I (and many others) recently received an email about the Lightcone fundraiser, which included:

Many people with (IMO) strong track records of thinking about existential risk have also made unusually large personal donations, including ..., Zac Hatfield-Dodds, ...

and while I'm honored to be part of this list, there's only a narrow sense in which I've made an unusually large personal donation: the $1,000 I donated to Lightcone is unusually large from my pay-what-I-want budget, and I'm fortunate that I can afford that, but it's also much less than my typical annual donation to GiveWell. I think it's plausible that Lightcone has great EV for impartial altruistic funding, but don't count it towards my efffective-giving goal - see here [LW(p) · GW(p)] and here [LW(p) · GW(p)].

(I've also been happy to support Lightcone by attending and recommending events at Lighthaven, including an upcoming metastrategy intensive, and arranging a donation swap [LW(p) · GW(p)], but don't think of these as donations)

I'd love a "post a hash" feature, where I could make a private post with hashes of a post's title and body. Then when the post is publishable, it could include a verified-by-LW "written at" timestamp as well as the time it was actually published and some time-of-publication post-matter.

Idea prompted by re-reading a private doc I wrote earlier this year, and thinking that it'd be nice to have trustable timestamps if or when it's feasible to publish such docs. Presumably others are in a similar position; it's a neat feature for e.g. predictions (although you'd want some way to avoid the "hash both sides, reveal correct" problem).

Downgrading my competence estimation: Taiwan and Singapore's current coronavirus surge should serve as a warning to Australia (ABC Australia). Excerpts:

Taiwan

Taiwan's status for having successfully contained the virus was challenged in April ... Rules had been relaxed prior to the outbreak, allowing pilots to quarantine for three days instead of the full 14.

At first, infections were reported from pilots, hotel workers and their family members. ... Taiwanese were staying at the same hotel as the quarantining pilots. From there, the virus is believed to have made its way into Taipei's Wanhua district, known for its "tea houses" ... Many who tested positive were unwilling to declare they had visited such adult entertainment venues, making contact tracing more difficult.

Singapore

Even as Singapore was being celebrated, cases were quietly spreading through the island's one vulnerable location: Changi International Airport. It's believed that airport workers who came into contact with travellers from high-risk nations may have contracted the virus before visiting Changi's food court, which is open to the public.

Many of the cases linked to the airport cluster were later found to have a highly contagious Indian variant, known as B.1.617. ... "It's not like everything was relaxed in Singapore. It's not like behaviour has changed in the last six months. But I do think we've got a less-forgiving virus, which is more easily transmitted,"

Only 29 per cent of Singaporeans have received one dose. ... They're now considering lengthening the time between doses and vaccinating younger adults.

How a similar scenario would play out in Australia

What the recent outbreaks in Singapore and Taiwan show is that successful containment strategies can be thwarted by complacency and a failure to identify and act quickly to contain quarantine breaches.

Musing on a piece in Communications of the ACM lately (Changing the Nature of AI Research) - I find this level of ~reframing or insistence on a mathematical perspective quite frustratingly political. ISTM that this just isn't how software or AI systems work! (at least, those which can survive outside academic papers)

Taking a step back, Four Cultures of Programming (a fantastic 75-page read) discusses hacker culture, engineering culture, managerial culture, and mathematical culture in programming. I'm so deep in hacker/engineer culture that it's hard to see out of that, even if I use and appreciate (some) of the conceptual and technical tools from managerial and mathematical cultures.

(and if you want to learn more about the early history of software engineering, Arguments that Count is excellent; see also the much shorter Are we really engineers? essay series by Hillel Wayne)