ten" in the the "where you heard about Wave" box. But if you want to send me your name (e.g. to david [at] wave.com) then I can forward it to them to make sure, up to you :)
Thanks! I sent you an email!
Hi David, are you also offering internships? I'm a rising Junior, interested in EA and social impact, and I might be interested.
Hi, sorry we're only looking for relatively senior people at the moment. We're fully remote and aren't really set up for internships or juniors.
I really like this classifieds thread. ACT is such a marvelous community. I need to dig deeper because I can see so many things to follow up with. (Yes I also have ADHD!) I also wanted to invite anyone who has a deep interest in technology investing and evaluating companies that might be looking to work with me I'd love to hear from you. I had a career at IBM and one on Wall Street as a research analyst and left all that to work on my own years ago. We run a service called IPO Candy which we have expanded to include SPAC IPO names (SPACvest) and we are launching a few more in other areas. I have done most of the work myself but have a small support team that helps. I've run it a bit like a "lifestyle" business but with two kids looking at private colleges I am working on ramping it up into a more "real" business. It would be more fun to do with new collaborators or partners. If the plan works out it would generate a decent income and most importantly be fun and create lots of value for investors looking for the best ideas in emerging growth areas. You can email me at kris at ipocandy.com if you'd like to.
Strategy and Leadership in High-Growth Startups.
If you have founded or lead a post series A, high-growth tech startup and are committed to fulfilling your vision, let's talk. I provide
a scenario-based approach to developing a cause and effect strategy-- and to articulating it on a one-page map. We'll help you share it throughout your organization for the most holistic and effective execution.
Our second focus is on helping you and your leadership team to grow and expand your capacity as fast as your company is growing. You don't have time for a 20-year learning trajectory. Our executive coaching produces extraordinary leadership through the lens of both ontology and integrity. Great leaders cultivate extraordinary teams and they produce unprecedented results.
Contact me for an abbreviated, complimentary coaching session, or strategy advisory conversation.
I blog at https://BeyondBetter.io Its distribution is currently about 7,500. I hope you'll subscribe.
Pet project to advocate bitcoin adoption in my
Hometown:
https://bitcoin4cincy.com/
Perhaps you can tell me in a few words what is good about crypto currencies.
The biggest negative I see is that Bitcoin (for example) has no intrinsic value. Neither does the US dollar. But it is ridiculously easy to buy stuff with US dollars. It is my impression that it is relatively difficult to buy things with Bitcoins.
Why would I prefer Bitcoins to US dollars?
The biggest negative has to be the lack of regulation, no?
Bitcoin has enabled a new type of crime (ransomware) and made getting paid for kidnappings etc. much, much easier. Feels like practically all use of crypto is either speculation or crime.
"either speculation or crime"
I agree. That's where the value comes from.
The hundred dollar bill is still the currency of choice for most criminals.
> "Practically all use" - this is only true if you ignore 'buying and holding' as a use case
OK, fine. "Investing" but currently all actual users of crypto seems to be criminals? It's been more than a decade. Will this change?
Do you include these usages:
https://time.com/5486673/bitcoin-venezuela-authoritarian/
For those of us in first world countries where banking is more or less free and reliable, bitcoin seems like a solution to a non problem. For people in authoritarian regimes, or those with dangerous political instability, it can be life altering. Of course, we don't need to worry about political instability in the first world ...
I think "buying and holding" would fall under speculation here.
Exactly.
What's the difference between investing and speculation?
Investment (in the strict sense) is buying something for its value production (e.g. buying a property to rent it out, or to avoid paying rent yourself; buying a solar panel so you can power your house).
Speculation is buying something because you expect to be able to sell it for a greater price later (buying a property because you expect the value of land to increase; buying gold because you expect the value of gold to increase; short-selling shares because you expect the share price to go down).
Connotation? Speculation is what people who don't like investing call investing, afaik. Maybe also an assumption of greater risk and possibly predation. You'll here land speculation talked about where there seems to be an implicit assumption that the speculator isn't just taking a risk, he's also doing something wrong.
If you think the current financial system is more or less fair, then it’s likely impossible to persuade you to buy into bitcoin.
If you are open to the possibility that the current financial system is unfair, then the argument for bitcoin is stamped into the genesis block: when money can be created by political authorities, it distorts the entire economy.
Though arguably the solution is not to remove the ability to create money, but to give it to everyone.
Monopolies are bad.
(Just to be clear: I don't want everyone to be able to print counterfeit USD. I want people to be able to come up with their own alternatives, like eg bitcoin, and let the market sort it out.
Stable-coins are especially interesting, because they are the equivalent of privately issued currency redeemable in some common base money.
Historically, that arrangement worked out really well in the right (ie light) regulatory framework, like in Canada or Scotland.)
>>Though arguably the solution is not to remove the ability to create money, but to give it to everyone.<<
Use money creation to help finance universal basic income.
Sure! Holding Bitcoin means i'm happy when the governments print money. They're just increasing the value of my bitcoin. Print away, fellas!
Always on the lookout for people in Dublin or the surrounding counties who are interested in SSC/rationalism. I attend a recurring SSC meetup - if you're interested in coming along, give me a shout and I'll add you to our Telegram group.
Drone-doom metal fused with traditional Irish singing. FFO Sunn O))), Bloody Panda, Boris.
https://fosmetal.bandcamp.com/
Indie rock FFO Interpol, Bloc Party, Death Cab for Cutie.
https://open.spotify.com/artist/53P1Bl2rw4pubz11iB0Gub
Hello, o random internet traveller coming across this post. Do you have a minute?
If you do, I'd like to tell you about this blog I recently started.
https://aetherialporosity.wordpress.com
This is a sort of thing I've wanted to do for a while, but had always found excuses not to - probably partly out of a certain fear of cyber-ridicule. Well, no more. Ridiculous or not, it's out there.
Do you know me? If you do, I have this to say for it: it contains thoughts of mine, ostensibly about physics, Portugal (of course), and poetry; but possibly about other topics too. If you like these topics, or generally think there is interest in the thoughts I air or my perspective on things, this may be for you. If you don't know me, how do you know I'm not a super interesting person whose thoughts on random stuff you'd like to read? Check it out and see for yourself.
I hope you check it out - and if you do, I hope you like it.
See you around! (New posts come in roughly monthly, except for times of particularly tough workload - and holidays.)
I blog about American and European politics at https://atlanticsentinel.com
If any of y'all likes puzzles and specifically puzzle games, check out this Discord server: https://discord.com/invite/ZkV2zdb
We analyse common psephology (study of elections) methods, like uniform swing pendulums and economic factors, as well as make our own forecasts. We've written on using Bayesian statistics in polling (https://armariuminterreta.site/2021/02/20/outliers-in-bayesian-statistics/), Dark Side Election Modelling (https://armariuminterreta.site/2021/07/20/how-to-overfit-election-models/)
We've done some analysis of the impact of the pandemic on elections globally, we've taken a thorough swing at Shy Tory bias in polls, and we occasionally model counterfactuals, such as Ross Perot's unexpected ascendency to 3rd-party president (model: https://armariuminterreta.site/2020/12/12/perot-win-1992/; alternate history: https://armariuminterreta.site/2021/02/26/the-breakdown-of-the-1996-party-system/)
I make a regular podcast about architectural history and culture https://aboutbuildingsandcities.org/
Looking for recommendations for psychiatrists or therapists based in London, UK.
Are you interested in designing your own board game? How about an _online_ board game? (Think codenames.game, skribbl.io, or our very own http://oneword.games)
My cofounder and I have been working on a platform that lets you build your own online game, with a minimal coding experience necessary. We provide a drag&drop interface and handle all the server stuff; you bring the game idea. Want to try it out? Reach out to austin@oneword.games (or sign up for updates at http://oneword.games/platform)!
I write about anything that sparks my curiosity.
http://garden.johnraptis.dev
Here's my podcast where a friend and I blather about books we just read:
https://bookschmooze.com
It already has one episode with over twenty downloads 🦄 😎 #fame
It doesn't seem to work.
Sorry, maybe try Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/4tmY3Kz5WPywogcSqQ7UwK?si=AtxToO9vQsmogux-pV3ZZw&utm_source=copy-link&dl_branch=1
21! Also prettty sure the quote from the description is from Walden not Sagan. Or at least Sagan stole it offer Walden!
Thank you <3
This is a long shot, but I'll will try anyway. 😛
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman seeking ultra-Orthodox Jewish man. I'm a software engineer by trade, curious, and love to learn. I'm yeshivish and have been lurking in the SSC and rationalist community for years.
I'd be interested to have a chat. PM me after Shabbos :)
Ah, I don't think PM is possible. Feel free to reach out at threemillionthflower@gmail.com.
I was under the impression that was one of the few groups still using traditional matchmakers.
Traditional matchmakers may not know how to find a rationalist-compatible match!
I post Data Science/Data Analysis challenges/games on LessWrong; the handful of people who play them seem to really like them, and I'm hoping to get a wider audience by posting here.
You can access them all from my account at https://www.lesswrong.com/users/abstractapplic. The best one to start with is probably "D&D.Sci II: The Sorceror's Personal Shopper" (challenge: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Y9FcNzWqczbfqcPQ3/d-and-d-sci-ii-the-sorceror-s-personal-shopper, answer key: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cbmS7wkdFzka7SkvN/d-and-d-sci-ii-evaluation-and-ruleset).
This is a really long shot ... but I'll mention this anyway!
Are there any senior doctors, nurses, health professionals here who have a worry about the safety aspects of Handover (aka 'handoff' in the US) and transitions of care?
We have developed an clever system to replace and enhance handover sheets (also called rounding sheets or sign-out sheets in the US)
www.careful.online.
Anyone interested is welcome to contact us through the website.
Best wishes
DJ
Messaged
Hey Jeremy - Thanks for your message. I have written straight back but google initially blocked one of my attachments - so I've tried again with a dropbox link. Let me know if it arrives. Best wishes.
Thanks DJ, unfortunately it doesn't seem to have come through. I will try again with another email address.
Hey Jeremy. I tried again. Any luck this time?
Yes!
Two things:
Rational Review News Digest (the freedom movement's daily newspaper since 1991) -- http://news.rationalreview.com
William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism -- http://thegarrisoncenter.org
A solicitation to shill your note-taking app/strategy. Personally, I like to see video content of how your app/strategy is actually being used.
Are you interested in note-taking for something like classes? Or something more general? I use a variety of different apps/'strategies' loosely based/inspired-by GTD (Getting Things Done) and various other things I've read.
I would like to thank the person who advertised my #Art4effectivedonations project (in Slate Star Codex, April 2019): https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/03/classified-thread-7/#comment-737805
It gave this project a large boost!
