Ok. I'll wear a solid black shirt instead of my bright blue shirt.

talk to friends as a half measure

When it comes to your internal track record, it is often said that finding what you wrote at time t-k beats trying to remember what you thought at t-k. However, the activation energy to keep such a journal is kinda a hurdle (which is why products like https://fatebook.io are so good!).

I find that a nice midpoint between the full and correct internal track record practices (rigorous journaling) and completely winging it (leaving yourself open to mistakes and self delusion) is talking to friends, because I think my memory of conversations that are had out loud with other people is more detailed and honest than my memory of things I've thought / used to think, especially when it's a stressful and treacherous topic.^[1]

I was at an ARIA meeting with a bunch of category theorists working on safeguarded AI and many of them didn't know what the work had to do with AI.

epistemic status: short version of post because I never got around to doing the proper effort post I wanted to make.

A sketch I'm thinking of: asking people to consume information (a question, in this case) is asking them to do you a favor, so you should do your best to ease this burden, however, also don't be paralyzed so budget some leeway to be less than maximally considerate in this way when you really need to.

what's the best essay on asking for advice?

Going over etiquette and the social contract, perhaps if it's software specific it talks about minimal reproducers, whatever else the author thinks is involved.

Rumors are that 2025 lighthaven is jam packed. If this is the case, and you need money, rudimentary economics suggests only the obvious: raise prices. I know many clients are mission aligned, and there's a reasonable ideological reason to run the joint at or below cost, but I think it's aligned with that spirit if profits from the campus fund the website.

I also want to say in print what I said in person a year ago: you can ask me to do chores on campus to save money, it'd be within my hufflepuff budget. There are good reasons to not go totally "by and for the community" DIY like many say community libraries or soup kitchens, but nudging a little in that direction seems right.

EDIT: I did a mostly symbolic $200 right now, may or may not do more as I do some more calculations and find out my salary at my new job

Guaranteed Safe AI paper club meets again this thursday

Event for the paper club: https://calendar.app.google/2a11YNXUFwzHbT3TA

blurb about the paper in last month's newsletter:

... If you’re wondering why you just read all that, here’s the juice: often in GSAI position papers there’ll be some reference to expectations that capture “harm” or “safety”. Preexpectations and postexpectations with respect to particular pairs of programs could be a great way to cash this out, cuz we could look at programs as interventions and simulate RCTs (labeling one program control and one treatment) in our world modeling stack. When it comes to harm and safety, Prop and bool are definitely not rich enough.

my dude, top level post- this does not read like a shortform

Yoshua Bengio is giving a talk online tomorrow https://lu.ma/4ylbvs75