# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/my_research/my_ai_timelines.md

2025-02-20

# My AI timelines

DISCLAIMER
 - I'm not a deep learning expert. I understand theory of LLMs, RNNs, CNNs, etc. but I don't have experience training large models or curating large datasets or doing original DL research.
 - Please consider getting the opinion of many people other than me. Many of the signatories on [this list](https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk) have made individual statements, search for their podcast interviews, blogposts, research publications and so on. Lesswrong is also a good forum.
 - I strongly recommend you form your own independent opinion on this subject, and not blindly copy the views of others, no matter how smart or trustworthy they seem. This field would make a lot more sense if more people formed independent opinions. (And yes forming a good opinion takes a lot of time and effort, and you have to decide whether the time investment is worth it for you personally.)

This document is mainly aimed at lesswrong (LW) rationalists / effective altruists / adjacent people, since a lot of my work is culturally downstream of theirs, and a lot of my potential research collaborators exist in their communities. This doc will make less sense if you haven't encountered their writings before.

Most of this doc is guesswork rather than models I have a lot of confidence in. Small amounts of evidence could upend my entire view of these topics.

**If you have evidence that my view is wrong, please tell me**. Not having to spend any more time thinking about AI will improve my quality of life. I am being completely serious when I say I might thank you till the day I die, if you persuade me either way. I can also pay you atleast $1000 for convincing me, although we'll have to discuss the details if you really wanna be paid.

The last time I read papers on this topic was early-2023, it's possible I'm not up-to-speed on any of the latest research. Feel free to send me anything that's relevant. I haven't really updated my views on this topic since 2023, although the field has moved fast meanwhile.

**I have ~15% probability humanity will invent artificial superintelligence (ASI) by 2030.**
 - If it happens, this will be the most significant event in ~10,000 years of human history on many metrics of what counts as significant. (If the intelligence gap is sufficiently large it might even be the most important event in the ~14 billion year history of the universe. My probability for this is smaller.)
 - This will more-likely-than-not use transformers + data and compute scaling.
 - I define artificial superintelligence to be AI superior to the best humans (not median human) at basically every task humans can do on laptop with internet access.
 - See my usual disclaimer on predictions shaping reality. If you are involved in building ASI, please consider *not* doing that or atleast talking to me once about it. I don't want ASI to be built by 2030 unless many aspects of society change first.

**Conditional on ASI being invented by 2030, I expect ~30% probability it will kill everyone on Earth soon after.** In total that's ~5% probability of humanity killed by ASI by 2030.

I have chosen not to work on this problem myself. This is downstream of ~15% not being large enough and the problem not capturing my curiosity enough. I am not a utilitarian who blindly picks the biggest problem to solve, although I do like picking bigger problems over smaller ones. If you are working on safety of AGI/ASI, I think you are doing important work and I applaud you for the same.


## Reasons for my beliefs

*Mildly relevant rant on consensus-building:* Both these probabilities seem to involve dealing with what I'd call deep priors. "Assume I take a random photo of Mars and a random pixel from that photo, what is the probability its RGB value has higher Green than Blue?" Humans tend to agree better on prior probabilities when there's enough useful data around the problem to form a model of it. Humans tend to agree less on prior probabilities when they're given a problem with very little obviously useful data, and need to rely on a lifetime of almost-useless-but-not-completely-useless data instead. The "deepest" prior in this ontology is the [universal prior](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_inductive_inference).

~15% is lower than what many people in EA/LW communities assign, because I reject a lot of the specific models they use to forecast higher likelihood of ASI.
 - Total amount of neurons in human brain has nothing to do with compute required to build ASI, as evolution produced human brains and evolution used a lot more compute than an individual brain.
 - Nobody has a proposal that's IMO likely to work at replicating biological evolution in-silico. How to capture initial conditions? How much compute do you require to simulate the environment? I haven't seen convincing arguments for why these details aren't important.
 - I have a prior that most STEM research that promises bold outcomes fails. This is the default not the exception. To study this prior you have to go back in time to each of the failed research agendas of the past 100 years, and notice what it would have **felt like** if you were born then and were hyped up by a research agenda you didn't know would succeed or fail.
 - Update (credits: someone on LW): I have seen some basic arguments from neuroscience saying neurons (or the genetic information that produced the neurons) don't by themselves encode much of whatever it is that produces human intelligence, most of it is learned after birth. I'm open to arguments of this type but I'll probably have to study neuroscience to evaluate them.

[Discontinuous progress in human history by Katja Grace](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CeZXDmp8Z363XaM6b/discontinuous-progress-in-history-an-update) is the closest thing I could find to work that tries evaluating the prior probability of any reserach agenda succeeding with radical outcomes. I have not spent a lot of time searching for such research though. Convincing me either way may require publishing or pointing me to a lot more work of this type.

Alternatively you have to provide me a gears-level model that explains why the LLM scaling laws empirically hold.

~15% is higher than what many AI researchers assign, because I reject a lot of the specific reasons they give for why LLM scaling cannot possibly achieve ASI
 - I have read some arguments for why specific unsolved problems are *hard* when compared with already solved problems, and why there's no specific reason LLM will crack them.
 - However most of the problems LLMs have already cracked also got cracked without anyone having an actual model for why LLMs will or won't crack them. LLM scaling has consistently proven itself (to me) to be black magic; both its supporters and its detractors fail to accurately predict which problems it will or won't crack. Predicting loss curve doesn't tell which problems will or won't be cracked.
 - Some people cite architectural limitations of LLM as a bottleneck. For instance LLM has a theoretical upperbound on number of calculations per forward pass, and a certain ratio of "memory access" to "computation" steps. But solving a real world problem can use multiple forward passes + non-LLM scaffolding + non-self-attention layers. For example, you can often use layers from two different architectures (let's say self-attention layers and CNN layers) in a single model, train this model and get good performance.
 - Some people say we will run out of data required as per empirical scaling law but my guess is this is more likely than not solveable. I'm very unsure on this. (And I lack sufficient expertise to evaluate this argument tbh.) I'm guessing you can teach a model simple reasoning using a smaller dataset, use this model to fill holes in a bigger dataset, and then teach the model more difficult reasoning using this data.

~30% probability for extinction conditional on ASI invention by 2030 is because I am more optimistic about boxing an ASI than some LW rationalists. I do believe misalignment happens by default with high probability.
 - The intelligence difference between Einstein or Churchill or Hitler, and a hyperpersuasive AI is large, relative to the intelligence jumps shown by scaling so far. I understand there's no natural scale for intelligence. I am open to the idea a hyperpersuasive AI can exist in theory. (In this context, a hyperpersuasive AI is an AI that can gain complete control over your mind with near 100% probability simply by talking to you.)
 - I am assuming a high level of competence among the people boxing the ASI. I have low probability of ASI coming completely by surprise. A lab building ASI in this decade will almost certainly employ many people who take the prospect of ASI seriously.
 - I am assuming that pausing ASI research will be politically possible, even obvious, once we have built a boxed ASI with empirical evidence of a lack of safety. I think I have better intuitions on politics than the median LW poster.
 - I have some confusion on how the AI will reason about the hardware-software abstraction. At what point does an AI translate "maximise XYZ assembly variable" into "maximise the number of electrons in positions in semiconductor underlying XYZ"? My guess is whether an AI wants to "break out" of its machine depends on how it reasons about this. I accept that an ASI could understand that its variables are made up of positions of electrons in a semicondutor, I'm just unsure what it'll do once it knows this.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/my_research/distributed_whistleblowing.md

2025-04-12

# Distributed whistleblowing

#### DISCLAIMER
 - This document is written quickly and contains opinions I may change quickly, as I get new info.
 - This document contains politically sensitive info that I might take down in future.

This document describes how to setup distributed whistleblowing processes to reduce personal risk for everyone involved in the process. Typically whistleblowing (such as with wikileaks or snowden leaks) incurs significant personal risk. Reducing personal risk may ensure whistleblowing is highly likely to happen when an org doesn't have complete trust of all its members, forcing them to pay a secrecy tax (in Assange's words) relative to orgs that do have complete trust of their members and/or higher levels of transparency with the broader public.

I am especially interested in enabling whistleblowing on orgs and labs working on intelligence (such as superintelligent AI, BCIs, human genetic engg, human connectome research, etc) and national/international intelligence agencies that may work with them.

#### Potential problems
 - Low-attention regime
   - Whistleblower sends documents to an operator (let's called one of them Bob) via SecureDrop or via hard disk dead drop. Ideally thousands of such operators exist.
     - PROBLEM: good infra, protocols, incentives to coordinate hard disk dead drops don't exist, especially if trying to use multiple hops to reach destination
     - IMO hard disk dead drops and airgapped computers is better than using Tor + tails + PGP, as of 2025
   - Bob does redaction and releases torrent of the documents to public. Uses Tor and shares torrent link on some message boards like 4chan. (Or optionally, Bob performs another hop as follows: Bob sends redacted docs via securedrop or hard disk dead drops to all other operators, and one of them publishes the documents publicly as torrents instead of Bob himself.)
     - PROBLEM: need public guidelines on redaction, so anyone can do it (i.e. become Bob) This ideally ensures there are thousands of potential operators right from the start.
     - PROBLEM: for leaked docs/videos that are not especially high-stakes (such as govt classified docs), it might be okay to just publish the redacted docs/videos on a website at this stage. Website must be hard-but-not-impossible to censor. for instance 4chan for docs or rumble for video. Unsure which existing websites are best suited for this use case.
 - High-attention regime
   - Mirror a searchable version of docs to thousands of servers immediately
     - PROBLEM: need open source web crawler to crawl entire internet including any leaked docs/videos, and torrent links containing leaked docs/videos.
     - OR: PROBLEM: need a standard protocol to only crawl websites and torrents that claim to have leaked docs on them (maybe they include a special flag in their readme/robots.txt, and some cryptographic proof-of-work to prove they're not spam. proofs-of-work could be static strings attached to be documents, or they could be generated in HTTP requests and responses, like Proton and Brave PoW captchas)
     - PROBLEM: need open source plaintext extraction and embedding generation so that along with the raw html crawls (WARC), the plaintext and embeddings are also circulated in the same torrent. need standardised format (WARC-parquet?) that keeps some metadata just like WARC keeps metadata.
   - A popular media website publishes it to increase public attention
     - Popular media website will do document verification. I'm assuming they won't face any significant challenge with this.
   - Decentralised social media to discuss the document
     - PROBLEM: need open source crawling and mirroring crawls of all social media
     - I think actually doing distributed social media is too hard. Complexity of app ensures software developers who write the app are politically co-optible. What's easier to do is have distributed crawling and mirroring of a centralised site, so people in future can still view the consensus reached by users of the social media. If it ever gets taken down, someone can get a new server running (does not have to have content of old one).

#### Summary of potential solutions
 - coordination for hard disk dead drops, including multi-hop hard disk dead drops
 - redaction guidelines
 - open source web crawling
   - flags and proof-of-work to only crawl some websites
   - crawl and mirror leaked docs. crawl and mirror social media discussions.
 - open source plaintext extraction, embedding generation
   - standardise format to share extracted plaintext and embeddings
 - guidelines for latest hard-to-censor social media
   - to publish torrent link, maybe raw docs, and social media discussions
   - guidelines must be country-wise and include legal considerations. always use a social media of a country different from the country where leak happened.
 - country-wise torrents (not sure if this is needed)
   - torrents proposed above are illegal in all countries. instead we can legally circulate country A's secrets via torrent within country B and legally circulate country B's secrets via torrent within country A. only getting the info past the border is illegal, for that again need securedrop or hard disk dead drop if any country or org seals their geographic borders.
   - have to think more about who publishes the legal torrents

IMPORTANT: Need feedback from people who have actually worked with whistleblowers, to validate all hypotheses listed above.

IMPORTANT: Need to decide whether whisteblowing of important orgs (such as companies/labs researching intelligence, and national/intl intelligence agencies) is actually what I want to work on.

#### Crux: Does this lead to longterm human flourishing or not?

 - Would orgs developing intelligence (superintelligent AI, human genetic engg, BCIs etc) necessarily be trustworthy if there existed lots of public information about both their capabilities and their values?
   - Leaked info about values means public can decide if the org represents their true values. i.e. control via democracy instead of via market alone.
   - Leaked info about capabilities means public can coordinate under a different leader to shut down existing org and setup a different org.
     - This requires complete global surveillance (public information) and inter-govt coordination if the open sourced capabilities include offense-beats-defence weaponry deployable by small groups (such as bioweapons, nanotech weapons, etc).
     - Seems difficult to find a solution that can leak info about values of an org without also leaking info about capabilities of the org. Above proposed solutions will obviously leak both.
     - More narrowed crux: Lots of lesswrong crowd defers to yudkowsky's mental priors against open source ASI and open source bioweapons and complete surveillance (public info). Will have to write separate post on surveillance equilibria.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/my_research/one_pager.md

2025-04-12

# One pager

I decided to make a summary of some non-obvious insights of mine around similar topics. (A lot of this work is not original but borrowed from others.)

Scroll to the section of the page titled "software and society" to see what I'm considering working on nowadays.

**Summary**
 - Most information about everyone on earth is likely to end up in the public domain soon. Reasons for this include a) people being incentivised to share their information in public, because of the benefits they get in return, and b) cyberhacks and espionage leaking people's information against their will.
   - Some possible consequences of this include more direct democracy, improved law and order, less geopolitical monopoly power and improved truth-seeking on currently taboo topics.
   - Other possible consequences include highly stable dictatorships and generally damaging the lives of people deviating from societal norms (including deviating in ways that are not harmful).
 - I am currently making the uncertain bet that this level of information sharing might net good for humanity. I want to build software for it.
   - Cost of CPUs, disks, fiber optic cables etc going down means it'll be possible to build decentralised social media and governance platforms that don't require a lot of money to pay for servers and software developers. A decade ago, building social media required a lot of money, hence Big Tech companies built them and made many self-serving decisions in how they are governed.
 - Intelligence-enhacing technologies are becoming possible this century and can radically alter our society. Extinction-causing technologies are also becoming possible this century. Examples: superintelligent AI, human genetic engineering, brain-computer interfaces, human brain connectome research.
   - Our current mental models for regulating tech may be inadequate when dealing with this. A more intelligent mind can persuade a less intelligent mind to hand over money or votes for nothing in return. This breaks the foundations of both capitalism and democracy.
   - Cost of sensors, transducers etc going down could lead to invention of more scientific instruments to collect data. Invention of such instruments is usually accelerating for scientific fields. Example: microscope, telescope, cyclotron, DNA sequencer, etc
 - Offense-defence balances in technology shape incentives. Incentives shape culture. If you want to understand forces that shape how society evolves on multi-century timescales, study offence-defence balances of various technologies. Don't just study which ideology or morality is popular in society today.
   - (Incentives include providing physical safety, social approval or money as a reward for some behaviour. Culture includes literally all popular ideas and behaviours society, including ideas that have moral weight in people's minds.)


**Information and society**

How?
 - Historically, every advancement in transmitting information, be it horseback, semaphore, printing press, telegraph, radio or now smartphone and internet, have been followed by significant social and political change.
 - Cost of computing hardware going down has reduced the cost-to-benefit ratio for cyberhacking and espionage. Individuals and organisations will find it harder to keep secrets in coming world.
   - If you wish to protect information on a computer from being stolen by large corporations and nation states, both software and hardware methods fail. The only defence is physical methods - smash hard disks, switch off electricity, meet in person, etc.
     - Example: Various fiber-optic cable wiretaps and router backdoors revealed by Snowden leaks
   - Espionage is now within the reach of individuals operating independent of any corporation or nation state.
     - Examples: Ulrich Larsen, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning
   - Information once acquired is rarely lost or destroyed. Every cyberhack or intelligence operation increases the number of actors (N) in the world who now have access to that information. Since N goes up but never down, on a long enough timescale N approaches say 50, at which point it is basically guaranteed to reach the public eye.
     - Example: the 800+ leaked torrents for password databases behind haveibeenpwned.com
 - Physical and digital worlds are both likely to be surveilled.
   - As of today there is more public info in digital world than physical world. Conversely it is easier to meet someone in the physical world than in digital world and obtain high level of guarantee that the meeting was 100% private.
   - This might change soon. Gigapixel photography from helicopter/aircraft at 10 km altitude can probably surveill a city at a resolution precise enough for accurate facial recognition. ~10,000 quadcopter drones can also surveill a city precise enough for facial recognition, assuming one can pay enough drone pilots or automate the swarm.
 - Individuals and organisations that operate in public get various benefits, such as proving trustworthiness and receiving better feedback.
   - Example: popular podcasters like Joe Rogan
 - The differences in consequences between 99% sousveillance, 99% surveillance, 100% sousveillance and 100% surveillance are very large. I haven't figured out the stable equilibria for this yet, and have fundamental confusions here.
   - How?
     - Biologically implanted cameras and mics may be one pathway to achieve 100% coverage instead of 99% coverage. Drone, airplane and satellite footage, smartphones connected to internet, etc all achieve 99% coverage.
   - If 100% of people's info is public or only privately accessible to a few elites but a few elites' info is not public, it may enable dictatorships with much longer half-lives.
   - If 100% of people's info is public and all elites' info is also public, society could be significantly different than today. This could instead enable a more direct democracy. More on this below.
   - However 99% of people's info coming out in public seems like the more likely scenario than 100% of info coming out in public.
     - Especially motivated actors such as political dissidents will likely still incur the costs (social, psychological, financial) required to avoid being surveilled. People who are attempting to leak other people's information will be willing to incur significant costs to ensure their own information does not get leaked.
   - It is posible a 99% surveilled/sousveilled society eventually slides into a 100% surveilled/sousveilled society. I haven't made up my mind on this.
 - "Everyone's information being leaked to everyone else" (I'll call this 100% sousveillance) might be the least worst stable equilibrium.
   - In general there are two tradeoffs - privacy tradeoff and freedom of speech tradeoff. How much privacy does society provide its members and how much freedom of speech does society provide its member. IMO extreme ends of both tradeoffs are more stable than middleground position.
     - It is difficult to ensure only *some* large group of people know a secret and they don't leak it further, it is easier to ensure either no one or a small group knows the secret, or everyone knows the secret. Small means necessarily less than 50 people, and usually less than 5 people.
     - It is difficult to ensure only *some* topics of content are not allowed to post on a given internet platform. Eventually the platform may be politically co-opted so more and more types of content are restricted. Alternatively one structurally builds platforms such that all types of content are allowed.
   - A moral stance that is pro-free speech is also anti-privacy. If Alice has obtained Bob's secret information, a maximally pro-free speech will allow Alice to publish this info online because there is no trustworthy Carol who gets to decide which content one is allowed versus not allowed to publish online.
     - A pro-free speech stance is therefore also in conflict with EU's right to be forgotten, as no Carol is trusted to decide which information should or not be should be erased from public eye.
   - Another stable equilibrium might be to build a community of a few hundred people and completely disconnect from the rest of society. People and information go in, no person or information ever comes out. Multiple generations of people are raised in the same isolated community. A secret-keeping community of few hundred people will allow more ideological diversity than a group of two (like a married couple) or ten (like a C-suite of a company)

Consequences
 - Increased public info about elites may reduce freedom of elites and establish a more direct democracy. Both corporations and governments will be more controllable by the general population.
   - This has similarities to town life versus city life. The internet is homogenising global culture and morality by putting town incentives across the globe.
 - Truth as a moral virtue is likely to thrive in a highly transparent society as long as multiple actors can defend themselves long enough to persuade others. Nuclear weapons allow this at national level between nuclear-armed countries. Guns allow this at individual level in countries that tolerate guns.
 - Geopolitical power is built majorly by maintaining lead time over competitors in various technologies. The leading manufacturer of any product gets export revenue from across the world. The second leading manufacturer with 6 months inferior product gets zero export revenue. (They either survive in domestic market or go bankrupt.)
   - Example: Airbus in France and Germany manufactures and exports most of the world's civilian aircraft. China manufactures and exports most of the world's solar PV modules.
   - Increased public info about such orgs will significantly reduce lead times, but not eliminate them. Competent actors will likely still be able to remain on the leading edge and get the same geopolitical power they did before.
   - There may be more incentive to be competent as an elite running such an org, and hoarding of technical talent and knowledge will no longer be sufficient moat to keep the org.
   - Replicating entire supply chains from scratch in competing nations might become possible with smaller lag time.
   - Example: If an arms race is started for human genetic engineering, there will be a smaller difference in relative power between competing nations as the entire biotech supply chain will get replicated in a small number of years in multiple nations.
 - Increased public info about citizens (including those committing crimes) may help fix law and order in many countries.
   - Stable economic growth requires law and order.
   - Example: Acemoglu's nobel prize-winning work, direct correlation between countries with high GDP and stable law and order.
   - Lack of law and order has multigenerational psychological effects. Physical safety is low on Maslow's hierarchy and is more important to most people than an abundance of consumer goods.
   - Economic metrics such as GDP are a weak proxy for measuring human happiness, including political metrics such as stability of law and order will make it a better proxy.
   - I'm still unsure who will get to define what "crime" is in the new equilibrium. Which morality becomes the majority morality? It is possible each nuclear-armed nation and its dependents ends up homegenising moral ideas among its members and gets one universal morality. Liberalism and various religious moralities are top contenders.
 - Increased public info about citizens' private lives might damage their lives. But it might also improve society's ability to seek truth on topics currently considered taboo.
   - A lot of information about individuals does not reach the public eye, because people have incentives to hide it. I'll call this "Social dark matter" (SDM). See also: Duncan Sabien's article.
   - Common topics considered social dark matter by individuals: death, morality, sex, money, mental and physical health, relationship conflicts, religion and politics
   - Some professions have higher access to social dark matter, such as psychologists, religious leaders, tech CEOs etc.
   - Increased public info about citizens might means a lot of such social dark matter forcibly comes out in public.
   - Social dark matter is very useful for empathising with individuals and giving them useful advice. A society fails to make progress on issues when consensus cannot be established in public on them, and social dark matter by definition is not in public view.
   - Establishing consensus allows dominant paradigms of thought to fall and new ones to replace them. Common knowledge is needed not just widespread knowledge.
   - Example: Blue Eyes puzzle (theoretical example). Nicotine and methamphetamine usage have reduced in the US today compared to 1980s. Increased willingness to discuss substance abuse may be a causal factor.


