How am I spending my time?

As of April 2024, I'm:

• Working full-time at BlueDot Impact building the AI safety and alignment field. I've recently been working on:
  • figuring out an AI safety field strategy, as part of being a field catalyst that develops a strong field
  • building a new introductory AI safety course
• Handling technology and governance at Raise, a charity that encourages students to think about effective giving. This includes handling our end-of-year submissions to the Charity Commission, and looking after our open-source software.
• Learning about:
  • implementing AI evaluations with local LLMs, including making improvements to projects like inspect-ai, inspect-evals, llama-cpp-python
  • agentic AI coding tools, particularly Cline, which I'm trying to upskill the BlueDot team to use
  • the model context protocol, including building MCP servers for Airtable and computer use
  • science of learning principles, from Stephen Kosslyn's books, so I can apply these to the courses at BlueDot and my blog writing
• Hobbies:
  • board games: Magic Maze and Aeon's End
  • video games: PlateUp and Ultimate Chicken Horse
  • physical activity: renovating the house! (which also involves cycling to Screwfix every ~5 minutes when I realise I've forgotten something)

Featured projects

• AWS Email Simulator: enables devs to test emails without AWS credentials, and work productively without internet. Downloaded over 650,000 times.
• YouTube thumbnail hider: browser extension with over 60,000 weekly active users and plenty of glowing 5-star reviews.
• Apply for a postal vote service: fully-working GOV.UK-style service. I think this is the first ever properly electronic version of this form.
• Serverless offline watcher: developer tool that enables extending the Serverless framework with arbitrary file or directory hooks.
• London cycle parking: find cycle parking quickly in London.
• ISA tracking tool: compatible with 4 brokers for read and write operations. Has reliably tracked my ISA performance every day for the last 5 years.
• PDF scanner: add a scanned look to documents, more convincingly than existing services.
• RSA SecurID library: reverse-engineered security token generator, derived from a C library. Also available as an easy-to-use browser extension.
• TypeScript i18n library: A lightweight, flexible, and fully type-safe translation framework for websites, native apps and servers.
• Google Doc to LaTeX: Converter that makes writing LaTeX a piece of cake.
• Discord reminder bot template: send reminders from GitHub. 2 min setup.
• Day visualiser: ever felt you needed more existential dread in your life? See how fast the day is slipping away from you.
• Media: I publish free-cultural works on places like Wikimedia Commons (where I also helped build the Android app). They've ended up in US state forestry manuals, South African national textbooks, papers on language models, and YouTube videos with millions of views.

Most of these have their source code availabile on my GitHub. You can contribute to support their development.

Communicating with me

Note: Don't worry too much about following these exactly! Details here are mostly relevant for people I work with a lot.

From you to me:

• Bias towards overcommunicating with me. Leave pauses so I can interrupt you if you're telling me stuff I don't think is relevant.
• Give me feedback. Prefer unpolished timely feedback to no or late feedback. Bonus points if you can be specific or provide examples.
• State your uncertainties and where you've made assumptions.
• Dislikes unplanned synchronous communications.
  • Exception: if we are colleagues and something is blocking you.
• Asynchronous comms:
  • Slack if we have a workspace in common relevant to the topic, you know I check that workspace, and it's something short.
  • WhatsApp, Messenger or Telegram for personal stuff (no formal work comms).
    • Exception: If we're working somewhere that doesn't have a communication tool, you can send work comms here.
  • Google Docs or similar for anything longer or that needs collaboration.
  • Email for everything else, or where you're not sure.
  • It's fine for you to send me asynchronous communications while sitting next to me.
  • If you need me to do or answer something, make it obvious. For example:
    • Add '[Action required]' to the subject.
    • Prefix tasks with 'Action required:' and bold them.
    • State any relevant timelines upfront.
  • If I need to read it, use the email 'to' line or tag my Slack handle.
  • Don't inline reply to emails. It's hard to see what's been added, muddies email history, and causes difficult-to-resolve forks.
  • Don't just say hello.
  • Prefer to communicate widely (e.g. Slack channels/email distros, not DMs) so others can learn from our conversation later.
    • Exception: discussions about personal or sensitive matters
• Synchronous comms:
  • Likes: In person, or Google Meet.
• Enjoys working in public
• If you're asking me to review something, see my review guide.

From me to you:

• I try to triage comms within 72 hours, and respond within 1 week. Slower when I'm extra busy. I don't usually send acknowledgement messages unless asked.
• Assume misunderstanding, not malice. In particular:
  • If I'm going in the wrong direction, tell me early.
  • I tend to overcommunicate to ensure we're aligned. Interrupt me if I'm telling you something you know!
  • If I am slow to respond, I'm likely a bit overloaded with other stuff.
• I will send you asynchronous communications while sitting next to you, unless you ask me not to. This is to avoid interrupting you, and so that you can instead address comments at a time that is convenient to you.
• 👀 is 'looking', ✅ is 'done', 👍 is 'acknowledged' (not meant passive aggressively), ➕ is 'agreed', 🙌 or 🎉 is 'yay'