shipwrecks

8, in preadolescence: I loved reading and video games. During 3rd grade alone, I devoured over 10,000 pages of young adult fiction. On my Game Boy Advance, I rode my bicycle together w my level 98 Charizard in the canonical Pokemon Yellow.

I was born into a religious cult, which complicated my process of individuation. Rather than studying mathematics diligently with private tutors to get into MIT or Stanford, I was grappling with my identity pedagogy from the embryo. After reading the Book of Mormon at the age of 12, I prayed to God with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith hope in Christ. There was no external response: even if there was, I was already smart enough to understand that coincidence and emotion could never be taken as scientific evidence of a higher power.

Everyone encouraged me to try again, to have faith. I felt cognitive dissonance, I felt like it would be insincere to approach my child consciousness in relation to nature with a confirmation bias. You see, I had already read Danny, the Champion of the World and I knew Roald Dahl was a much better author than Joseph Smith.

Less than a week prior my journey to the divine, I had played Minecraft for the first time. The feeling I had, hiding in a dark cave that first night, listening to the clacking of skeletons outside... It made me feel alive.

God was boring, I wanted to play Minecraft.

14, I started teaching myself how to create games in Stencyl.

15, I read Les Misérables. It was my first encounter with the nuances of morality and the arguments of atheism.

I didn't realize it at the time: but I was a budding rationalist pursing a self-developed ontology in an homogenous environment of missionary fanatics!

18, I move to Salt Lake City to go to the University of Utah to be an entrepreneur. I read books on linguistics to create a language learning video game - Hola Mundo. I raise a couple thousand dollars; create pixel art and a drag-n-drop prototype.

Everything falls apart. My hand is cut by a thick shard of a broken glass carton of milk after unloading grocery palettes from a semi truck to the Sugarhouse Smiths for 6 hours straight. I don't have enough money for tuition for a second semester.

Broken carton of milk on the floor. First person perspective. Looking at my hand, which is cut by a thick shard of a broken glass. Blood and milk swirling.

When I encountered LessWrong, it was like walking into a nostalgic home.

26, 2023 was the hardest year of my life. The most beautiful and kind Diné woman parted with me — in a wintery Montana March I landed boots first, in what I can only describe generously in hindsight as a PvE permadeath Rust gardening server.

Entering permaculture survival mode on the homeless heels of running out of savings to independently develop my natural language game engine Future Literate: I attempted to grow all my own food and build my own housing from raw Ponderosa pines.

My playful hand-cultivated three sister curve life wilted dead overnight during a month-late frost. I had trouble getting enough access to the sawmill, due to my carefree passionate attitude clashing with the austere rules of a gustatory eco-monarchy governance structure.

By the time I had escaped from four months of indentured servitude to get access to an acre of land for a year, I had no money for organic food, no money for transportation, no money for tools, no money for housing supplies.

I forage huckleberries by borrowing an electric bicycle without asking to ride 10 miles up a hill into Lolo National Forest. The bike gets a flat at the top of the hill. I walk for hours to get back. I borrow a truck to go get the bike, the motor on the truck overheats and the truck ceases to function. Nobody likes that. I feel unwelcome here, I feel impoverished and unsafe.

I try to get a gamedev job in Seattle, but it doesn't work out. I end up walking 25 miles to try to get back, before the pain in my feet gifts me the humility to hitchhike. I abandon everything I own and cycle 210 miles through rural backroads to Missoula, Montana. I spend my last $6 on an espresso latte and collapse penniless into noon-nap at a park.

I start delivering DoorDash orders on my bicycle. Over the summer and into fall, I cycle about 2000 miles, delivering over 400 orders. I intended to use the money to buy a car, but instead I spend my sweaty dash dollars an old gaming laptop and write Planning Constraint Adaptive Paths to Novel Ecosystems, a paper on open ended AI invention for NeurIPS Temporal Graph Learning Workshop. I visit Stanford campus to meditate and work on AI safety after independently studying the CS224W course material. My project was to create a graph neural network dataset for research on open source hardware product ecology pathfinding in PyG... someone stole my sleeping bag in Palo Alto, and, right after I returned, someone stole my new sleeping bag.

Eventually, the pain of what I experienced day to day became grief, and the grief of my physical discomfort together with my anxiety of our civilization lacking the civic capability to create AI safely became psychological trauma. I've always tried to be so strong and resilient, to encourage my imagination and reading literacy to nurture life and intelligence, to prototype the integrated open source software-hardware infrastructure to back lifelong learning and play for every person, every day.

I learned that I'm not strong enough to survive alone. I'm not sure if H. Sapiens will make it either, so I've been learning how to be unconditionally kind, and to develop proactive emotional intelligence to support those who have been kind to me.

My dad is a really kind hardworking guy, he's good with tools and social situations in ways that I'm not. When I messaged him to ask if he would bring my Voron 2.4 up to Montana so I could prototype a housekeeping robot for hotels, he bought me a Honda car to help me with my complex life situation. I was planning to use my $1000 in savings for a 256GB RAM realtime Wikipedia future simulation server prototype.

Here's my maternal grandmother, stacking the emotionless rain-greyed phalanges of the terpine skeleton of Robot Dojo.

My library buttressed in bags and suitcases did not remain sheltered for my rushed absence due to mammals and weather, and thus most of my books became a decomposition dataset for my book simulator. My limbic system haunts the crevasses of my sulci for the irresponsibility of sinking my 2nd edition Jane Eyre and rakes on a 1st The Naked Sun.

Game Over for Immortality Upload.

Evolution of my Sensitive Soul, consumed by microbes.

Trashing Yuval's 21 Lessons for the 21st Century with Speculative Everything alongside... tampons box? I would have smiled if I wasn't having trouble breathing, being strangled by pathos.

I was scammed by permaculture into trying to build affordable housing from nature with integrated autonomous life support technology in a village of ghosts, scammed by LessWrong into deep concern about global existential risk caused by imaginary future AI, and scammed by DoorDash into accepting rich people transferring the mortality risk of the United States' automobile infested nightmare of a transportation system to my body to try and fund AI safety on a bicycle.

I spent 3 months homeless working on AI safety in 2023 (I was developing a realtime Wikipedia future simulation consensus supervision server architecture for autonomous invention-pathfinding Linux desktop software agents — Graph Simulator).

I have lost my emotions now because I think that future simulation AI architecture is safety critical for prevention of mass extinction events caused by technology, but it is maladaptive for me to work on it because nobody cares.

What did I do wrong? Why can't I work on automated open source hardware science labs for nematode emulation research?

I don't have a PhD in nematology, but I studied how to grow a makerspace with graph neural networks to build a spaceship with Taraxacum kok-saghyz!

Why is my creativity I love so much as worthless as chewed gum stuck in hair to others, even backed with months and months of 12 hour days working as hard as I can?

After reading Marvin Minsky's book, The Emotion Machine, I was equipped with the mechanisms to pierce my consciousness, and I destroyed the selectors inside of myself that cared about AI safety.

AI safety is no longer my problem since I am not paid to 200k/y work on imaginary future problems. It's DARPA's problem now.