**Software and society**

(This section talks about my current plan for next few months or years. This could change in future.)

 - I (Samuel) am most keen on building new forms of governance via software.
   - Naval Ravikant says there are 3 types of leverage in society: capital, attention and internet-copyable products such as books, videos and software.
   - Internet-copyable products are the newest and least competed for.
   - Internet can transmit incentives and culture. People can paid over the internet. People can get social approval over the internet. People can be influenced by ideology over the internet.
   - Therefore new forms of governance can be built via software. Early examples: cryptocurrency, twitter-influenced public policy
 - I'm currently making the bet that 99% surveillance is difficult to avoid. Also it may have significant benefits if managed well. Hence it may be worth actively accelerating towards such a world, and ensure the transition is managed well. I am not confident this is a good bet but it is the bet I'm currently making.
   - A lot of the consequences of 99% surveillance listed above (direct democracy, improved law and order, improved truth-seeking on SDM topics, no singleton superpower) may occur if 99% surveillance is built the right way.
 - Big Tech companies currently write the software that governs society, whether their execs are fully aware of it or not. Typically, computer hardware is expensive and software developers are expensive. This necessarily meant only a large company (in terms of capital) can manage society's software and hardware stacks.
 - Hardware costs
   - Within the next 10-20 years, it will be possible to store every word spoken by every person on Earth, on a home server affordable to a group of friends. If information and software gets open sourced, it will be possible to build governance using open source software rather than letting Big Tech alone govern society.
   - This is not true for video data however. Video data of every person ever on Earth is still too expensive to store on a home server. Big Tech may still get some influence on how society is governed, by defining rules of access for video storage.
 - Software costs
   - Software is expensive to write because of complexity. AI + video data + cheap hardware might reduce complexity of various popular applications.
     - Often software is complex because hardware is expensive and hence optimised algorithms are needed. Cheap hardware for text-based data may mean it will be possible to use less efficient but also less complex ways of writing software.
   - Search is the most popular application of the internet. Be it searching for partners or employers or food or household products.
     - Embedding search is a low complexity way of solving search. 
   - Identity is a necessary application for governance software.
     - Cheap video capture and storage may allow for decentralised identity, each person can just upload their own video in public.
   - Most internet applications (including search, identity, payments, communication, etc) exist in an adversarial environment where people must either prove trust or operate despite low trust.
     - Video data will help scale trust.
     - Example: Online conversations on political topics may be higher trust if done via video.
  - Conclusion: I think building governance via software needs the following 3 primitives to exist first, and governance software must be built on top of it:
    - Low-complexity high-accuracy open source search engine that can be hosted for cheap.
      - LLM embedding search is one possible way.
    - Uncensorable network of data transmission, along with low complexity ways of dealing with file formats.
      - Hard drive dead drops and independently motivated spies are one possible way.
      - I don't have a solution to the file format problem though, it seems important to figure out.
    - Cheap ways of dealing with video data, be it storage, transmission, embedding generation, converting formats, etc
      - I haven't figure this out yet. Also seems important to figure out.


**Technology**
 - Most fields of science and technology get accelerated when someone invents a tool that allows data collection of a system that was previously not possible at same cost and resolution. Example: electron microscope, optical telescope, cyclotron, phosophrescent DNA tagging, etc.
   - Cost of electrical components such as transistors, actuators, inducers, etc has gone down, which will generally accelerate all scientific fields as it could lead to invention of new data collectio  instruments.
   - Materials science is underrated as it plays a significant role in invention of data collection instruments.
 - Intelligence-enhancing technologies are worth paying special attention to, as a small differential in intelligence leads to a large differential in power of every kind - offensive and defensive, scientific, engineering, military and political.
   - If the intelligence gap is sufficiently large, this breaks the foundations of both capitalism and democracy. If Alice is much more intelligent than Bob, Alice can run simulations of Bob's mind accurately enough to persuade Bob to hand over money or votes in return for nothing valuable.
   - This is true whether Alice is an AI or a mind upload or a gene edited human or a group of humans communicating via BCIs.
 - Key intelligence enhancing technologies: superintelligent AI, human genetic engineering, human brain-connectome mapping, cognitive-enhancing drugs, nanotechnology, ?
   - Research into superintelligent AI is already ongoing at full pace. AlexNet in 2012 was key milestone. If built this will be in a sense the last invention of human history, as the AI will them be faster than us at making new inventions.
     - I have estimated 15% probability of superintelligent AI being built by 2030. Scaling laws seem to work but nobody knows why they work or how long they'll keep working.
   - Research into human genetic engineering has stalled due to lack of consensus in academia on political consequences. CRISPR invented in 2012 was key milestone. This pause is fragile and powerful actors will be able to accelerate this field soon. Gene editing of humans has already succeeded in China (illegal experiment).
     - CRISPR may also enable human-animal hybrids and enhancing human traits besides just cognitive ones (IQ, memory etc)
     - Gene drives can cause the extinction or genetic modification of entire populations, not just individual members. This works better in species with small generation time (i.e. not humans)
     - Both human genetic engineering and gene drives have massive implications for warfare, economic growth, political structure of society etc.
   - Human brain simulation might be possible within 30 years but no one really knows. Fruitfly connectome has been mapped in 2017-2023, and neuroscientists are currently trying to understand implications. Connectome data includes connections between neurons but not signals going through them.
   - Research into brain-computer interfaces is ongoing. Example: Neuralink I have not studied it deeply.
   - Research into nanotechnology seems to have slowed to a crawl. I looked at it surface-level but haven't understood deeper reasons why the field has slowed. Fundamental breakthroughs are likely needed.
   - Research into cognitive-enhancing drugs is not something I've looked a lot into. Many such programs were illegally run in 20th century, this might have influence on getting motivated researchers or academia grants for it today. In general we lack knowledge of biochemical pathways to directly affect higher-level rational brain, instead of affecting lower-level emotional brain and affecting rational brain indirectly. Examples: injecting oxytocin, adrenaline, LSD, barbiturates etc
 - Extiction-related technologies are worth paying special attention to.
   - CRISPR invented in 2012 may make it possible to produce bioweapons in the next 10 years, which could cause human extinction.
     - Gene drives may also cause significant population-level changes which could affect food supply, incide of natural disease etc. This could affect human population significantly, but is unlikely to cause human extinction.
   - Superintelligent AI if invented could cause human extinction. My blind guess is this has 30% probability of occuring assuming superintelligent AI is invented.
   - Reduced cost of surveillance may have some influence on nuclear balance of power, as all nations will get much better visibility into each other's nuclear deployed arsenals, manufacturing facilities and supply chains. This is unlikely to change the fundamental rules IMO, so odds of human extinction are not significantly affected by this.

**Technology and society**
 - Offense-defence balances inherent in technology shapes incentives. Incentives shape culture. Culture shapes laws.
    - If you want to predict or influence societal structure far into the future, you should probably study offense-defense balanaces inherent in technology.
 - Culture shapes laws
   - Law enforcement cannot enforce a law if most of the lawyers and policemen and general population of a region don't believe that law is moral. Eventually the law will get changed in favour of the new culture.
 - Incentives shape culture
   - Incentives don't easily change a person's values, but they may change a person's behaviour. Incentives however place selection effects for people who already agree with the type of behaviour being rewarded, and those people become high-status in society. People who have not yet decided their values are more likely to copy and internalise the values of whoever is high-status.
   - Sometimes there is clash between financial incentives and social incentives. Sometimes people alter their behaviour to make money at the expense of what behaviour their social circle expects of them. This tends to make them lonely in the short-term, but in the long-term their social circle too is likely to emulate the same behaviour.
   - To do: Examples. This section is incomplete. (I've avoided sharing contemporary examples as they're often politically sensitive, but I could probably find some historical examples and post those here.)
   - In the absence of incentives grinding culture into a specific form, culture progresses via mutation and remixing. Most new ideas are near neighbours of old ideas. Human brains are machines whose output depends on input. Fundamentally new ideas that don't depend on old ideas don't usually exist.
     - Affecting the distribution of popular ideas in collective attention affects the likely new ideas your society comes up even though you can't predict the new ideas themselves.
     - Many technologies in today's society seem a direct consequence of the cultural environment their inventors grew up in. For example: superintelligent AI research ongoing today because Yudkowsky and other singularitarians increased collective attention focussed on these ideas.
   - Morality is a key aspect of how culture transmits.
     - When two cultures clash, how much members of both cultures tolerate each other depends on the moral judgement they assign to the opposing culture. Your culture has won a person to it when it has shaped that person's morality.
     - More tolerant cultures spread under certain circumstances and less tolerant cultures spread under different circumstances. Often a highly self-replicating culture has both more and less tolerant versions of it so it can spread in both environments. (There's probably some link between these idea and ideas around common knowledge and preference cascades which I haven't figured out yet.)
 - Technological offense-defence balances shape incentives
   - To do: Examples. This section is incomplete.
   - Competition for capital and attention exists at every level of societal organisation, not just between corporations and governments. For examples individuals, families, ethnic groups, etc. Competitions at different levels of structure affect each other. A nation that is in wartime competition to produce more steel than its opponent is also likely to force more competition between its citizen steel workers for example.
     - If you want to influence society in any way, you have to atleast be competitive enough to survive. What "competitive enough to survive" looks like depends on the situation.
 - Some technologies can be produced and used by small groups, whereas others can only be used by large groups.
   - For example: uranium centrifuges and solar PV modules require a large group of people to manufacture them, whereas guns and radio can be manufactured by a small group of people.
   - Tech that can only be produced by large groups fuels a lot of geopolitics. Nations and corporations try to become the first to build some tech, prevent other nations and corporations from catching up, and then use this as a bargainining chip to export whatever morality holds that group together in the first place.
   - Deliberately choosing to build tech that can be produced and used by small groups has consequences for societal structure. The open source software movement is one example of this.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/use_ai_with_my_website.md

2025-01-26

# Use AI with my website

Here's some ways to use AI to improve your experience browsing this website.

/raw/ contains all the static files of my website, including markdown, images and audio.

The broader thesis I'm betting on is that as long as the raw content is present in a folder, AI can do everything else with the content - simplify it, summarise it, style it, translate it etc.

I'm aware the implementation of some of these features sucks right now and requires technical skills. I'll try improving all this when it's a priority for me and I have free time.

#### Audio/Video

See: /raw/english_video_ai_generated_{date}

Generated using: OpenAI DALLE-3 images, ElevenLabs audio voiceover

This may have inaccuracies or be outdated. You can also use AI to generate this yourself.

#### Search

See: /raw/misc/english_singlepage_{date}.md

Copy-paste the contents into the prompt window of your favourite AI, and follow it with whatever question you want to ask about my writings. I have dumped my entire website contents into a single page, so it is easier to copy-paste.

#### Simplified english

See: /raw/english_simplified_ai_generated_{date}

Generated using: OpenAI o1

This is a version of my website content with simpler english.

This may have inaccuracies or be outdated. You can also use AI to generate this yourself.

#### Translation

See: /raw/हिंदी_अनुवाद_ai_generated_{date}

Generated using: OpenAI GPT4

This is a hindi translation of my website.

This may have inaccuracies or be outdated. You can also use AI to generate this yourself.

#### Styling

If you don't like the styling (font family, font size, line spacing, etc) on my website, you can do the following.

1. Give an AI the [current CSS](https://samuelshadrach.com/viewer.css) and [current HTML](https://samuelshadrach.com/viewer.html) file as input, and ask it to generate a modified CSS file based on your preferences.
2. Upload the modified CSS file to any online file storage such as google drive or aws s3.
3. Paste the (publicly accessible) link to the modified CSS in the form input at the bottom of the page. It will persist for the duration of your browsing session.

P.S. The default css and js are also mostly written by AI, so it's unlikely anything you generate is much worse.


#### Full stack

See: /raw/misc/english_tarball_{date}

If you want to do something more complicated (such as doing many of the above steps together), you can download the tarball and then ask AI to write a bash pipeline for you that does all the necessary steps.

## Future features

In short, I really don't want to host a (not static) backend or manage user payments. And I don't see why the use cases below should should require me to host one.

The features I'm personally most interested in:
 - WebRTC client connecting to OpenAI Realtime API (audio), with this website's content injected as context
   - This is a common enough use case that I wish someone else would offer hosted backend for this.
 - Better payment system
   - An important reason AI app devs need to host a backend is because OpenAI wants to be paid by app devs, who will then optionally collect payments from end users.
   - For my use case though, ideally OpenAI collects payments from users and issues (ephemeral) API keys to the client directly. Then no backend would be required.
   - Legal liability might be a reason they're avoiding doing this. I'm unsure. Maybe OpenAI wants an app dev who they can hold responsible for API inputs with malicious intent.

Other features that would be cool:
 - Ability to ask OpenAI to crawl my website directly. No "singlepage" needed. I have updated my robots.txt but OpenAI still refuses to crawl my website.
   - Legal liability might be a reason they're avoiding doing this. I'm unsure.
   - Maybe they don't want to be held responsible for sending GET requests on IPs with bad reputations. Or they don't want to handle responses containing data of malicious intent.
   - If legal liability is the only reason, then ideally the crawler runs client-side.
 - Browser allows changing UX using AI. Some of the features above like translation and changing CSS are UX features that could ideally be supported by the browser itself. Until then someone could write a browser extension for it.
   - So far I don't see a reason this can't happen. Maybe it will happen eventually.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/my_projects/my_projects.md

2025-03-11

# My projects

[Search Engine for Books](http://booksearch.samuelshadrach.com)
 - Use AI (openai text-embedding-3-small) to search a large collection of books (libgen english epubs)
 - Intended for researchers

[Tokens for tokens](http://tokensfortokens.samuelshadrach.com)
 - Pay for OpenAI API using cryptocurrency, at discounted rate, anonymously


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/projects_for_you/project_ideas_for_you.md

2025-04-11

# Project ideas for you

#### Summary using data

If you don't want to read a lengthy post, just look at these price charts. Many of the projects I suggest are direct implications of these graphs.

<iframe src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage?tab=chart" loading="lazy" style="width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;" allow="web-share; clipboard-write"></iframe>

<iframe src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gpu-price-performance?tab=chart" loading="lazy" style="width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;" allow="web-share; clipboard-write"></iframe>

<iframe src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-of-sequencing-a-full-human-genome?tab=chart" loading="lazy" style="width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;" allow="web-share; clipboard-write"></iframe>

<iframe src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices?tab=chart" loading="lazy" style="width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;" allow="web-share; clipboard-write"></iframe>

<iframe src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-battery-cell-price?tab=chart" loading="lazy" style="width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;" allow="web-share; clipboard-write"></iframe>

 - Sensor technology - I can't find a good graph for this yet but cost of sensors (electric sensors, light sensors, transducers) has gone down, which can potentially drive down cost of scientific instruments in basically every field. Cost reduction in scientific instruments in turn drives scientific progress.

# Most important projects as per me

What?
 - Here's a (incomplete) list of projects that might be worth pursuing.
 - Feel free to complete any of them if you find them interesting enough.
 - You'll probably also get other ideas if you browse through my website. I hoping to minimise duplication of info on my website.
 - I might work on some of these myself in future.

Important?
 - What is "important" depends on one's worldview.
 - This list is biased towards my worldview.
 - I would encourage to form your own independent view of what is important or meaningful to you and select projects based on that, instead of blindly copying my view.
 - Since your ability to succeed at the project depends on your skills and your interests, it seems to me worth listing many options, rather than few.
 - **I'm aware this document is somewhat of a mess and reflects confused priorities.** I'm aware further prioritisation is possible. I currently lack good mental models for how to do the prioritisation.
 - It's possible some of these ideas are completely off-base. If so, please let me know.

#### Anyone

Writing
 - Write a book about your life that will be released after you die. Prefer including information that you don't feel safe sharing while you are still alive.
   - Objective: People of later generations will get unfiltered view of the good and bad in your life, and can use this information to make their lives and their society better.
   - If the information will negatively affect other people who'll outlive you (such as family members), consider leaving the book with a young lawyer / trusted person and a date when they should release the book.
   - Publishing it (getting an ISBN or whatever) is optional. Put the book online and pay a trusted person to ensure the server hosting it doesn't ever go down.
   - You can also start a non-profit that popularises this "autobiography after death" idea and handles legal, payment, webhosting aspects for everyone else who wants to launch such a book.

 - If you hold any well-paying job, record videos of your day-to-day life at work. This will help others more quickly acquire the necessary tacit knowledge for them to get your job.

#### Any STEM researcher

Writing
 - Make a blogpost with photos of the latest equipment in your lab, short descriptions of what each equipment does, and short videos showing how to operate it.
   - Target audience: STEM-degree holder who know nothing about your research field
   - Objective: someone can quickly get an idea of what your field of research does on a day-to-day basis, without having to complete a bunch of courses.
   - Ideally you could even publish video recordings of all your experiments which are published in journals. It will be easier to understand, replicate and notice errors in experiments if there is publicly available video recording of them.
   - Update: jove.com seems like it already does this. It's not open source though, seems to follow journal subscription model. Open source resource may still have value.
 - Identify Hamming questions in your research field and write about them. Hamming questions are basically the set of questions that would accelerate the research field *the most* if solved, and have a non-negligible chance of being solved if people tried solving them. For many fields, the Hamming question is IMO inventing a data collection tool (like microscope, brain probe, cyclotron, etc.) that provides data at a resolution/cost/speed not available with existing tools.
 - In general if you have any sort of expertise that is rare on Earth, consider writing about it. If you're patient you may be positively surprised how many people read it.

#### Politics

 - Consider starting a youtube channel and getting enough attention to influence politics.
   - Which niche you want your initial userbase to come from is upto you, the important thing is to not stop there and go for mass appeal eventually.
   - Which country's politics you'd like to influence is upto you. Probably you'll pick the country you live in.
   - This is the kind of insanely ambitious plan I wish I was the right person for, but might not be.
 - Look into industrialisation of agriculture in India, in particular the politics involved in consolidating small land holdings into big ones so that large-scale automation becomes possible.
   - 500 million plus people's lives depend on it.

#### Media/journalism

 - Consider starting an independent espionage org to infiltrate and HD video record an org doing something of questionable morality. For example, the Mole (anti-NK) or Edward Snowden (anti-US).
   - Consider NOT mentioning my name anywhere; I make no public claims on which orgs do or don't deserve to be spied on.

 - Consider operating a SecureDrop server at your media org
   - This plan requires 3 people, a journalist who can filter and publish info, a sysadmin who can manage server and a politically connected individual who provides immunity to the other two.

#### Psychology

 - Consider starting a youtube channel on psychology or or cultural issues.
   - IMO a lot of problems in modern world can be solved through changes in culture, even if there are no significant changes in material circumstances. So a few people like you could many countries' populations on a better path.

#### AI research - artificial superintelligence

 - Please read my post on [AI timelines](../my_ideas/my_ai_timelines.md) or related posts made by others.
   - They explain my guesses on why the AI labs in San Francisco might invent artifical superintelligence in the next 10 years, and what its outcomes could be.
   - If such arguments persuade you, consider working in the field of AGI/ASI safety.
   - I won't make specific recommendations on which exact project or job role is good, you have to figure that out for yourself. Please don't blindly defer to others when making this decision.

   - Random idea: Consider uploading a youtube where you print LLM weights on sheets, hire ~100 people for a year and ask them to compute a forward pass by hand. My guess is this will make it easier for a layman to understand how AI actually works.

#### Fusion energy

Research, writing
 - Consider working on fusion energy, or writing about it.
   - I'm not particularly optimistic on the plan of using magnetic fields to contain 10M K plasma, maybe pursue a different research agenda unless you have some special insight into why you can make this work. If you spend a year in the space you'd have more expertise than me and would be better equipped to pick research directions.
   - IMO a lot of cultural problems in the world would be improved if everyone involved was more wealthy. (Assuming wealth is measured in terms of real resources like food, water and energy consumption per capita, and not measured in terms of dollars.)
   - IMO this is one of those rare ideas that is radical and yet agreed on most people as good, if they think enough about it. Unlike many of the other projects listed on this page, that have obvious downsides if executed well and even more downsides if executed poorly.

#### Biotech

Research
 - Look into feasibility of mics and cameras implanted into human body. (If this turns out feasible, carefully pick who to disclose this information to.)
 - Work in the bioweapons space, to reduce risk of anyone using a bioweapon or mitigating damage
   - I'm not sure what the best projects are in this space, go ask someone who knows about it.
 - Work on genetic engineering of humans to increase IQ, executive function, etc
   - I'm the wrong person to ask what the best projects here are, see [this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JEhW3HDMKzekDShva/significantly-enhancing-adult-intelligence-with-gene-editing) for example.
   - High quality datasets is one of the immediate technical bottlenecks for this. Need DNA sequences matched to life outcomes for millions of people. Assuming per genome cost of $500, it will cost $500M to collect 1M sequences unless you can persuade people to your cause and donate their sequences to public domain for free.
   - This is one of the most radically life altering tech that may soon exist. I don't yet have a strong opinion whether it's good for the world for human genetic engg to progress. You will have to form a strong opinion to pursue this because a lot of people in the field will dislike your opinion irrespective of which side you pick.
 - Work on a promising subfield of genetic engineering
   - Some potential areas: gene drives, reducing cost of DNA sequencing, automation of any part of genetics R&D such as gene cloning, artificial selection
   - In general I'm optimistic on building systems that can search for good edits and populate them across a species, instead of manually searching for that one magic edit.
   - I don't yet have enough expertise to suggest which the best subfields are, but its obvious some are much more promising than others. (If your plan would not disrupt the whole field if successful, consider *not* working on it and pick a different plan instead.)

Writing
 - Write about automation of biotech R&D. Optimistic/pessimistic/neutral take, anything is fine.
 - Write about history of 1990-present biotech.


In general a bunch of biotech research is dual use. I don't at the moment have good recommendations for how to navigate that. You'll have to figure it out yourself.

#### Cybersecurity

Infra
 - Consider operating a SecureDrop server at a media org
   - This plan requires 3 people, a journalist who can filter and publish info, a sysadmin who can manage the SecureDrop server and a politically connected individual who provides immunity to the other two.

Hardware
 - Improve airgapped tech
   - Test all the Faraday cages available online for security. Suggest recommendations based on security, price, blending in with society, etc
   - Handmade radios that can read wifi IP packets. (I'm not sure this is even possible.)

Software
 - Improve internet anonymity
   - Payment-based (or proof-of-work-based?) firewalls so server owners don't need to deanonymise and demand "reputation-building" of IP addresses to defend against DDOS. Proton and Brave already have working implementations of proof-of-work captcha, I'm unsure why they haven't replaced Cloudflare yet. So you could figure that out.
   - Pay-for-bandwidth on Tor (or something Tor-like), so nobody has to altruistically donate bandwidth on Tor
   - Invent something Tor-like that resists analysis of metadata and traffic stats better than Tor
 - Improve airgapped tech
   - Increase ease-of-use of LUKS disk encryption.
   - Help with mature implementation of Shamir secret-sharing that can ship with linux.
     - `ssss` already exists, I'm not sure what's the process to make it as trustworthy as pgp for example. Probably just more cybersecurity researchers using it and reporting issues?
   - Linux phone that doesn't suck.
     - Will need to get popular enough that all popular apps (food delivery, ride sharing etc) also ship a linux version of their app. 
     - ios and android (and the mobile browsers) would be a lot less locked down if linux phones existed as a competitor.
 - Misc
   - Good SFTP GUI clients for android and ios (iphone)
     - Support image/audio/video thumbnails and previews, GUI file browser, support internet connections that are really good (low latency) and really bad (high latency, high packet loss)
     - ios filesystem probably sucks on purpose so people are forced to purchase icloud subscription (or purchase macbook+airdrop) instead of renting a linux server. The bigger move to play here is to launch a linux phone (see above).

Writing
 - Write about hardware backdoors.
 - Write about cyberwarfare from a game theory lens.

#### AI and information tech

Software
 - LLM embedding search projects
   - Obtain upperbound on effectiveness of LLM embedding search-based stylometric doxxing.
   - LLM embedding search over Libgen books' text.
   - LLM embedding search over CommonCrawl plaintext.
   - LLM embedding search over ethereum blobdata or another hard-to-censor data store.
 - LLM language translation projects
   - Integrate LLM language translation better with browser and OS.
   - Realtime voice language translation for in-person conversation. Connect to two pairs of headphones and two screens. Play the translation while the person is still speaking, and subtract the original from the headphone mix. [Example by Twilio](https://www.loom.com/share/71498319660943638e1ef2c9928bcd2a)
     - Pricing is an issue, will reduce with time as GPU FLOP/$ goes down. As of 2025-04, gpt-4o-mini realtime API costs for audio output ~ `($20/1M tokens) * (20 tokens/s) = $0.0004/s = $1.44/hour`
 - One-click LLM-generated summaries of every ~10 pages of any libgen epub.

 - [TIMEBOUND] Solve [VNC challenge](https://codex.flywire.ai/app/vnc_matching_challenge) in drosophilia connectome. No neuroscience knowledge needed. Fully map vertices between two graphs (~19k vertices each, ~2-4M edges each) to maximise number of common edges.
   - This investigates the connectome hypothesis. Is a weighted graph of neurons (connectome) alone sufficient to learn useful things about C elegans or Drosophilia melanogaster brains, or is lower-level information such as electric signal data needed?

Infra
 - Hard disk "dead drop" marketplace - as a replacement to torrent for large datasets

#### Pharmacology

 - Figure out substances that do any of the following, but without the downsides and side effects that existing substances have:
   - improve socialising similar to alcohol and cannabis, or similar to oxytocin. Especially focus on changes in ability to experience trust or love that are long-term.
   - render someone incapable of lying, similar to barbiturates but more effective. (If you find this, disclose this very carefully, it has huge political implications.)
   - improve fluid intelligence (IQ), focus, executive function, working memory, long-term memory, etc.
   - increase human lifespan
 - In general any sort of work in pharmacology that is aimed at improving the baseline human condition, rather than fixing disabilities, is someting I'd be a fan of.
 - In general pharmacology seems to focus more on changes in low-level cognition with the hope this percolates to changes in high-level cognition instead. (System 1 versus System 2?) Figuring out ways to directly target changes in high-level cognition seems useful.

#### Neuroscience

 - Work on simulating fruitfly brain or figuring out more insights about it. Or write about this topic.

 - Work on brain computer interfaces.


#### Meta work

For each of the projects listed, you can directly work on the project. Or you can do "meta" work that enables other people to complete the projects.

Examples of meta work:
 - find people who can fund the work
 - find people interested in doing the work and connect them to each other
 - raise media attention for the work to find more interested people
 - figure out business models if possible (Usually the most impactful+tractable+neglected opportunities to improve the world are hard-to-commercialise. Once you can find a way to commercialise them they become less neglected)
 - set up research labs or offices with infrastructure conducive to the work, and reduce entry barrier for interested people to get access to the infra
 - publish reviews of existing work. write about failed agendas so researchers won't waste time on the failed ones.
 - train people who are interested in doing the work but lack skills

Depending on the project, you can identify which of these meta work will be more useful and which will be less useful.


# Some more projects

Here's some more cool projects. I'm less confident they're important or worth doing, but consider looking into them anyway.

#### Urban planning

 - Figure out why don't we build one city with one billion population
   - Bigger cities will probably accelerate tech progress, and other types of progress, as people are not forced to choose between their existing relationships and the place best for their career 
   - Assume end-to-end travel time must be below 2 hours for people to get benefits of living in the same city. Seems achievable via intra-city (not inter-city) bullet-train network. Max population = (200 km/h * 2h)^2 * (10000 people/km^2) = 1.6 billion people
   - Is there any engineering challenge such as water supply that prevents this from happening? Or is it just lack of any political elites with willingness + engg knowledge + governing sufficient funds?
   - If a govt builds the bullet train network, can market incentives be sufficient to drive everyone else (real estate developers, corporate leaders, etc) to build the city or will some elites within govt need to necessarily hand-hold other parts of this process?

#### VR

 - Build VR good enough that in-person conversations feel equivalent to online conversations
   - This is an alternate approach to the above problem of not forcing people to pick between their relationships and their career
   - I haven't studied VR well enough to decide whether this is a promising project or not.

#### AI and information tech

Software
 - Language learning content
   - Possibly produced by video generation AI
   - Produce video content aimed at language learning based on "comprehensible input". (Video content of real-life scenarios where visuals help explain to the viewer what the audio means.). Prefer near-zero large gaps in the audio, entertaining not just educational, and progressively increase vocab size and grammar complexity based on the learner's language level. Repeat this for all pairs of popular source and destination languages.
 - Look into Denuvo game crack and study state-of-the-art in beating code obfuscation.
   - Using deliberately complicated data structures is one of the last defences against perfect surveillance, see how well it actually holds up versus not.
 - Find zerodays, leaked identity databases, hacking software etc and publish about them publicly.
   - It would be nice to get more public information on what state of the art looks like here.
   - There's a responsible way to do this, figure that out for yourself and follow it.
 - Write better RAM-only software
   - We're reaching a point where the whole world's plaintext data and most of its programs can run entirely in RAM, rarely ever touching the disk. (As of 2023, RAM is $1000/TB, in 10 years it could be below $100/TB making storing CommonCrawl \*.WET 600 TB in RAM affordable.) Even backup can be done to another machine's RAM instead of to disk. Performant RAM-only databases and software are still hard to write however.
   - In general OSes and software are often written with the assumption that RAM caches some subset of data on disk and disk caches some subset of data on other disks in the network. These assumptions might or might not change in future.
 - Improve DevOps to setup cloud machine in < 1 second
   - Within one second it should be possible to get the following ready: launch new machine, install requested software (apt install xyz, snap install xyz), libraries (npm install xyz, pip install xyz, etc), load user API keys to respective tools, load user dataset on disk
   - There are two software dev paradigms: where developer time costs more and where hardware+electricity costs more, this is to speedup the former
   - (Maybe) Increase ease-of-use of resizing and attaching/detaching block storage without corrupting the filesystem or data. Attaching disks is a faster way of transferring large datasets compared to downloading to disk over the internet. (For all data except large datasets, ideally they're stored in in-memory databases and no disks are needed.)
   - (Maybe) Provide installed versions of all popular apt, pip, npm liraries on such attachable disks so no separate installation time required.
     - Allow fetching them during first run of the program instead of mandating a separate install step.
     - Distribute .pyc bytecode instead of python wheels (for all combinations of OS, python and library versions). In general, figure out why npm installs and pip installs are slow and speed them up
   - (Maybe) Standardise a keystore where someone can dump all their API keys, and import them on any internet-connected machine with one-liner command + password + 2FA (optional).
   - (It's possible some of this can already be done a different way, and I'm just ignorant)
 - Global notification app
   - Allow any website to register with your app and push mobile notifications through your app
   - Why?
     - Ease of ensuring user security from everyone except the server themselves: Websites (Google, Apple do security via chromium, safari security features) > Mobile apps (Google, Apple do security via android and ios security features, and app store approval system) > Desktop apps (User must figure out which apps to trust)
     - Open source mobile browser is easier to maintain than open source mobile OS. In general, software complexity is a moat. Easier to maintain reduces cost-of-exit from Google and Apple ecosystems, which reduces decision-making over future direction of ecosystem exerted by Apple and Google. (ios+android market share is 99.5%, adding Samsung android-skin its 99.8%, whereas chromium+safari mobile browsers are ~97% with firefox and UC browser as minor competitors. Minor competitiors still drastically reduce cost-to-exit for the user.)
     - Most mobile apps could be mobile websites instead, if they had a way to send notifications while closed.
     - (Launching a linux phone is a bigger move than this though, prefer working on that if possible.)

Infra
 - Setup low latency ("edge") GPU datacentres in hundreds of cities across the world
   - i.e. as many geographic locations as cloudflare, not aws
   - its possible cloudflare themselves do this over next 1-2 years
   - This is a "cool" project that benefits a few use cases (such as AI-enabled cloud gaming) but doesn't necessarily improve the world in terms of amount of surveillance.

#### Games

 - Write a game that does not blindly copy ideas from existing game genres.
   - Games allow you to express a strictly larger set of ideas than films or books. However as of 2024 it's still more common for a person to say that they changed their life over a book or film, than a game. If you're imaginative enough, you can change this.

#### Robotics

 - Run an automated kitchen operating at medium scale (1k-1M meals/day), or advance robotics and AI for the same.
   - If you compare society before Newton and today, cooking is one activity that still consumes a huge number of man hours as it did then.
   - "Scaling laws" + robotics has lots of low hanging fruit, see DeepMind's end-2024 papers for example. Even if you don't work on the AI yourself, there may be other work (such as hardware) which helps bring the AI into the world faster.

#### Biotech

 - Look into making meal replacements (Huel, Soylent etc) more tasty, run longer scale trials etc
   - I don't know much about freeze-drying proteins/vitamins/minerals or about chemistry of taste, so I'm the wrong person to guide you here.
 - Work in the artifical meat protein space
   - Again, don't know much about this space personally.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/reply_vitalik_dacc_reply.md

2025-03-07

# Reply to Vitalik on d/acc

Vitalik recently wrote an article on his [ideology of d/acc](https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/01/05/dacc2.html). This is impressively similar to my thinking so I figured it deserved a reply. (Not claiming my thinking is completely original btw, it has plenty of influences including Vitalik himself.)

Disclaimer
 - This is a quickly written note. I might change my mind on this stuff tomorrow for all I know.

Two axes he identifies for differentially accelerating tech are:
 - big group versus small group - prioritise accelerating tech that can be deployed by a small group rather than by a big group
 - offense versus defense - prioritise accelerating tech that can be deployed for defence rather offense

I think I generally get where this is coming from and find these important ideas.

Some confusions from my side:
 - Self-replication
   - I am generally in favour of building self-sustaining social systems over not. Success of d/acc ultimately relies on followers of Vitalik's d/acc a) building only those tech that satisfy d/acc criteria and b) providing social approval to people who build tech as per d/acc criteria. For this system to be self-sustaining, point b) may need to be passed into the future long after all of d/acc's current followers (vitalik included) are dead. Self-replicating culture is possible to build but extremely difficult. Religions are among the oldest self-replicating cultures. Ideas such as markets and democracy have also successfully self-replicated for multiple centuries now. I'm unsure if this idea of d/acc being present in culture is alone sufficient to ensure people in year 2200 are still only building tech that satisfies d/acc criteria
   - Often, culture is shaped by incentives IMO. If people of the future face incentives that make it difficult to follow d/acc, they might abandon it. It is hard for me to explain this idea in short, but it is something I consider very important. I would rather leave future generations with incentives to do a Thing, than just culture telling them to do a Thing.
 - Terminal values
   - To me the terminal values of all these galaxy-brain plans is likely preserving and growing timeless stuff like truth and empathy.
     - Defensive tech provides truth a good defence as information is easy to replicate but hard to destroy. As long as multiple hostile civilisations (or individuals) can coexist, it is likely atleast one of them will preserve the truth for future generations.
     - However, it is harder for me to see how any of these plans connect to empathy. Sure, totalitarianism and extinction can be bad for promoting empathy, but I think it requires more work than just preventing those outcomes. Increasing resource abundance and solving physical security seem useful here. Building defensive tech can increase physical security. In general, my thinking on which tech increases versus decreases human empathy is still quite confused.
 - Takeoff may favour offence
   - Intelligence-enhancing technologies such as superintelligent AI, genetic engineering of humans to increase IQ, human brain connectome-mapping for whole brain emulation, etc. are so radically accelerating that I'm unsure if an offence-defence balance will get maintained throughout the takeoff. A small differential in intelligence leads to a very large differential in offensive power, it is possible offense just wins at some point while the takeoff is occuring
 - Entropy may favour offence
   - Historically, it has always been easier to blow up a region of space than to keep it in an ordered state and defend it against being blown up. Defence has typically been achieved and continues to be achieved in game theoretic ways, "if you blow up my territory I blow up yours", rather than in actual physical ways, "I can defend against your attack, also my defence costs less than your offense". This seems somewhat inherent to physics itself, rather than specific to the branches of the tech tree humans have gone down as of 2025. Consider this across times and scales, from the very small and ancient (gunpowder beats metal locks) to the very big and futuristic (a bomb that can blow up the observable universe may have no defence).
 - Maybe big group is inherently favoured
   - What a big group can build is a strict superset of what a small group can build. Ensuring that all the frontier tech can necessarily be built by small groups is hard. A lot of tech in today's world follows centralised production decentralised consumption. For example solar panels can only be manufactured by a large group, but they can be traded and used by a small group. Even if all this tech is open source such that another large group could, in theory, build a copy of it, in practice this often doesn't happen (why?). Supply chains stack on top of each other, so a few such leads stacked on top of each other means no other big group in the world can easily independently produce the product if they have to build it from scratch (by scratch, I really do mean digging their own water and iron ore and crude oil out of the ground and building an independent supply chain). Assuming multiple big groups can't build independent supply chains, one big group can use measures such as export controls to prevent other big groungs from building a specific tech.
   - Internet has made it harder for any big group to maintain monopoly on the knowledge required to produce a given tech, but there is a significant lead time that can be still be obtained by being first to deploy a tech (or tech stack or supply chain) irl or at scale, which can then be leveraged for some objectives.
   - In general considering all these nuances seems worth doing for me.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/I_want_leverage.md

2025-03-10

# I want leverage

Disclaimer
 - This is quick note. Haven't spent much time on it.

How does someone build massive amounts of influence over society?

I am highly sympathetic to Naval's viewpoint that there's 3 forms of leverage in society:
 - attention
 - capital
 - internet-copyable products - software, blog posts, video speeches, etc

You can also merge multiple forms of leverage
 - For example Zuckerberg has now built leverage in terms of both capital and software.
 - Vitalik too built leverage in terms of both capital and software, although increasing political popularity of crypto means he is also building leverage in terms of attention.
 - Maximum leverage may very well to build alternate forms of government that operate in internet-native ways, rather than operate in conventional ways but adapted to the internet.

Real power versus formal power
 - It is also important to differentiate between formal positions of power and actual influence on millions of people. A billionaire may have thousands of people listening to him, a random youtube podcaster may have millions of people listening to him. Owning a formal position of power does not mean lots of people are actually paying attention to you or changing their own speech or behaviour as a result of your speech and behaviour.
 - Internet allows one to build deeper connections with millions of people, than was ever possible before in history. You are still limited on close relationships like friendships, you still can't make a million friendships for instance. But you can for example get real feedback from a million people, be it collect it, keep track of who is providing what feedback and why, filter it, and connect each piece of advice to the relevant people who will take decisions based on it. This was not anywhere as easy to do in world where your voter's feedback would reach you via postal service via train for example.

Self-replication
 - You might want your leverage to self-replicate after you die. Building a structure (such as a corporation or government) that can meaningful weild your leverage after you die is one to ensure long-term influence on society. Some corporations and governments are much more effective than others at weilding leverage after you as the founder die.
 - An even more powerful way of doing self-replication is for millions of people to themselves voluntarily self-replicate your way of doing things. For instance ideology that is pro-democracy or pro-market has self-replicated for multiple centuries. An important factor here is that spreading the ideas also means newer believers are motivated to replicate the societal structures that would allow for even further growth. Societal structures provide features such as resilience, legitimacy and accountability. Religions have replicated for millenia. Religions too spread in terms of both ideas and societal structures that rely on the ideas. Starting an ideological or religious movement is one of the strongest forms of leverage to exist.

What leverage do I want, personally?
 - I am personally most keen on building an alternate form of government via software, that does not rely on me acquiring any formal position of power.
 - I am also keen on leverage in the form of becoming an advisor to someone with a lot of capital or attention.
 - I am somewhat keen on but not very keen on leverage in the form of books or videos where I directly provide value (such as life advice or career advice) to millions of people. My current guess is this is not what I'm best suited to. I'd prefer building the tools, incentives and culture for other people to do this instead of doing it myself. (I might change my views on this in the future.)
 - I am not keen on putting the work to acquire a lot of capital or attention myself. Apart from requiring a massive amount of effort and time to succeed at (because they're older and more competed forms of leverage), they will also both place constraints on my behaviour which I'm currently not keen on accepting. (I might change my views on this in the future.)
 - I am not keen on trying to become a religious/spiritual/ideological leader currently. I don't think I currently have deep enough understanding of such topics to succeed at starting an ideological movement that survives multiple generations, and I don't think investing a few years of my time will be enough for me to succeed at it. (I might change my views on this in the future.)


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/software_as_hypothesis_testing.md

2025-04-09

# Software as hypoethesis testing

Common goals for building software include acquiring money, acquiring people's attention, and providing them tools to solve a problem of theirs.

I realised I'm writing software with a different goal - to test hypotheses about reality, by making contact with reality.

 - I wrote the libgen search project not primarily because I wanted to help researchers or make money myself, but because I wanted to check whether it can be built or not. Can an AI recommend me books I can't find myself? Answer I got was yes, an AI can recommend me books that are useful that I wouldn't find otherwise. AI can improve my epistemology.
 - Similarly, I wanted to know if using search tools to seek truth on currently taboo topics is possible or not. So I wrote a tool to search reddit. The tool I wrote did not get me significantly better answers than just making google searches with "site:reddit.com" appended. Although tbh googling reddit posts itself is enough to make progress on topics considered taboo.
 - I wanted to know if LLM-based stylometric doxxing is possible. I am yet to get an answer on whether stylometric doxxing is possible, but atleast I have a better picture in my head now of what a doxxing tool will look like. It is going to require more grep than embedding search, and it is going to require more crawling of websites that commoncrawl refuses to crawl because it respects robots.txt. Doxxing tools like whitepages likely purchase data from brokers that don't respect robots.txt, hence they have more information. Also, I learned that stylometrics only comes into the picture after you have integrated all the classical approaches to reducing number of potential matches. Stylometrics can filter 1 out of 1000 people easily but can't filter 1 out of 1M people as easily, so it has to be combined with classical approaches.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/polyamory.md

2025-02-21

# Polyamory

I'd probably be polyamorous if I were living in the US. As of today though, I am not practising polyamory.