Thank you! :)
I make music, of many kinds. And I write about it and the world around it. http://jsegel.bandcamp.com is maybe the best place to start. Or JonathanSegel.com
Looking to date in London. Looking for a woman who is clever, kind and poly. I'm tall, like organising events and EAish. Message me @nathanpmyoung on Twitter
Creating codex 10 community in northern Europe. For ideas and reach out, you can write
to eatleaf at protonmaildotcom
Readers may enjoy my blog: https://samenright.com/. I write in-depth book reviews, as well as posts about jazz, philosophy, and economics. The blog is funded by Emergent Ventures and I'm in the MR links sometimes. Thanks!
Attaboy Sam
We take complex medical papers in AI & healthcare and summarise them in easy to understand terms: explainthispaper.com
Investment opportunity. 100+% return p.a. Minimum ticket 100k. Detailed information only on per request basis.
I am from Slovakia and my partner used to work in Samuel's company. (The company is Vacuumlabs as you find out in the replies and Samuel's second name is Hapak). So I can confirm they are a normal IT company, kind of ambitious. Later I was in brief online contact with Samuel due to covid testing his company was offering to his employees, where non-employees were allowed on request. So I know they are normal. Do not know about this investment opportunity.
...meaning I have no information about that investment opportunity.
Any investment that guarantees or suggests a particular rate of return is suspect. Claiming particularly high rates of return even more so.
How should you be contacted?
Either my email samuel (at) vacuumlabs (dot) com, or you can write me via linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuelhapak/
As a long-term SSC/ACX commenter, I hereby confirm that:
* There is a company called VacuumLabs, just like described on LinkedIn. The company is completely legit. Their web domain really is "vacuumlabs (dot) com".
* There is a former CEO of VacuumLabs called Samuel Hapák, just like described at LinkedIn. His e-mail address really is "samuel (at) vacuumlabs (dot) com".
I don't know what exactly that investment opportunity is, so no comment on that. Just wanted to vouch for this *not* being... well, the thing most people probably think when looking at that comment (and if I hadn't known Samuel and VacuumLabs, I admit that would be my first reaction, too).
Should obvious scams be removed maybe? I don’t think this is how investment works.
Seconding Red-2, anything that advertises return over content is either a scam or scam-adjacent. Please do not message this person.
Maybe you should get some details first before accusing other people of scamming?
My comment is hopefully a red flag for potentially more gullible readers that they will have to do their due diligence very thoroughly.
You give no details on what you are offering, and have no company or description on your account. You say you can double peoples investment yearly, but say nothing of the risks involved.
There are risky leveraged positions that can be taken that give these kinds of return, sometimes - with an almost equally likely chance to lose everything. -This can be done openly with no reason for secrecy or private postings without information.
Fair, here's mi linkedin, so you can see I am not a fraud:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuelhapak/
Your comment reg. risky leveraged positions is fair, it's nothing of that kind. I don't want to share details publicly because I might break some regulation by doing so. Also, I don't really expect getting much interest this way, but felt it would be nice to share the opportunity with the community I've been watching for years.
You might be advised to contact a securities attorney.
Or hire an investor relations person
That's how I got my business going. I just told people to throw money at me and they did so without question . It was really surprisingly successful.
Oh, hang on....
There are regulatory aspects that allow me to share detailed information only on per request basis. And frankly, I don’t really have high expectations from this. Just wanted to share this opportunity with like minded people.
Great - I'm fascinated. I've sent you a request by email.
Haven't received anything, would you try again please?
Tailoring/dressmaking services available. Based in London but can ship worldwide.
Having an item custom-made for you is more expensive than buying off the rack, but it allows you to get exactly what you want - even if that item doesn't exist yet. For example, my latest custom order is a sleeveless cross between a judo gi and zapp brannigan's uniform made from psychedelic-patterned silk: funky leisurewear for hot days.
How do we contact you?
Good point, I forgot we are on substack. Please find contact info at
https://www.frockme.co.uk
How do you take measurements around the world?
Good question, it's a challenge! The latest evolution of the process is:
A) if you already own something similar to the garment you desire which fits in the way you want, measure that and send photos (showing garment plus measuring device) to avoid miscommunications.
B) If you want something dissimilar from what you already own (which is obviously often the case with a tailored garment) then we will provide clear instructions for how to measure your body, and again ask for photographs of the measurement taking place.
I have been writing a blog for the past 4 months - https://ilearned.substack.com, where I archive interesting things that I discovered from blogs, books and podcasts. I started this for myself to better retain the things that I am learning, I hope some of you find it useful too.
There is no limitation per se on the topics, though so far, I have mostly written about finance/investments, business strategy, psychology (in consumer choices, or within organizations) or philosophy.
www.susanhunterpsychotherapy.com - U.K. based and work internationally. Reminding people (we know how, many have just forgotten due to their conditioning) how to be a good friend to themselves and more, to cherish and celebrate ourselves (without becoming narcissists). It’s the magic switch that makes us automatically more loving and towards others, more appreciative of everything, end self sabotage, and we end up dumping all that is bunk and often earning more too as we feel more confident and deserving of it. What’s not to like :-)
I have nothing to declare but my genius 😉
On second thoughts I also host a weekly science-based acoustic gig / singalong/ chat on Zoom - Super Blurry Astronaut LIVE - usually Wednesday or Thursday 8pm UK time. I post details of each week’s theme and crowdsource suggestions for songs on Monday via various science comms networks and on FB eg https://facebook.com/events/s/super-blurry-astronaut-live-la/2956979244545641/ (yesterday’s gig on lachrymosity).
Do join… or email me to join the list.
Editing Services
Competitive pricing, no minimums. Happy to provide a free sample edit up to 750 words. Master’s degree from UC Berkeley.
Pricing examples for standard nonfiction:
- Developmental editing @ $0.03/word
- Line editing @ $0.03/word
- Proofreading + copy editing @ $0.025/word
asaediting@gmail.com
I am a would-be editor. I have a general idea of what those categories encompass. It would be beneficial for me if you would define them in more detail. To whatever depth you prefer.
Hi Peter, here is a good overview of the categories: https://typerightediting.com/levels-of-editing/
I write a blog at: https://escapingflatland.substack.com/
I'm looking for someone with experience and expertise in dealing with long-running anhedonia.
I've had long-running anhedonia (about 11 years) that's done a great job ignoring everything I've thrown at it, from diet to exercise, medication to meditation. The objective aspects of my life are in good shape (social life, career, family, physical health), but like a light switch 11 years ago, pleasure and joy just kinda disappeared. I've got a therapist and psychiatrist, and am looking for either:
- Your experiences overcoming anhedonia
- Recommended reading on how anhedonia operates
- Pointers to bizarre treatments or out-of-the-way experts in anhedonia
My email address is hixgrigby@gmail.com -- Thanks for anything you decide to offer!
I had anhedonia for tenish years, but I think you already tried what worked for me.
Out of curiosity -- can you share what worked for you?
I would be interested in anything you learn, too.
How do we contact you?
I am looking for Platonic Friends. I am not lonely. I'm already in a committed, monogamous relationship. I am also probably already too busy anyway. However, I can always use to add more people to my friend group, or mix things up further with more types of stimulation.
Location: Dallas-Fort Worth (but I am open to pen-pals)
Career: Analytics
My interests include philosophy, social sciences(especially economics), religious studies, business, technology(especially data/analytics). I also like video games(specifically RPGs) and anime.
To flesh this out, I mentally came of age to GMU economists, early Less Wrong, as well as Calvinistic Christianity, and the new atheists. I am an atheist, but have a reasonably strong understanding of Protestant theology, as well as philosophy of religion. In my free-time, I run discussions on various topics in religion and philosophy. Honestly, I tend to see religious studies as something like a discussion of weird garbage, but sometimes it can be interesting or illuminating. (Also, I think 80% of the Bible is badly written. Paul is a good author, and Ecclesiastes is well-written, but Augustine is probably smarter than both)
Additionally, I was an economics student in college because I find the social sciences fascinating. Over time, I have molded this interest in the social sciences to an interest in business studies. (Think Peter Drucker, Clay Christensen, and HBR) Additionally, I have developed a strong professional interest in technology. I also organize events to discuss business and technology concepts in my area.
What I am seeking is just more interesting people to bounce ideas off of, ideally in a less confrontational setting. I'm also ~90% less pretentious than I'm coming off here, and hopefully 25-75% more competent.
My email is ryanwagen@yahoo.com. If you're interested, then I look forward to hearing from you.
Note: "Platonic Friends" capitalized for clarity, not for relationship with the philosopher Plato.
Platonic Friends, because Platonic Solid Friends aren't actually solid friends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid
Haha!
Published my book today on the 50th anniversary of the end of the gold standard and the birth of fiat money in August 1971 https://www.zvi.net/money. The book explores money, how it drives the economy, and why since 2008 trillions of dollars, euros, yen have been printed but not spent.
Compare Selgin's work. Eg https://www.alt-m.org/2015/07/29/there-was-no-place-like-canada/
Interesting 🧐
I just published a memoir about my wife's project to build a house after being diagnosed with advanced colon cancer: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09BV8MSKR.
Reverse Classifieds possibly an open dev post: daytime babycare
With COVID-19 scares and a lot of lower wage folk on the sidelines due to all the handouts, how would you recommend finding what amounts to a day time nanny in San Antonio (don't like these nanny websites) who will feed and change a 3 month to 1 year old from say 7am to 3pm?
Issue being MIL fearful of abusive childcare providers or deriliction of duty, etc.
If you have the means, have you tried upping the wage? The lower wage folks who are on the sidelines will probably come off for good pay.
One way to protect against abusive/negligent child care providers is to get a nanny cam and check it randomly from work
I see people seeming to be successful at this kind of thing on NextDoor:
https://nextdoor.com/city/san-antonio--tx/
At least where I live, if you post something like this, you're likely to get a few neighbors saying "oh my aged mother could use work like this" or "I recommend so-and-so." Might work.
Imagining a reverse daycare situation where childless remote tech workers pay for the company of a cute and cuddly baby while they do their soulless software job. Not gonna happen, but funny
I honestly would pay for this
Have your never cared for a kid? They run on their own schedule.
I'm a life coach. First session free. Take it as an opportunity for me to orient you towards various kinds of interior work you could be doing to be more awesome and no obligation to work with me.
You can find my blog here: www.bearlamp.com.au or just email me at redeliot at gmail to make a time. Mention acx to help me know who you are.
