Bragging Thread, August 2014

I live in an Asian country. I've won a scholarship worth 50000 USD per year for four years that will allow me to read Mathematics&CS at the University of Oxford! Also, I am now in a romantic relationship that I've wanted for quite some time now. I'm having one heck of a great month. That being said, the relationship and the going abroad thing aren't going to go very well together, but I'm sure I'll manage somehow.

My startup recently closed an incredibly important deal, and had amazing growth in July, and important people are interested in investing. Proud to have gotten this far. Excited to see what's next. A bit overworked but it feels kinda good.

I've written a short fiction piece that has been accepted for publication. My first ever professional publication will appear in February's issue of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine.

I've turned in the complete draft of my first book to my editor, and 4/6 cool people I asked to blurb it said yes.

A girl (who I shall not name here) has been hitting on me on Facebook recently. On Friday August 1st, we went on a date.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Does losing weight count? According to the arbitrarily precise $20 digital bathroom scale I bought from Walmart, I weighed 233.6 lbs on July 1, and 223.4 lbs as of this morning.

I weighed 263.8 lbs on April 16, about two weeks after the start of my current diet. The BMI charts I've looked at say I should weigh ~ 170 lbs, or about what I did in my senior year of high school ('77-'78). That weight doesn't sound feasible to me now.

I'm currently interning at MIRI, I had a short technical conversation with Eliezer, a multi hour conversation with Michael Vassar, and other people seem to be taking me as somewhat of an authority on AI topics.

After the MH17 flight was shot down in the skies of eastern Ukraine, I spent an insane amount of time poring over various bits and pieces of evidence that pointed to how it happened and who was responsible. Soon after the crash evidence started appearing that on that day a Russian-made BUK missile launcher was driven through nearby towns controlled by the separatists, and the SBU, the Ukrainian counterpart of the FBI, published intercepts of phone conversations between rebels that indicate the missile launcher was brought across the border from Russia the night before and sent by one of the rebel commanders to the exact location where the launch was suspected to have come from. However, much of this evidence was scattered, inconclusive, or quickly claimed to have been faked by the SBU, and at the same time other versions of what may have happened appeared and multiplied.

I found bits and pieces of local evidence from July 17th before the crash (e.g. locals tweeting they saw a BUK driving through their town or talking about hearing the launch), located and double-checked detective work already done by others (e.g. geolocation of key photographs/videos showing the BUK launcher), and noticed that several people working independently from different bits of evidence converged, without knowing of each other, on a particular location southeast of the town of Torez as the launch site. I compiled it all together into a long compelling blog post (in Russian) filled with evidence and careful examination of each piece of evidence, how it could or could not have been faked, and how this all ties together into an overwhelmingly likely version. The post and its followups saw >3000 comments from people debating various pieces of evidence and debunking alternative stories, with subthreads going into expert discussions on weather conditions, correctness of geolocation efforts, JPEG compression artefacts, debunking of conspiracy theories based on an unlikely Youtube date-tagging bug, and much else. Journalists travelled to the suspected launch site and found burned ground and suspicious-looking plastic pieces (but no smoking gun). An independent Russian TV channel invited me to appear on a panel (I did so by Skype) to communicate the evidence.

Drawing from several online resources, including lukeprog's "How to Beat Procrastination," I helped my high-school-aged daughter understand the workings of her brain a bit better. She has had great success in achieving several short-term goals for herself over the past month.

Testing an algorithm I developed a byproduct algorithm which outputs 3D crosswords. Automatically given a list of words. Many thousands of them are already on my PC.

This has been virtually unknown before, at least with a few or no black fields.

Now I wonder, can I sell this to newspapers, would their readers enjoy that kind of a puzzle? Six 6 by 6 square crosswords, interdependent with each other by the third dimension at every field.

Or some even bigger cubes, perhaps 10 by 10 by 10? Or a 5 by 6 by 7 crossword?

The building algorithm is here now. But I don't want to spend too much time with this anymore. A middle-man or a middle-firm to newspapers would be appreciated.

I applied to be a Black Rock Ranger (it's a Burning Man thing), and just completed training today.

I made a website featuring my artwork and re-opened my freelance art business. I already have people asking about commissions! Yay!

I've written 12 chapters of my web serial, Watchmirror, over the course of the summer, and it recently topped 2000 page views. It doesn't sound like much, but it was way more than I ever expected.

I wrote a 140 character lambda calculus interpreter and a bigger and more complete (static name resolution + renaming + repl) version of it.

June 1st or July 1st?

I translated the essay Superintelligence and the paper In Defense of posthuman Dignity by Nick Bostrom into German in order to publish them on the blog of GBS Schweiz.

He thanked me by sending me a signed copy of his new book "Superintelligence". Which made me pretty happy.

Flew to and from Canada over the July 4th Weekend, brought in a large relationship (client) for my firm, updated my wardrobe, celebrated Eid & the end of Ramadan, and signed up for lesswrong.