- People to follow up with from Gwern meetup:
- Kyle Schiller: reads Rachel’s substack, my post on SBF
- Alexey: Looking to restart New Science. Broke.
- Gwern
- Asara
@August 9, 2024
- Work: 7/10
- Quadratic funding pool with Anton is happening!
- Nice to see the moral support and comments after posting the proposal around Manifund locations
- Talking with Matt Clifford of EF & def/acc — maybe 4-8 week London cohort??
- Thought logistically complicated but maybe solveable
- Kinda looking for a change of pace, some more adventure
- Not much work on buni, to busy ughing on the writeup I guess
- Manifold
- James is pretty manic on Manicode, applying to AI Grant. Definitely feels like lack of momentum on his side
- Stephen switching up the lawyers in hopes of getting a faster opinion
- Maybe might hire Joseph?
- Team still seems to be pretty aimless, idk
- Relationships: 7/10
- Last Friday: coworking at Lighthaven, then Valinor for a baby shabbath
- Always weird how these people just end up being “normal folks”: Scott, Kelsey, Ajeya, Clara, etc. The baby especially does this a lot. If everyone passed babies around, there would be world peace.
- Taco Tuesday Drinks Night was pretty good. Best part: getting people to clean up!
- Matt Gasda play!
- Play itself was a bit underwhelming — and we didn’t host amazingly.
- More appreciative of Bet on Love now
- But still good to have a bunch of Anthropic folks arrive and hang out, good to chat briefly with Avital & Leopold and demo our baby. Also hearing Alex talk about Claude was very sweet, love the “demo on my phone” vibe.
- Mom came by and we had beef noodle soup together, that was nice
- Ada at 1 month
- Settling into a reasonable routine. Mom comes over to help during the day, I do a share of attending at night with bottle feedings and diaper changes
- Not very hard to take care of an infant but pretty attention-demanding while caring
- Seeing if we can outsource more of this; a few folks expressed interest in babysitting at Taco Tuesday
- Maybe we should also invite people/friends over for dinner where we cook together and people take turns caring for her
- Health: 7/10
- Exercise: Missed a few days of jogging, oops.
- Diet: Putting on a bit of weight, I think?
- Sleep: Pretty interrupted, some amounts of low sleep thanks to baby.
- Focus:
- Pretty good modafinil day!
- Generally office days are still kind of meh, end up very low energy and surfing internet instead of pursuing anything.
- Dragged my feet a lot on getting the announcement written — had scheduled for Monday but then extended all the way to Th night.
- Getting over ugh fields still super important!
- MTG: Realizing I’m actually doing pretty good, with 65%~ win rates overall and showing up on the trophy leaderboards for MH3 and BLB
- Did another class with Sam, though got less out of it (he seems less invested in BLB)
- Nice to jam games while wearing Ada in a sling, or at night
- Trying to study more (17lands). Maybe listen to lords of limited or lrcast?
- 6am Qualifier Weekend tomorrow
@July 29, 2024
- Work: 7/10
- Paid out charity payouts (most of them)
- Bit more work with buni — got the react compilation together
- Manifold: IMO Gold market blew up, got a Q&A with Eliezer
- Inbounds from Beth (retro patio11) and Anton (quadratic funding pool?), outbounds to patio11 on regranting
- Relationships: 6/10
- Nate’s demo day on Sunday
- Overall, a lot of awesome people, fast-talking folks excited about technical details ranging from Taiwanese lang to 3d printed trees (below) to sfdata to cryptography
- Slightly different than classic EA crowd (but also had ML people around). Much more tinkerer/hacker spirit, convos about base reality instead of referencing ideas
- Purchased 3d printed stuff from Jamie — is my role more and more “financier” and “connector”??
- Didn’t demo anything :(
- Maddy birthday party — nice to hang out and see the fam in the park
- Avital reached out for Matt Gasda play
- Taco Tuesday: ~50 people! on a last minute board games thing
- Rachel relationship check in:
- Rachel thinking a bit about how to outsource, chatting with Ella to come in and help
- Hard to ask people to do things — how do I get better at this?
- Overall, might want more systems to offload/share responsibility
- Rachel’s okay to start on something like Manifest AI — try selling Leopold and Dwarkesh on this?
- But doesn’t want to feel obligated into doing something, can maybe contribute a few hours a day
- Also wanting more time to herself or with me? Described an ideal birthday as waking up, walking to coffeeshop. How do we make this happen more?
- Health: 7/10
- Exercise: A bit more jogging, really the bare minimum to qualify
- Feeling like muscles have atrophied, maybe want a gym membership
- Diet: Going out to eat at nice restaurants a lot for having a new baby. Not much cooking since.
- Sleep: Hardest part — esp on nights when I’m responsible.
- Hard to balance between sleepiness/work/MTG/social
- Focus:
- Overall feeling better moodwise: more projects coming, I’m driving a few things (buni and MTG), got the SFF grant, Manifold on upswing?