I overlap with the operational effect of therapists, with a bit more freedom because I'm not actually a therapist. I moved my identity through rationality, meditation, post-rationality, therapy of various kinds and ended up pretty damn good at solving problems both on the explicit, deliberate, coaching level and on the embodied, somatic, field-of-awareness level.
I specifically work across an embarrassingly large number of models, systems and theories because I couldn't make myself specialise. These include: Internal Family Systems therapy, directly working with emotions (fear, anger, sadness), meditative practices (including awareness, embodiment, noting, somatics, jhana and more), developmental systems (keegan, stages, spiral dynamics, integral), weird energy systems (like chakras, meridians, somatics), shadow work, and more that I haven't called to mind just now.
As an example of the kind of work I do. I recently talked to someone who had trouble organising their reactions to a psychedelic trip and helped to place their capacity to approach the "scary" phenomena and permit them to reprocess things.
I talked to someone a week ago who found himself in a drama triangle with a work colleague and his boss. We talked about the aspects of the triangle and the healthy triangle and how it deeply connects to his upbringing with his sibling, the compelling nature of drama and how he had a role to play in perpetuating the drama because he was just so fascinated by it, and also how it's up to him what he wants to do now that he's found himself here, if he wants to continue the job or not, and that it is salvageable but may require some effort.
I talked to someone a few weeks ago running a startup and caught in unworthiness procrastination loops. We examined where they came from and found them in highschool, we sat with them emotionally and they softened in a way that the situation is workable and there is not as much procrastination as before.
I talked to someone who kept finding friends boring, we talked about the conditions being set up in judging friends which made them accidentally show up as boring and how to facilitate more interestingness in the people being met.
I talked to someone with 10 years of chronic pain. We processed each of fear, anger and sadness until they were less of a restriction on her. We talked about how the chronic pain is at least partially a deliberate defence mechanism for her because the exterior world is "bad" and "scary". Since then there's been less pain and she's enjoying life more.
I talked to a guy who I sensed had heaps of capacity but wasn't stepping up. I told him to "be more awesome", which he knew, he did on the spot by "stepping into the spotlight" per-se. within a month he had gotten a new job, moved city, and was having an awesome time. (he had done a great deal of personal work but hadn't realised how much he could just be more awesome).
Everyone's story is different and yet there's something of a universal human pattern to the stories. I love to see the humanity in all of us and to undo the knots of the mind.
I'm interested! You might wanna hire one of the people advertising copyediting for your website though 😂. Hell, I could do it; it would only be like 15 mins work.
Interesting!
As a side note, you may want to specify on your "Coaching" page whether your prices are in Australian dollars (inferred from the domain) or USD (for better or worse, the default assumption for things aimed at an international audience).
I wrote a book on personal finance for absolute beginners on modest incomes, starting from basics like debt, emergency funds and budgeting, leading up to investing in index funds and getting good advice.
The preview available for free on Amazon contains a comprehensive chapter summary so you can see whether this book suits your needs, or perhaps the needs of your profligate nephew:
https://www.amazon.com/Poor-Mans-Guide-Financial-Freedom-ebook/dp/B086YHWV8C
Thanks for having a classifieds post.
teamspeak3: 79.136.87.88
I'm very handsome and you should follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/armanddoma
Full-hookup RV spots by the month in SANTA CRUZ (pleasure point) in my underground backyard urban farm 0.5mile from the beach. Amazing location. https://sfbay.craigslist.org/scz/sub/d/santa-cruz-rv-spots-on-urban-farm-2mi/7359130185.html
Check out my curated progressive/intellectual aggregator, LeftTimes -- sources range from ACX to Marxists in all media formats. There's also iOS and Android apps. https://lefttimes.org/
I have a blog on a wide variety of topics, including:
Descriptions of SCIENCE for a broad audience:
- Long series on Chaos Theory ( http://thechaostician.com/what-is-chaos-part-i-introduction/ ) and Relativity ( http://thechaostician.com/gravity-is-geometry-parts-i-ii/ )
- Shorter posts on Fractals ( http://thechaostician.com/fractal-dimensions/ ) and Entropy ( http://thechaostician.com/entropy/ )
- A post for children on Why is the Sky Blue? ( http://thechaostician.com/why-is-the-sky-blue/ )
Books Review, including:
- Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott ( http://thechaostician.com/book-review-of-seeing-like-a-state-by-james-c-scott-1998/ )
- The Sovereign State and Its Competitors by Hendrik Spruyt ( http://thechaostician.com/book-review-of-the-sovereign-state-and-its-competitors-by-hendrik-spruyt-1994/ )
- Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson ( http://thechaostician.com/book-review-of-creative-evolution-by-henri-bergson-1907/ )
- Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Piketty ( http://thechaostician.com/book-review-of-capital-in-the-twenty-first-century-by-thomas-piketty/ )
- The Horse, the Wheel, and Language by David W. Anthony ( http://thechaostician.com/book-review-of-the-horse-the-wheel-and-language-by-david-w-anthony-2007/ )
For the 2% of you who are Mormons, there are also some religious posts you might find interesting:
- A Data Driven Recent History of Missionary Work ( http://thechaostician.com/a-data-driven-recent-history-of-missionary-work/ )
- Ex Nihilo Creation of Religion ( http://thechaostician.com/ex-nihilo-creation-of-religion/ )
I enjoyed the intro to chaos, it filled in some gaps for me. I’d suggest though adding links to the next at the bottom of each part to avoid having to scroll back up and find the table of contents. And the intro text doesn’t need to be on each page. Otherwise nice use of images and clear explanations. SCIENCE!
I'm glad you enjoyed it !
And thank you for the suggestions.
Looking for remote devs to work on a platform for ML code, fellow digital nomad asx readers to meet, MRI or ETI technicians with track record of publishing novel imaging work, anyone that has a stronger than random opinion about ideal BF pct target once you get bellow 15, someone that enjoys Asimov and wants to illustrate a fiction book. george at cerebralab.com
I perform part-time outsourced CFO services and advise multiple startups, and I absolutely love it. If you are looking for FP&A help, I’d be happy to have a chat.
I mainly focus on consumer products and technology, but finance is finance, and I’m flexible on industry.
mattlybbert at gmail dot com
I'm an investor; mostly angel scale. Send me your pitches at winterindustries####@gmail.com except replace the hashtags with "1784".
I'm looking for work as a data analyst. I have
-2 years experience as a data analyst supporting a team of QA engineers
-masters in psychology
-good at Excel and translating between data and non-data info
-self-sufficient (know enough to google what I don't know) with R and SQL
Open to any industry but especially interested in work related to decision making or consumer behavior.
If your company is looking for someone like me, please contact me at LukeZhao9 (at) protonmail (dot) com.
If you have a psych MA and can do analytics, you’ll be a good bet for a “people data analyst” job and there’s decent demand for it right now (I’m a DS in that field). 2 years of excel and intuition about behavior should be enough to get you in the door. If you want to chat you can reach out at <firstname>.<lastname>@gmail.com (to be upfront, I’m not hiring right now)
Thanks for the suggestion Will! I wasn't aware of the People Analytics job title before and this has helped me narrow my search and have a little more focus in the thousands of remote jobs.
I wrote a speculative novel. Sent out thirteen query letters - got rejected by seven so far. Six more to go. Wish me luck! If I don't find an agent, I'll self-publish.
Goood luck
Thank you. My chances of being picked up by a literary agent are %0.000000000001. But maybe I can sell a few books on my own.
Just dropping a backlink. https://www.va-nutshell.com
Shilling my blog. BCIs! Psychedelic fiction! Robots! Come one, come all. https://howthehell.substack.com/
Just read your most recent post on BCIs and enjoyed it! It's such a speculative subject currently but I thought you provided a nice overview of the current state of imaging technologies. Looking forward to part 2.
I work as a privacy lawyer in Canada (https://www.frankprivacy.com/). If you work for a business operating in Canada (or thinking of expanding), I would love to help.
I'm organizing a techno-optimist short story writing competition! Would love to get submissions from any Astral Codex 10 readers interested in creative writing, and I would greatly appreciate you subscribing if you're interested in reading the top submissions. https://myrielmedia.substack.com/p/call-for-short-stories
I wrote a fairy tale about the invention of calculus: https://markmywords.substack.com/p/short-fiction-isaac-newton-and-the
My company is currently hiring for a ton of new positions. Early stage AI startup in the transactions space, open to remote work, keen to learn culture. If interested, please contact me at thomas dot stearns26 at gmail dot com
https://deep-labs.com/careers/
Are you a rationalist running for office? $1 gets you your first hour of campaign consulting; you'll be glad you did. JRM, longtime resident o' these comment pages and recently elected judge, can give a reference. I've been doing campaign consulting for more than a decade and been point on over a dozen small-time campaigns, and this is me doing my part to raise the sanity waterline.
Written a book or other major work that you're proud enough of to wish it were typo-free? My previous hats include law review editor, newspaper editor, medical devices technical writer and project manager and current hats include fiction editor and English-translation polisher. If you're small-time and flexible about when I get around to your work, my low-end rate is competitive for the quality I offer: $40/hr. If you need a turnaround measured in days or weeks, my rates are industry competitive.
Email me at k*h*meck at gmail, except remove the asterisks.
I've written a pair of posts on fundamental ideas in biochemistry/biophysics, starting from classic papers. They're aimed at a basic college-level physics & chemistry background. I'm looking for feedback on the tone & style before I write more.
1. www.devonstork.com/p/life-at-low-reynolds-number
2. www.devonstork.com/p/kinetic-proofreading
Thanks, I enjoyed this.
The tone is fine, but I don't think they're accurately aimed at a basic background. In style, yes, but there are important background ideas I think you should bolster at bit if you really want to reach people with something like a freshman-sophomore level of understanding of physics and chemistry and biology.
For example, in the first article you don't define viscosity at all, even conceptually, and this is a very important concept which is often not studied in detail until an upper-division or graduate fluid mechanics class. You could even do something as simple as draw a picture of a sphere falling through liquid, and point out viscosity is just the quality of the liquid that tells you how fast it falls -- in a low viscosity fluid (water) it falls fast, while in a high viscosity fluid (thick oil) it falls slowly. That's probably enough for most people, but I think you probably need to say something so they feel comfortable they understand what you mean.
You don't really talk about *why* Reynolds number is the key metric, either, and I feel that might be worth discussing at least a little. There are plenty of hand-wavy conceptual explanations of why Re encapsulates so much about hydrodynamics, maybe a little sketch or few sentences paraphrased from a basic textbook would help. Not that many people at the freshman/sophomore physics level are used to thinking in terms of dimensionless constants and scale factors, you kind of have to get to an upper division if not graduate level to start thinking that way. (Mind you, the engineers might be, but you didn't say you were aiming this at engineers, although some would be quite interested I think.)
