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August 2020 Updates
Sign up for these updates through email Hello and happy September! Here's what happened last month and what I was reading, watching, and thinking about. Highlights from August Work-wise I sp...
Rapid Tests
Visit the accompanying simulation to explore the model Introduction With all of the controversy around lockdowns and mask wearing, it feels as if attention has fallen away from scientific and tec...
July 2020 Review
Some personal highlights from the past month: I decided, after polling friends and family, to move to a place where I've been assured summer never ends - San Diego. Recommendations for...
Results from the Where Should we Move Poll
The results are in!
Solving Math Problems by Relay
Posted on LessWrong From September to November 2018 we ran an experiment where people did programming in relay. Each player spent ten minutes on a programming problem before passing on their code ...
June 2020 Review
I feel like the theme of June was volatility. We're in a different world where institutions that have existed for decades suddenly feel like they're on their last legs. Excerpts from my Ju...
Build a SIR Model
I wrote a short tutorial on creating a SIR model with HASH. In it I detail how to create the initial agents, add contagion behaviors, and how to extend it with “policy” options like isolation and t...
May 2020 Review
Overall this was a pretty great month. I feel a little weird writing that while still under Coronavirus lockdown and with protests and riots consuming the American body politic, but on a personal f...
AI Vignettes
It's difficult to imagine what the world would look like if we do achieve some extra-ordinary AI tech. For instance when we say AI in the next ten years will be able to drive a truck cross-coun...
Recommended Things
Last Updated May 17th, 2020 Software Roam Research: The bi-directional links, daily notes page, and graph structure of Roam really fit my brain. I've been a much more active notetaker and jou...
Winograd Schema Challenge
The Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) is one of the hardest benchmarks for language models to beat. It's an unusual structure that tests "common sense" reasoning. Example (from Wikiped...
Grant Making
Problem: How do you scale grantmaking and investing? The process of evaluating applications is very difficult and often relies upon a single individual with good judgement investing lots of time. T...
The Wall Street Bets Buyout Fund
The Wall Street Bets Buyout Fund Moviepass, the erstwhile company selling dimes for nickels, was at one point worth less than $45,000. The top investors in the world came together with an idea - b...
Why aren't there more hacks?
Web security is terrible. It's extremely hard to secure computers from motivated and competent adversaries. So why aren't there more hacks? I look out in the world and there's tons of...
Moderation ML
Executive Summary Active Learning ML moderation system for online forums. The moderation system flags content for human review when below a threshold of confidence, the moderator classifies it, an...
VRChat and Play
VRChat is amazing. VRChat is Second Life meets Oculus - a totally open environment with no rules and total freedom to wear any character and face you want. The structures and avatars are construct...
Soft Eyes
A teacher of mine, when describing how to solve an Algorithms problem, stresses the importance of making sure you understand the problem in it's entirety, taking it all in. In the inner game o...
Crowd Med
Looking through my old blog posts I found this post on the DARPA Red Balloon challenge I wrote in 2015 for CrowdMed. Still a very relevant look at a cool project in crowdsourcing. What Balloons Ca...