- MTG: Seriously trying for MTG top 250 mythic for qualifiers now. Got to Mythic yesterday, still some ways to go
- Annoying that MTG actually takes up intellectual focus, to do well — competes against work for high horsepower
- Also competes in terms of “shower thoughts”, so very dangerous. Maybe running is healthier to just, run
- Musings
- Goals this week:
- 3h/day focus time on buni
- 3 MH3 drafts a day til season close
- Delegate out these 3
- House Dinner
- Taco Tuesday
- Baby (Adasitting)
@July 23, 2024 (megacatchup)
- Work: 6/10
- Playing a bit with buni (Bun-powered react hosting/generation)
- Nice to sink into technical work; had one or two days of deep deep work; plus motivated to set up home office for ergonomics
- Manifold: weekend Biden Outage, with corresponding traffic spikes!
- Plus: Elon Musk, Matt Yglesias, Nate Silver, Patio11 shoutouts. Conor Sen?
- Relationships: 8/10
- Took baby into hospital, actually nice to have some 1:1 time and do parental work
- Baby overall:
- Been saying, haven’t felt that different to be responsible for a baby, since we’ve been responsible for a bunch of people before. Aka not a huge imposition
- Also, Rachel’s been doing much more of the parenting. Plus Meg.
- Maybe a bit of tension? I want her to get back to working, and outsource childcare where we can. Eg night doulas.
- I’m feeling a bit sad that she spends so much time watching TV now, seems like a red flag. But I’m playing a bunch of Magic and browsing internet, so…
- Sleeping in separate beds for the last few weeks: I think I’m pretty okay with this; makes the cuddles together more valuable, but I can also have a different late night cycle, which I like.
- Health: 7/10
- Exercise:
- Jogging a bit now; took Ada out once.
- Diet:
- Eh — think I’ve been putting on a bit of weight? Possible eating too much sugar or carbs. Been easy to get good food thanks to Meg and people coming over.
- Might be interesting to switch to a soylent diet for like a week
- Sleep:
- Interrupted a bit with Ada, now also sleeping random long sessions during the day. (though, don’t really mind). Nice to have a very flexible schedule.
- Dreaming more (one esp vivid/complex one of “metahells”)
- Focus:
- Some deep work on buni; been pretty good. Still a bit scatterbrained on other days, checking a lot of Twitter, Discord, email.
- Trying Moda day on Wednesday. Maybe schedule these more?
- Playing a bunch more Magic/MH3 draft! On the weekend, randomly qualified for Arena Open day 2 (though then didn’t get farther); booked a class with Sam Black. Thinking of trying to get into the next Qualifier Weekend…?
- Musings:
- Things have felt a bit slow, I haven’t been driving that much since the end of Manifest. Opposite of mania.
- Feels a bit lonely; like nobody to work with, nobody really paying attention to my work. Feel the siren call of Manifold Discord; do spend a bunch of time reading that still; feels like my current online community, instead of Taco Tuesday or Manifund.
- Some things looking up now:
- Some expressions of interest in funding from SFF speculation grants (though, may have fallen through); also $40k check from unknown DAF
- Ross on the Manifund board; maybe we don’t need to return the money
- Silly, but back-to-back Magic wins (5 trophies in a row)
- Lots of tentative ideas, but not much conviction to go ham in one direction. Next steps if I wanted to dive deep:
- buni — launch v0, apply to YC?
- Manifest x AI — see if Leopold and Dwarkesh are in?
- celeb regrantors — pitch Patio11 and Elizer? Maybe 1 more?
- Manifund DAF — schedule a bunch of user interviews with donors?
- SF Constellation — check in with Barrel House Brewery
Catching up week by week Saturdays
- June 15
- End of Manifest, 4-day vacation with Rachel to swimming pool
- June 22
- Guardian article, EA forum drama…
- Campfire party TT — rambunctious, fire spilled, Joel and Lisa
- June 29
- Prep for baby? Don’t remember much…
- Chatted with Caleb again about processing backend ops
- July 6
- July 4th hackathon plus fireworks afterwards
- Maybe the “SF Constellation” is kind of viable?
- Then: Baby born!
- Birth process: first 24h quite harrowing; Morgan kinda gave up and swapped; then the
- Entire of Rachel’s family around
- Lots of visits from my family too, Madeline and Alex especially
- Jul 13
- Baby first week
- More visits to doctors; stroller trip, learnings on dealing with baby
- Taco Tuesday with showing
- Some hacking, eg setting up manifund.org/finances
- Jul 20
- Board of directors meeting: onboarded Ross
- Having Derik around as a guest for a week — pretty fun, engaging convo on spending vs saving for EA efforts, Constellation, looking into the Lucerne Castle
- Baby second week?
- Meg has been super helpful
Before: