2026-06-07 21:00:00
I was in SF this weekend for LessOnline. It's nominally a blogging conference, but in practice it's more of a Rationalist meetup. I was there in my personal capacity, though I did end up having a lot of conversations about biosecurity and may have accidentally done some fundraising. Lots of good parts, but my favorite was calling and playing for a contra dance:
This was similar to the house party dances I've called a few times. Two sets, which was very tight (cozy!) but it was a good time!
We had a live band: Ben on piano, Aleks and me on fiddle, Catherine on sax, and a volunteer on cajon. I called while playing, which works as long as we stick to simple tunes. We had no sound reinforcement, and I did need to do some shouting when calling, but the low friction and "each musician adds something" feel of an all-acoustic dance is pretty great. It was short enough (55min), and each dance needed few enough calls, that my voice feels fine.
Almost all longways whole set dances:
I didn't introduce anything that required roles, kept the piece count low, and reused figures a lot. I'd like a few more dances in this general structure: I recently added Luke's Charge and Drag, which is just the right amount of additional variation.
Unlike a house party dance we didn't take any breaks: there were enough people that we could dance straight through. I did give people a lot of time to rest and chat before teaching each dance, though, since otherwise I expect we'd have had a lot of attrition.
One thing I like about doing such simple dances is that, even with a crowd where a large majority have never danced before, there's no need to call the whole way through. People also really quickly get a sense of starting each figure when the music says to, which I think takes much longer to develop if the dance is challenging.
We put it together last minute, but it was a big success and I'm glad we did it!
2026-06-06 21:00:00
Five years ago I read a post on the EA Forum arguing that "election campaign contributions might be a way in which you can have a substantial impact as a small donor". It struck me as weird but plausible: a combination that you see a lot of on the Forum.
A few months later I read another post, a case for Carrick Flynn in particular. It made a lot of sense, but while I don't remember my specific reservations I do remember not being convinced initially. After a lot of talking with Julia and others, however, this campaign did seem like a really promising opportunity. Six days later we made the donation:
We hadn't donated to a political campaign since college, but Julia was impressed with this candidate's work on pandemic preparedness, which is an area we've both thought was important for a long time. In general, we prefer to donate through funds because they are able to put a lot more time and attention into identifying excellent donation opportunities, but campaign finance rules mean this model doesn't work for political donations.
Flynn lost, and not for lack of funding. People took away a range of lessons (see the comments too!) from the attempt; personally my largest was that it's really important to assess early on whether the candidate is resonating with voters, and proxies like "previously elected to local office here" are super valuable.
The argument for individuals donating to support candidates still made sense to me, and I would still have been willing to do it for the right opportunity. For the next few years, however, I didn't come across any that were sufficiently compelling. And with a lot of other things going on in my life I didn't seek these out.
In Fall 2025 friends started discussing political donations more, and I met Eric Neyman who was putting together a working group to identify and rank political donation opportunities from the perspective of "making the long-term future go well." I read his analysis of cost-effectiveness of donating to Alex Bores' campaign, talked to friends, and talked with Bores himself briefly when I was in NYC for EAG. Not wanting to repeat earlier mistakes, I was glad to see he's already been evaluated by the electorate in becoming a state legislator. Which is not to say he'll definitely win: it's a competitive field and he's at 42% on Manifold. Still, I decided to donate, and later donated to several other people that some combination of Neyman's group, the Secure AI Project, and politics-focused EAs recommended. They've mostly been Democrats so far, but party isn't my goal: it's about what I expect the candidates will do if elected.
After continuing to think about this, I actually think I should make political donations my primary method of giving. The vast majority of charitable dollars legally can't go to candidates, and I don't expect this to change. Donors with a lot of money to distribute have the same lowish hard-dollar limits I have, and much of the remainder, including a lot of likely-forthcoming Anthropic employee funding, is in donor advised funds. This means my money is unusually well-suited to help fill what I see as one of the highest priority gaps.
