assorted things to write about
things I want to write about:
- traveling
- llms + ml research
- organizational politics
- real politics
- begrudgingly being female
- (as a disclaimer, I'm actually pretty alright being female, but it is sort of a pain managing some degree of social expectations)
- egg freezing
- "biohacking your way to freedom"
- dating (specifically, my form of wanting to date socially competent, career successful AI nerds and... the anti-correlation between that and other things I wanna have)
- my date-me-or-not doc
- being ok (maybe) of dying alone (in the partner, albeit not community) sense, given all the awesome old ladies I've met who are rocking it
- yeeting myself out to foreign countries
- long-distance hiking
- long-distance running
- sucking at swimming but doing it anyway
- (this is quickly becoming just a list of "what are the random things that I've got going on that I'm now thinking about")
- being first generation
- how behavioral psychology is a form of cultural technology
- ...and how society as a whole has gained so much of that form of cultural technology (partially through the internet) to the point where it feels funky trying to interact with folks who haven't picked up that cultural technology (though you can't really be upset at them either)
- an ill formed thing that needs to be cleaned: how do I navigate making a point to get exposure and experience with different things yet still chat to other folks about that in an accessible way
- ...and conversely, how do I keep myself open-minded and not elitist (or come off as elitist) when I'm talking to someone where the difference in prior experience may be explanatory for large parts of a disagreement? Is there any hope?
- communication as an abstraction tree
- communication as propaganda
- communication as something that feels almost more important of a contributor to doing-the-right-thing as the doing-itself, but that feels obnoxious and icky
- ...especially cause sometimes the folks that specialize in the communication bit might lose context for the doing-itself bit and then everything gets wonky... but sometimes you need dedicated communicators if an org is big enough and... ugh
- ...(multiple real-life examples I've firsthand seen for the above)
- ...(ugh there's spicy real anecdotes that I've got, but I guess there's even some of those I really shouldn't be putting on a place like this cause folks might still be touchy and I don't wanna deal with blowback even if it might be instructive and ugh)
- power + access != freedom
- "Every founder tells themselves a story about why they’re heading to the gold rush, but [...] there are really only two. Do you want to be rich, generating wealth in service of some further end? Or do you want to be king, with money a mere byproduct of trying to make the world the way you feel it should be?"
- I know my feelings about money pretty clearly there (my current amounts/style of living are more than enough for me) but what is the kingdom that I would build? How would I build it and how much of my own freedom am I willing to trade for it?
- ...also similarly, how much am I willing to chase trying to build a kingdom (of and with others) versus being content with a modest life? (I don't think I want a modest life but there are parts of it that I want, so what exactly does that mean?)
- Regularizers of society
- ...cause humans are too good at min-maxing (especially as crowds) and it causes problems
- Bunch of specific details about gossip + things in the market that explain the things I sort of want to spend time doing right now, while I'm intentionally funemployed
- ...prolly can't actually say the gossip publicly lol
- ...I'm also not sure I've got the directional thoughts fully formed, though it's plausible
- How do I balance my time?
- ....how do I decide what to be good or not on?
- ^ Neither of these are ones I've actually figured out, but whatever this is a blog for musings
- Comparing and contrasting between NYC, SF, Seattle, Boston, and generic American suburbs from time spent in all of these
- ...maybe also the vibe of Spain?
- I'm gonna end up getting doxx'd on this aren't I.
- Ill-formed thoughts on ML:
- Deciding to go for a real baby or an ML one; ASI timelines + different sorts of AI risk
- What feels like is missing from the current AI systems and where-ish might some of that land
- How do we get more generalizable, more controllable forms of grokking? Is there some sort of empirically-derivable, ML-y notion of "computational complexity" to help model the fact that
- Ill-formed thoughts on the ML community
- Ugggggggggh I hate Bay Area startup people (not actually but the trends, the trends)
- Someone once made a throwaway comment about how "The Bay Area has both the best and the worst that the US has to offer" and I think that is definitely true
- There's not actually that much intellectual depth (assuming you're already capable of getting to senior in engineering fairly easily) necessary in order to be "useful" for ML, but there does seem to be a lot around working on the right thing and getting access to the right directional information (which necessitates being in the right place)
- I suppose there is depth in some of the specifics of the esoteric knowledge and a probably nontrivial amount of pre-existing breadth one needs in order to not be overwhelmed/lost. I'm probably hand-waiving over the former cause I don't care about it as much and discounting the difficulty of the latter too much than I should be (cause "going for breadth" has been a bit of my style...)
- Ugggggggggh I hate Bay Area startup people (not actually but the trends, the trends)
- Shits and giggles posts that would be sorta fun:
- How much would it cost SpaceX to take over Uganda and would it be economically worth it? (ie, for its raw materials + proximity to the equator)
- ...and if say SpaceX weren't to do it, what would it cost for some well-resourced entity to slowly force + grow stability in say, Africa or South America? (Ie, sorta do Rwanda's "Singapore of Africa" thing but over longer stretches of time?)
Started writing this out cause I was stuck writing any particular thing so... here let's just do a mind-dump of stuff I've been thinking about recently.
Formatting pass done to group by topics cause otherwise this was even too much of a mess for me. But can't say I've done a grammar edit or anything so meh