Why?
 - Long-term benefits
   - I'm sympathetic to the idea of compound benefits. Investing 10 years into the same person has compound benefits you don't get if you choose a new person to date every year. I don't have a deep understanding of what the compound benefits are, but I'm convinced they're real and significant.
   - I'm also sympathetic to the idea of planning your life many years into the future instead of just doing what feels good for the next day or month or year.
   - My ideal is not a casual relationship as I tend to get attached to people.
   - I'm not very keen on staying friends with women I'm attracted to, due to this not working out in past experiences.
 - People are hard-to-compare
   - I'm sympathetic to the idea that different people provide different forms of values that are hard to compare, say on a scale of 1 to 10.
   - If I'm forced to pick only one partner for my whole life, I will naturally have a high bar for who I wish to pick. I will have to eventually breakup with anyone who fails to meet this bar, no matter how good they are for me or I am for tham. I do think nobody can be perfect at everything, and there will ways in which this ideal person falls short no matter who they are. There will be meaningful value (trustworthy advice, knowledge, emotional support etc) I can get from people other than this one person.
   - Imagine being forced to have only one friend, for example. It would significantly alter your attitude towards friendships if you're forced to pick only one.
 - Increasing/decreasind distance with time
   - I like gradients over sharp cut-offs. If you're monogamous you're forced to either consider someone as having potential to become one of the most important people in your life, or remove them from your life completely. There is no in-between.

Why not?
 - I don't yet have a lot of real world data on problems faced by polyamorous couples. I'd like more data on the same.
 - As long as I live in India, I and people I date are likely to face societal judgement from religious people. I'm not sure dealing with that is worth the benefits.
   - I also hope to remain friends with religious people and be included in their social circles, to whatever extent that is possible. Some of the kindest people I have met in my life are religious, for example, and I expect I can grow as a person by spending more time with them. This is easier to do if I weren't actively practising polyamory. (I'm sure there's people who think I'm committing evil simply by thinking about the idea and not practising it, but I can't do anything about that. I can censor my actions and words to some extent, but I can't censor my thoughts. That is sacred to me.)

How?

Scarce resources include time and location.
 - I used to think time is a constraint for practising polyamory but I'm less convinved by this now. Even if you have only 4 days a month to spend with other people, you can split that as 2 days a month per person. Doing this over 10 years still likely gets some of the compound benefits I mentioned before.
 - Place is a significant constraint. Since I plan to eventually shift to the US, one way or another, any social bonds I form while in India will eventually need to adjust to that. (This is the kind of annoying tradeoff that makes me wish billion-person cities existed.)

Navigating this is confusing and I don't have all the answers yet. In my mind there's a clear pareto frontier where both increased and decreased self-expression come with significant upsides and downsides.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/my_role_models.md

2024-12-05

# My role models

I'm generally against the idea of having a single role model in my own life. (You can have a role model in your life, I have no problem with that. I'm talking strictly about myself here.)

That being said, here's an incomplete list of people I rely on for motivation. (Motivation is not the same as Advice)

 - Eliezer Yudkowsky
 - Tim Urban
 - Moxie Marlinspike
 - Vitalik Buterin
 - Yeonmi Park


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/elite_class_social_norms.md

2025-01-14

# Elite social norms

I have been raised in upper-middle class India which means I have internalised many of the social norms of the middle (knowledge) class and am blind to many of the social norms of the upper (elite) and lower (labour) classes. I am very sympathetic to perspectives such as [this analysis by siderea](https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1237182.html) on why social class is more important than economic class, and this helps explain why I am blind.

This entire post is therefore a bunch of guesswork from someone who does not have enough first-hand data. Everything here is to be read with the understanding that it could be completely incorrect with significant probability.

If you are an elite, please correct the incorrect parts. It'll mean a lot to me if you do.

#### Disclaimer

Publishing this article in public makes me nervous for a couple of reasons.
 - I am still in a knowledge-gathering phase of my life. I want to spend more time interacting with people outside my class and learn more about what life is like for them. I'm worried I will get reduced opportunities to do that if people know I'm going to publish some of my learnings on my blog.
   - This is especially true if what I publish includes criticism, and isn't just descriptive of the facts.
   - This is especially true if I publish includes incorrect guesses of what it's like in other classes. People could think I'm naive and overconfident, and not be willing to correct me. (If you think I'm naive and overconfident, please correct me, I will appreciate more for this than if you keep quiet. If I don't accept your criticism that's okay, I'll still appreciate the attempt.)
   - In general, if I have published anything that you don't like, please let me know. I'll usually be willing to take it down or atleast rewrite it in a way it no longer feels like it is criticising you specifically.
   - (There may be exceptions. Maybe you've done something especially immoral from my perspective, and I want to call you out publicly and pick a fight with you. But this is rare, I don't usually start conflicts with other just because their values are different from mine. If you are afraid that something you say to me will end up on this blog against your wishes, please ask me first.)
 - If I had a magic wish, I would love to be part of the elite class instead of my current socioeconomic class. I think there's a lot of good that can be done in the world only by elites (or by people of my class who join the elite class).
   - However some of my current behaviours and actions in the world are already indicating my membership of the knowledge class, and my potential lack of eligibility to other classes.
   - For instance my ideal attitude to criticism is a lot closer to people of my class than the elite, whenever I hold back on offering criticism I feel like I am betraying my inner ideals for instrumental gain. In practice yes I often hold back on offering criticism for various reasons, but I hate the fact that I have to do this. (Yes, all 3 classes withold criticism, but elite class does this the most IMO, atleast for public criticism not private.)
   - If I choose to give up on my ambition of becoming an elite, I could still have significant influence, for example by influencing and advising existing elites. But this influence will still be reduced (by how much??) if I refuse to adopt any of the social norms of the elite class myself.

**I still remain unsure whether this article should stay published. If you think I would have a better life if I took this article down, please let me know.**

## Elite social norms that differ from knowledge class' social norms

A bunch of the social norms seem explainable just through incentives. I probably don't actually have to spend 10 years living as an elite myself to figure it out.

If I have to summarise this entire post in two lines it's probably the following:
 - Elite social circles are a small world, there's a small number of people like you. Your entire life - personal and professional - depends on allying with some subset of this set of people.
 - In labour class, others can destroy you so you must be careful how you behave. In elite class, you can destroy others so you must be careful how you behave. It's only the knowledge class that lives in this fictitious zone of "equality".

Now that the summary is over, I'll talk about details.

 - My guess is elites can get away with a lot more weird or even immoral behaviour in private, compared to people of other classes.
   - My guess is elites on average have a stronger demarcation between their private and public life than people of other classes. (Although yes ofcourse all 3 classes maintain this demarcation.)
   - Elites can get away with a lot more things in private simply because of the power they wield. If an elite ever got into a conflict with someone of the knowledge class, they are likely to "win" in many ways.
   - This includes self-expression that would be punished in other classes. If an elite wants to architect their house in a 16th century style, or consume a range of non-FDA-approved supplements, or go live in a monastery for a year, or have multiple partners, it's easier for them to do that. Many people of other classes would love this level of freedom and self-expression, but get restricted by their immediate social circle.
   - [Trigger Warning: Rape] This also extends to immoral actions. For example, it's a lot easier for an elite to get away with rape than someone of other classes. I also think the number of men of other classes who would rape others if they could get away with it is surprisingly high (atleast 5%, global average), but elites get to act on it instead of just thinking it in the privacy of their minds. There are 3000 billionaires today, I'm pretty sure atleast 150 of them are rapists (I'm not including paid sex work here, and I'm not including edge cases like a 50-year old sleeping with an 18-year old here).
     - Disclaimer: Predictions shape reality. Please don't turn my prediction into reality. It would be nice if I was wrong, and this number was a lot less than 5%.
 - My guess is elites are on average more lonely.
   - It is a small world at the top, there's less than 10000 elites globally. For the knowledge class it's easier to do something weird and trust that you eventually find a find people who are not just tolerant but actively supportive of anything weird you want to do. For example, if you want to suddenly convert from hinduism to christianity, you can probably find an existing community of hindus-converted-to-christianity of your class. If you are a Nepali immigrant to the US, you can probably find other nepali immigrants to the US, of your class. As an elite it's a lot harder to find another elite who shares your unique set of life experiences. (Also it takes a lot of time and effort to forge social bonds outside your class that are based on honest foundations, see my next point.)
   - As an elite you're basically 24x7 exposed to non-elites who are engaging in varying amounts of deception to get access to some of the capital and attention you wield. This is true both in professional life (other companies and non-profits who want to ally with you) and in personal life (people who want to befriend or date you). This also seems obvious based on incentives. If someone has $1M it might be worth spending 1 year trying to entrap them, if someone has $1B it might be worth spending your entire life trying to entrap them. Forging trustworthy bonds outside your social class takes a significant amount of time and effort, in fact a significant part of designing your company or government or whatever is basically figuring out how to get people of other classes to do your work without you ever having to trust them.
   - As an elite, if you're ambitious and trying to get something done, you need to interact with a lot of people where you cannot let your guard down emotionally. You cannot choose to avoid interacting with people if you are ambitious and wish to climb further upward. (This is true for basically all 3 classes, but it is an added factor here. I'm not claiming it's worse or better in this class.)
   - There is also cultural spiralling here. If the other people you know are also more lonely and less willing to take bold risks, this will also rub off on you.
 - My guess is elites can get away with less weirdness on things that actually matter, in business and politics, than people of the knowledge class.
   - There's a lot of nuance here that's hard to summarise.
   - This is especially true if they wish to keep their elite social circles (including friends and family) or climb up within their class.
   - This is especially true if the elite wields or aspires to wield attention rather than capital. Elites often wield a lot of attention by crafting a public image that is entirely separate from their private image.
     - Getting a large number of people behind cause may require you to support the average of their views, and the average of a large number of people's views is by definition conformist.
     - [Side note: I wish there was an honest way to do this. For example, I have massive respect for a politician who says "my private beliefs are X, however the voters have voted for Y, therefore if I were elected I'm going to do Y" and I have a lot less respect for someone who just pretends their private beliefs are Y. I understand that the former has disadvantages. For instance, your voters may be too unintelligent to understand the nuance. Also, your message will get mutated as it spreads across place and time, and competes with other ideas, so you may prefer communicating a simpler message over a more complicated one. If someone figures this stuff out, I'd be grateful.]
 - Elites can get away with less criticism of other elites. People of the knowledge class can tolerate more criticism on average, both on the giving and receiving end.
     - Criticising another elite in public is essentially rallying a mob against them. An elite's words in public carry a lot more weight than someone of the knowledge class. (Arguably, being able to rally people using words is basically the most important role an elite plays, in a sense.)
     - An elite's words also end up setting up status heirarchies across all the organisations they control. If you as an elite criticise only one particular type of behaviour by someone, people across all your organisations will go out of their way to avoid that particular type of behaviour.
     - The elite who receives the criticism can also do a lot more damage in response. See again, "it's a small world". The elite on the receiving end can influence their network of other elites to demand conformism or else cut off their ties with you. The extreme end of this phenomena is countries going to war over personal rivalries involving trivial matters.
     - Even when elites do use their media houses to push criticism against other elites, it's done via abstractions. It's "The New Yorker published X" not "the Newhouse family who owns Conde Nast allowed X to be published", it's "the NSA helped kill X" not "Michael Hayden the NSA director helped kill X", it's "climate non-profit got shutted because X" not "Mohammed bin Salman the prince of Saudi Arabia shuttered climate non-profit". Most of us don't even know the names of the people who own the media houses and companies and nonprofits that we interact with on a day-to-day basis, this alone is proof that abstractions work. (I'm not claiming anything about these specific examples, they're just examples.)
     - [Side note: My guess is a lot of criticism being extinguished top-down on the internet, is downstream of this phenomenon. Elites own the social media and knowledge workers publish on them.]
   - Knowing when to do things "how things are usually done" and when to invest on your personal beliefs around better ways of doing things - seems like one of the strongest markers of an elite's good judgment.
 - My guess is elites look at morality differently than people of the knowledge class.
   - Elites are less likely to register the harm done by the organisations they wield as harm that they personally have done. See also: [Power buys you distance from the crime](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fB4gvoooNYa4t56S/power-buys-you-distance-from-the-crime)
     - (Arguably knowledge workers do the same blame deflection, just in a different context. If a smartphone manufacturer uses slave labour to mine their rare earth metals for their smartphone, then the people purchasing the smartphone typically think they're blameless with "if not us then someone else would do it" as a potential justification, and the CEO and investors of the company also typically think they're blameless with "if not us then someone else would do it" as a potential justification.)
   - Elites are basically above the law, the only law that matters is the rules set by other elites. The only way people of the knowledge class get to enforce rules on the elites is to find another elite who is willing to do the enforcing.
   - Most large organisations end up doing some harm to someone. Some of this is an accidental byproduct of governing a large organisation.
     - Often organisations was designed by people other than you. Even if you as an elite have the ability to re-design them better, it's often not worth the time and effort invested to do this, if your goals in life are something else.
   - Some of this is deliberate. Governments often deliberately suppress their citizens using the military for example. Companies often have armies of salesmen, lawyers and scientists aimed at addicting people to various products. These armies don't spontaneously spring into existence, there are elites who devote their entire life to trying to build them. A full analysis of deliberate harm done by elites and why this happens is out of the scope of this post.
   - Again, "small world" phenomena means as an elite, you have less ability to cut people out of your network if they have done evil things. If you want to raise as much capital or attention as possible towards a cause, you have to be more willing to tolerate receiving it from people who have done evil things. How much you tolerate depends on your negotiating position, which could depend on how rich you are, for eexample. A knowledge worker's moral line might be "I will not accept money from anyone who is rude to all their friends."; an elite's moral line might be "I will not accept money from anyone who has committed genocide.". An aspiring elite with $10M may be more tolerant of a billionaire rapist, another billionaire may be less tolerant of the first billionaire, because the former is more dependent on the billionaire's support. (I don't know where these lines actually get drawn in practice, I'm just guessing they get drawn differently.)
   - Elites are definitely more sympathetic to utilitarian ethics - ensure good done is greater than harm done. Elites accept as a matter of course that they will end up doing a bunch of both good and harm in their life. Knowledge workers are more sympathetic to deontological ethics - do not harm, how much good you do less important.
   - The net result of all these dynamics makes elite morality noticeably different from that of knowledge workers.
   - [Side note: I wish some elites could help explain their morality to the rest of us. I'm afraid many elites have given up on trying to explain anything to anyone, and this makes me sad. Many knowledge workers think that if an elite must have high moral standards, they must copy the values of the knowledge workers themselves. This is not possible due to all the incentives mentioned above. The net result of making such a demand is that you get politicians who pretend to "live like a common man" while thinking in ways very different from one. I wish some elites could explain to us what high ethical standards look like *from their own perspective*, and then actually try to uphold those standards. Forging genuine empathy and understanding between members of both classes is going to require work of this sort.]
 - My guess is elites trade a lot of favours, especially the ambitious ones.
   - Keep tracking of debts owed and incurred to other elites, not just financial but favour-based, seems like a non-trivial part of the job of an ambitious elite. Not keeping good records puts you at a disadvantage.
 - My guess is elites, especially the most successful ones, make plans with time horizons longer than the other two classes.
   - This is definitely not true of all elites, I'm sure many are just trying to improve status among their peers or find a better partner or whatever.
   - Having more wealth does allow you to make plans on the timescale of multiple generations though, so a handful of elites make use of this opportunity.
   - Sucessful elites put a lot of time into thinking what happens to their wealth, position and organisations after they die. They try finding successors (for example grooming their children for the role) and try modifying their organisations such that they can survive their death. They especially do this when they are old themselves. They care about what story they are remembered for.

[Side note: I basically think the internet is going to disrupt the social norms of all three classes. I would first like to understand what the current norms are, before trying to predict how they will be disrupted.]


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/readme_for_unimportant_folder.md

2025-01-06

# README for "unimportant" folder

Attention is a scarce resource. Whenever I make a bid for your attention (be it in person or online), I only want to push a small amount of content. Anything I do not think is important enough to push on someone with limited attention goes into the "unimportant" folder.

My standards for how crisp a world model is or how clearly it is communicated are lower in this folder.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/taboo_words.md

# Taboo words on this website

2025-03-29

I am sympathetic to the lesswrong social norm of taboo words. Basically you avoid the usage of words that are not defined in a clear way where everyone agrees on the definition. If you think somsone is using a word without clear definition agreed by everyone, you can ask them to repeat their point without using this word.

Taboo words on this websites:
 - can, possible, because
   - On this website I almost will never say "X happened because Y". I will almost never say "X is possible" or "X is impossible".
   - Saying "X happened because Y" means in an alternate universe where X did not happen, Y would not have happened.
   - Especially when studying history it is difficult to construct this alternate universe thought experiment in a way everyone agrees what the thought experiment should be, and what its outcome would be. (I accept that in theory this thought experiment works fine. Human brains don't violate deterministic universe. It's just in practice we don't know how to get the outcomes of these experiments.)
   - In practice often multiple pre-conditions existed when an event happened. The combination of those pre-existing conditions is not simple linear algebra, "A and B and C => Y", it's "f(A,B,C) => Y" for some poorly understood f.
   - I prefer the phrases "causally upstream" and "caually downstream" over the word "because".
   - There are different levels of "impossible". There are events that would have required people to have different ideas or imaginations in order to happen, there are events that merely required the right amount of funding or the right set of social bonds to form, there are events that required increased amounts of engineering resources, there are events that would straight up violate the laws of physics if they happened. Unless an event would violate the laws of physics, I'm hesitant to say it is impossible. And if it violates the laws of physics, I may be open to its possibility, human understanding of our current physical laws is less than a century old, it could have exceptions.
   - If nothing is impossible, then saying "X is possible" also conveys zero useful information so I avoid saying it.
 - less, more
   - I will almost never say "X is less" or "X is more". Scales are relative, and where exactly the middle of the scale gets defined to be is often a political question. I will almost always say "X is less than Y" or "X is more than Y". This could be when referring to any adjective. X could be more beautiful, powerful, wealthy, empathetic, knowledgible etc. than Y, but X will never just be more beautiful, powerful, wealthy, empathetic, knowledgible etc. period.
 - should, ought
   - I wrote a lengthy disclaimer on is-ought distinction elsewhere on this website. In short, I believe is-ought is real and really important. I will almost never tell someone they should value XYZ as a terminal goal in life. Instead if I am asked to offer advice, I will tell them potential consequences of various actions. Whether those consequences are good as per their values is something they'll have to decide on.
   - In general I'll be specific about who the subject of each sentence is, and make sure it points to individuals not a group. Often people skip the subject and the sentence gets interpreted with "everyone" as the subject. I will almost never say "society should do/think/say/do" or "the government should do/think/say X" or "everyone should do/think/so", I will generally be more specific about exactly which people in society or government I am referring to.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/embedding_search.md

2025-01-10

# Embedding search

I'm writing a post on why I'm so excited by embedding search.

It may have massive upsides and downsides. Also the ingredients for it seem mostly ready. So it'll be difficult to un-invent even if the downsides are greater. It seems better to adapt to a world where better embedding search is present.

A lot of distinct problems in life seem like they could benefit from better embedding search.
 - Finding a life partner
 - Finding funding or a job
 - Finding books, articles, etc relevant to your research
 - Establishing trust. Getting diverse information sources about a person helps build trust faster.

Some dual use implications:
 - Finding people who are trying to stay hidden because they are afraid of or competing with you or someone else. (This is dual use.)
 - Finding secrets leaked to the internet (or any private database) by powerful organisations. (This is dual use.)
  - In general, even things like finding funding or becoming better at research, etc accelerates everyone irrespective of what their goals are. 

Attention markets on the internet right now are quite power-law distributed.
 - If you want to find people of a specific niche, often you have to first get attention of the mass public, and then filter out the subset of this that is interested in your niche. This is especially true if there doesn't exist an already well-established community with organisers and funders.
 - Attention markets are power law-distributed because there's atleast 1 million people competing for attention, but any random user has not more than 10 or 20 internet sources they regularly follow. (Sure, you might follow 1000 instagram pages, but you're not paying attention to all of them.) If you can't get into someone's top 20 follows, you're at a massive disadvantage when trying to get mass attention.
 - There aren't clear rules for how to give or receive attention. In practice this leads to an arms race, one side invents ever new techniques to spam all the platforms, and the other side raises the entry barrier to allow anything in.

Embedding search might (??) also help fix the attention market. For example, I could list 5000 people I'm interested in, and the other person could also list 5000 people they're interested in, and if there's overlap then we connect. At no point do either of us need to send a DM without knowing a good probability estimate of whether this is useful or spam for the other person.

Elites use filters
 - The more you wield a scarce resource such as attention or money, the more people are competing to get in your network or influence your thinking. And the more you need to be deliberate about what filters you use to let people in or out.
 - A lot of problems in society are causally downstream of principal-agent problems. Elites don't know who to trust and get fooled into doing massively suboptimal things, basically all the time.
 - Building better filtering mechanisms for elites seems useful.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/simplify_embedding_search.md

2025-04-10

# Simplify embedding search

tldr complexity bad, graph algo good, geometric algo bad, buckets good

Why?
 - I'm looking for a simple embedding search algorithm because political projects should rely on simple software not complex software.
   - Torrent codebase is simpler than etheruem codebase for example, hence torrent is less likely to get politically captured IMO.
   - Examples of such political projects: search feature for distributed social media, spam filter for distributed social media, spam filter for SecureDrop servers that accept leaked documents, search feature for published leaked documents, etc.
 - As of 2025, embedding search is necessary and almost sufficient method of using LLMs on a big dataset. And LLMs are state-of-the-art AI for basically every task.
   - This could change in future, for instance it will one day be cheap enough to just feed an internet's worth of tokens as inference tokens and find out the most relevant content.
   - We also don't yet have good interpretability tools to make sense of layers besides the embedding layer.
   - Since input is too expensive and other layers are unhelpful, we will likely rely on embeddings

Embedding search: Given a dataset of vectors and a query vector, find top-10 vectors that maximise dot product with query vector.