This is not the full case (see Ozy, Lincoln, and Scott) but it's the part that took longest to click for me.
Overall I feel pretty mixed about this. On the one hand, for years I've wanted to apply my comparative advantage as an independent individual to make more impactful donations, and it's great to finally really be doing this. On the other, it's kind of depressing. It's a familiar feeling: when I moved from primarily funding global poverty to trying to reduce catastrophic risk I felt the same way: more distance from helping the world's poorest people in the present, when they would very clearly benefit a lot from my money. But I do think it's here my money will do the most good, and that's what drives me.
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2026-06-05 21:00:00
I'm leading a non-profit team building a pathogen-agnostic early-warning system. As AI systems become increasingly capable substitutes for expert human biologist expertise, the risk that someone could engineer a pathogen to spread widely before detection is going up. We've made great progress and we're now running the world's largest metagenomic biosurveillance network, but there's still a huge amount that needs doing: we're hiring!
We're processing >50B read pairs of wastewater and nasal swab data each week (more than anyone else!) and will be more than doubling this in the next year. At the same time, we need to bring our end to end time down from ~12hr to ~2hr (massively parallel problem, should be possible to get <1hr).
This means we're looking for people who know how to build and scale processing systems and infra, and don't need a bio background:
Software Engineer, High-Performance Pipelines: Engineering our metagenomic detection pipelines for speed, scalability, and reliability. (job description, ~L4-L5 equiv at Google, $165-190k)
Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer: Own our AWS infra, which enables everything above (job description, ~L5-L6 equiv at Google, $195-220k)
For both of these we're looking for people to work with us in-person in Kendall Sq (Cambridge MA).
We're offering a $5,000 referral bonus, paid out in stages: $150 if we invite them to a technical interview, another $650 if we bring them on site, another $2000 if they accept an offer from us, and a final $2,200 at the three month mark. If you know engineers, a few minutes thinking about who might be a good fit is worth your time, and theirs!
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2026-06-03 21:00:00
Running an air purifier on a battery could be really useful in an emergency that combined a biological or nuclear threat with a power outage. Getting one that can run on 12V DC and attaching it to a LiFePO4 battery is about $188 (plus $164 for the purifier) for something that will give you 141 CFM for over a week.
I've been thinking about DIY biohardening, primarily to reduce risks from environment-to-human threats, and a lot of what's out there assumes the power grid stays up. This doesn't seem like a good assumption: even if society does a fantastic job protecting essential workers and prioritizing keeping the grid up, I expect many more outages than we have today, and longer ones. If an outage means you lose positive pressure and get sick, that's really very bad!
If I needed to build a DIY cleanroom today, I'd start with my AirFanta 3Pro. While it being HEPA is overkill for cleaning the air that's already in a space, it's great if your goal is to clean air as it enters a space.
The simplest option is to buy a portable power supply. I have the 1,056 Wh Anker SOLIX c1000 and at $450 on Amazon it's comes to $0.43 / Wh. If I trust AliExpress, I could maybe get it for $322 ($0.31 / Wh). These look to be pretty typical for portable power supplies, and I like that the SOLIX supports solar charging.
Another option would be deep cycle AGM lead-acid batteries. This is what I went with in 2018. Doing some reading now, though, it seems like they're rarely worth it anymore. A 100Ah AGM, which you should really only take 50 Ah of, is $160, and a 100Ah LiFePO4, which can be discharged down to 80-100%, is $147. Plus the LiFePO4 is less than half the weight: 24lb vs 57lb.
