Most awesome things during the last two months (since there wasn't a bragging thread last month):

Hacked my motivation system to finally install a sustainable exercise habit. I had long been trying to get myself to exercise more. Every now and then I managed to create a morning routine of going out on a run, but this habit would always fall apart whenever I'd get sick or otherwise be prevented from engaging in it for a while. The problem was that, while I could get the habit going by pushing myself, getting the habit started always required some active pushing. What I needed was something that would naturally pull me instead, causing me to get outside without requiring active willpower expenditure.

When I asked myself how I could achieve that, the answer was pretty obvious: I knew a bunch of people who were getting exercise by playing location-based games. And I knew that I had a tendency to get addicted to games very easily, so this seemed just like the thing that would work for me. For various reasons (most importantly wanting to limit my Internet use), I had long resisted acquiring a smartphone, but I felt that actually getting some exercise was important enough to give in. So I bought one and installed two games I'd heard about, Ingress and Zombies, Run!.

Zombies, Run! I only tried once and then never replayed it, but Ingress became a lasting habit. As of this writing, I've walked/jogged/ran a total distance of 162 kilometers (101 miles) during the 54 days that I've played it. The habit has persisted throughout the kinds of events that used to break my previous exercise habits, including one occasion of getting sick for a few days, and a period where I was so focused on finishing my studies that I only had minimal time for exercise for a couple of weeks.

Finally finished all the last coursework needed for my MSc degree. I've filed the last forms needed for graduation: now all that remains is to wait for the university's bureaucracy to finish doing whatever it is that they do, and then collect my degree certificate at a small ceremony on Dec 16th.

Wrote a paper starting work on an important but as-of-yet untouched FAI subproblem (building an actual model of what exactly "human values" are), which was accepted to the AAAI-16 AI, Ethics and Society workshop. Will upload a copy of it on the public Internet sometime soon, after finishing some final revisions.