This is equivalent to finding top-10 vectors that minimise euclidean distance with query vector, assuming all vectors are unit vectors.

Common algos
 - Graph-based - HNSW, pinecone proprietary (?) algos
 - Geometry-based - locality sensitive hashing, k-means clustering, product quantization (subvectors)
 - Brute-force

Dataset sizes
 - Rule of thumb: 1000 chars (1 KB) -> 1536 dimensional float32 vector (6 KB)
 - 1 TB plaintext => 6 TB embeddings, 1 PB plaintext => 6 PB embeddings

Brute-force algo
 - Commoncrawl is ~1 PB plaintext. Trillion vectors (10^12). ~10 PB embeddings
 - Brute force can be done either fully in RAM or by loading disk to RAM at query time. This is affordable for 10^6 vectors but not for 10^12 vectors.
 - If disk throughputs become fast enough, one could do brute-force on a large array of disks in parallel. Join 10,000x 8 GB/s 1 TB disks in parallel, and you can search a batch of queries in ~15 minutes. This cluster costs atleast $1M in hardware alone.
 - Brute-force algo on disk will be possible within a decade or two. But is expensive today.

State of the art algos are captured by ANN benchmarks and big ANN benchmarks. The main conclusion from them for me is that graph-based methods beat geometry-based methods.
 - My guess is this is because of curse of dimensionality. You don't lose a lot of search accuracy if you quantise vectors to 4-bit (or maybe even 2-bit or 1-bit). So you are basically searching for bitstrings that have low hamming distance from each other. Using intuitions from 2D and 3D geometry no longer makes sense to me.

[Pinecone's articles on FAISS](https://www.pinecone.io/learn/series/faiss/composite-indexes/) are the best resource on the internet on this that I've found.

Buckets
 - As long as you can put the trillion vectors into buckets of million vectors each and quickly identify which buckets have the query's matches, you can then just go and brute-force search those buckets.
 - Additional software complexity to save a few milliseconds of search time within the bucket is not necessarily worth it, depending on the application.
 - Indexes must not occupy too much memory. For instance in LSH, each vector is stored along with a (say) 24-bit signature for 24 hyperplanes. 3 bytes / vector. In HNSW, each vector is stored along with index positions of atleast 10 neighbours. >100 bytes / vector. 
 - If you do the bucket approach, you need to store the index positions of all vectors in a shuffled order. For 10^12 vectors, that's 5 bytes / vector. Or you can avoid numbering the vectors at all and just the store the raw vectors in the shuffled order. This way you require zero extra space.

I'm yet to find a state-of-the-art algo for this, I just shared some intuitions of mine here.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/tokens_per_dollar.md

2025-04-02

# Tokens per dollar

I end up recomputing these numbers many times so here's a handy reference. Feel free to plug in your own numbers.

```
FLOP : floating point operation(s). assume float32 unless specified otherwise.
FLOP/s : floating point operations per second
FLOPs, FLOPS : I will never use this terminology

Given a GPU:
FLOP/$ = (GPU FLOP/s) * (GPU lifespan in s) / (GPU sales price in $)

Given a GPU and an LLM for inference:
$/token = (FLOP / token) / (GPU FLOP/$) = e * (LLM params) / (GPU FLOP/$)

where e : number of times each LLM param was accessed (and multiplied) per forward pass
e > 1

(assumes cost of energy consumed over 5 years is much smaller than sales price)
(assumes one inference token per forward pass)
```

Assuming Llama3 405B inference, picking a machine
```
Llama3 405B float32 memory = 405B * 4 = 1620 GB
H200 memory = 141 GB
1620 GB / 141 GB = 11.48
=> Atleast 12xH200 required
```

Assuming 2x8xH200 SXM
```
Total FLOP/$ = (2 * 8 * 67 TFLOP/s) * (5 years) / ( 2 * $300k ) = 2.817e17 FLOP/$
```

Assuming Llama3 405B inference
```
$/token =  e * (405 billion) / (2.817e17 FLOP/$) = e * 1.44e-6 $/token = e * $1.44/1M tokens
```

Here's [OpenAI pricing page](https://openai.com/api/pricing/) for comparison.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/death_of_big_tech.md

2025-03-10

# Death of Big Tech

Two major reasons why big tech companies exist:
 - Software is complex. Hiring lots of good software developers is expensive.
 - Hardware and electricity is expensive. Hardware includes everything from fiber optic cables to satellites to cameras to server CPU and RAM.

Credits: Moxie Marlinspike and others for really convincing me why software complexity is the heart of the matter here.

Because hardware costs are exponentially reducing every decade, I expect most applications to be possible on a small amount of hardware within next 10-20 years. Applications that might not still be cheap include a) applications based on videos b) applications based on heavy usage of LLM inference c) applications discovered in future, such as applications based on 3D data.

Because of recent advances in LLM embedding search, I expect a few key applications such as search to become easy to build. A major part of what a lot of tech companies do is just a) provide incentives for people to share their data online, and b) use this data to connect one set of users to another set of users. Uber connects drivers to passengers, Linkedin connects employees to employers, Facebook connects friends, Google search connects people to articles and news etc. A lot of these applications can simultaneously be outcompeted by an application that uses LLM search to connect users.

It should be possible to build this 10-20 years from now, such that any person on their personal computer can host a server that does what Big Tech currently does. This gives me (and others) 10-20 years to figure out what a good replacement for Big Tech looks like.

Big Tech may still survive ofcourse, but their form will look noticeably different.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/vision.md

2025-04-02

# Vision

Disclaimer
 - This is a quick note. I might change my mind on this stuff tomorrow for all I know.

Lifetime goal (maybe)
 - Transcend my own mortality. Want my work to be remembered centuries after I die

5-year goal (maybe)
 - Build open source uncensorable social media and governance platform. Will operate via hard disk dead drops instead of the internet

1-year goal (maybe)
 - Build open source embedding search


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/ml_is_not_geometry.md

2025-04-04

# ML is not geometry

I am recording an intuition I have about ML, just to see if it was right or wrong a few years from now. I have no immediate plan of working on it.

Disclaimer
 - There is small possibility someone uses this and accelerates ML field by a lot, and this has bad outcomes for the world. Lemme know if you'd rather I take this page down.

In general I have the intuition that ML should be seen in graph terms not geometric terms because of curse of dimensionality.
 - 1.58-bit or maybe even 1-bit models may converge faster than fp8 assuming same compute spent training both. There may not be significant loss of accuracy.
 - there may be a graph algorithm that outperforms backpropagation. Instead of imagining backprop finds weight matrices that are geometrically close to original weight matrices, imagine it searches through "Hamming space" to find bitstrings with low hamming distance from original bitstrings.

Evidence in favour of this view
 - 1.58-bit quantisation works well atleast for inference
 - Graph-based embedding search (HNSW, microsoft diskANN) outperforms geometric-based embedding search (LSH, k-means clustering, google scANN)
 - ReLu outperforms all other activation functions


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/ai_enabled_cloud_gaming.md

2025-01-18

# AI-enabled Cloud gaming

AI-enabled cloud gaming seems like one of the hardest applications to do on cloud rather than locally. However I expect it'll get done in 10 years.

If you're a game developer you might want to work on this.

Why?
 - Latency limits of human body
   - Video output - Most people can't distinguish individual frames in video above 90 frames per second (~10 ms / frame)
   - Audio ouput - Some audio engineers on reddit find 10 ms latency when playing music digitally to be noticeable but acceptable.
   - Keyboard + mouse input - Human motor reaction times are generally estimated above 100 ms. Upper bound on nerve conduction velocity is around 120 m/s, covering 1 metre of neurons from hand to brain requires >10 ms. Anticipating inputs and reacting to them can lower response time (often happens in games).
   - End to end - Many cloud gamers have reported on reddit that <10 ms latency is where FPS and other action-heavy games feel as fast as playing them offline.

 - Internet bandwidth limits
   - streaming 24x7 video requires lot more bandwidth than text/image/audio
   - 1 gbps fiber connection (with no upload/download cap) is becoming increasingly popular in US, which is more than sufficient to stream UHD 90 fps video.
   - Streaming 3D content directly is not possible though. VR headsets-based use cases might (?) still prefer streaming 3D content over the rendered 2D output, I haven't studied VR well enough.

 - Latency limits of computers
   - Input/output device latency - 1 ms latency (1000 Hz) has been achieved on keyboards and mice, and gamers generally feel increased latency won't be detectable.
   - Game engine, 3D rendering latency - I don't know much about this, but seems doable for most games today in under 1 ms? It depends a lot on the exact application though, there's definitely lots of 3D apps that can't be built with 10 ms latency constraint.
   - Network roundtrip latency - <10 ms has already been achieved on consumer fiber connections in many US cities, there's no fundamental reason paying customers can't get this in cities across the world. Light travelling from Netherlands to California (9000 km) one-way takes 33 ms, in practice roundtrip latency is reported around 100 ms (50 ms one-way). As long as the closest datacentre is within 1000 km, there's no physical limitation on achieving <10 ms via fibre connection.
   - AI inference time - As per Jacob Steinhardt, [forward passes can be significantly parallelised](https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/how-fast-can-we-perform-a-forward-pass/). 1 frame of video can be generated in under <1 ms, assuming you build an ASIC just for that specific model.
   - AI inference cost - This is the biggest bottleneck. Diffusion models use maybe 0.1-1.0 PFLOP for 100 sampling steps, for one frame. At 90 fps that's 10-100 PFLOP per second of video generation. For 1 second per second output, you need a GPU cluster with 10-100 PFLOP/s. H200 is 4 PFLOP/s fp8 rentable at $2/hour. Assuming Epoch AI scaling laws of FLOP/s/dollar doubling every 2.5 years, we should get 16x more FLOP/s/dollar in 10 years, so 100 PFLOP/s rentable at $2/hour.

Effects on IT ecosystem
 - If this application can be done on cloud, then almost any application can be done on cloud
 - Cybersecurity and user control will be the only reasons to do things locally, performance will no longer be a reason. Financial incentives to build anything in favour of security or user control are a lot weaker than the incentives in favour of higher performance. Big Tech will no longer need to fund open source software for performance-based reasons, hence open-source software could lag behind. 
 - Client device could also change. End state of this vision is 99.9% of people own machines with touchscreen (keyboard+monitor) and network card (but no CPU, no disk, no RAM) and it is not practical to do anything unless you submit the job to a server. (This will probably a Big Tech server, unless small cloud is able to compete on getting low latency connections with ISPs who have inherent network effects.). See example of mobile being more locked down than desktop, but having more users. It is possible to live without a phone, but you lose access to jobs, friendships, etc. and are at a disadvantage relative to everyone else.
 - This incentive structure makes it technically less challenging for the NSA (or its equivalent in your country) to get 99% surveillance over people's thoughts. As of today they need to backdoor lots of devices, routers and cables, and send whatever is useful back to their servers. This might be possible technically but requires more developer time and coordination/coercion of intermediaries to pull off.
 - Incentives push in the direction of them using this data for political purposes and also leaking the data itself.



# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/unimportant/all_data_in_ram.md

2025-03-16

# All data in RAM

I have found it increasingly obvious that there is no technical barrier to all the world's data ending up stored in RAM in the next 10-20 years. Disks could become obsolete for most use cases. I figured I should write about it publicly too, so it's obvious to others too.

(All data in this article is being measured in petabytes for ease, 1 PB = 1024 TB. Your consumer laptop probably has 0.25-1.0 TB storage in it, so a petabyte is a thousand times that.)

## Latency

As of today, RAM latency < Network latency < Disk latency

See [Latency numbers every developer should know](https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832)

Latency is the primary reason why developers will prefer storing this data in RAM rather than on disk or tape.

You can also read my other post on AI cloud gaming for extended discussion on latency. The short version is that it will likely soon be possible to stream your entire computer experience from a datacenter at <10 ms latency. Since human body operates at latency higher than 10 ms, it will be indistinguishable to you from something running locally on your machine.

## Data size

All data formats are ultimately some mix of text, image and video.

For now if we consider just text:

 - CommonCrawl is an open source dump of a good fraction of the entire public internet. It's .WET plaintext files total around **0.6 PB**.

 - Assume hypothetically we could capture every word spoken by every person on earth. A person speaks \~10k words per day.
   - Shannon's estimates are English communicates \~1 bit per char and 5 chars per word, so a person produces \~6 KB/day.
   - Assuming we are storing the data for entire Earth's population for past 100 years. Total data = 8B persons * \~6 KB/day/person * 365 days/year * 100 years = \~1700 PB. 
   - My blind guess is we can get it down by atleast 1-2 more orders of magnitude with more advanced compression techniques. Most times when people say something they're not the first person in history to be saying it. Assuming this we may only need to store 10-100 PB. Let's assume we need to store **100 PB**.
   - LLMs are probably a good example of this, Llama 3 140B weights fit in less than 1 TB (0.0001 PB), yet Llama 3 140B can say things similar enough to what most humans say most of the time.
   - There's a lot of metadata and intermediate data generated by processes and input devices however I would be surprised if per person, they're generating an order of magnitude more data than the \~6 KB/day the person anyway generates.

 - All of Earth's video and image data is unlikely to fit in similar size range. However if we use AI to generate text descriptions for all the data, this again fits in comparable size.
   - Assume we downsampled the video to 1 frame per second and generated 100 bytes of description per frame. Each description only needs to be a diff compared to the previous description. And we are likely storing data in a compressed format, not english. 100 bytes is 800 binary flags that have differed from the previous frame 1 second before.
   - At 100 bytes/second we generate \~8500 KB/day/person. This is 3 OOMs more than the previous data, so if we could hypothetically store this for the entire population for 100 years we get **2,000,000 PB**. This is an upper bound on all the data we would ever really need to store for most tasks.

 - For completeness, lets also consider worst case of storing all video data without much compression.
   - Assume 1 hour of 4K 96 fps video takes 30 GB to store. Human perception can't differentiate video at much higher color quality or frame rate than this.
   - Assume we want to store 100 years of content for 8 billion people.
   - This is **210 billion PB**

 - It is possible that in the future we invent new types of tasks that require even more storage. For instance if we scanned humans in 3D or scanned lots of biomolecular data from them. Or if we used AI that generated a huge amount of intermediate data (chains of thought ??). As of today it's not easy for me to predict this, if someone has spent more time trying to predict this I'd love to hear from you.

## RAM Cost

As of 2023, RAM costs $1M/PB as per Our World in Data. See [our world in data historical data](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage) on RAM costs.

(If you want off-the-shelf cost for consumers, it's noticeable higher. Hetzner EX44 cloud machines cost $44/mo for 64 GB RAM, or $8.5M/PB/year. This also includes cost of network, disk, support staff, etc. not just Hetzner's profit margin.)

Seems reasonable that RAM could cost below $100k/PB by 2030. Assuming RAM lasts for 5 years before it gives up, this is $20k/PB/year.

At hypothetical $20k/PB/year it costs:
 - $12k/year to store every word on the public internet today (0.6 PB) - affordable for a rich donor or a group of friends
 - $2M/year to store every word ever spoken (100 PB) - affordable for a medium-sized tech startup with Series A funding.
 - $40B/year to store descriptions of video of every person ever (\~2,000,000 PB) - affordable for a Big Tech corporation, assuming they can capture additional revenue of $5/person/year from 8B people to justify it.
 - $4000T/year to store all video of every person ever (\~200,000,000,000 PB) - not possible

**It is possible we don't end up acquiring this much data by 2030, but if so the reasons will be culture and incentives, not technical reasons.**

Also please remember these are only 2030 numbers. If Moore's law does not stop and research into reducing RAM cost does not stop, these numbers could go down by a few more OOMs by 2040 or 2050.

## Disk cost, disk weight

I figured I'd include this section just for completeness.

As of 2025, aws s3 deep archive offers tape storage for $12k/PB/year. Assume this cost reduces to $1000/PB/year by 2030.

At hypothetical $1000/PB/year it costs:
 - $600/year to store every word on public internet as of 2025 - trivially affordable
 - $100k/year to store every word ever spoken (100 PB) - affordable for a group of family/friends to pool, or for a rich donor
 - $2B/year to store descriptions of every video ever (\~2,000,000 PB) - affordable for a Big Tech corporation even if they generate no additional revenue by doing so.
 - $200T/year to store all video of every person ever (\~200,000,000,000 PB) - not possible

In terms of weight, as of 2025, LTO-9 stores 45 TB at weight of 200 grams, or \~4.4 kg/PB. Assume this too reduces 10x, so it will weigh \~0.44 kg/PB by 2030.
 - ~0.25 kg weight for every word on public internet as of 2025 (0.6 PB) - fits in your pocket
 - 44 kg weight for every word every spoken on Earth (100 PB) - fits in a school bag
 - 880 metric tonnes for (descriptions of) every video ever (\~2,000,000 PB) - a typical frieght train carries 5000 metric tonnes, a typical aircraft carries 100 metric tonnes.

## Data transport

Cold storage
 - If the data is in cold storage
   - If you can afford to buy N disks or tapes, you can probably also afford to hide N disks or tapes. All such data will be very easy to transport both legally and illegally. Any govt or large company with govt support can smuggle an aircraft's worth of freight for example.
   - It will be very easy to make multiple copies of this data and very easy to destroy individual copies.

Datacenters
 - If the data is online in a datacenter
   - Every word every spoken (100 PB) can be stored in a secret datacenter whose location remains unknown
   - Descriptions of every video ever (\~2,000,000 PB) will probably get stored in datacenter whose location is known. Maybe you can split this into multiple small datacenters and hide it, I'm unsure how technically feasible this is.
 - Datacenters today
   - As per [this xkcd](https://what-if.xkcd.com/63/), Google datacenter and NSA datacenter are the largest and are roughly on order of magnitude of 10,000 PB. GPS locations of these datacenters are public information, along with estimates of their power and water consumption.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/connect_with_me/contact_me.md

2025-03-27

# Contact me

## Online

**My email:**

samuel.da.shadrach@gmail.com

How?

Please consider emailing me if you at all believe either you might benefit from it, or I might benefit from it.
 - Please don't waste words writing formal salutations and filler words, just get to the point.
 - I find call faster than text for extended conversation.
 - To maximise value you get from me, consider writing a short document about what you'd like to talk about and attach it to the email. Then we can schedule a quick call where I go through your document and provide input to you.
 - Just in case I ignore your email, you can get my attention by [donating me](./donate_to_me.md) a tiny amount and attaching proof in the email.

Why?
 - I'm okay being spammed. Worst case I'll ignore your email. It doesn't consume a lot of your time to write me a one para email, so you shouldn't overthink it.
 - I don't mind spending one-hour calls with lots of strangers to help them. I expect some fraction of these callers will repay the favour back to me when I need it.
 - It does not matter if we've spoken before or not, or if you're approaching in a personal or professional context, or what your message is about, as long it'll add value to me. Even if you're criticising or accusing me for example, it's possible this adds value to my life, and I might appreciate you for the same.

## In person

Probably first meet me on audio/video call, and if it goes well, we could meet in person.

## Security

I cannot promise high degree of secrecy or security for anything you send me. A motivated attacker could easily get access to my devices and accounts, or ask me questions in-person which I may honestly answer.

Consider submitting to a [SecureDrop server](https://securedrop.org/directory/) or meeting the journalist in-person, if you require secrecy. SecureDrop journalists likely have previous experience dealing with anonymous high-stakes submissions.



# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/connect_with_me/hire_me.md

2025-02-26

# Hire me

You can hire me for $200k / annum or $150 / hour for almost any task in almost any location.

I might also be open to offers in range $100-200k / annum, but whether I accept will depend on specifics of the opportunity.

[Contact me](./contact_me.md) for the same.

P.S. If you can refer me to a job I end up sticking to for atleast one year, I can pay you my first 3 months of income minus minimum wage. Referral means I don't need spend a large number of hours in application processes.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/connect_with_me/date_me.md

2025-04-03

# Date me

Writing this doc is hard because:
 - I have an incomplete model of what I could one day appreciate in other people, and an incomplete model of what other people could appreciate in me.
- What is socially appropriate to discuss depends on where I live.

I value novelty highly so if you're interested in me romantically, you should probably reach out even if the criteria below don't match. Cost of failure is very low from your point of view, I would appreciate the attempt even if it fails.

[Contact me](../contact_me.md) if you'd like to talk.

Time and place are constraints placed by laws of physics. Money and values are also cited as common reasons why relationships succeed or fail.

Relationship style
 - **This doc is mostly about criteria for long-term relationship - which I'm willing to share publicly.**
 - I probably want to get married. I'm straight. I'm not particular about what age I get married or what age you are.
 - I have no clue if I want children, and haven't put enough thought into it. (I could change my mind on this point later.)
 - I would want to attempt being polyamorous if I were living in the US. I'm unsure about this while living in India though. See my other doc on this. I generally want more data on successful examples of both monogamy and polyamory.

Place
 - If I get financial backing, I probably want to live in San Francisco.
 - Otherwise I could probably live in any tier-1 city in India.
 - I might be open to living outside India or living in India but not in a tier-1 city. For this, I should end up liking the people and environment of your city, it's not enough if I like you. Another restriction with living outside India for the long-term is that I don't want to take a job so I may not be eligible for visa.
 - (All of this could change depending on which phase in life I'm in.)