Unlike the portable power supply, version, this requires assembling a few components:
A coulomb counter shunt, which tells you how much power you've drawn so you know how much is available and whether you're almost out. ($16.19)
A fuse holder and fuses, so a short circuit doesn't start a fire or destroy your battery. ($1.70)
Connectors, so you can easily connect and disconnect without worrying about messing up polarity and destroying something. ($4.66)
Charger, so you can bring the battery back up to full when you have access to power again. ($18.99)
I already had all of this from my earlier inverter project, except for the fuse (integrated into the inverter) and connector to the AirFanta (which takes a 5.5mm x 2.5mm center-positive barrel jack). Hooking it all up, I can run my AirFanta off grid:
If I didn't already have most of this, I'd have been spending $188 for 1280 Wh, or $0.15 / Wh. This is much better than the portable power supply, it also provides much less: I can only use it to power things with 12V DC.
Now, you might imagine someone would sell a box that wraps a battery and provides these extras so you don't need to DIY anything, but as far as I can tell this doesn't quite exist. People sell "battery box power centers" for use on boats, but they don't measure how much power you've drawn. With a modern LiFePO4 battery this is a big issue, because you can't really estimate power from voltage. These boxes also don't provide charging: on a boat that's not a feature you're looking for. So I think full featured portable power supplies and DIY setups are the two main options.
Personally, I'm glad to have both systems:
The Anker SOLIX portable power supply is much more flexible: it powers things over AC, provides USB ports, charges very quickly from the wall if power is available, and can be recharged by solar.
The DIY 12v system is simpler, less likely to break, modular and easy to fix, and cheaper. If I want to go bigger, I can expand my total capacity just by buying additional batteries at $0.11 / Wh.
I can also move power between the two systems with relatively low losses, to take advantage of flexibility or capacity as needed.
I'd really like to know how much power this would draw and how long I could run it for, but without actually building something and taking measurements all I can do is estimate. A big question is whether it could get to useful levels of pressurization: I don't think it would get anywhere close to +75 Pa, but maybe +10 Pa would still be possible and good enough if we can avoid wind by pressurizing something inside an existing building? For now I'll set all that aside and look just at the case that's easy for me to work with: running the air purifier as it's designed to be operated.
So: how long can I run the AirFanta for? What setting should I use if I want to maximize my clean air delivery rate (CADR)?
The manufacturer gives power and throughput numbers, but I expect slightly lower power usage from running it directly on DC. They report 33.2W on the highest setting while I measured 29.2W, so this looks like a factor of 14%, just around where you'd expect. Scaling down by that factor, and calculating CFM per Watt, I get:
| Setting | Power (W) | CFM | CFM/W |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1.93 | 57 | 30 |
| 2 | 4.12 | 141 | 34 |
| 3 | 9.74 | 247 | 25 |
| 4 | 16.58 | 321 | 19 |
| 5 | 24.04 | 374 | 16 |
| 6 | 29.12 | 413 | 14 |
You can see that setting 2 is the most efficient but also produces less air: if you have unlimited purifiers you should run them all on 2, but if you need more output you might need to run them higher to get sufficient CADR.
We can also estimate the runtime we'd get at different speeds. I'll model the 12v DIY system as a 100Ah LiFePO4 12.8v cell (1,280 Wh) while the Anker C1000 is 1,056 Wh. [1] I'm estimating that the C1000 loses 2.5W just by being on, an additional 7W if it needs to run the inverter, loses 7% on DC-DC conversion (12V port) and 14% on DC-AC conversion (AC outlets). So I'll model the 12V DIY system, the C1000 via the 12V port, and the C1000 via the AC ports (where we then lose another 14% on AC-DC conversion):
| Setting | 12 DIY | C1000 DC | C1000 AC |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 663 | 231 | 87 |
| 2 | 310 | 152 | 70 |
| 3 | 131 | 81 | 47 |
| 4 | 77 | 52 | 33 |
| 5 | 53 | 37 | 25 |
| 6 | 44 | 31 | 22 |
The effect of overhead on runtime is substantial, especially at low draw. On setting #2, producing 141 CFM, the DIY system should be able to run for just under thirteen days, the C1000 with DC for just over six, and the C1000 with AC for a little less than three. At higher draw this is less of a concern, since if the fan needs 29W losing 2.5W (or even 9.5W) to overhead matters less.
