We're going to do a Hackathon on Mon, 12/5 at Sports Basement Berkeley from 10am to 5pm following EAGxBerkeley.
- Who: anyone! software engineers will be primary contributors of course, but we will offer optional introductory sessions for the curious / aspiring developer. You do not have to have attended EAGxBerkeley to attend the Hackathon.
- Where: Sports Basement Berkeley at 2727 Milvia St.
- Note this is 15 - 20 minutes from the conference by public transit or car. We recommend taking BART.
- When: Mon, 12/5 from 10am - 5pm
- What: Work independently or with collaborators on EA-aligned project of your choosing
If you would like to submit a potential Hackathon project idea, please leave a comment!
As a Hackathon participant, be on the lookout for related events each day of the conference:
- On Friday evening, we'll meet for a social around dinner time
- On Saturday, we'll have a speed networking event for Software Engineers
- On Sunday, we'll have a Hackathon Q&A and planning session
The scheduled events for the Hackathon will begin Monday at 10am when Sports Basement Berkeley opens to participants.
- 10am — venue opens
- 10:15 — opening talk
- 10:30 — project pitches — people with ideas can share those to the group
- 10:45 — start work
- 12pm — lunch
- 4:55 — wrap up
We will also be offering optional 45-minute learning sessions:
- 10:45 — basics of git (for newcomers to coding)
- 1pm — setting up your development environment (for newcomers)
- 2pm — intro to frontend development (for everyone)
- 3pm — intro to backend development (for everyone)
These talks will be at a separate table so that we are minimally disruptive to people who are still working.
In terms of projects, we hope people will work on things that they find to be interesting and potentially impactful. Keep in mind, there may be the option to continue collaborating virtually, so don't limit the scope of your ambitions to what can be accomplished in a single day.
We hope you'll join us for the EA Hackathon! Please complete this Expression of Interest form and consider signing up for the EA Software Engineering mailing list. And don't forget to apply to EAGxBerkeley if you want to go to that too.
Some approaches to solving alignment go through teaching ML systems about alignment and getting research assistance from them.[1] Training ML systems needs data, but we might not have enough alignment research to sufficiently fine tune our models, and we might miss out on many concepts which have not been written up. Furthermore, training on the final outputs (AF posts, papers, etc) might be less good at capturing the thought processes which go into hashing out an idea or poking holes in proposals which would be the most useful for a research assistant to be skilled at.
It might be significantly beneficial to capture many of the conversations between researchers, and use them to expand our dataset of alignment content to train models on. Additionally, some researchers may be fine with having their some of their conversations available to the public, in case people want to do a deep dive into their models and research approaches.
The two parts of the system which I'm currently imagining addressing this are:
Ought's Elicit is the prime example.
I hear OBS might be a good tool for this.
Maybe a little late, but here is an android app that does recordings, you can contribute directly on the github.
Other potential project ideas that can help with this are: