Raymond's Weblog^

About Me

I guess I’m a bit of a generalist. I did my degree in mathematics and philosophy mostly because I wanted good fundamentals and I didn’t want to specialise.

Officially the thing I do is run a residency programme, which in practice is a way for me to live with people I like and have space to work on a very broad range of projects.

Over the past few years my main interests have been:

Research, mostly into machine learning, predictive models, and causality
Writing, sometimes about AI, often satirical, originally plays but more recently screenplays
Teaching, mostly at little workshops, where I tend to teach epistemology, information theory, and sometimes a bit of music
Startups, usually little side projects: formerly a dating app and a charity that provided on-demand mentoring, and currently something to do with housing
Music, mostly in the form of little singalongs, and mostly the guitar or the ukulele, although I dabble in the harmonica
Drifting, which for me has meant usually not staying in one country for more than six months, although that seems to be changing

“But who are you really?”

Some opinions:

AI is probably the most important thing going on right now, and that there’s a reasonable chance it will lead to a catastrophe
It is often useful to reason about the world in terms of incentive landscapes, and to ask how the ‘preferences’ of a group might differ from the preferences of its members
The part of the world I grew up in is having a crisis of faith: many structures that used to facilitate relationships have collapsed, been dismantled, or been outcompeted
There are enormous gains to thinking carefully about what you want and then trying to do it, as opposed to roughly imitating whatever you see other people doing

About the site

It’s a nice easy Jekyll site on Github Pages. I tweak the css a bit, I write little markdown files, and they miraculously appear on the internet.

Aesthetics

I’m going with minimalism. This is basically the default primer theme, but I tinted the background a little and replaced blue links with dotted underlines that darken when you hover over them. I also decided to add a parallax dot effect in the background, because I wanted the site to feel slightly more distinct.

A Brief History

I used to be on Ghost, because I worked for a company that used Ghost, but it was overproduced and too complex, and it was hard for me to publish posts if I pictured all my subscribers reading them, partly because lots of people I really liked and respected had subscribed.

So I nuked it and switched to this incredibly hacky static site where every page had a link to a boilerplate.js script that loaded the css. I let my thoughts branch a bit more, and it was more like a living document. But it was an unmanageable mess.

This is the third iteration, with some of the original posts preserved. For now it’s minimalist, lightweight, and easy to maintain. We’ll see how it goes!

Frequently asked questions

(The current bar is about three times)

^?

It’s a caret. I use it to track and denote unfinished things a bit like a proofreading caret, although those are usually lower, like this: ‸.

I also like it as a neutral icon which nods at exponentiation. Something something working in public, shipping before you’re ready, compounding growth.