Time
 - I probably can't spend more than 1-2 days per week with you. I try to spend a good amount of time working. I also value a minimum amount of alone time. (This could change depend on which phase in life I'm in.)

Money
 - I'm quite particular about keeping our finances separate. I could make exceptions if you're earning less than 10k INR / month but even so, I'm probably not the best match for you.
 - I'm okay dating someone with significantly less or more money than me. It comes with additional challenges, but my current guess is it can sometimes be worth putting the effort to solve them.

Values
 - I value authenticity and emotional vulnerability highly, among close relationships.
 - I'm atheist and can be annoying about this in private. We'd be a better fit if you're atheist too.
 - I'm somewhat altruistic and ambitious. We'd be a better fit if you are similar yourself, or atleast understanding of this aspect of me.
 - I don't let anyone else take my life decisions for me. We'd be a better fit if you take your own life decisions yourself too. I'd rather not start a long-term relationship with you if I know other people (such as your family members) are going to interfere in a negative way some months or years later.

I'm sympathetic to [Paul Graham's advice](https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html) on this.

> Don't marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work, or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you're ambitious, you need to work; it's almost like a medical condition; so someone who won't let you work either doesn't understand you, or does and doesn't care.

I'm also sympathetic to the perspective that relationships are built not found. As long as we align in a few core ways, I'd be willing to overlook a lot of other potential misalignment. (For example, I will probably not be ruling someone out just because of poor physical or mental health or because of different hobbies or lifestyle)

I'm generally unsure on the importance of alignment of core values in a marriage.
 - In general I find only a few people who share my core values and beliefs, and only a few people who share my lifestyle.
 - I would like the freedom to make significant changes to my core values and beliefs and lifestyle even after getting married. An extreme example of this would be someone who converts their religion many years after getting married.
 - In my experience alignment of thought process on day-to-day decisions can be just as important as alignment of thought process on the big decisions. I sometimes find it difficult to spend significant amounts of time with someone who makes their day-to-day decisions using a thought process very different from mine. I find this much easier to do if I spend a smaller amount of time with them, and also spend time with others.
 - I want more data on successful examples of marriages that maintain a high level of independence for both partners.

Personality traits
 - Introvert. Nerd. Very curiosity-driven. I look at the world through a very intellectual lens. This could be a plus or minus depending on your own outlook of the world.
 - High openness-to-experience. Not that interested in stability or minimising risk. If you're too low on openness-to-experience or risk tolerance, we're probably a bad fit.
 - Direct communication style, can give and receive feedback and criticism. I can dial this down on request but only so much, if you're very sensitive we're probably a bad fit.
 - I can put significant efforts (including one-sided) for others, can share past examples of the same.
 - I'm not the most happy or emotionally stable person as of today. You will inevitably have to shoulder some of the burden despite my best efforts to find other solutions. (This could change in future.)

Intimacy
 - I find "actually wanting the other person to have a good time" to be more important than just "not technically violating consent". Basically whose interests are you optimising, when your interests diverge. My previous partners seemed mostly happy with me in this domain lol.

Social circle
 - See my doc on [my people](../my_people.md) for more on this. My social circle is still evolving. Not everyone I know gets along with or even knows each other, so it's okay if you don't get along with some of the people in my circle either. I'm unlikely to break apart our relationship just because my friends or family disapprove of it.
 - Likewise I'm probably not going to be willing to make significant changes to myself in order to impress your social circle, although I might put in a little effort if requested.

Hobbies
 - Hobbies don't matter to me for relationship compatibility but I'm listing them anyways.
 - Travelling, board games (chess, catan), music (rap, rock, nightcore, etc), books (nonfiction, you can read my posts on my research for more)
 - I tend to shift places often so I prefer hobbies that are easier to carry arround. Extreme end of this is obviously hobbies you can access on a laptop. (This is not a hard constraint, and could change in future.)
 - I might be open to trying your hobbies too.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/connect_with_me/donate_to_me.md

2024-12-31

# Donate

If you like the work I do, consider donating money to me.

Do not donate:
 - if your expected networth in next 5 years is below $500k. There's a possibility you need this money more than me.
 - if you feel you have obtained most of your money by morally grey or immoral means. This is true whether or not I ever get to know how you obtained your money.

#### Donating less than $1000

For amounts below $1000, I only accept Monero (XMR) from anonymous donors.

**My XMR address:**

```
446uMYQvFeN5kmwC4TKs4h9BLTbDmXD9ECTTpe5NfnXKby7XSeY876LMpSryKMLFBAYLYWumrxdftLcqnp2F1CSQMHrHpPb
```

I prefer anonymous donations because I don't have time or interest in doing a background check on small donors. And I would not want to entangle my reputation with yours without a background check.

How?
 - If you've donated to me, do not message me saying you've donated to me, as that can break the anonymity.
 - The best way to buy XMR is usually buying BTC first using a bank transfer, then swapping that for XMR. Reddit has recommendations for both KYC and no-KYC options. If you find this hard or time-consuming, consider finding a friend who can buy it for you and paying them a commission. Learning these skills can be fun and can come in handy in the future.

#### Donating $1000 to $500k

The above XMR address still works. However I can likely support other payment modes such as wire transfer (SWIFT), Paypal/Stripe or US equity.

I can also list you on my website after a background check, if you prefer this.

[Email me](./contact_me.md) and I'll quickly figure out the best way to accept your donation. If you're undecided on whether to donate and want a 1-hour call with me first, please email me.

#### Donating above $500k

I'd recommend donating $500k first, and giving me a couple weeks to figure out the legal aspects. Once I'm ready, you can send the remaining amount. [Email me](./contact_me.md) and I'll figure it out.

Allying with a politician or billionaire would be my lifetime goal. If you are one, I'm willing to put in a lot of effort to build such a relationship. It could be a standard donor-recipient relationship, in which case I will insist on maintaining autonomy over my decision-making. Or it could be a relationship that involves shared decision-making, in which case we may both have to make compromises.

## Consequences of donating to me

Money donated to me is not earmarked for a specific project, it is given so that I have more agency in the world. **If I spend all of the money on having fun or on some fruitless endeavour, I have not done anything unethical.** I'll try not to do that, but I make no legally binding promises.

Receiving $500k cumulative donation would significantly change my life, as that would let me get an EU citizenship and fast-tracked US green card. If I were to live in the US (most probably in SF), I could meet potential collaborators and mentors, and abide by the free-speech norms of the US. I am not keen on shifting to the US on a visa that lets someone else arbitrarily restrict what I do or say.

Receiving small donations will not significantly change my life but would provide me encouragement, and allow me to tell others that I get paid for my work, instead of telling them I'm unemployed.

I am not dependent on donations. I currently live in India on approx $200 per month (approx $2500 per year). The exact amount I spend can go up or down, for example depending on the projects I'm working on. I can sustain myself on my savings for atleast a few years.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/connect_with_me/my_people.md

2024-04-12

# My people

Here's my current model for deciding how to interact with people in my life.

Reasons to have people in your life:
 - physical intimacy
 - regular emotional support
 - regular financial support
 - regular logistical support
 - emergency financial support
 - emergency emotional support
 - emergency logistical support
 - advice
 - casual interaction

Scarcity
 - Scarce resources include time, money and location.
 - Physical intimacy and regular emotional support are the most dependent on living in the same place as the other person.
 - Receiving and giving advice, and casual interactions require very little time commitment. So I can freely do this with many people. I want to be able to receive advice and causally interact with a wide variety of people.
 - I am wary of promising regular emotional / logistical / financial support to anyone.
 - I have promised emergency emotional and logistical support to a set of people I consider close. I'll provide a 6-month notice period if I ever want to break these commitments. I'm hoping most of these commitments last multiple decades. (If you're unsure if you're on this list, please message me and ask.) Even if I haven't promised you anything, feel free to ask me for help when you need it. I'm generally helpful, time and location permitting.
 - I am wary of promising emergency financial support to anyone. I have offered financial support before (loan or donation) and I am open to requests for the same. If you are asking me for financial support, it will help your case if you have:
   - a good reputation verifiable by your social circle, and they are informed about the support you've received
   - what a bank would consider credit-worthy, such as a source of income or collateral

Who?
 - I value novelty and ideological diversity. If I have a novel interaction with you, it is likely this means either you have deviated from social norms in some way, or you belong to a group whose social norms differ from the groups I have spent time in. If either of these is true about you, I am likely to find you interesting.
 - If we share topics of curiosity or similar ways of thinking on a day-to-day basis, then too I am likely to want to spend time interacting with you.
 - Getting into my inner circle (to receive significant support from mine) can usually be done by fitting into one of the above clusters plus having a significant number of shared experiences with me. There may be other ways to do it; I don't have a deep understanding of why I find people interesting or worth spending time with.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/value_differences_disclaimer.md

2024-12-24

# Value differences (Disclaimer)

Your first impression after meeting me in person or via audio/video call may be noticeably different from what you'd expect if your only impression of me is from this website. Different contexts elicit diifferent slices of one's personality.

My website attempts to have high information density of things not already obvious to you, and things you may disagree with. Whereas if we meet in person or on call, and don't know each other well, it may be better to find things we agree on first.

Also, if I'm meeting you in person, I'm likely to put more effort trying to understand your values and beliefs, as compared to preaching my own values and beliefs. I want to understand you and be able to empathise with you even if I don't agree with you.

I am still trying to figure out the optimal balance between sharing my own views and trying to understand other people's views. This is my current best attempt.

My core values include truth and empathy. If you practice these in your daily life, we are more likely to get along, no matter what our specific values and beliefs may be.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/advice_for_you/advice_disclaimer.md

2024-02-20

# Advice (Disclaimer)

I am quite confused which audience I should tailor this advice page and generally my entire internet presence to. I'm currently experimenting with trying to tailor to everyone simultaneously. I think maintaining multiple separate identities on the internet does not work well over long time horizon. I probably won't update these pages regularly, as giving advice is not my primary life goal.

I generally hesitate on giving advice. There is a lot of advice on the internet and a lot of it is noise to me. 

#### 1. Evidence behind the advice

Assuming I was the recipient of advice, here's the hierarchy of how seriously I'd take that advice:
 - advice empirically proven to work
   - the more meaningfully distinct circumstances it has worked in, the better
   - a theoretical model for why the advice works is a bonus, but sufficient empirical evidence always trumps theory
   - IMO there are entire fields where the replication crisis can be solved by making larger sample sizes the norm and small sample sizes as abnormal (by getting the funding, culture etc so this is possible)
 - theoretical model of why some advice would work 
   - the more distinct types of people are confident in the model, the better
   - empirical evidence about similar-but-not-same situations is a bonus

Whenever you are taking advice from me, try to figure out where exactly on the hierarchy the advice sits. Even if something worked for me, please remember I am just one person. And if I don't have personal experience with it, please remember this is just one person's guess with no empirical evidence.

#### 2. Context-dependence of advice

I rarely ever tell people that they "must" or "should" do xyz. If I make this mistake please correct me.

You have information about:
 - how your brain works - your likes, dislikes, what motivates you, etc. Conveying information about your feelings to me is difficult, even if you genuinely want to convey it. So I assume I lack this information about you. In particular there is an is-ought distinction where transmitting information is easy ("if you do X, Y will probably happen") and transmitting values is hard ("you should want Y to happen"). So I mostly talk about the former.
 - your context, your unique life circumstances. Conveying this information to me is possible but takes a lot of time. So I may also be lacking this information about you.

This doc is full of me saying "consider" doing xyz. If I use the word "consider", that means there may exist exceptions to the advice. Sometimes I may be aware of the exceptions but I'm not listing them out, and sometime I may not be aware of the exceptions. The point is to use your own judgement. You are the master of your own life and I'm not interested in being your guru.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/advice_for_you/advice_for_you_knowledge.md

2025-04-06

To do for myself:
 - Rewrite page so it's simpler and more people can understand
 - Make it easier to directly navigate to relevant section. This page is currently too long.

# Advice for you (Knowledge class)

If you don't understand anything on this page, please ask me about it.

Please read [Advice Disclaimer](./advice_disclaimer.md) first.

#### Summary

 - One of the biggest mistakes people make is blindly copy-pasting values and beliefs of family and friends. If you want an amazing life, be more deliberate who you are learning from and why.
 - A fast way to learn anything is to immerse yourself in an environment with other people who know how to do the thing.
   - This is also possible online if you can't meet people in person. I generally recommend spending a lot of time online.
   - Internet-sellable skills like writing, podcasting, game dev, software, etc. make more money than other skills.
 - My (weak) guess is that meaningful work and meaningful relationships will probably be biggest determinants of your life satisfaction. Figure out for yourself for makes your life worthwhile, don't blindly trust my guesses.
 - Don't blindly assume that money can help you, don't blindly assume it can't help you, it is better to think about the specific problems you are facing.
   - If you have < 50k INR, more money may fix some of your life problems.
   - If you have > 10 lakh INR, more money may or may not fix some of your life problems. 
   - If you have > 10 Cr INR you can live in any country and any culture. Culture influences many things about who you are.
 - Make lots of notes. Publish information about yourself online.
 - If you have savings you plan to not touch for many years, invest them in S&P500 not in real estate.


# Career advice

### If you have atleast 6 months worth of savings - career advice

Proof: I don't have personal experience with this.

In India, 6 months worth of savings is around 50,000 INR. My advice is slightly (but hopefully not very) biased towards Indian context because a lot of people I encounter are from here. It's possible there are unique challenges faced by people of your country that I'm unaware of.

Consider finding a job that provides you with a lot more savings. Making more money may reduce your anxiety of the future. Making more money may allow to make less compromises on your moral values. Also you might get more free time to devote to something or someone you care about.

I understand you might be happy not trying to increase your income, and that is also fine. Don't let me ruin your happiness. Depending on how much free time your job gives you, you may also choose to start a side project or hobby around things you care about. This is great, although I would usually recommend starting it part-time and not quitting your job.

(If you are very ambitious, you can also read the section after this section.)

How?
 - Independent decision-making
   - The more ambitious you are, the more you have to take your own career decisions instead of blindly copying what your friends and family are asking you to do. The decisions required to climb one step in society's status heirarchies may look smart to them and the decisions required to climb five steps may look stupid to them, if none of them have climbed five steps or seen anyone else who has done it. For example if you're a shopkeeper it's easier to propose to your family that you'll buy a second shop, than to propose that you will campaign for your town's MLA seat. How ambitious you are is a personal choice. I am not telling you how ambitious you should or should not be.
   - If they dislike your choices, sometimes you can simply explain to them why you think your decisions are better than the decisions they are proposing. If that fails, there are non-violent ways to resist other people trying to influence your career in a negative way. Whether you choose to use such methods is a personal decision and depends on the exact details of your situation. See my [Controversial ideas page](../my_ideas/controversial.md) for more.
 - Work ethic
   - I should maybe start by repeating all the advice that should already be obvious to you. If you want to work hard in order to increase your income: don't be addicted to substances, get good diet, sleep and exercise, don't gamble your money, etc. (If you don't want to work hard or make money, that is a different matter.)
 - Degree and credentials
   - If you can get a bank loan to pay for your college, you should probably take it. If someone is willing to loan you money for the same, maybe you should accept. But there are more details here which I can't explain in short. (This advice is India-specific. Cost-benefit analysis of acquiring college education depends on which country you are in.)
   - A lot of the really good jobs do not require a degree but require skills. However entry-level and easier jobs have a lot of competition hence employers use the degree as a filtering criteria. It is easier to climb up if you have a degree, but don't let lack of degree discourage you, your chance of success is still high if you work hard and smart.
   - If you already have some skills but lack credentials, upload short videos on youtube showcasing your skills. Good candidate includes competent and aligned. Youtube videos can quickly showcase that you are trustworthy, that you can function in a professional context, and that you are competent. Basically, you want to reduce the number of hours the employer or human resources (HR) department has to invest to find out if you are a good candidate. Every hour of additional work for HR is a cost, and credential-based filters (like degrees) are a way for HR to reduce that cost. If you lack credentials, you have to find other ways to quickly get their attention.
 - How to actually study
   - If I have to summarise this entire section in one word, that word is "exposure". Expose yourself to people doing the thing you want to learn to do.
   - Getting access to a laptop is extremely important if you want to acquire new skills, as most useful skills require atleast some amount of self-studying, which is difficult to do on a phone or using books. If you can't buy a laptop or borrow it from a friend or family member, consider going to an internet cafe.
   - Try to find videos of people's day-to-day life doing the job you wish to acquire. There is a lot of "tacit knowledge" you will quickly pick up from such videos, which you won't get from textbooks.
     - For example if you want to be an architect, see a video of an architect while they're working. You'll get to know which features of their CAD software they actually use versus ignore, which parts of their work are original versus googled, and so on. A textbook that teaches you how to use the same CAD software won't teach you this.
   - A lot of the actual learning you can obtain by self-studying on your computer. However, making friends who know that skill is useful. Some ways they may help: they will be able to tell you which resources are useful and which ones are not useful. If you go on the wrong track, they'll be able to correct you. They may also motivate you and support you emotionally.
   - Making friends will also tell you about the job besides knowledge itself. For example how much it pays, which companies and cities/countries have good opportunities, what is valued within the field, what people pay attention to and ignore in general, the social structure inside the job etc.
   - You can also consider just observing them while they do their work. There is a lot of tacit knowledge that can be acquired this way.
 - Selecting a job to study for
   - This process is likely going to take some hit and trial. It'll depend a bit on your interests, on your current educational background (what you actually know, not what degree you have), and on who you know and what skills they can help you learn. The first skill you try to learn isn't necessarily the skill you will finally end up making money from.
   - Figure out how much time you are willing to invest. Learning a skill like software or finance will pay more, but will require atleast 1-2 years of full-time hard work. (If you're only studying part-time it'll take a lot more time.) Learning a skill like digital marketing or copywriting (well enough to get a job) may be doable in 6 months of full-time hard work, with the right guidance.
   - In general acquiring a skill that allows you to sell something over the internet is a good idea. For example: software, writing, marketing, research, podcasting, consulting, coaching, graphic design, composing music, game development, etc. An internet business can get 1000 or 1000000 times the paying customers without putting in 1000 or 1000000 times the work.
   - If you are joining an internet business like the options listed above, it is common to see the following:
     - Earnings if successful: Founder > Employee at small company > Employee at big company
     - Time required to be successful: Founder > Employee at small company = Employee at big company
     - For a lot of people, your best option for a first job is an early employee at a small company that sells services online. Expect to put atleast 3 months searching for such a job, after you have requisite skills.
     - You can also found your own company. Expect to wait atleast 5 years before you make any money. This is unless you have some special insight why you'll do it faster than that.
   - In general I recommend picking a skill or job you have atleast a little bit of genuine interest in. If you hate it, you might lose motivation to study for it and give up. It does not have to be your number one passion, but you should not hate it. You may have to self-study for multiple years till you get a job, so you need to know how to stay motivated for a long time. Even once you get the job, you don't want to end up stuck for many more years doing something you hate.
   - Try to experiment as much as possible (without spending money). It will help you learn what you are good at and what you like doing. I did this in college and benefitted a lot from it. I tried editing music, writing a book, writing rap, practising debate and public speaking, starting a college club, and a bunch of other stuff. Most of the experiments flopped but I learned about what motivates me.
   - I have basics of software development skill which I mostly self-studied. If making money is your goal, becoming a software developer is unambiguously a good option. You must be good at math and average at english to pursue it. (See your class 10 math and english marks to know if you're good, otherwise go and study class 10 syllabus first.). You can ask me more if you want to learn software.
   - Some random opportunities you can look into:
     - Join French foreign legion, its part of the army in France - no degree needed, but you have to pay for flight yourself, and selection not guaranteed (you have above 50% chance if you take the opportunity seriously)
     - Teach English in southeast Asia - any degree ok, get TEFL certificate for $40 online, you can find job only after reaching destination country, contact me to know more.
     - Start a kitchen for a niche (less popular) cuisine. Many Indian cities and towns lack this. For example if you live in Kolkata, start an Odisha restaurant. If you live in Silchar, start a Manipuri restaurant. If you live in Delhi, start a Thai restaurant instead of a generic (indianised) Chinese one. Monopoly is good for business, 4-5 kitchens competing for the same customers is bad for business.

I will update this section once I have more data or spend more time thinking about it. 

### If you have atleast 5 years worth of savings - career advice

In India, 5 years worth of savings is around 10 lakh INR. The exact number varies a lot by country.

I assuming you have the skills and credentials to make this money yourself, i.e., you didn't inherit it or win it in a lottery or something.

(If you are very ambitious, you can also read the section after this section.)

Misc advice:
 - Consider hiring a secretary (college-educated, remote, english-speaking, digitally literate, full-time), to do some of your admin work like drafting emails. It is possible to hire a full-time remote secretary for $200/month. It probably doesn't matter which country you are living in, if you are willing to hire remotely. If your salary exceeds say, $1000/month, there's a good chance it makes financial sense to hire a secretary and save your time for something else.

#### Making another 5-30 years worth of savings might or might not be a good goal

Proof: I don't have personal experience with trying to make 1 crore INR. Consider getting the opinion of people who have tried this.

This section is a bit country-specific, sorry.

If one of your main life goals is to make > 1 crore INR and you believe this will make your life more happy/peaceful/meaningful/etc than it is today, I strongly recommend you try the following experiments. I don't think I'll be significantly happier with 1 crore, and my guess is there are many others whose brain is wired similar to mine in this regard.