The other big thing I noticed is that you didn't talk about why diffusion "slows down" over long distances, in the sense that it takes increasingly longer than ballistic motion, and that will be somewhat non-intuitive to anyone who isn't very familiar with diffusion already. I think an illustration of a random walk, or a graph comparing diffusive motion versus ballistic might be helpful, since this is key to why there is a characteristic distance over which the (ballistic) motion of the E. coli eventually outperforms mere diffusion, which explains the Berg diagram nicely and all that weird zig-zaggy motion you can see protozoans execute under a microscope.
On the second article: I would highlight the alpha carbon in the AA because unless people remember their basic biochemistry well they might not know which it is.
I would at least write down the Michaelis-Menten equation and define the terms, since that is really not something with which generic underclassmen will be on intimate terms. It will also help with some of your later equations, which sort of come out of the blue otherwise. I would still prove with a little algebra that f is the ratio of the binding constants.
You might point out that the binding forces are all intermolecular, because otherwise, to the typical chemistry student, 23 kJ/mol is a *small* not large amount of energy, but if they understand you're talking about a handful of H bonds it makes more sense.
Again, I would derive that the net f with two steps is the product of the ratios of binding constants. A few lines of algebra here will really help someone who isn't very familiar with the ideas already.
It's an admirable effort, and I bet not a few people will be happy to read it, especially if you help as above with some of the places where their pre-existing knowledge might have minor holes. Good luck!
Thank you very much for the detailed feedback! You've correctly pointed out a few shortcomings with balancing concision with background. I'll focus more on how to do that clearly both in these two posts and in the future.
I just reread Jerry Pournelle's 'A Step Farther Out' and your 'life at low reynolds numbers' is just as good.
I appreciate the encouragement.
Content is great.
Style:
Which of these is easier to read?
1. "When you get to the scale on which cells operate, the world looks different"
2. "The world looks different when you get to the scale on which cells operate"
This applies across both articles.
Thanks! It seems I should do another reread for sentence topic ordering.
I've read the original 'Life at low Reynolds number' transcript, and I have to say your summary post is great. I'm a bit confused though by the necessity of footnote #4 (for "blue whales are big") -- I thought this was lay background knowledge?
I'm glad to hear it. The whale footnote was definitely a bit tongue in cheek, intended to get a chuckle from the reader.
Graphic Arts Mercenary for hire: https://www.swihura.net
I'm a data analyst looking for startups or similar high-growth organizations. I've analyzed spreadsheets for 3+ years, and I've practiced daily to broaden my skillset to include programming (Python, R, SQL), case studies, and (recently) contributing to open-source projects, like Kaggle competitions.
Currently located near Huntsville, but open to relocation (and remote, of course). Full-time work is preferred, but part-time / flexible hours aren't entirely off the table.
If you're curious, email me at jarrettvickers2@gmail.com for resume/portfolio.
Hi! I'm Misha. I have three things to classify:
1. I've been having a lot of fun doing photography, and I'm interested in excuses to travel. If you have projects such as photo journalism or wildlife research (ideally with only moderate amounts of hiking), I would be very interested in helping out with that sort of thing.
2. I'm single, and looking for a long-term partner. I'm heteroflexible but mostly into women, live in Madison Wisconsin, and am open to having kids.
3. I'm interested in start-up investing, particularly at the angel stage, and I'm always happy to read pitches.
A mini-portfolio and contact info can be found on drethelin.com
How do you find so many owls?
Great northern owls have a tendency to stay in relatively small areas, and They frequently hoot early in the night, so what you can do is go around in the evening around sunset in or near the woods and listen. They also seem to have habitual trees they like to spend time in. So most of the owl photos that I have are of like, 2-3 (probably? not exactly sure since I can't distinguish them that well) owls that live and hunt a short distance from where I live, where I know some of the trees that they spend a lot of time in for whatever reason.
Once you've started spotting them, they get a lot easier to spot, as in my experience are most birds.
I have a blog: https://denovo.substack.com/
It's about anything I find interesting, which these days is mostly biology / biotech. Currently I'm writing a series on the human herpesviruses.
Even if you're not interested in them, they're interested in you!
I'm a freshly minted PGY-1 Psychiatry resident in the US looking to make friends with other psych residents (or just psychiatrists) who frequent blogs like this. I am writing this post spontaneously, but I think it might be cool to form a small group that can trade/discuss research papers in the field, bitch about residency, share experiences/advice while we learn how to become independent physicians, and maybe even meet up at conferences.
If this sounds like a thing you might be into, drop me a line at: nilskwendel@gmail.com
Torchship: A hard SF adventure story. An undercover agent joins the crew of a interstellar freighter to deliver cargo in a galaxy scarred by AI rebellions. Pilots are forced to use slide rules to navigate their ships while gamers face death if they evade the restrictions on their computers. Finalist for the Prometheus Award for best libertarian SF novel.
Available as ebook, paperback, and audiobook: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0195ZSG4W/
And in an omnibus with the sequels Torchship Pilot and Torchship Captain: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B079VKR2KN/
I believe I have now read the Torchship trilogy three times. Very good stories and some interesting ideas.
Kindle Unlimited! Downloaded and starting tonight.
Karl, noticed the narrator on the audible.com book versions of your book was also named Gallagher. Wife? Daughter?
Laura Gallagher is my wife. She's also done narration for folks other than me. If this worries you, I'll point out Audible has a good refund policy.
I would actually be worried about amateur narration after some bad experiences, but from what you say, she's not an amateur!
No, no — no problem at all (I’ve already gotten your trilogy; I’m always looking for someone new to read). I was just curious.
I tutor math and physics, mostly at the high school/AP/IB/introductory college level. Online or in person. Occasionally I will take a middle school student, especially if they are an ACX fan. Subjects include algebra, geometry, triginometry, precalculus, calculus, algebra-based physics and calculus-based physics, and all AP and IB physics and math exams. I will also occasionally take a computer science student. I used to be a high school AP computer science teacher, my students averaged 4.0 on the AP exam.
Would love to discuss tutoring my boys. One starting grade 11, and the other just starting high school. The last year and a half in Toronto have been devastating.
We began to assign and assist with "math sheets" last autumn, but it really hasn't been enough to make up for the schooling they've lost.
Please contact me at wojtek at grabski dot ca.
https://newsletter.eleanorkonik.com/
Once a week I share a newsletter (RSS or email, it's hosted on Ghost) that's a brief overview with follow-up references about a particular topic I'm researching that week. For example: obscure facts about scurvy, the history of hats around the world, and the plausibility of herding giant spiders for their silk.
My main blog -- https://www.eleanorkonik.com -- is mostly focused on how archaeology and history can help speculative fiction writers; some of my articles have been published by outlets like SFWA and Tor. Occasionally I talk about notetaking (I'm a moderator for the community around personal knowledge management software called Obsidian) & politics or do book reviews.
Personal knowledge management software certainly piqued my interest!
Obsidian is great and the community does an amazing job of teaching good notetaking skills for a variety of use-cases, which I feel like a lot of successful people missed out on in school because we didn't need it then.
I can vouch that Eleanor does excellent (and short!) newsletters, and she is very much understating how helpful she is with Obsidian.
aw thanks! Good to see you here, it's always nice to when communities overlap :D
musictherapypodcast.com
Therapy for musicians by a musician and therapist
I do coaching!
Achieving goals, emotional resilience, working with internal conflict, relationships, etc.
I can also help with psychedelic integration, if your latest attempt to restore your sense of smell with LSD went a little haywire.
Book a free intro call here:
https://pricklesandgoo.com/
And check out my "public notebook" in Roam:
https://roamresearch.com/#/app/HowToHuman/page/BSFuobcvJ
love the public notebook!
Hi. I write a blog on topics of interest to SSC readers focused on crazy ideas, the potential of future innovations, and effective altruism:
https://harsimony.wordpress.com/
A few posts which may be of interest:
A List of Major, Future Innovations (https://harsimony.wordpress.com/2020/10/31/a-list-of-major-future-innovations/)
Against World Government (https://harsimony.wordpress.com/2021/05/02/against-world-government/)
Let’s Eliminate Sleep (https://harsimony.wordpress.com/2021/02/05/why-sleep/)
Counterfactual Contracts (https://harsimony.wordpress.com/2020/12/05/counterfactual-contracts/)
Write Down Your Ideas (https://harsimony.wordpress.com/2020/09/19/write-down-your-ideas/)
Also make sure to check out the link posts!
I have a blog! It's called the Questioner and it's about superforecasting, memetics, and psychedelics.
What makes my blog more interesting that the typical superforecasting/memetics/psychedelics blog is that I talk about the practical applications a lot more. For example, using memes to influence elections, using superforecasting to clean up in the stock market, etc. I also talk about a few experiments of mine in which I've done exactly that.
https://questioner.substack.com/p/coming-soon
If you are into poetry, short stories of love and love lost, life and all of its occurrences please check out Sign of the Secret of the Sign.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09C27HR17/ref=cm_sw_r_awdo_navT_g_7ZARXHEPEAVDMJBHQRT0
Ransomware and short stories: https://tepidintrepid.substack.com/
When you say "ransomware", do you mean you discuss it, advertise/give it, or inflict it? Or something else?
Perhaps a little bit gauche to ask, but I'd feel like quite the moron if I made a false assumption about this.
I'm working on an investigative horror tabletop RPG. I haven't come up with a final name for it yet, so it's currently called Untitled Cosmic Horror Project. It's pretty far along in the playtest process, and I'm running at least one game of it a week online.
You can download the quickstart rules here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FkWF23-XNqIiLGDhvWgP9pNpOUjbEbRT/view?usp=drivesdk
And join the playtest server here: https://discord.gg/5M65jFxS
My wife's Etsy shop for acrylic pouring paintings: https://www.etsy.com/au/shop/LadyYangArt?ref=simple-shop-header-name&listing_id=1002149973.
If interested please take a look and any comments or even criticism on the shop or the paintings I'm sure would be appreciated!
I really like them! They seem very low-priced – and the shipping costs are (expectedly) pretty high. It'd be nice to have some details about the sizes of the pieces.
Did you intend to link to the Australia listings? The details on my favorite piece claim "Dispatches from United States".
That's a good point about the sizes, I passed that along to my wife. As for the shipping yeah I think she picked whatever Etsy's default option was and that must include them shipping internationally (we're in the USA) but at a high price. Wish it could be lower but I'm not sure if there's anything we can do about that :/
Did you mean to link to the Australian version of the shop? (I don't live there.)
