One year and one month ago I decided to post a technical article / blog post once per week. Still going strong. Some of them are weak, but mostly I'm happy with the results. Apparently I enjoy writing about technical stuff.

For example, recently I told someone about quantum pseudo-telepathy, and promptly realized I didn't understand the details when I tried to explain it. I decided to spend the time to figure it out, down to at least the level of a quantum logic circuit. The Wikipedia article was zero help, just confusing me even more. So I started reading sources until I understood it well enough to write about how to simulate it. It takes me up to ten seconds per written word (counting every revision) to write a post so it took quite a lot of time to get those ~4.5k words down the way I wanted.

Another post I enjoyed writing, and more in tune with Less Wrong's subject matter, was Solomonoff's Mad Scientist. It just talks about a hypothetical machine that picks actions that maximize the prediction entropy of a Solomonoff Inductor (it is definitely not friendly).

In the near future I'm hoping to come up with a nice simple game to demonstrate making something "un-map-hackable" via secure multi party computation. It's simplest where there's three players, and I've already got the math and the code for the mechanism worked out for that case, but I haven't come up with something trivial enough to demonstrate it.

Having an end goal of explaining what I did has pushed me to finish more projects, instead of just starting them.

I left my family, my job, and my girlfriend to move across the country, to Austin, to explore the world, to work for myself, and to become a Complete Social Creature, aka a Normal Person, aka an Adult.

Progress. Being so far from home has freed me to act like who I want to be, rather than who people expect me to be. This is coming at the same time that social interactions are making much more sense than they did when I was younger. I understand what I have to offer and what others have to offer me, and how to frame our interactions like that. Dating is easier and less stressful, which is amazing considering how inscrutable I found it even a year ago. I've been working full-time on the side business, and we filled over 650 orders in September.

Setbacks. The day I moved down here, an unexpected expense wiped out a good chunk of my savings, at the same time my buddy quit the stake (poker), and the consulting job I thought I'd lined up never happened. So I'm playing with less of a safety net than I'm accustomed to, and I have to live on minimal income which is a stressor but a minor one. I haven't been here long enough to build the deeper bonds of friendship so I need to tread carefully. But overall it's an adventure and a great challenge and I'm very excited to keep moving forward.

Probably very late to the thread, oh well. Some weeks ago I started vividly imagining a certain style of 3D pixel art, and the imagination was so insistent that I wrote an editor program for that kind of art using JavaScript and WebGL (it will be on GitHub once I clean it up), and before even finishing the editor I started drawing stuff with it and couldn't stop. Today I set up a tumblr for the things I draw: eachothersbreath.tumblr.com.

Learning the Rust programming language. It looks like a surprisingly solid candidate to push into the C++ niche of very high-performance large-scale programming. The big difference to most other candidates is that the developers figured a basic coding idiom that doesn't use garbage collection, while still guaranteeing that you won't have memory leaks, accessing invalid memory or null pointer dereferences crashing your program unless you go out of your way to do unsafe things at designated-unsafe blocks of code, at the cost of a somewhat complicated type system. It's backed by the Mozilla Project, so it also has a bit more resources to go with than average single-programmer language projects.

I'm working on creating a good Anki deck for learning human physiology that I'm going to release publically.

I want to run a study with it to see whether certain options in Anki help users. That means I also need to write a plugin to extract Anki review data in a way that allow the users of the deck to send it back to myself.

I made Sodna, a lightweight virtual terminal library for developing text mode games like NetHack or Dwarf Fortress. It's meant to be an alternative to the currently widely used libtcod, which comes with a large amount of game logic routines for C programmers as well as the virtual terminal implementation. Sodna opens the graphical window, lets you draw colorful letters and read keyboard input, and does nothing else, so it's a good alternative for people who want to roll their own game logic code.

Mostly made this to scratch my own itch, I found libtcod annoyingly bloated for making quick prototype games when using a new programming language, since I'd be making the game logic code in the new language anyway and only wanted the library for quickly bringing up a simple text terminal.

