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This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
The goals of this post are to:
1. Raise a question I see as crucially important to the goal of aligning AI to animal welfare...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
Recent opportunities to take action
I work for a small Canadian software company that needs a new C#/TypeScript engineer. Everyone at the company normally works remote. IMO the software is not that interesting―typical Alberta software, water management for oil & gas―but our code is fairly well-factored, the frontend is pretty, and you could probably be paid to do some research into AI, and/or integrate some sort of nonlinear/MIP solver technology, or something involving hydraulic modeling.
My employer doesn't want to pay much more than the going rate for Alberta. That won't seem great to Americans, but you might snag some equity, we are near an inflection point, and we expect to grow quickly ("small business" quickly, not "startup" quickly). Intellect is a must.
Consider this job if you are strong in C# or TypeScript, you like remote, the pay is acceptable and you'd want to work with me personally (I wrote perhaps ~75% of the product).
Who am I, then? I could say many things. I'm a rationalist EA who, in the past, wrote a Super Nintendo emulator, the MilliKeys keyboard for PalmPilots, the FastNav GPS system (with turn-by-turn directions, traffic-sensitive routing, etc.), and I used to build a set of open-source projects called "Loyc". My personal page is at david.loyc.net. I am a writer with no audience and I will let you be the judge of whether this is because my writing is boring, or some other reason. YouTube must think I'm spicy, because they often censor me. Finally, I describe my approach to software here ― TL;DR: I value appropriately small code. After more than 4 years our core product―which serves three different submarkets―is about 125,000 lines of code excluding tests and blank lines. It would be less if I'd had full control of it, and 10,000 of those lines are comments ― ideally we'd have more. In my experience, many/most devs would've used 500,000 lines for this.
Our software stack includes .NET 8, EF Core, PostgreSQL, HiGHS (LP/MIP solver), Leaflet, React 18, MobX, MUI, Chart.js, Docker, ansible, Traefik, Dart (oops) and Flutter, among other things. You don't need skill in any of those, though you must be strong in C# or TypeScript, and I'm looking for multiparadigmatic competency ― e.g. you can switch between OOP and functional programming depending on what best fits the situation, or you have a knack for UX design, or something. Nice-to-haves include "vibe coding" skills (because I don't know how), sysadmin/prod/Linux skills, strong communication skills (detail, precision, and accuracy without ambiguity) and open-source contributions you can use to demo your skills.