Oh that's so weird, I don't know how that ended up that way. I think to obtain the link I searched it up myself on Google and that's what Google gave me and I pasted it in without checking. Well the right link for what it's worth is https://www.etsy.com/shop/LadyYangArt?ref=simple-shop-header-name&listing_id=1002149973.
I'm on the job hunt, and the SSC classified thread produced some good leads a while ago, so hopefully the ACX one will as well!
I'm a graduate of Carnegie Mellon's privacy engineering master's program, and also got my bachelor's from there undergrad in computer science and mathematics. Before I went back for grad school, I worked as a programmer at Microsoft and Booz Allen, and more recently I've served as a UN expert on child online protection and taught for Art of Problem Solving. Some personal programming projects I'm proud of include a mod for Slay the Spire and several automated logic puzzle generators. I'm a skilled writer and presenter, with a knack for finding memorable examples of technical concepts, such as a magic-trick-based cryptography lesson or a parapsychology experiment for a class on experimental design and statistics.
I'm most interested in privacy-related work, but I'm flexible. I really enjoy teaching, I'm quite practiced at coding, and I pick up new domains of policy very readily. If you know of any job openings I might be a match for, please let me know here or contact me at euclid11 (at) gmail.com.
hot area in blockchain / crypto. might have a few suggestions. if interested, pls reach out to me at mail [at] liulily.com
I write collections of nanofiction/metafiction science fiction in an empire of postsophont libertarian space elves that have been quite well received. And cited in the comments back on SSC a few times, as I recall. If this sounds like it might be your thing, books and reviews are available here:
https://www.amazon.com/Alistair-Young/e/B00A3957R4/
and the writing blog where I share my drafts, for a taste of the content, is here:
https://eldraeverse.com/
I’m an artist and designer who specializes in caricatures of people (and pets!) that are great for birthday, anniversary, wedding, etc gifts:
http://www.iklunk.com/caricature
I'm working on an AI assisted language learning thing for intermediate to advanced users. I'm looking for some early feedback. You get to use it for free during the alpha in exchange. https://forms.gle/7iJaAwTHX1nA6WRNA
This isn't happiness
★ https://thisisnthappiness.com
Art, Photography, Design & Disappointment
https://feeds.feedburner.com/thisisnthappiness
https://feedly.com/i/subscription/feed%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2Fthisisnthappiness
https://thisisnthappiness.com/rss
also on wordpress :
https://isnthappiness.com/?feed=rss2
I’m one of the founders of Substack, and a long time SSC/ACT fan.
We’re hiring engineers (and other things) and have had great luck with folks from the community.
https://substack.com/jobs
Is there a way to make internal jump links work on substack posts, even if it's just for the web version of the article?
What's your total compensation range for the Full Stack Engineer position?
Hey there Chris, what are your (and/or Substack's) thoughts on newly minted engineers with demonstrable competence and potential?
Apply!
We would host our development blog on substack except it doesn't support syntax highlighting for code snippets.
Not quite what you asked for, but team says
> We do have a github gist embed that no one knows about, which includes syntax highlighting
I found this by accident, and use it for my random hacking/making snippet & release announcement blog. Useful, but somehow I have to discover how to make it work again every time; documentation, or even a button in the editor, would be very much appreciated.
(Oh, and since this is a classifieds thread, here's the link to said random snippet blog:
https://randombytes.substack.com )
This makes me sad. I will tell the team
Inability to crop my avatar made me sad just now :)
I work for an always-hiring software startup in the NLP and AI space, more or less: balto.ai. It's a real-time conversation guidance platform, it does what it says on the tin, and does it really well.
We are not Bay-based, have a remarkably positive and extremely low-ego culture, and need talent in engineering, implementation, sales and account management (and also we could use a CFO with SaaS experience). Series B will close very soon.
WE WILL HIRE YOU WITH NO RELEVANT EXPERIENCE IF YOU ARE WILLING TO LEARN. Many of our best people came to us from bartending, construction, and even straight out of liberal arts programs at tiny colleges.
Peruse our jobs board here if this sounds interesting: https://boards.greenhouse.io/balto
I would love to learn how you trained your AI - I’m looking into something in a very different field and trying to gauge how much effort/money it will take
What's your total compensation range for the Full Stack Engineer position?
mid five figures to low six figures, plus ISOs - heavily dependent on your experience level
If you want to ask questions, you can hit me up at brad at balto dot ai. Put ACX in the subject line (or SSC if you're old skool)
Hello I’m a UX/UI designer from London. Im between jobs atm so if you’ve got a project you’d like an app designed or any feedback on I’d be happy to help, wouldn’t necessary need to be for £$€. I’ve a portfolio at dyniol.com
Hi - if you're interested in the crypto space - have a need right now for a mobile app to complement a pretty successful web experience. Mail [at] liulily.com
Thanks dude, I’m interested but Coinbase still haven’t accepted my iD so I lost interest 😅 open to any projects atm tho I don’t think your link works?
I've bookmarked your site, will let you know if we have any projects.
I'm Amy Alkon, and I write "science-help" - research-based advice. My current book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence," explains the *actions* to take to transform yourself to live with confidence. http://amzn.to/2fFdl2c
*Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases #ad
Want to get at truths the ancient sages of all cultures knew but have largely been forgotten in our youth-obsessed modern world?
I apply what I've known and read of history, psychology, and spirituality to what's going on today.
Check it out/subscribe at: richardtseng.substack.com
Request for shilling: what are good products for sleep? I’ve tried various doses of melatonin, blue light blocking glasses, white noise generators, and CBT but none of them seem to have much of an effect, positive or negative. I don’t really have a huge sleep problem, but I really like good nights of sleep
Benedryl is effective and not habit-forming, it’s worked great for me on nights I really need to sleep well.
CBD tinctures have worked for me like they did other respondents. I would recommend Lazarus Naturals as A) they're wonderful people with excellent customer service B) their prices are the best C) they always post assay results. I can also endorse theanine and sleep masks.
Something I have found helpful that I haven't seen elsewhere: SAD lights. You can string a bunch of 1600 lumen bulbs to a dimmer switch and counteract lack of light exposure.
Recommendations from Andrew Huberman were a total life-saver for me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm1TxQj9IsQ
I had a prolonged day-night cycle as a side-effect of ADHD medication (Concerta) and was basically forced to live on a 28-hours day schedule. Then I've only changed my light regime, opening my blackout curtains immediately after I wake up and turning off all overhead lights after 9 pm, and it fixed my schedule in like two days, totally overcoming any stimulant side-effects. I should also note that I live in Tel Aviv where we have a lot of sunlight, people in other places might need to actually go outside in the morning to get the required light dosage or even use bright artificial lights, especially in winter.
50/50 GBL/GHB. Start low and go slow (and don’t die).
800mg of l-theanine before bed has helped me dream more and stay asleep longer (in addition to the other sleep hygiene habits recommended)
5-HTP. I find if you take too much, however, it can make you drowsy the following morning. I have tried everything under the sun, and this is the only one that has worked without also being addictive in some form.
Some people are weirdly sensitive to caffeine's effects on sleep. If you are like me, you might find that even a small coffee or tea in the morning will severely impact your sleep quality.
I swear by 7.5mg of mirtazapine 1.5 hours before bed.
Low-THC/high-CBD gummies/chocolates. The highest ratio I've seen is 30:1 ratio of CBD to THC. Works like a charm.
Collection of tips I've received asking this question before (about how to wake up on time):
1) 0.3mg timed release melatonin 60-90 mins before bed (increase dose slightly if ineffectual)
2) Have a cat/dog as a pet
3) Exercise sometime during the day (but not too close to bedtime)
4) No screens before bed
5) No caffeine or sugar/snacks before bed
6) Journal before bed
7) Move to a different timezone and do things remotely on your own day/night schedule
8) See a therapist about anxiety and other involuntary thoughts/feelings
9) Get a smart watch that can vibrate on your wrist
10) Get a sunrise alarm clock
11) Consistent sleep routine, try to eliminate sleep time variance
12) Have kids
13) Eat and hydrate properly
14) Have an actual reason to wake up in the morning. Something to look forward to.
15) Splash cold water on your face after getting up to pee close to waking time
16) Sleep meditation using the calm app
17) Go to a sleep medicine specialist, check if you have sleep apnea
18) get magnesium glycinate or magnesium citrate
19) Use a heavy weighted blanket
20) keep the room cold, under 67 F
21) Have a firm, 12 inch mattress
22) Wear loose comfortable breathable fabrics to bed
23) Have a comfy pillow that adjusts to your body
24) CBT with Sleepedy
25) Chamomile tea
26) Read something mundane and boring before bed
27) Wear a sleep mask to block out light
28) Remove phone from bedroom
29) Increase the volume of your alarm and keep it out of reach
30) Take a THC/CBN/CBD tincture
For me, combo of blindfold and low temp works wonders. If you want to spend a lot, check out https://www.eightsleep.com/ or https://www.chilisleep.com/
For me, it's a combination of a not too hot room (~20°C at most), a white noise machine, melatonin, no stimulants after 10 AM and no alcohol. So I would suggest trying stimulants timing, cutting alcohol and temperature control.
blackout curtains, earplugs, and meditation, here's a good one from the military: https://lifehacker.com/try-this-military-meditation-routine-to-fall-asleep-fas-1828661790
If you've gone through all the bio and behavioral stuff already, check out The Sleep Book: How to Sleep Well Every Night by Dr. Guy Meadows on Audible. https://www.audible.com/pd/B00LGXG4Q4?source_code=ASSOR150021921000V. Worked for me.
I wrote a book that generated no interest:
https://www.radiantpress.ca/shop/9781989274477
"In handwringers, self is a half-baked hope gleaned from various media, populating page after page with chattering anxiety circling identity, authenticity, religion, and culture.This collection of short stories revolves around Jewish identity and the schlemiel -- a figure in Jewish folklore described as "one who handles a situation in the worst possible manner or is dogged by an ill luck that is more or less due to his own ineptness." The schlemiel is not always apparent in the pages, but is continually evoked as a guiding concept, a tribute, an homage, and a narrative identity. The length and arrangement of the stories approximate a chaotic media experience: clips, soundbites, advertisements, shows, films, photographs, the all-at-once internet; a disembodied head spins like a top in green and black holographic space -- is this the likeness of a far-flung psyche or just a forgotten Much Music commercial? Collectively, moments of epiphany and/or crisis suggest fragments of self deliriously trying to assemble, clinging to would-be wisdoms and TV tag-lines, while failing to locate its/their misplaced community."
I wanted to let you all know about my paid Anki alternative, 21st Night: get21stnight.com . It was designed to solve a few issues I had with Anki:
1) Full integration with notes and pdfs: it always bothered me that the flashcards I made from my notes were in a separate place/unattached to the notes themselves. 21st Night integrates them tightly in one place.
