2025-12-13 21:00:00
Far-UVC is something people have talked about for years in a "that would be great, if you could buy it" sort of way. Coming soon, once someone actually makes a good product. But the future is now, and it costs $500.
Many diseases spread through the air, which is inconvenient for us as creatures that breathe air. You can go outside, where the air is too dilute to spread things well, but it's cold out there, and sometimes wet. You can run an air purifier, but cleaning lots of air without lots of noise is still the world of DIY projects. Ideally you could just shine some light, perhaps in the 222-nm range, which would leave people alone but kill the viruses [1] and bacteria. Yes, let's do that!
Last year if you asked "if far-UV is so great, why isn't it everywhere?" one of your answers would be:
There are very few providers, and hardly any of them sell an off-the-shelf product. You usually can't just buy a lamp to try it out—you have to call the company, get a consultation, and often have someone from the company come install the lamp. It's a lot of overhead for an expensive product that most people have never heard of.
This has changed! You can buy an Aerolamp for $500, shipped. Proudly displayed at Thanksgiving:
Here are four silently cleaning a whole lot of air at a dance I help organize:
At $500 this is out of (my) Christmas gift range, but I think we're now at the point where dances, churches, offices, rationalist group houses, schools, etc. should consider them.
(I have no stake in Aerolamp and they're not paying me, I'm just very excited about their product.)
[1] Ok, yes, I know viruses "can't be killed" because they're "not
alive", but far-UVC causes them to become unable to infect and
replicate which is close enough to "killed" for me.
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2025-12-12 21:00:00
My current setup for playing dances is a bit excessive, and I transport my pedalboard in an old hardshell suitcase. [1] There's no built-in padding, so I use sheets of foam to protect my equipment. Initially I just had these loose, but this was one more piece to deal with, so I decided to permanently attach them to the suitcase.
It's tricky to bond foam to plastic, but after some LLM-assisted searching it seemed like 3M 90 spray adhesive was a good choice. I followed the instructions (outside!) and attached my foam sheets to the case:
I was going to write something up right away, but I was wary of the dynamic where I write when something is new and exciting but before I know if it will last. Would the sheets just fall off again?
It's now been four months, including six gigs with Kingfisher, three with the Free Raisins, and one with Dandelion. [2] Four of these involved flights, which with the rough handling and temperature swings are probably the worst abuse the case will get. And... it's great! I haven't had any issues, and they still seem well attached. I guess I could have written the post when I had that just-did-something-new energy after all!
[1] I looked into lighter
options but everything was super expensive and I couldn't find
good used options.
[2] Somehow I ended up playing a very large fraction of my dances for the year this fall. This was more than currently makes sense given work and family, and I'm going to try to spread things out a lot more.
2025-12-11 21:00:00
The gates in the lobby of my workplace annoyed me for years: they would often reject my access card, and I'd need to tap several times. After a while I realized that the reader was getting confused by the other RFID cards in my wallet, and if I pulled the card out of my wallet first it worked every time.
This turned out to be very easy to fix: tape a piece of tinfoil to the back of my access card:
I feel a bit silly that after spending months pulling the card out each time the fix ended up taking me a couple minutes. I often decide to put up with minor annoyances instead of thinking about whether there's a way to fix them, and I think overall that has made my life substantially better, but in this case even a little thought would have been well worth it!
2025-12-06 21:00:00
On a road trip there are a few common options for food:
Bringing food or going to a grocery store are the cheapest (my preference!) but the kids are hard enough to feed that we often buy prepared food when we're traveling. [1] And they often prefer food that takes a while to make (usually pizza) over what you can get in a drive through. A couple years ago I realized there's another option: calling in an order for pickup to where you'll be soon.
We'll use Google Maps "search along route" to identify a place ~30min out, and phone in an order. [2] By the time we arrive, the food is ready. We can combine the speed (and buffer maximization) benefits of drive throughs, with the variety of options from the wide range of restaurants that offer pickup.
[1] I'm also working on getting them to do better with brought food,
but I'm focusing on lunch at school here because that's a much larger
portion of their food away from home.
[2] It kind of amazes me that pizza places will take the costly action of preparing a pizza to my specifications based on a simple phone call, with no contact information beyond me giving a first name. I mean, it's great, but like so many things in our society it only works because there are extremely few people want to cause havoc and are willing to put any effort into doing so.
2025-12-03 21:00:00
Summary: Anthropic has many employees with an EA-ish outlook, who may soon have a lot of money. If you also have that kind of outlook, money donated sooner will likely be much higher impact.
It's December, and I'm trying to figure out how much to donate. This is usually a straightforward question: give 50%. But this year I'm considering dipping into savings.
There are many EAs and EA-informed employees at Anthropic, which has been very successful and is reportedly considering an IPO. The Manifold market estimates a median IPO date of June 2027:
At a floated $300B valuation and many EAs among their early employees, the amount of additional funding could be in the billions. Efforts I'd most want to support may become less constrained by money than capacity: as I've experienced in running the NAO, scaling programs takes time. This means donations now seem more valuable; ones that help organizations get into a position to productively apply further funding especially so.
One way to get a sense of the impact of donating sooner is to imagine that others will donate $1M to my preferred charity this year, and $10M next year. If I have $200k, I expect giving it all this year, for a total of $1.2M this year and $10M the next, would be more valuable than splitting it evenly, for $1.1M this year and $10.1M the next. The $100k in question would be a 9% increase in funding this year, but only a 1% increase next year.
In retrospect I wish I'd been able to support 80,000 Hours more substantially
before Open Philanthropy Coefficient
Giving began funding them; this time, with more ability to see
what's likely coming, I'd like to avoid that mistake.
Now, Anthropic could fail, the IPO could take a long time with minimal opportunity for employees to take money off the table before then, or the employees could end up primarily interested in funding different things than I want to see funded. Still, it seems to me that EA-influenced funding likely goes a lot farther in the next few months than it will in a few years, and I think I should probably donate more this year.
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2025-11-23 21:00:00
It can be hard to get the kids to practice their instruments. Sometimes they're having trouble focusing, don't like their assigned piece, or are just grumpy. One thing I'll offer them in these cases is "busking practice".
The idea is, we'll pretend we're busking together. I'll start playing a tune they know, and they should do something that sounds good. That could be playing the tune with me, making up a harmony, or just figuring out a single note that sounds ok and playing patterns on it. If they make a mistake, we keep going. If they can't figure out what to play, we keep going. We're practicing performing. It helps that they're pretty motivated to get good at busking, because they know they can earn money that way.
Working on the pieces the teacher assigns (if you have a good teacher!) is very efficient a turning time on an instrument into becoming a better musician. But if willpower is the limiting factor and not time, and especially if the alternative is a super short practice or no playing at all, the important thing is just picking up the instrument and playing something. I like that busking practice give us some structure for this, and lets the kids build up their performance skills.