This pushes the analysis much more in the direction of the DIY system, especially if lower current is enough.
[1] Because the LiFePO4 cell has charge limiting circuitry built in,
it's ok to run it to 0%: it will just shut off. While you shouldn't
store it fully discharged, in this case I'm imagining we recharge it
promptly. This means we get the full capacity from both batteries.
2026-06-01 21:00:00
Most rooftop solar installs don't provide power when the grid is down. The primary goal is to avoid sending power out to the grid where it could injure people working to restore power, but more recently it's been expanded to avoid energized lines extending out from the panel where they could injure a firefighter on the roof. When we installed solar in 2018 we selected an inverter which offers an outlet that provides best-effort power ("Secure Power Supply") during grid outages when the sun is shining. I'd try to sell you on it, but the newer rules mean my inverter wouldn't be legal for a new install.
I suspect this doesn't pass a cost-benefit test, especially when you consider the risk of serious disasters. Since the harms of allowing it are concentrated (firefighters) while the benefits are diffuse (everyone with solar) and speculative (very uncommon for a disaster to be this serious), however, it got banned.
Still, I wanted to make sure mine was still working, and especially that it would be able to charge my two portable power stations (Anker SOLIX C1000 Gen1 and Gen2). I tried over the weekend, but it was cloudy and the panels weren't producing much. It wouldn't charge the batteries, but it could do an 8W lightbulb:
When I came home from work today, it was a complete best case scenario:
I turned off the Solar AC Disconnect, to simulate a grid outage:
I plugged in the Gen2, and it said it was drawing 1,004W:
The inverter said it was sending 1,031W, which is close enough:
This is enough for a full charge in about an hour. After it finished, I plugged in the Gen1 to charge. It said it was drawing 512W:
These were both above 50%, though, so it's possible they'd draw more power if they were less full. It looks like you can use an app with Bluetooth to adjust how much current they pull, down to 200W. I wish they had a button for this, but in the meantime I should ensure that we have at least two phones in the house with the app installed.
Overall I'm pretty happy with this, but I don't like the single point of failure with the SPS, and it also doesn't work well when it's not very sunny: there's no way for the power bank to ramp down to draw only as much as the SPS can produce. One neat thing about these power banks, however, is that they have the ability to charge directly from solar panels:
The solar input supports an 11-60V solar charger with an XT-60 connector. If you use an 11-32V solar charger, the current supports 10A max. When you use a 32-60V solar charger, the current supports 12.5A max.
You need an MC4 to XT60 cable, and you need to ensure the panel
doesn't produce more than 60V. Our first set of panels are LG Neon-R
360 (43V) and our second set are QTRON M-G2+ 425
Jinko Eagle 54 G6R (39V). In an emergency it should be possible to
repurpose a panel to charge the battery. It's possible I should get
another panel that wouldn't require climbing on the roof, though!
2026-05-31 21:00:00
When Lily was about two she told me she wanted a song about "no". This was ten years ago, and I don't remember why she wanted this, but I made something up:
This is a song about no.
This is a song about no.
This is a song about no, no, no.
This is a song about no.
The song goes... No no no no no no no no no.
The song goes... No no no no no no no no no.
The song goes... No no no no no no no no no, no, no.
This is a song about no.
It's useful anytime the kids want a song about something I don't know a song about. For example, it often served as a song about "turtle". Of course the more syllables the subject has the harder it is to sing, but that just makes it more fun.
I applied my nascent music writing skills, and tried to set it down in dots:
Julia adds:
Oh I remember why it was invented. This was when Lily was still sharing a bedroom with us (out of necessity), when she was around 20 months. She would demand songs about various things as part of going to sleep. You were asking her, "Do you want a song about frogs?" But that night she answered "no" to all suggestions. So you asked, "Do you want a song about no?"
"... Yes."
So you sang this in the dark.