2) Ease of use: Anki has a lot of features, but it's really difficult to use, and forces you into its own paradigm. I wanted something that had all the features of Anki, but was easier and more flexible to use (e.g. you didn't have to review your cards with spaced repetition if you didn't want to)
3) Stickiness: somewhat tied to ease of use, Anki is really hard to stick with. I wanted a studying app that was easier to stick with than Anki.
21st Night has full import/export with Anki, Quizlet, and CSV/PDF (for flashcards/notes). It has a 2 week free trial, and you can also try out the demo on the website without creating an account. Check it out at get21stnight.com !
woah. I love Anki. Does it teach calibration practice?
Not sure what you mean.
I want something that allows me to make cards to test calibration like is done in this test: https://calibration-practice.neocities.org/
Can you speak more about why your app is "stickier" than Anki?
I have gamification features that make it stickier: coins, streaks, trophies, etc.
FWIW, my biggest issue with Anki was upgrades that changed the format of my decks. Sometimes changes went from A to B and then back to something like A again, but the automatic upgrading of existing decks added extra complexity, rather than restoring something that looked like the way I'd designed them. And I couldn't both stick with the old way (i.e. refuse the upgrade to Anki) and use their only synchronization mechanism between multiple devices, which is to sync via their site (no peer to peer syncing).
I help people start folding origami tessellations by explaining the basic building blocks and underlying principles. I'm currently running a 5-week live series on the foundations, with recordings available to catch up or review previous sessions. You can sign up at https://gatheringfolds.com/signup and the second session will be Friday, August 13th.
I have been designing and manufacturing tactical shotgun accessories for police and non-police for 18 years now, after an earlier career in high tech: https://www.mesatactical.com/
The Short Cheap Math Book (tax books also available) https://www.amazon.com/Short-Cheap-Math-Book-Mathematical/dp/B08NTZTS2B/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+short+cheap+math+book+kirk+taylor&qid=1628722991&sr=8-1
Shilling for my wife's designer home decor store: https://citra.studio
They just started not long ago. The main product right now is a set of cool rugs. If you're not interested in rugs but like their style/want to follow them because you *also* think the rugs are cool, they're on instagram as @_citrastudio .
https://soen.substack.com/
An inquiry into this-worldly redemption; essentially an extension and refinement of the "self-actualization" discourse running through figures like Jung, Nietzsche and those associated with the Esalen Institute in the 60's and 70's
I wrote a simple site to conduct polls using ranked choice voting - https://poller.io
You can try it out if you ever need a good way for a group of people to pick a single winner from a group of three or more options.
Hey, I like this.
I recently had an idea about Olympic type voting. So if you’re in a group and want to pick say who you thought played the best in a team sports game, you vote for your top 3. Gold 3 points, silver 2, bronze 1 etc. And then the app/site adds up the votes and determines the winner
How difficult do you think something like this to build?
This would be pretty easy from a calculation standpoint. As you mentioned in the other post, it would reuse a lot of the Borda Count logic.
I think the trickier part on my end would be integrating it into the user interface nicely. I guess it could just be a checkbox in Poll Options to include this new type of calculation and then a number input to count only the top N choices and zero out everything else. I wonder if this has an official name? - Then poll takes would still have too rank everything for the other poll types.
I'll definitely think about this next time I get back into the code (which is quite sporadic as this is a side project).
I suppose it’s a bit like Borda Count but only the top 3 get points. So even if there’s 15 voters you can only get 3 outs for being someone’s first choice, 2 for second and 1 for bronze. I’m sure there’s some basic Java to work it out but I don’t know how to do it lol
IMO you should allow users to choose one result type from the get-go. Otherwise people might argue post-factum on whether or not IRV is better than Burda, rather than choosing one method in advance.
I can confirm that this post-factum debate happens in practice :)
We've settled on a rule to pick the winner beforehand, but you're right that it would be nice to build into the app. Appreciate the suggestion!
I think I am the only regular reader who believes in God. Still.
Blog -- https://kristenburroughs.com/
I am Orthodox. Most cats worship Bastet.
Hearing Bastet’s name always warms my heart. The name of my first cat friend. Such a beauty.
(AD gif "there are dozens of us!")
In seriousness, my impression is that the SSC community seems (slightly) more open-minded towards theism than other online rationalist (or pseudo-rationalist) communities! And there is at least one high-profile SSC theist reader, in the person of Ross Douthat. So take that as you will!
The 2019 SSC survey (to take a random example) says 10% of 13,000+ respondents describe themselves as 'committed theists', and perhaps half of that (the pie chart doesn't say) as 'lukewarm theists'. 80% are atheist/agnostic, to round out the picture. https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/2019%20SSC%20Survey.html
I recently started a Christian- themed hobby blog with a friend. Not as sharp as yours but I’ve enjoyed starting to write.
https://trocb.blogspot.com/?m=1
Well, I am a Rabbi, and do as well.
I’m a devout Eastern Orthodox Christian with a ton of kids so there’s a few of us kicking around out there.
Me too, but probably not as many kids.
Me three (no kids yet) - I'm honestly a bit surprised by how many are on this thread given we account for 0.4% of US christians?
Perhaps the God of Spinoza?
Not the only one!
If you don't believe all that much in the efficient market hypothesis and appreciate brief write-ups about forgotten stocks. And/or if you have an interest in political science on a more abstract level (more posts on that coming soon):
turtles.substack.com
I recommend my podcast, The Lee Show, for funny stories, discussion of current events, geopolitics, and ideas that you won’t find elsewhere
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lee-show/id1576247771
https://open.spotify.com/show/3b4Z3xMsklWEk7vT9fHtr6?si=SblAmabASIWX1R6VG2Dt_g&dl_branch=1
Links to it for a couple of leading podcast players above. Enjoy!
I have a book coming out, Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History's Least Likely Self-Help Guru. It's the world's first self-help guide based on the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe. That'll sound like a joke, and it is. But I mean it, too. Poe is the hero we all need now. https://www.amazon.com/Poe-Your-Problems-Uncommon-Self-Help/dp/0762499095/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1610205425&sr=1-1
A few years ago I wrote, programmed, scored, and did most of the art for a video game called Manna For Our Malices. The pitch is "groundhog day meets the x files, as an anime".
It's available from both itch (https://enkiv2.itch.io/manna-for-our-malices) and steam (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1013580/Manna_for_our_Malices/)
I tried it; interesting idea! A few suggestions/complaints (hopefully constructive if you do something similar in the future?):
(SPOILERS AHEAD)
- We need a "skip to new text" option: right now in a new loop, the only options seem to be to click through all dialogs again manually (most of which is unchanged and thus boring), or skip everything using the Skip button (and then miss any text which has changed since last loop)
- The fact that the PC gets killed the same way every evening makes no sense (and is thus rather immersion-breaking). Like my character remembers enough to make a bunch of new choices all throughout the day, but then decides to walk down the same dark street and get stabbed from behind again? At least bring a flashlight and turn around; she could solve the mystery very quickly. Given that there is some kind of magic going on anyway, perhaps you could at least partially resolve this issue by signaling that it's part of the magic at work ("As night falls, I feel a strange compulsion to retrace my steps...")
Thanks for giving it a try!
The 'skip' button actually skips only already-read text (unless you change that behavior in the configuration menu). This is a pretty standard thing for VNs, and came built-into the engine, but I could have made the behavior a little more clear (particularly since skipping is very important to this game & much less important for other, more linear games).
Regarding the PC getting killed every night -- I agree that it's a bit forced. There's an in-universe excuse for it (specifically, that the two consciousnesses inhabiting the PC have to negotiate handling various events, and so a habitual thing like going home is harder to avoid -- you have double the behavioral inertia), and there are parts of the game later on where this fate can be avoided, but it's the kind of thing I couldn't figure out how to circumvent totally in this game. In the currently-in-development sequels, this kind of thing is being avoided (in part because they aren't keeping the same time loop mechanics).
Oh huh, I must have messed with the config by accident or something; sorry for maligning your skip button :) (First time with VNs so I don't know anything about standards.)
Since everyone is sharing their substack, here's mine:
https://moreisdifferent.substack.com/
So far I have written about FDA reform, connectomics, and AI for COVID-19 diagnosis. It's been on a 3 month hiatus since I moved and changed jobs but I have a new post on FDA reform in the works (focus on regenerative medicine / stem cells). In the future there will be less on the FDA and more on AI Safety and Progress Studies.
Also related to FDA reform - check out this panel I organized which has high information density:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL4q9gPlGAY
and my summary:
http://transhumanist-party.org/2021/04/25/summary-fda-reform-panel/
here's my list of possible FDA reforms:
https://moreisdifferent.substack.com/p/a-laundry-list-of-possible-fda-reforms
For longevity fans -- this isn't going to launch officially until early September, but I've been given permission from the founder (Dylan Livingston) to share it among "transhumanist communities and mailing lists online". What I'm talking about is The Alliance for Longevity Initiatives, a new 501c4 organization that is the first of its kind. Unlike other longevity nonprofits, they can (and will) engage in lobbying and political activities. I'm really proud to be their first member and I encourage others to join early for similar bragging rights. Check it out here : https://www.a4li.org/ . Dylan worked on the Biden campaign and he's been working full time on this for several months, laying out a very strong foundation, putting together a really stellar advisory board and board of directors which will be announced in September.
+1 to Dan Elton's blog. He has the best writeup of the delay on the Pfizer vaccine approval!
We're writing Dolt, a SQL database with git versioning features. It's a SQL database you can branch and merge, fork and clone, push and pull, just like a git repository. It's like git and MySQL had a baby. The people here are smart enough to see the possibilities with that, so go check it out:
https://github.com/dolthub/dolt
This is really interesting!
I'm guessing this is more for 'static' databases, e.g. databases that, 'in production', are mostly read-only, and NOT say high-volume OTP kinds of uses.
I'm also not a fan of MySQL and have mostly avoided it, particularly professionally. Did you pick it because it's something like the most commonly used RDBMS?
What're your high-level goals for the project?
Definitely not only for static DBs, although certain patterns of branch and merge do work best like that. If you just want a high-throughput OLTP server with no versioning, MySQL is better, for now. But we're closing the gap on performance pretty quick, down from 20x slower a few months ago to 4x now. The idea is that eventually you would use Dolt anywhere you use MySQL now, it's just a better MySQL that has versioning built in. But there are lots of ways you can use branch and merge in a non-static way. Some of our customers are giving each of their customers their own branch for isolation, for example.