The other thing I'm working on: the loved one quit her horrible job in August 'cos she couldn't stand it any more, and is now MUCH happier. Unfortunately, this means she needs to somehow produce an income as an artist. This is of course difficult. Though the T-shirts are selling a few (US store, UK store). And the gap from 0 sales to 1 sale is much bigger than the gap from 1 sale to 100 sales. She's also writing a children's book with dinosaurs, with the eager assistance of the 6yo.

We've also got about 70 litres of mead brewing at home, and it's coming out shockingly nice. Brewing for sale is of course highly regulated, and if we wanted to start it as a separate business we'd be starting in the realm of £10k starting capital needed; but partnerships with already-licenced brewing premises are feasible, so she's talking to a local indie brewery about doing a nice mead starting in mid-October (when they have a spare vat) for sale and hence money.

So, her job is to be the artist and mine is to be the manager. Not much money yet, but we're not starving (here's to high-paying day jobs in IT) and it's lotsa fun.

I'm working on helping effective altruists make more money and be more successful in their careers. 80,000 hours has done a great job helping people make high-level strategic decisions such as "should I work in Law or Finance?" My focus is on helping people who've chosen a career path be more effective and make more money. For example, I've helped several of my friends negotiate an increase in their salaries and hope to spread these skills amongst the EA community at large.

One example of this has been individual conversations regarding career advice. I've also been talking to people who have thought about this issue, such as Alexei or the folks at CFAR. By working with several people, I'm hoping to get a set of coherent career advice and turn this into a course that EAs could benefit from.

One candidate so far seems to be a course on negotiating your salary and promotions. Other common questions have included:

• How do you learn to model people/organizations/markets effectively, in order to find the most valuable problems to solve?
• Which skills should you prioritize learning in order to maximize income?
• What factors are important in choosing a job, and what factors should be ignored?

I founded a company, Lambda, a talent agency for exceptional developers, designers, technology professionals.

Here's the pitch:

It's currently very difficult for many nontechnical people to find high-quality software developers and designers to do contract work. Because it's often difficult to judge technical ability if you're not a technical person yourself, people often select the lowest bid for the project they want to get done, resulting in poor work or missed deadlines. People want to pay for high-quality talent, they just can't tell the difference.

By screening all candidates ourselves, prospective clients can come to us and get an assurance that their project will get done well. We're tapping into a dark pool of high-quality talent, by signing up entrepreneurs and other skilled folks who aren't on the market otherwise, who wouldn't even consider participating in a marketplace filled with low-quality talent, because they value their time.

More importantly, we provide a service to developers by doing the legwork of finding clients and screening them for quality. There's a world of difference between clients who understand what's involved in a complex software project, and those who don't.

• Restart doing sport regularly. I started going to the gym one year ago, with the goal of 3 times per week. I reached an average of about 1 time per week, but with a very uneven distribution - i.e. 1 week 3 times, then two weeks nothing. Since July, I didn't have any regular exercise. At the last less wrong meetup, I set the goal to go to the gym 1/week and do the 7 minute workout twice per week. That was on the 22nd. In the first week after setting the goal, I didn't succeed. This week, I did the 7 minute workout once.

• Till the next meetup (27th October), read chapter one of "Good and Real" by Gary L. Drescher. I haven't started yet, but am a fast reader and hope to do it this week-end.

Currently working on a Django app to create directed acyclic graphs, intended to be used as dependency graphs. It should be accessible enough to regular consumers, and I plan to extend it to support to-do lists and curriculum mapping.

I need to work on my JavaScript skills. The back-end structure is easy enough, but organising how the graphs are displayed and such is proving more challenging, as well as trying to make a responsive interface for editing graphs.

My personal area of interest is to work out a framework which could map human 'ideas' to AI goals, so that we may be able to monitor friendliness.

It is a lot more complex than I understand, so I I believe the best long term benefit would be for me to acquire maths skills and knowledge.

So, I have been taking a fairly intensive load of online courses to learn maths and other AI topics, to acquire as much practical knowledge as possible. I don't think it will cover all the gaps in a formal maths eduction, but being a motivated self learner I am interested in seeing how close I can get.