Experiments to run to test if you *really* want 1 crore or not:
 - Make a list of things that you will be able to afford with more money that you can't afford today. Try renting a trial version of this today for one month, and see if this indeed makes you happy. Examples: bigger house, more international trips, high-end gaming PC etc.
 - Ask atleast 5 people in your social circle who have >1 crore and <1 crore how happy they are. Find people who are self-aware and likely to be honest with you. Also try to notice why they are happier - is it more luxury, better partner, freedom from social circle, less pressure to get job, etc.)
 - Run following thought experiment. Imagine you had a button that could switch off the part of your brain that generates anxiety when you pursue a higher risk career path. Imagine you had a similar button that could switch off the part of your brain that internalises social pressure from family and friends to make more money. What would be a good decision for this hypothetical person?
 - Take a few months off from your job. Make a list of things you'd like to do that don't require a lot of money, but require a lot of time. Then actually spend few months doing these things. Notice how it feels. Examples: learning a language, completing college courses online, becoming better at video editing.

For me personally, things I don't consider major benefits of 1 crore INR, assuming one already has 10 lakh INR:
 - more status among my social circle, possibly better partner
 - house, bigger house, vehicle, bigger vehicle
 - more travel
 - more tasty food, higher-end clothes, home decor, other consumerist stuff
 - safety net for medical emergencies

For me personally, things I consider major benefits of 1 crore INR:
 - going really deep into a hobby
   - For example one could setup a private research lab or a recording studio or a high-end kitchen. A hobby of this sort is capable of capturing my sustained attention for multiple years.
   - I have met only a few people in India doing this sort of thing with their money. If you are doing something cool, please [let me know](../contact_me.md). I'd love to learn more about you and what you're working on.
 - school education for (potential) children
   - But also like, consider homeschooling your kids, if your and your child's aptitude exceeds the school teachers'. 80% of my school education was a waste of time and money (no offense intended to my schoolteachers, most of them were decent people). Your kid can socialise with other kids elsewhere for free, and they may be eligible for a loan for college.

If you still conclude at the end of these experiments that making this money will make you significantly happier, feel free to do what as your heart desires. Ignore my advice and any social pressure I might be providing.

#### Making $1 million might be a good goal

Proof: I have some experience trying to make this amount and failing at it. I don't have personal experience with having this much money. Consider getting the opinion of people who do have this amount.

For me personally, main benefit of $1 million:
 - You can get an investor visa and live in any country in the world. You are no longer beholden to the laws and culture of a single nation, and you'll feel more safe. People of different cultures are likely to treat you differently both in the average case (day-to-day experience, workplace, etc) and worst case (during wartime, genocide etc)
 - The main determinants of your quality of life no matter where you live will probably be your work and your handful of close relationships. Living in a different country is especially valuable if it will lead to better work or better close relationships.

For me personally, not a benefit of $1 million:
 - FIRE (become Financial Independent and Retire Early) is not an interesting goal for me, most people who spend > 10 years to achive FIRE seem to get bored at the end anyway. Travelling and relaxing 24x7x365 is not enjoyable for most people, you will probably have to start your own projects to keep yourself occupied.

How?
Most stable career paths in India take too long (>10 years) to make this amount of money. If this is your goal, you are much better off doing one of the following:
 - upskilling and getting YoE on resume to the point where you can get a job from a developed country, either in-person or remote. This could involve getting foreign degree, or Indian job and in-company transfer
   - I don't have personal experience with this so ask people who do. I know this is quite common.
 - starting your own startup or business
   - I have a lot of resources on this, but here's not the place to share it. Read Paul Graham's blog, even if you are not founding a tech startup.
 - cracking UPSC
   - I generally don't recommend UPSC to most people, as most UPSC preparants can get higher rate of return on their time by studying a skill like software or writing or research or finance
   - Consider studying like 1/4th of the syllabus and give previous year exam papers on just that portion. From your marks you'll get a rough idea whether you're on track to cracking the exam or not.

Pursuing either of these requires you to quit your current job in India and not worry too much about leaving the "low risk" path.

There are a few other edge cases, for example you could marry someone with money or network with them and become their consultant or become a sex worker or something. I won't discuss them much here.

#### Not making money might be a good goal

Proof: I have over a year of personal experience with this.

The important thing is to measure your money not in number of lakhs but in number of years it buys you. Assume a frugal lifestyle and write down this number of years for you personally. If this number exceeds 10 years, you have a good reason to not focus on making more money.

Personally I realised I would be miserable trying to start a tech startup with sole goal of making $1 million, hence I gave up on this goal. (I'd probably be happier once I had the money. I'm talking here only about the process of acquiring it.) I'd much rather work on projects I care about. Figuring out which projects are worth doing takes time. I am still in the process of figuring this out for myself, but I'm confident I'm better off this way compared to when I tried to make money.

I might still take a job at some point, but atleast I'm clear the primary reason I chose this was not money but instead learning or social connections or something else. This is a huge privilege and I'm grateful to have it.

I don't recommend my current life path to everyone, but I recommend atleast considering it as an option.

### If you have $1 million - career advice

Proof: I don't have $1 million. Consider getting opinion from those who do.

Consider reading my advice on the other advice page.

If you are sufficiently ambitious, I would generally recommend considering not living in your home country. There are probably better opportunies available outside of it. The main exception I can think of is if you have already built a lot of country-specific knowledge that gives you an edge in business or politics in your country.

Business cultures vary *a lot* depending on country, based on my limited experience. Consider experiencing business cultures in multiple countries, no matter where you finally settle.

#### Becoming a major politician or a billionaire might be a good goal

Proof: I don't know much about this. Consider asking someone who does.

If you want significant influence over society, this is an option. You will have to work very hard, in order to acquire the required attention or capital. Also you will have to learn some of the behaviours of a socioeconomic class different from yours. You will definitely lose some of your current family and friends in the process, so it will be socially isolating. Also there may be an aspect of luck, many self-made billionaires admit to the role luck played in their success. (Although most people who do report luck as a factor report odds like 10% or 30%, not something unlikely like 1%. So don't let the luck factor dissuade you.)

I don't have a lot to say because it isn't something I know enough about yet. But I am interested in studying this, whether or not I ever seriously pursue this myself.

# Advice apart from career advice

### Advice for everyone - Make notes

For almost everyone on Earth, I recommend making more notes about your life.

Why?
 - You will likely gain a deeper understanding of various aspects of your life.
   - It could be fundamental things like what your likes, dislikes, values, etc. are.
   - It could be practical things like how to dress or what to eat or how to write good emails.
 - You will retain thoughts that are otherwise temporary and easily forgotten.
 - It'll help you make long-term plans.
 - You'll notice patterns over long periods of time, such as problems that repeated themselves multiple times. and solutions that have worked multiple times.

How?
 - Pen/paper or digital works. I prefer digital because it's easier to edit and easier to preserve. (Yes, paper survives 100+ years, hard disk survives only ~5 years, but you can make copies of digital work more easily and preserve the copies.) Preserving long-term is very important, you want to be able to preserve your notes for 30+ years.
 - I've never made paper notes. If you're making paper notes, it is best you get advice from someone who does this. If I remember, state of the art is using acid-free paper with archival ink and storing backup in a secure location with low humidity. (The paper is more important than the ink.)
 - If you're making digital notes, the easiest option is google drive or apple notes or something similar.
 - If you don't have or want to use KYC/phone number/digital ID, protonmail/protondrive is a good option as of 2024-12. Most websites (like Google, Apple, etc) force you to enter phone number which is tied to KYC in many countries.
 - Also it is a good idea to keep a backup on a disk in a secure physical location. Check the disk for errors once a year and swap it every few years, most disks fail in ~5 years.
 - If you know basic software development, I recommend you rent a linux machine, ssh into it and store plaintext/markdown notes instead. File formats, folder structure, account login methods, payment methods, UI/UX and lots of other things change every few years. Many of these rapid changes are causally downstream of the war between Big Tech companies, and it's better if your second brain isn't stored in some random file format you don't understand.
 - Some people like the fancy features of Roam, Obsidian, hackmd and so on. I've personally not found any of the features worth sacrificing the ability to preserve your notes 30+ years. If any of these tools support import/export in plaintext (NOT json, csv, rtf, docx or anything else), you could consider using them while also maintaining a plaintext backup outside of the tool.
 - Beyond this how much security you need is upto you, as additional security takes a lot more effort. Most people don't critically "need" more security, although it would be nice to live in a world where higher security could be obtained for little effort. Make sure to define your threat model. If your threat model is defending against targetted govt investigation and intelligence agencies, you could look into: LUKS disk encryption, anonymous server host paid anonymously (or better, host your own server in a secure location), separate devices and locations to login, PGP-encrypted ASCII paper backups along with disk backups, cronjob or custom deadmans switch, study enough network programming that you actually understand network vulnerabilities of your system, and so on. You'll get good security recommendations on the dark web. An airgapped machine in a faraday cage is the most secure setup, but most people want network access.
   - If you're using an NSA-proof security setup like this, maybe consider publishing the details so the rest of us can converge on best practices. (I understand people who use maximally secure setups are the same set of people who will not talk about their secure setups. That's why I'm nudging you a little bit here.)
   - Also remember that if you're operating this sort of setup, 50% of your opsec is the people you surround yourself with, not cybersecurity stuff. Spend as much effort studying that as you spend studying cybersecurity.


### Advice for everyone - Learn from the internet

Why?
 - You can improve nearly every aspect of your life by learning from the internet.

How?
 - As of 2024, most google search results are SEO-optimised crap. (The website author deliberately wants your search to hit their page so they can serve you ads, and they don't care if they actually answer your question or not.) 
 - Popular platforms worth using as of 2024
   - Reddit - honest recommendations, life perspectives, technical Qs. Use "site:reddit.com" in your search query to get responses from reddit. Reddit users are not being paid to answer your query, and are more likely to be honest.
   - Libgen - free books
   - scihub - free papers
   - Youtube - podcasts, life perspectives
   - Stackexchange - very technical Qs, academia-heavy audience
   - Twitter - I hate the forced login and politics, but its good for following latest news in any community
   - Tiktok - yes lol you can even get latest news and technical tips on tiktok
   - discord - fastest way to audio/video call strangers, can follow open source (usually tech) projects
   - hackernews - basically the number one forum for software developers
   - lesswrong - niche forum I follow. In general whatever niche interests you have, there's probably a very small number of places on the internet that have its userbase. Find these places and follow them.
 - As of 2024, attention on the internet follows a power-law distribution. A very small number of websites have almost all the attention of all people on Earth. If you want to get answers to your queries, you have to learn to post your queries on these platforms.
 - LLMs like GPT4 (ChatGPT) are also good for receiving advice, and getting better.
 - Search even things you'd not think about searching. Every question you can imagine can have answers online. For example, how to become better at running, how to ensure house remains heated, how to sleep better, how to win arguments, etc etc etc.
 - Learn to get good at filtering information.
   - Most of the people around you in real life are a biased audience, they represent a very small portion of humanity. They are selected based on nationality, class, profession, religion, style of thinking, etc. Most of the people on the internet are also a biased audience. Different websites filter for different types of people. (And yes, please remember that people on the internet are people, with an entire life outside of the handful of comments of theirs you read.)
   - For example chemsistry stackexchange will predominantly attract people with a chemistry degree and predominantly from US/Europe. Whereas a subreddit about your country will attract the upper and upper-middle class of your country, all degrees, and likely only one political side. (The people of the other political sides were probably annoyed and went to a different subreddit or website instead.)
   - [Social dark matter](https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/social-dark-matter) is another very important idea to internalise here. Almost everyone has things they will avoid talking about or be dishonest about, especially on the intetnet, because of their irl situation. You will get a skewed picture of reality if you trust their internet representation to completely capture the irl version of them.


### Advice for (almost) everyone - Make a website

 - For almost everyone I recommend making your own website
 - How much and what types of content you post on the website is a personal decision. However, having a website will remind you that you have this option.

How?
 - As of 2025, if you lack software skills, it's easier to host content on substack and youtube respectively. I'd still recommend making atleast a one page website that links to your substack and youtube. You can learn to use github pages for this, or pay someone who knows a bit about software.
 - If you have non-zero software skills, here's a simplified version of the setup I use. Rent the cheapest Hetzner Cloud server you find. Store your plaintext and other static files in `/var/www/Website`. Store the config file below in `/etc/nginx/sites-available/yourwebsitenamegoeshere.conf`. Delete the default website and config file found in these folders. Then `sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo apt install nginx -y && sudo systemctl start nginx`. Whenever modifying static files do: `sudo systemctl reload nginx`. Purchase a domain from cloudflare or anywhere else (cloudflare does free DDOS protection), and set `A` records to your server's IP (IPv4). You can also use AI to write a more elaborate nginx conf and write CSS files for you.
```
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name yourwebsitenamegoeshere.com www.yourwebsitenamegoeshere.com;
    root /var/www/Website/;
    location / {
        autoindex on;
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
}
```

### Advice for people who publish content online

Please consider keeping plaintext (txt, not json, docx or whatever format) backups of your work.

Why?
 - Your favourite publishing platform (be it substack or wordpress or whatever) is not guaranteed to exist in 5 years, and if it does it might look like a different company altogether.
   - Payment policy might change
   - KYC / identification policy might change
   - business model or revenue stream might change, which changes everything about a company (even Big tech companies are not immune, Apple is the only whose revenue is not ad-based, LLMs might change the ad revenue landscape, etc.)
   - company might be acquired or lose talent etc. Check lifespan of median tech company.
 - Your account might get censored, hacked, lose access etc.
 - Popular file formats might change in 5 years. Plaintext lasts forever.

### Using AI to accelerate learning

Why?
 - AI can help you learn anything faster.

How?
 - It is best if you know basic software developer skills and can write simple bash scripts. (If you're on windows please rent a linux machine. Don't learn windows commandline, it's a waste of time.)
 - If you don't have software skills, you can probably still find websites with ready-made tools to do most of the following for you. The ready-made tools may have some disadvantages compared to writing your own tools (such as rate limits, ads, higher cost etc) but you'll find them.

Some specific tricks using AI to speedup learning:
 - Transcribe youtube videos: yt-dlp + ffmpeg silenceremove + whisper API
 - Extract plaintext from any webpage: curl + htmlq
 - Extract plaintext from epubs: unzip + find + htmlq
 - Once you've extracted plaintext, you can use AI to generate summaries and notes, simplify complex terminology, ask specific questions, generate quizzes or anki decks, etc.
 - Ideally you should be able to embedding-search everything. As of 2025-01-14 I'm not aware of any embedding search solution where you can "bring your own plaintext" and it'll do embedding generation and inference. But I'm expecting this will soon exist.

### Trading and investment advice

Proof: I have personal experience. I have invested and traded my money, and worked at trading-related companies.

Why?
 - Most obvious reason is making money. Knowledge of S&P500 and basics of finance are among the most valuable pieces of knowledge on earth. You might be losing a significant amount of potential earnings if you choose not to invest your money and leave it in your bank account instead.
 - IMO studying finance is somewhat useful even if you're not investing your own money. Looking at the world through a lens of probability and linear optimisation is a skill that many finance/econ people have and many non-finance people could benefit from.

How?
 - Investments and trading will likely not be the primary determinant of your life trajectory, unless you make it your full-time job. Increasing your income or revenue is more useful than trading/investing your existing money.
 - If you are very ambitious, there's probably some projects you actually believe in that you can make concentrated bets on - finanically and otherwise. But for most other people, its worth knowing about investment basics and making a handful of investments in the background.
 - If your savings cover less than 3 months of your living expenses (and this isn't expected to increase over the next 5 years), most of this information is not relevant to you. I'd recommend keeping your money safe in your bank account for emergencies, and not trading or investing it. You can still acquire some of the knowledge, without putting in any money.

#### Investments

 - I have used IBKR to buy S&P500 as a long-term investment (>5 years hold). I may or may not also own some BTC and ETH.

How?
 - S&P500 is the single most important investment you should understand deeply. It is more important to understand basics of S&P500 than it is to understand gold or real estate or cryptocurrency or bonds or interest rates or anything else. This is true even if you finally decide not to invest in it yourself.
 - If you are considering buying S&P500: Make sure to look at S&P500 100 years historical chart. Consider studying basic concepts of finance like probability, expected value, variance, tail risk and timeframes. This knowledge is not mandatory but it'll prevent you from buying too much / too little or selling your investment too early.

#### Trading

How?
 - It is possible to self-study trading from the internet. However, trading knowledge has an uncanny valley where someone who has a medium amount of knowledge and experience will tend to lose more money than someone who has no knowledge or experience. You have to cross this valley to become an expert. If you practice trading for multiple years you'll probably be profitable eventually, but consider if the time invested doing this is worth it. Long-term passive investment is good when you don't have a lot of time to devote to trading.
 - If you'd like to learn trading, practice with a small amount first, but take your decision-making process as seriously as if you had invested a significant amount. Don't bother with paper trading, just use a small amount of real money. Make sure to list multiple possible outcomes of each trade, their probabilities, the underlying hypotheses behind your trade and what could invalidate it.
 - "Technical analysis" is mostly a scam IMO, ignore it. Fundamentals-based trading is fine. Using an algo to predict trends in other people's trades is fine. Small cap is usually better than big cap for trading due to less efficiency. Shorter timeframe (seconds, minutes) is usually better than longer timeframe (weeks, months) if you're writing a bot, and vice versa if you're not.
 - Being successful at options trading is harder than it looks, I've lost money almost everytime I've done it and I don't personally recommend it unless you can devote atleast a year full-time just to options. This also applies to any unusual derivative whose theoretical valuation model looks at all similar to black scholes. (For example, binary options, there are mobile apps that try to addict you to it.)


### If you are a software developer

Proof: I have personal experience as a software dev.

Every development in how information transmits - be it printing press, semaphore, radio, television, telephone, and now smartphones and internet - has brought significant changes to how war and politics are practised. Consider studying the political implications of your own work. I only recommend studying this if you genuinely care or are genuinely curious.

You might have some influence on where your work finally ends up being used.
 - No matter which country or company you're in, the knowledge you produce as a developer will likely eventually transfer to the Big Tech companies. This is both the technical knowledge and the business knowledge (how you onboarded and retained your users).
 - This could be via a chain of acqusitions, via people leaving your company to start another, or via blogs and github repos.
 - The fraction of Earth's population using Big Tech services has been going strictly upward for 20+ years, and Big Tech getting more ways to onboard and keep users is a major reason for this.

### If you want to learn software dev

Why?
 - As of 2024, software development is one of the highest paying professions that you can get just by self-studying for 1-2 years on the internet. This is because a software business can serve millions of customers while investing very little money. Most other industries either can't serve millions of customers, or require significant initial investment to do it.

`Net revenue = number of customers * (profit per customer - cost per customer) - initial investment`

How?
 - Self-studying software often means climbing a learning curve that goes vertically upward. You might end up spending a lot of time and effort feeling like you are not learning much, only for you to suddenly realise at the end that you have learned a lot. Digging in deep into one concept might require you to learn two more concepts which might require you to learn two more, and only finally does even the first concept start making sense. Ensuring you are psychologically capable of putting effort even when you don't see immediate results, is an important skill in order to learn software development.
 - There's broadly 4 pieces of knowledge that are useful for you: basics of programming, linux and compiler and IDE knowledge, specific tech stacks for specific types of problems, and data structures and algorithms.

 - w3chools has good tutorials for learning software development.
 - Start with their tutorial on Python. Python is a good language to start. After learning some python, you can learn C. Don't make javascript your first language.
 - Ask a friend who knows software to install the tools for you, such as compilers/interpreters, libraries, etc. Installing things is not beginner-friendly and you should not spend time on it as a beginner. Making a friend who knows software dev is also useful to ensure you're not on the wrong path.
 - Initial concepts worth learning are: how to do standard input/output, data types, arithmetic, loops, functions. At first, ignore concepts that are not in this list, and become experienced with these concepts first.
 - Write code in a simple text editor like Notepad, Notepad++, Sublime Text, etc. No need for fancy IDE. Online code editor is okay but also learn how to do things on your own machine.
 - Also learn some linux commands such cp, mkdir, rm, mv, etc. Sign up to a platform like aws ec2 or gcp to get access to linux machines. You might get free credits.

 - Once you have done all of this, try learning a language for a specific task. For example ReactJS for frontend web development or Java for mobile app development or whatever. It is possible to directly jump into building a website without knowing fundamentals, but you will eventually end up going back to fundamentals anyway.
 - You might also want to do a course in data structure and algorithms at some point. If you enjoy data structures and algorithms, you can also do this before you learn a specific tech stack such as for website or app development.
 - Do whatever keeps you motivated. It's better to learn things the wrong way than to give up and not learn.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/advice_for_you/advice_for_you_india_knowledge.md

2025-03-03

## Trading and investment advice

Read the section on the other advice page.

Real estate underperforms S&P500 by a lot unless you have insider knowldge. Buying real estate as an investment (not for living in it) is the number one financial mistake I see people make in India.

NIFTY is also a decent option if you can't or don't want open a foreign account to buy S&P500 ; difference between NIFTY and S&P500 performance is not large if I remember correctly.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/advice_for_you/controversial_india.md

2025-04-12

# Controversial topics thread

If you are not from India, this post is likely less valuable to you than some of my other posts.

Please consider first reading the page on [Disclaimer on value differences](../value_differences_disclaimer.md).

## Freedom of speech

I live in India, upper-middle socioeconomic class (college-educated, net worth $20k-$100k). This might place certain restrictions on what I can say and how I say it.

Some topics that are considered sensitive:
 - criticism of people in my immediate social circle
 - criticism of any religion or religious leaders, including related issues like dating, caste, etc.
 - criticism of any political party or politicians in India
 - criticism of India
 - ???

All my opinions on these topics are within this one post, and I will avoid mentioning them in other posts. 

(I might use pseudonyms to talk about these topics anonymously. I understand that someone putting enough effort can probaly doxx them anyway.)

## No movement pls

Social change happens not when 10% of people want change, but when 10% of people know that everyone in that 10% wants change. Establishing "common knowledge" is a major part of it. See also: [Blue Eyes Puzzle](https://xkcd.com/blue_eyes.html), [Scott Alexander's political posts](https://slatestarcodex.com/about/), [Srdja Popovick's book](https://www.amazon.com/Blueprint-Revolution-Nonviolent-Techniques-Communities/dp/0812995309#customerReviews)

**I am NOT interested in acting as a leader for social change around any topic mentioned on this page.**

Goals of this website:
 - Find high quality research collaborators, receive high quality feedback
 - Spread knowledge

NOT Goals of this website:
 - Establish "common knowledge", start a political movement


## Rule of law

Protecting your safety, belongings and relationships requires living in a culture that allows you to protect these things. Law enforcers are usually members of your culture and ultimately accountable to members of your culture. It is not practical for law enforcement to protect you if most members of your culture don't feel you deserve to be protected.

Physical safety is the second level of Maslow's hierarchy, after having enough food and water. In today's world (and particularly in India), it is rare to find someone dying of thirst or starvation. But it is not rare to find someone who feels unsafe.

Fear begets fear. If you are afraid of people of a different value system from yours, you're less likely to advocate for rule of law to protect them. They will then use extra-legal means to protect themselves. Now both you and them are less safe.

People who feel less safe can be less empathetic, less honest, less trusting and more isolationist. If many people collectively feel unsafe, this has impacts on nearly every aspect of culture. These damaging effects can persist multiple generations, as it is transmitted from parents to children.

In particular, if you are benefitting in any way from making others feel less safe, please consider whether your benefits are worth inflicting this sort of damage on another person. The damage can persist long after you die, the benefits may not.

Please consider protecting people in your daily life from harm irrespective of their value system. Please consider advocating for a rule of law that protects everyone. This way everyone can peacefully coexist despite their differences.


## Individualism

I am quite individualist. I take my life decisions myself, and I want to ensure I'm the primary person responsible for the outcomes of my life. IMO some people, but not necessarily all people, could benefit from being more individualist. How you want to live your life is a personal decision. I am not recommending everyone copy me.

I am aware that belonging to upper-middle class is a significant causal factor in this choice of mine. I am not significantly financially dependent on anyone, no one is significantly financially dependent on me, and bad choices taken by any one person in my social circle (including me) don't significantly financially affect other people in the circle.

Why?

Some important ideas that I believe in are as follows.

1. Almost nobody likes being controlled by another person.
 - This could be a parent or sibling or spouse or employer or political leader or anyone else. Voluntarily following someone almost always feels better than following them under threat of violence or starvation.
 - Ideally you can negotiate boundaries and agreements with people in your current social circle in a mutually beneficial way, be it when deciding your actions or when expanding or narrowing your circle.
 - I'm strongly in favour of consensual social connections over non-consensual ones.
 - I'm also generally in favour of making long-term commitments not only short-term ones. Consensual agreements doesn't necessarily mean no commitments or responabilities.
 - However, sometimes people in your existing social circle might restrict you and seek control over you. If you are currently under someone else's control, and you would prefer to break out for any reason, this might be possible. See below for how.

2. There are 8 billion people on this planet. The probability that your family and friends are among the wisest / most knowledgible / happiest / kindest / etc people out of these 8 billion is approximately zero.

 - You can still selectively learn good things from your family and friends, but it'll help to also consider learning from others.
 - You can increase the odds you have an awesome life by deliberately choosing what you learn and from whom. Your source of inspiration and learning could be a podcaster or religious leader or politician or filmstar or anyone really.
   - Copying other people's decisions tends to get you life outcomes similar to those you're copying. Make sure to track what outcomes your role models got in their own life.
 - If you are not satisfied with your role models' life outcomes and want something better (or even just different) for your life, you must learn to think independently and act independently.
   - Becoming an independent thinker starts with exposing yourself to books, people and situations that others in your social circle are not being exposed to. Your brain is a computer, its output depends on its input.
   - I have gained a tremendous amount of value in my life doing this, arguably more than my entire formal education (although it's kinda hard to compare, they both support each other).

3. Approval / disapproval of you by your social circle is one of the largest predictors of your behaviour.

 - Social incentives (what your friends and family approve of and disapprove of) are often a stronger predictor of your behaviour than financial incentives (what makes you more money) or culture (what other people around you usually do).
 - If you choose your social circle deliberately, you can alter your own thinking and behaviour.
 - Pain of social disapproval is often greater than reward of social approval, atleast in terms of how it feels inside your head. You should be especially careful about what your peers disapprove of, as this will affect you more strongly.
 - See also: Asch's conformity tests and other research that confirms these hypotheses in a specific lab setting


#### See also: Dealing with abusive situations

DISCLAIMER: I am not an expert on dealing with abusive situations. If you are in such a situation, try to get advice and support from people who have more experience with it than me.

How to break out of another person's control?
 - Two things you need:
   - a source of income or sufficient savings not under this person's control. If you do not have this, obtaining this should be your life priority.
   - moral convinction that you are not anyone's slave or property.
 - Conflicts of this type that I've seen are often more psychological warfare than actual war.
   - If you believe you are not under their control, this reduces their control over you.
   - Non-violent resistance is powerful and ensures you retain the moral high ground. Keeping this internal sense of morality and self-respect is important in order to break out.
   - If they threaten violence, it is often a bluff, they lose their power if you call their bluff.
   - Even if they are violent, spending one month in a hospital may be better than spending decades as their slave.
   - Some situations are extreme enough that your abuser would literally rather murder you than let you go free. In this case, you may have to be more strategic, move slowly, find allies before making any move. Your opponent is not willing to play fair and neither do you have to. You may end up scarred whether you stay in this situation or attempt to break free. Remember that one day you are going to die, and your choices will affect your life many years to come.



## Cosmopolitanism

I am extremely cosmopolitan.

If this at all interests you, I recommend making friends (or atleast acquaintances) of people from countries other than your native one. I would also recommend making friends with people of different cultures in your country, of different socioeconomic classes, and of different value systems.

How?
 - This could be online or by travelling to other places or by finding people from those places visiting or living in your city.

Why?
 - Friends can tell you things you won't learn as easily from social media or elite-funded news channels (i.e. almost all news channels).
 - Also you'll be able to empathise with actual people rather than figments of your imagination. I've personally had good experiences doing this.
 - The really optimistic version of this is, maybe wars will become less likely if everyone had friends from other countries, maybe class boundaries would reduce and so on. But I think the benefits to you as an individual alone are worth it, ignoring the societal benefits.


## Religion

I am atheist. I strive to be tolerant of people of other faiths, although there are some topics we may have to avoid in casual conversations in order to have a pleasant interaction. I wish more people in this world were atheist like I am, but converting people to atheism is not the primary goal of my life. I can probably peacefully coexist with you if you are religious.

Which religion you choose to belong to is one of the most important decisions of your life. You don't want to blindly pick whichever religion you happened to be born into. It is better to think deliberately about it.

How?
 - If you are interested in exploring further on this topic, there are lots of freely available websites, books and videos online. Consider reading the writings of all the major world religions, and reading materials from multiple conflicting points of view.
 - I'm not sure what the best intro resource on atheism is, maybe [this one?](https://www.suchanek.name/texts/atheism/ChapterUniverse.html).

**The rest of this section elaborates my personal views on religion. If you're not interested, you are free to ignore it.**

There's a bunch of separate threads of evidence in favour of atheism that I consider worth studying. Which ones you study more deeply may depend on your interests. The most important thing is you actually study these topics yourself from the ground up, so you aren't blindly trusting a bunch of scientists or scientific institutions.

Stuff I've studied reasonably well:
 - biochemistry, genomics, computational genomics ([example](https://asia.ensembl.org/info/genome/compara/mlss.html?mlss=1098))
 - newton's laws, quantum mechanics, newton's laws implying deterministic universe, philosophical implications of human brains also being deterministic
 - occam's razor, solomonoff induction
 - chalmer's hard problem of consciousness

Stuff I've studied at surface level:
 - radioactive carbon dating of fossils
 - particle physics, esp. particle physics around big bang, star formation
 - evolutionary explanations for mammalian morality
 - redshift of stars due to universe expansion
 - psychology, evopsych, sociology of groupthink

Stuff I wish I'd study sometime:
 - reading holy texts of all major religions (I'm still halfway on this)
 - CMB radiation
 - neuroscience and psychology research on meditation, prayer, community rituals

Some potential advantages of being atheist:
 - In the very long run, you might help humanity find the truth. Truth tends to survive the rise and fall of civilisations, as information is easy to preserve and hard to destroy. A record of your beliefs and actions may be preserved and later read by others even if your nation gets nuked to dust, for example.
 - People around you might benefit in terms of material wellbeing. Post-Englightenment, there's a direct correlation between countries' GDP growth and their cultural tolerance of atheist scientists and engineers. (I also suspect there's a direct correlation between this tolerance and rate of new inventions by country, but this is harder to prove.)
 - You might avoid some traps like using medicines that haven't undergone double-blinded randomised control trials and may hence be toxic.
 - It might improve your critical thinking skills. Many cognitive biases are due to social pressure, learning to resist social pressure will make you a better thinker. Your beliefs may be less compartmentalised, as knowing the truth in one subject also aids with knowing the truth in other subjects (and vice versa knowing falsehoods deteriorates it).

Some potential disadvantages of being atheist:
 - You may end up distanced from people who no longer share your values. Coordination is easier between people with shared values and beliefs. You may find it harder to coordinate with others.
 - You may end up distrusting of other people's beliefs. You'll realise truth-seeking is really hard and a lifetime of effort is not enough to discover all the important truths about the world.
 - You may have more anxiety about the future. You'll realise many events in life are random and beyond your control. (For example, this could be who you date or how good your health is or how a particular exam result went.) You'll realise people often imagine fictitious narratives to make sense of random events, because they don't like random events.
 - You'll realise most problems in life don't solve themselves, someone needs to actually put in the work to solve them.
  - You'll have to take life decisions while facing more uncertainty about potential outcomes. You'll realise many facts about our past, present and future are currently unknown. Many of these facts will remain unknown even after you die.
 - You may become more confused about your morality. You'll realise that different cultures produced people with different moral values.
 - You'll realise the world is not a fair place, karma doesn't always work. History is full of mass murderers who received more love and popular support than you ever will.
 - You may end up less satisfied with your present circumstances. Most religions teach some degree of contentment with one's present circumstances.

If you have recently become atheist, I encourage being kind to yourself while you figure out its implications for your life. This took me many years to figure out, and could take you as well.

## Economic growth of India

I currently have no strong reason to favour economic growth of one country over another country, or to value the happiness or lives of people of one country over another country.

That being said, if you were interested in increasing economic growth rate of India, here's my guesses of how you'd do it. Economic growth is typically of two types.

 - Zero-to-one scientific innovation
   - Achieving this in India is really hard IMO
   - Will require cultural tolerance of atheist scientists and engineers in broader society, and a well-funded political faction backing them.
   - For a given research field, there is typically only 1-2 places on Earth where top scientists go. Will require building culture behind such institutions in some fields.
   - Will require funding too, although my guess is funding is not the sole factor, and culture is typically a stronger factor than funding behind outcomes of research labs. Indian govt annual revenue is ~$500 billion. Becoming world leader in any field typically requires $100 million to $10 billion in non-profit/govt funding.
   - Will require sufficient people to become wealthy enough to join upper / upper-middle class where independent thinking is possible and valued.
 - Globalisation, i.e. copy-pasting innovations that already been successful in other countries
   - This is already ongoing in India
   - Stronger rule of law and respect for individual property rights will help.
   - More free market will help IMO, with less selection of winners by govt. Will also need regulatory bodies who are educated about the fields they are regulating.
   - Inviting more foreign companies to undertake major infra projects will help. As long as knowledge ends up diffused to people locally, it matters less who invests in the infra or takes governance decisions IMO. Allowing foreign investors to own significant infra projects can be net good for Indian economic growth, depending on the details of the deal. For instance it is important that projects are profitable and don't significantly increase national debt.


# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/advice_for_you/advice_for_you_elite.md

2025-04-11

# Advice for you (elite class)

#### Summary

 - Because of principal-agent problem, you can't trust other people to do your work for you, no matter how much money you are willing to pay them. You can't pay someone to actually care about a goal, you can only pay them to pretend to care. Someone who cares about achieving a goal will generally strongly outcompete someone who does not care.
 - Therefore, you have to become knowledgible yourself.
   - Study physics and engineering. Most power in society is built through technology.
   - Study politics.
 - You can probably have more impact than you think, if you want to have it. One elite can single-handedly alter the trajectory of human history. Don't let your family and friends tell you otherwise. People like me are counting you to make good decisions.

## If you have above $1M net worth and want influence over society

Proof: I don't have personal experience with this, I just read a lot.

Consider studying politics. Many rich people (even billionaires) don't understand politics and this limits how much influence they can have. Money does not directly translate to political power, the relationship between the two is more complicated. If you only focus on making money, you might be disappointed at the end.

Consider studying maths and physics, if you don't know it. Since the Enlightenment, most power in society is built via technology. No amount of hired experts will substitute for the fact that you don't understand calculus. You won't know how to hire the right people or verify the truth of what they're saying. If you understand technology, you will have much better options available to you in life.

Consider sharing more about your life experience and opinions in the public domain. Your money buys you a degree of safety most people don't have, and many people can benefit from someone who can safely talk about controversial topics. If people verbally attack you it's fine, you are still safe.


## If you have above $100M net worth or could get atleast 10M votes in a hypothetical election

#### My pitch on raising your ambition

A handful of actions taken by you can literally mean the difference between human extinction and world peace and prosperity beyond our current imagination. The fate of 10,000 years of human history and 1,000s more in the future sits on your individual shoulders. If you play your cards right, you could found a nation state. You could bridge differences between leaders of existing nations, and help form a world government. You could figure out sane policies and institutions for technological progress, and also teach other elites to have sane well-informed decision-making on it. You could even start a new religion that lasts centuries after you die, and provide people with safety and meaning.

Please don't limit your own imagination, and go for a small goal like "I will buy a seat in XYZ political party and that's it, the sum total of my legacy".

You don't need to wait for the support of a lot of other elites, you can just start making moves by yourself and wait for others to follow.

You may be able to derive a lot of personal meaning and happiness from this. If you do, you might come to the conclusion that one person's suffering or risk of humilitation is a price worth paying, when considering the stakes. (Or you might not, I am not claiming I'm good at predicting what gives people in your situation meaning or happiness.)

A lot of people including me are counting on you to take good decisions. You might or might not have a healthy way of handling this burden psychologically, but it is a true fact about reality IMO and I think you should know. I'm generally not a fan of psychological strategies that involve hiding yourself from the truth.

#### Other things you can try

 - Maybe try explaining your moral code and your general life situation to people outside your socioeconomic class, without dumbing it down or pretending to be a common person. I would like to understand your perspective better here. I think this could help increase empathy and understanding across the class difference. (No, many people will still not get it, but a handful of people might, if you explain it well enough.)
   - Examples of this: people who do podcasts, people who post on twitter
   - "Born Rich" by Jamie Johnson (owner of Johnson and Johnson) seems like one example, although it mostly covers (relatively) unambitious elite, not the ambitious ones. Also I think there's way to shoot that exact same documentary in a more positive light.
   - Naval Ravikant's writings also are a good example for people not of the elite class to learn more about elite class norms



# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/advice_for_you/advice_for_you_india_labour.md

2025-04-06

To do for myself:
 - Rewrite page so it's simpler and more people can understand
 - Make it easier to directly navigate to relevant section

# Advice for you (India, labour class)

You can also read the other post on knowledge class. If you are sufficiently ambitious, you can climb classes by following the advice in that post.

#### Summary

 - If you want to make more money, talk to people who know how to make money. To do this, you may need to learn english and shift to a tier-1 city. To learn english, spend many months watching shows and youtube videos in english.

## If you don't know english (and live in India) - career advice

Proof: I have learned many skills from the internet, and this has helped me a lot. Most of my college education did not directly help me do this, but being good at english and math did.

There are a lot of benefits to knowing english. Think about it. Maybe studying english should be the number one priority of your life. (Or maybe not, but I want you to think about it.)

(If you are very ambitious, you can also read the section after this section.)

Why?
 - Most of the good job opportunities require you to study english.
 - A lot of good educational resources are available only in english.
 - A lot of people have a lot of useful knowledge but they don't know your local language. If you both learn english you can both learn something useful from each other.
 - If you can't afford to go to college, that is fine, there are other ways of making money.
 - For example, you can learn some skills by asking friends with those skills. If you don't have such friends, you can make new friends.
 - If you are ambitious, you can study how to do the job from the internet.
 - Your current family and friend circle probably does not know which job opportunities are best for you, and you will have to make new friends to guide you.

Proof: I learned English and Hindi as a kid and don't have much personal experience learning a language as an adult. I am just copy-pasting language learning advice from the internet.

How?
 - Do not waste time reading English textbooks. Do not study grammar.
 - Spend atleast a few months listening to movies or TV shows or podcasts etc in English. Start watching something that uses simple words. Do not use Hindi subtitles. This can be boring at first, but doing this for a few months will change your life.
 - Once you have spent enough time listening, you can practice speaking with friends who know some english. (If you don't have any such friends, make friends in-person or online.)

## If you have less than 50,000 INR in savings and live in a village or town (in India) - career advice

Proof: I have seen more than one person shift to a city and the struggles they face in first couple of months. I have not experienced this myself.

Think about shifting to a big city.

(If you are very ambitious, you can also read the section after this section.)

Why?
 - This decision is not permanent. You can go back later if you try it out and you don't like it.
 - If you live in a city, you can meet people who know a lot of skills and know how to make money with those skills. You can befriend them and learn these skills, and make more money yourself. However, learning new skills is a slow process. When you first shift, you will have to take a job you know how to do. After that, you can try learning a new skill.
 - If you live in a city, you can meet people who think and behave differently than you. This is not just about career. This includes what their personality is like, how they approach relationships, what beliefs they think are important, what are their hobbies and interests, etc.  You might want to learn some good things from them, or you might not. Until you try, you probably won't know. It is difficult for someone to explain this to you if you haven't experienced meeting lots of people yourself.
 - If life in your house or neighbourhood is not good right now, shifting away from it can improve all the aspects of your life. In cities, your friends might not know each other, so they might gossip less about you. And you might feel less pressure to behave one way in front of others.

How?
 - Very important things you must carry with you:
   - ID cards - aadhaar card, driving license, etc
   - Debit card - make sure you have money saved in your account and you are not carrying all your money as cash
   - Smartphone, SIM card
   - Laptop, if you own one
 - Important things you should also carry:
   - Induction stove, cooking utensils, food storage containers - it could be expensive for you to buy these again
   - Clothes
 - Important things you should practice before coming:
   - Learn to use Google Maps and practice using it
   - Learn to use Whatsapp, SMS, phone call, UPI, if you don't already know how to
   - Learn to use IRCTC online website to book train tickets, and MakeMyTrip app to book bus tickets.
 - Important things you should do soon after coming:
   - Find a PG to stay on the first day itself. Do not waste a single day of your time finding a PG. Every day you waste means loss of money.
   - Pick your PG roommate carefully, if they are depressed or an alcoholic for example, it will affect your mood a lot. 
   - Find a job soon after you have a place to stay. Do not waste more than 3-4 days of your time finding a job.
   - Do not relax once you have a job. Make sure you have some backup job if the first job you pick later turns out to be a bad choice. Ask your coworkers to make sure you will get your salary on time.
   - Within the first month, try to make some acquaintances of the same gender. This is especially important if you are a woman. It is fine if you don't trust them a lot at first.
   - Nobody is guaranteed to help you when you run out of money. Try your best to keep some savings at all times.
 - Important things you should do eventually:
   - Talk to lots of people of different backgrounds. Put active effort to do this. You will learn a lot if you talk to the right people and ask the right questions.



# File: /Users/samuel/Documents/Samuel/Website/scripts/../raw/english/about_me_summary.md

2025-04-12

# About me

![Samuel Passport Photo](../media/self_solo_pics/samuel_passport_photo_small.jpeg "Samuel Passport Photo")

DOB 2001-01-03, Male. Completed schooling in Delhi 2018, Graduated IIT Delhi biochem engg BTech+MTech 2023. Worked at cryptocurrency startup Rari Capital. Have basic skills in software, finance, biotech and idk what else.

Topics of interest: history and future of technology, mass surveillance

I'm currently still figuring out which project I should long-term devote myself to.
 - I'm exploring possibility of building a distributed wikileaks that reduces personal risk involved. I'm especially interested in talking to whistleblowers or people who have worked with or developed infrastructure for whistleblowers. I want feedback on this document on [distributed whistleblowing](./my_research/distributed_whistleblowing.md)

My latest project: [Books Search for Researchers](https://booksearch.samuelshadrach.com)

My latest research: [One pager](./my_research/one_pager.md).

Notable influences: cypherpunks mailing list, extropians mailing list

Currently living in Bangalore, India