We indeed picked MySQL because of its install base. A lot of people have expressed a desire for Postgres instead, but none of them have agreed to pay us to build it, which we would definitely do. We'll add additional dialects, starting with Postgres, after we hit 1.0 late this year.
The goal for Dolt is to be a general purpose SQL database with version control baked in, which is a very new concept. Lots of DBs do revisions or time travel, but nobody else can do branch and merge. In the short term these capabilities enable new patterns of application development and operations which we find very interesting. In the long term, we hope Dolt will enable two-sided data marketplaces with many producers and buyers.
It's a very intriguing concept! I'm sure I'll think of some novel uses over time.
I think my concerns about considering it, as a substitute for a "general purpose SQL database" would be about ongoing operations, e.g. administration and maintenance. For example, I'd _assume_ that there's some way to 'truncate' the history of a database, as that would be my initial worry in terms of (financial) costs of adopting this over MySQL.
> Some of our customers are giving each of their customers their own branch for isolation, for example.
I'm struggling to think how that would work in a 'typical multi-tenant' application database. If the branches provide isolation, why not just give each customer their own instance of the database? Are the customers 'pushing' from their branches to a common 'remote' database? What's an example of the value of that from either your customer's perspective, or your customer's customer's perspective? (Obviously the customer's customers have their own version history just in their own branches.)
For operations, the idea is that Dolt is actually easier. Every commit can be a backup, and you can verify they're working on DoltHub. Restoring from a backup is just a `dolt checkout` command, no downtime. Other admin tools, like truncating the history, are a work in progress. But Dolt isn't much more storage intensive than other versioned DBs, storage grows with diff sizes.
You can give each client their own DB, running on the same box or different boxes, and that's isomorphic to giving them their own branch. Just different trade offs for operational stuff. The main advantage is you can do live schema + data migrations of domain (common) tables by making edits upstream (master) and then merging them downstream on some schedule you control. The use case is that each customer has a branch where it appears (on that branch) that all the data in the entire database is theirs, no need to bake customer numbers into your schemas and indexes. And of course each customer branch can be the parent to many other branches (local to that customer), which lets each customer experiment with different datasets without messing with their "prod" branch. This happens a lot in machine learning, for example.
I have wanted this for so long for SQL Server.
Perhaps a stupid question, but the git features would be for DDL level stuff right? I wouldn't need to merge for an INSERT statement back the the master branch for others to see it would I?
You might be interested in DB Ghost if you're using (Microsoft) SQL Server. I still kinda prefer their 'sync' model over typical migrations for, e.g. deploying (mostly DDL) changes to databases. Maintaining migrations (for both DDL changes and 'code data' or 'seed data') in version control is a big win, but I liked the model whereby you can 'see' (read) in one place the current 'state' of some 'schema objects' (e.g. tables, indexes, stored procedures) without having to either trust your local 'dev' instance of a database (or re-run all of the migrations from scratch each time).
It versions both data and schema. So if you are working on your own branch and insert rows, nobody on other branches will see it until you merge it back.
You can also just all connect to the same branch and edit it together with normal SQL transactions. Everybody chooses which branch to come up to at connection time, and of course you can create new branches or switch branches in your session, and merge branches into each other. You only work on an independent branch when you want to keep it isolated for a while for whatever reason.
how it's different from datomic?
Datomic gives you data history, but not branch and merge. Or clone, or push and pull to remotes, or any other git operation.
Do you also give out merge conflicts free of charge?
On a serious note it would be interesting to see how https://github.com/attic-labs/noms/blob/master/doc/intro.md#prolly-trees-probabilistic-b-trees
differs from http://lampwww.epfl.ch/papers/idealhashtrees.pdf /persistent data structures in clojure.
Dolt is built on top of noms prolly trees, not sure if that's why you brought it up :)
Very cool idea, I'll check it out.
Following up on my free podcast audiobook of Scott Alexander's "UNSONG", I'm narrating the works of David Chapman, starting with "Meaningness". https://fluidity.libsyn.com
Oh, I was unaware Chapman was this popular. Looking forward to it.
Scott has written about his ideas before, albeit almost a decade ago: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/06/on-first-looking-into-chapmans-pop-bayesianism/
Goodness! Unsong in podcast form? You've made my day - thank you.
I'm glad that made your day! You can find that podcast here: https://unsong.libsyn.com/
I'm very happy to have found this, too!
Subscribed!
New, free, values-based, video-only dating app where you pre-filter based on dealbreakers & dealmakers (crowd-sourced; no "expert" algorithms): https://drom.date/astralcodexten
I'm confused (or at least disappointed) because the name is Swedish, but the dealmakers/breakers seem very America-centric.
It's hard to find a short name that isn't already taken :) We feel that "dream" (in Swedish) represents our purpose very well. We do hope to expand globally including Sweden as we grow.
We're early stage so not many users yet. We're focused mostly on English speaking countries but we're open globally. We don't have translations for the app yet, though.
I blog at benjiwheeler.medium.com . I write about politics, education, books and technology. I'd say my tone is intellectual but accessible, skeptical but not overly smug about it :) I think ACX readers would find my writing worth reading!
Do you miss the good old days when Slate Star Codex had a side bar with many wonderful products? Relive those halcyon days every time you bite into Mealsquares: https://mealsquares.com/. We're kind of hoping you mostly taste the nostalgia since we're so low sugar.
Unfortunately, I've gone through the process of "looks interesting, I wonder if they ship outside the US yet" about five times.
Thanks for the reminder. I've checked out your product many times in the past trying to find a good way to eat predictably and lazily while minimizing the kitchen work I need to do, and can't really remember why I've always chosen to not go with mealsquares. I'm ordering the sample box.
Who do you use for shipping? I'm actually fairly happy with my current meal service in terms of the food itself, but am very likely to cancel because UPS keeps delivering late or never, often lets food sit in the truck until it's spoiled, and is constantly destroying the boxes. If I switch, I'm not switching to another vendor that uses UPS.
Also, does your application interface allowing changing an email address? One of the other annoying things about my current service is it doesn't, so I'm forced to stick forever with the crap spambox address I use before I trust you.
Any chance you'll get formal kosher certification?
What are the odds of a vegan (or lacto-vegetarian) version of Mealsquares? I really enjoyed them, but I stopped eating eggs a few years ago.
We haven't found a functional/nutritional substitute for eggs and whey, so no plans for vegan squares sorry.
Hah. Forgot about you guys. Last time I ordered was years ago. Going to place an order now. I am new fan of Huel : Hot and Savory which I view as an innovative product in the nutritionally complete meal replacement space (don't care for Huel the drink though). Here's my Huel referral code where you can get 15% off : https://huel.mention-me.com/m/ol/wk4vr-9e6bd37203 You also get a free t-shirt on your first order which is actually really high quality and not all cotton so it dries quickly if you get sweaty.
<shill mode>
Free Black Thought (FBT) combats racial essentialism and the politics of racial authenticity by promoting public awareness of the great diversity of thought among black writers and artists. In so doing, we seek to highlight the unique contributions to public debates made by heterodox black voices from across the political spectrum. FBT is non-partisan: we pursue no political agenda other than a commitment to free speech, civil rights, and a conviction that a pluralistic society committed to liberal democracy is nourished by the entire spectrum of black thinking on matters of politics, society, and culture.
FBT’s Compendium of Free Black Thought contains topically arranged bibliographies of heterodox writing by black authors: https://bit.ly/Compendium_of_FBT
The FBT website features a curated list of heterodox black podcasters and YouTubers, arranged into broad categories by political ideology (“Liberal,” “Centrist,” “Conservative”): www.freeblackthought.com
Our Journal of Free Black Thought just published its inaugural essay by Glenn Loury, Professor of Economics at Brown University and FBT advisor: https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/wrestle-not-against-flesh-and-blood
</shill mode>
Thank you for your consideration.
Glenn Loury is great. His Convo w/ Wesley Yang is amazing.
Will check this out.
A dating ad, why not: Compared to the average ACT reader, I am athletic, extroverted, offline, low in neuroticism, and interested in aesthetics. Hobbies include cycling, wilderness backpacking, climbing, music, and dance. The dream is to build a household glowing with love, music, and community. That could include building the physical house — and definitely includes unschooling, free-range parenting, or something along those lines. Looking for competence, judgement, and flow. On a date I can take you to the mountains or to the Met, your choice.
My basic information: M seeking F, aged 33, truly 6'0" (189 cm), income ~$400k with upward potential, working remotely.
Location: US West or Southwest, open to travel and snow-birding. I spent the pandemic taking a COVID-safe road trip around the West, which I'm still on. Give me a reason to move to a place.
Not what you're looking for, I'm a happily married straight male, but I'm in Colorado- interested in backpacking with you sometime if you're up here
I'll probably be in CO again later this year. Email me, astraldating@gmail.com
Good luck. Dating while location independent is surprisingly hard!
Email astraldating@gmail.com if interested.
I don't have dyslexia but apparently mis-read that unit conversion! 183cm it is.
I'm convinced. Admittedly I'm a straight man in the UK already happily in a relationship so not much use to you. Still, you might be the most eligible bachelor I've come across in a while! Best of luck with your search.
Definitely "looks good on paper".
Use the Zoomcorder video robot (which I built!) to record your next webinar or meeting WITHOUT you attending. (It's ideal for video meetings where you mainly listen.) Immediately after the meeting a recording will be sent to you to watch anytime. Try it out at: https://Zoomcorder.com
I wish I had something already written up on this, but before the comments become too unmanageable ...
I'm an independent researcher EA interested in sponsoring someone to work on a research agenda related to AI-driven persuasion tech-slash-memetic warfare. See https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/qKvn7rxP2mzJbKfcA/persuasion-tools-ai-takeover-without-agi-or-agency for some idea of what I'm talking about. I envision this would be a 2-3 month project for an EA aligned student or recent grad.
I'll look for people through more traditional channels soon, but wanted to throw up something here to cast a wider net. In the meantime, if you'd like more information, please shoot me an email at memeticwarfarin at gmail.com.
Can you talk more on the scope of the 2-3 month project?
Do you plan for any deliverables, besides a paper?
If your research is successful, how much of it will be published?
It is not clear to me that we have a good framework for researching defense against these tools, however there may be no major blockers to the creation of the tools themselves.
My concern is that it may be counter productive to explore this space in the wrong order, we should want a broader understanding of AI alignment rooted in more innocuous applications of AI before we specifically research memetic tools.
The only deliverable would be a paper, to be published if and only if the benefits to doing so clearly outweigh any potential hazards. The primary goal would be to generate a framework for thinking about potential dangers in this space and identify areas of concern for further investigation. This is an area that generally worries me, but it's way outside of my field of expertise, and I don't know how to go about evaluating its importance or tractability given that almost nothing has been written on it. Beyond personal interest, the research agenda might be used to apply for funding for further rounds of investigation via an appropriate, aligned funding organization.
