I think the highest priority question is probably something about how quickly you expect AI to go. I'm mostly not planning anything 8 years out, because I think the world is likely to be massively different.

The next highest priority question is something about how you expect AI to impact your various potential career options. For example, it seems plausible to me that almost all dental care could be moderately skilled people wearing high resolution cameras and receiving real-time advice from AIs with current tech, let alone near-future tech, and 8 years is a long time for society to catch up. On the other hand, CS is becoming automated even more rapidly!

So this isn't really the question you're asking, but I'd prioritize learning how to get the most out of frontier AI systems: getting good at specifying what you want and recognizing whether you've received that. A lot of this is traditionally management. I'd try to do as much of this while in college as possible, but not stay any longer than necessary; 4y is already a very long time.

Seems worth doing!

Yup! Linked from the bottom of the post.

Also (not linked; learned about it in comments) a nursing home

Why is it good practice to allow a post to be on the forum for some time before the response is available to readers?

meltblown polypropylene may be more capable of surge than I previously assumed

Note that this factory was just producing polypropylene pellets, not melt-blown fabric or masks themselves.

The pellets also last ~indefinitely if well stored (no UV, no heat, minimal oxygen, low humidity), and so are well suited for stockpiling. But you'd probably want to move up the chain and stockpile the fabric instead, or perhaps N95s themselves, or perhaps reusable respirators, ...

Currently, when I see something that reads as AI written that's a pretty strong signal that the nominal author doesn't fully stand behind the post.  I really hate it when I engage deeply with the arguments in a post and write a carefully reply, only to learn that the author wasn't really trying to say that and didn't review the output of their AI carefully enough.

I think maybe that wasn't public until 2026-01 with Dario's "All of Anthropic’s co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of our wealth"?

almost as big as Coefficient Giving

Specifically within animal welfare (this wasn't immediately clear to me, and I was very confused how CG's grants could be so low)

Could probably get more support if you presented it as not limited to veganism: a lot of people have dietary restrictions (ex: allergies) and this is a way supermarkets could compete for customers.

It depends a lot on what the org is doing, but my understanding is that even most advocacy 501(c)4 organizations stick to lobbying and not campaigning (which would trigger 527(f) taxes). But you're right, worth checking!