I'm considering going in the direction of independent AI alignment research, at least for the next few months. So I was wondering - how does one get access to resources usually provided by a university?
Things like:
1: scihub, scihub, scihub. If that fails you, look for the paper to be posted on any of the authors websites. I can count on one hand the number of papers I couldn't get through either of these methods. I'm at a university and still don't bother to use the library.
And if that fails, you can usually contact the authors directly. Most academics are happy to have people interested in their work, and papers will have a corresponding author with an email address. Though obviously this method is only worth the bother if it's a really valuable paper for you.
See here for a similar discussion on accessing articles as an independent researcher. TLDR: The Unpaywall extension is a good alternative to scihub because it links to legal Green Open Access version of articles (and scihub is a bit intermittent with uploading new content). There are other options, but most are less efficient than these two.
I think you could apply for funding from a number of sources. If the budget is small, I'd start with the Longterm Future Fund: https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future
I know that's the source for e.g. a salary. But say you need less foreseeable expenses like a conference, or use of resources that are usually shared like GPUs. Should you use these funds for that too?