If I could set policy for the world, I'd much prefer that no one research memetic tools, but there are such enormous and I think obvious financial and political incentives for doing so that I think waiting entails an unacceptably high likelihood of very bad outcomes.
I write a funny literature / book blog at http://dreicafe.com. The shtik is to take "serious literature" and present it to a layman reader (I pretend I'm writing for a tradie mate); I occasionally stretch the definition of "literature" to e.g. TalkBass forum posts. It's framed as letters to friends. I am going for short & highly funny articles, but with meat on the bone for each one.
There's Melbourne Australia 'Lockdown Experience Blog' content in the older issues (mostly complaints about "pick up yr dog poo") signs, for anyone into that sort of stuff!
http://dreicafe.com
I’ve worked with Capitalists, Communists, and Catholics in Asia, Europe, and North America and have set up an executive coaching practice for potential / current leaders in business, government, and nonprofit. john@bahsuh84.com
I write about Freemasonry. Everything anyone could ever want to know about the ancient Fraternity:
https://emeth.substack.com
Disclaimer: Not my project. Just something cool I'd like to share.
Worried about climate change? Want to help accelerate the development of nuclear power plants but don't know where to start?
If you can write Python, you can help! As it turns out, there are mundane issues like:
- How do you encode a pebble bed reactor design in a yaml file, so that simulation framework can ingest it?
- How do you upgrade to the latest version of numpy without breaking anything?
- How do you support other grid types? The simulation framework can handle it, but the UI can't.
Check out this GitHub project, they are accepting contributions: https://github.com/terrapower/armi
Perks:
- Feel like you're doing something about climate change.
- Learn about reactor core design.
- Get noticed by senpai Nick Touran (https://partofthething.com/).
As a youngster first getting interested in programming and reading the Jargon File, I assumed I'd go through a "larval stage" and write lots of open source... but never did. I appreciate this notice, and hopefully will check it out.
Please elaborate. This seems like it would be right up the alley of many people in my circle but that github link is SUPER intimidating and doesn't have an obvious entry point.
Sure!
I've found these pages to be pretty good entry points to learn about how the code is organized:
https://terrapower.github.io/armi/developer/guide.html
https://terrapower.github.io/armi/tutorials/walkthrough_inputs.html
Here's how to install:
https://terrapower.github.io/armi/user/user_install.html
There are a bunch of issues labeled as "good first issue". If you're interested in working on an issue, you can express interest and ask clarification questions. They're welcoming and pretty responsive!
https://github.com/terrapower/armi/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22
If you want your kids to learn coding, you could do worse than to try the relatively new live classes we do on top of our game-based-learning coding platform: https://codecombat.com/parents (self-paced options also available). Works best for kids 8-14, but can serve well as soon as they can type, and plenty of adults learn coding with us, too.
I write law review articles about First Amendment protections for free inquiry (including freedom to experiment, to collect/analyze data, and to make scientific claims that fall short of current FDA/FTC requirements of proof.) Perhaps of interest to this group.
Jane Bambauer, Is Data Speech? (https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2014/01/66_Stan._L_Rev_57_Bambauer.pdf)
Snake Oil Speech (https://www.law.uw.edu/wlr/print-edition/print-edition/vol-93/1/snake-oil-speech)
All Life Is an Experiment. (Sometimes It's a Controlled Experiment.) (https://www.luc.edu/media/lucedu/law/students/publications/llj/pdfs/vol47/issue2/J.%20Bambauer.pdf)
The Empirical First Amendment (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/159598594.pdf)
I am so grateful for SSC / AC10 content (including reader comments).
Mortality, public finance, and public pensions -- I have a substack (link next to my name, but for convenience: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/ )
I'm a life actuary and I'm really into explaining mortality trends right now. Tax policy and stressed public pensions are also tops for topics for me.
I am replying just to recommend checking it out - I've found Mary Pat's writing on many topics well worth reading over the years. (Sadly, most of what I read is on the much-missed Actuarial Outpost/Rebel Forum).
Thanks, Sam! ;)
And yeah, while I do interact on r/actuary and goActuary.com, I keep most of my public pensions/finance writing to the blog now.
Astranis is hiring for all kinds of engineering and non-engineer positions. We're a team in San Francisco, recently raised a 250m series C, building small geostationary communications satellites.
https://www.astranis.com/careers
Applied for a position I think I have a good background for, mentioned hearing about it through this posting.
Check out Rational Animations. An animated, hopefully high-quality, YouTube channel about rationality, EA ideas, and more: https://www.youtube.com/c/RationalAnimations/featured
Looking for anyone to collaborate with and share thoughts on the following topics:
- practical applied human longevity (basically slowing aging via any biological mechanisms, but more so the practical side of things we can actually do, rather than just funding $50M 5 year-long studies)
- using machine learning and related emerging tech to provide novel classes of experiences, particularly with relevance to music, voice, VR, and anime (two example projects from this year: https://thisanimedoesnotexist.ai/ and https://koe.ai)
Bonus points if you're in Austin TX and/or are into other topics I love such as music, infosec, finance, Japanese, and many others (see website). If any of this sounds interesting to you, read more about me and get in contact with me via https://nearcyan.com/, thanks!
Your website’s essays/posts were a nice read!
thanks! I had drafts for so many more posts but I got very out of the habit of wanting to write for a few reasons, so although I'm a bit disappointed that I only have a few posts up, I'm glad you enjoyed them!
Comments if you care:
A minor factoid in one post was “inflation may be necessary to increase spending”. I don’t think that’s particularly true, as cash sitting at real -2% vs investments sitting at 5-7% real and bonds at 0% real doesn’t actually present that different long term incentives (you still would rather invest your savings and get a higher growth rate) and most people spend because they have reason to - consumers probably won’t buy a car or fridge next year because deflation. Inflation is rather considered good because it gives the fed monetary policy flexibility (or something like that). And a google suggests at least one expert agrees with me on that https://www.marketplace.org/2019/09/12/why-is-inflation-necessary/
Wikipedia has a similar problem to Firefox in terms of the org spending little on development and useful stuff vs lots on nonsense. The WMF budget and spending keeps increasing every year and it’s not clear why. I used ungoogled-chromium for a while for the best of both.
(And some stuff about my diet that the supplement post brought up) I’m more skeptical of the longevity studies and other perceived benefits of some of the non vitamin compounds in the supplement list. A combination of publication bias on both base error rate and methodological variation means I don’t take individual or even ten studies showing some trend in animal or humans super seriously. Also there’s just so many people and groups doing so many studies like that, and there don’t seem to be too many negative results of any form floating around. I also don’t think the current though around cholesterol and health is quite right, at at least certainly not the full picture, but have no clue as to what would be quite right. So for instance I don’t see the garlic and simile as useful, and a combination of randomly eating during the day and a very unusual diet probably means I won’t get whatever potential benefit there is from the insulin and glucose related compounds.
I generally don’t take supplements. I just eat a variety of animal products (buying organs, bones, and whatever random stuff is available, cracking bones open for marrow, and just buying whole small animals and eating every edible part, crunching softer cartilage, etc) and a large quantity of fruit and assorted plants, and based on some tests on the variation across different organs in animals, natural products like spermidine and glycine I probably get enough of from meat and and Fisetin and other stuff from fruit. I maybe should eat more fish though, probably tbh, but idk how to balance the heavy metal and other ocean pollutant risk.(seems fish oil is low on mercury from google scholar, but I wonder if it just concentrated the organic mercury (which is fat soluble)... idk). And that did remind me that I probably really should get blood work to check for deficiencies...
On chocolate - for a bit I ate a lot of chocolate (no sugar), and it seemed to have a rather strong caffeine like effect to me, and theobromine is off by one methyl from caffeine.
Appreciate the comments a lot, some of those posts I never linked anywhere so it still comes as a surprise to me that they've been read, but I'm glad at least someone enjoyed them!
Inflation: Reasonable, I think it'd be better to state what I had said in terms of when there's two competing currencies; e.g. if you have USD and BTC, and you expect the BTC to go up, you'd want to hold onto your BTC and spend your USD for what you need instead, so there'd be less BTC spent in comparison.
Wikipedia: My Wikipedia experience is generally still very pleasant, although I'm aware of some categories of issues they face, I definitely have a more enjoyable time using Wikipedia on average than using Firefox. I still plan to continue using FF or forks of it, but Chrome has a lot of very nice performance advantages too.
Diet: Skepticism is great to have with anything related to diet and supplements; the science is not only very hard, but there are insanely large profit motives for most parties involved, so that's always reasonable imo. On lipids/cholesterol, Peter Attia has some great podcasts on it (and on a ton of other things) that I mostly agree with his thoughts on, but it's safe to say that the mainstream consensus is very lacking there. Your diet sounds pretty interesting and potentially really nice, it's probably better to get what you want without needding supplementation if possible, I mostly am just being lazy with mine right now. You should definitely get tested from things though, it can't hurt (besides costing a bit). The last time I was tested for heavy metals the result was too low to be detected by the test, so I don't worry about them personally.
Thanks for the response, happy to chat about this or any other topic any time.
I'm looking for new female friends in my area (I live in Ramat Gan, Israel). I'm 38yo, divorced, engaged, have two children and a cat. My job is saving the world from the AI apocalypse. I'm a long time Scott Alexander fangirl, LessWronger, and a regular in the local effective altruism group. Approximately vegan. I love reading science fiction and fantasy, especially romance (but not only). Enjoy most types of music besides extreme metal. On the normie side, I like shopping, cafes/restaurants, cinema and dancing (although I rarely get to do the last two). Contact me at rot13 (https://rot13.com/) of uvtucevrfgrffbsryhn@tznvy.pbz.
Not a direct response, but I've been thinking about moving back to Israel recently - is there an interesting way/rat scene? Are there people actually working on AI safety stuff there?
There is a very active EA group: the average event has dozens of people, and there are lots of projects going on (https://effective-altruism.org.il/). Pre-COVID there was also a LessWrong meetup but it seems to be on hiatus atm. As to AI safety, I am actually working on it, yes! (https://www.alignmentforum.org/users/vanessa-kosoy, https://www.alignmentforum.org/s/CmrW8fCmSLK7E25sa) Besides me there is David Manheim.
Thanks!
For the ea group, it's interesting that the people I know on the Facebook group aren't who I'd have expected - they're mostly moderately-nerdy-but-mostly-normy girls I went to high school with, rather than the types of people I typically expect in ea/rat space.
Obviously, hardcore girls like me don't use facebook :P