I'm a technologist and researcher with interests in AI safety, the possibility of digital consciousness, and finance. I'm currently a grant-funded independent AI safety researcher. Right now, I'm working on two projects through SPAR that have implications for both AI safety and digital minds:
- Studying how functional emotions are related to model capabilities and preferences.
- Investigating model preferences in trading and dealmaking with humans.
Previously, I led quant research and research engineering at Betterment. Among other things, I was responsible for improving the model that handles trading decisions, and building simulation and evaluation infrastructure to accelerate and validate our improvements. I studied computational math at Oxford and, before that, math and philosophy at Yale.
This site features some of my fun coding projects and a couple non-technical endeavors. You can also read some essays and project write-ups here.
Selected Coding Projects
AvaLong — A web app for playing The Resistance: Avalon asynchronously. Take turns at your own pace over days, or play in real-time. Handles all the game logic: proposals, voting, missions, and the assassination phase. I currently have it running on an OpenBSD webserver from openbsd.amsterdam.
Showdown Warrior — A machine learning framework for training Pokémon Showdown battle AI. Modular architecture lets you swap decision-making strategies. Bots can learn from self-play or by watching human matches.
LumaBeat — An Arduino project that makes LED strips respond to music in real-time. Uses FFT to analyze audio frequencies and map them to colors. Bass maps to reddish, and treble to blue.
Fixing a Typo on FreeBSD Setup Screens — I ran into this while setting up my Raspberry Pi to run FreeBSD and it led to my first FOSS OS contribution :)
Some Other Stuff
My brother Tim is a musician. I maintain his site. We recently made an EP together with our sister called Horse Lizard Bird.
My review of Alexander Riegler, Karl H. Müller, and Stuart A. Umpleby's New Horizons for Second-Order Cybernetics was published in the American Book Review.