A couple years ago I put together a Secular Solstice Songbook, a compilation of all the songs we've sung at Boston Solstice. Anna Tchetchetkine and I led a session of group singing at LessOnline, following up from an informal one the year before, and I noticed several annoying things with its chord handling:

• Despite being digital, it didn't support transposition.

• Some songs didn't repeat the chord if they were unchanged, which meant that when scrolling new lyrics into view you'd lose the chords.

• This is minor, but I like to align the chords in a grid and the repeat sign was very slightly to narrow, throwing off the grid.

In asked Claude Code to fix these, and it did almost all of it. The exception was a few cases where it wasn't obvious which chords to use and I needed to make some manual edits.

DIY testing of air cleaning is practical, and thoughtful experimental design can substitute for high-quality sensors including for evaluating air purifier setups that give >100,000x particle reductions.

I've done a lot of DIY testing over the years ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). The goal is generally to understand how well something removes particles from the air. A professional particle counter (example) costs thousands of dollars, and they're amazing devices, but what you're paying for is convenience, reliability, calibration, and dynamic range. If we're willing to give up on convenience and buy multiple devices for reliability, we can cheaply address calibration and dynamic range with experimental design.

I was in SF this weekend for LessOnline. It's nominally a blogging conference, but in practice it's more of a Rationalist meetup. I was there in my personal capacity, though I did end up having a lot of conversations about biosecurity and may have accidentally done some fundraising. Lots of good parts, but my favorite was calling and playing for a contra dance:

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Five years ago I read a post on the EA Forum arguing that "election campaign contributions might be a way in which you can have a substantial impact as a small donor". It struck me as weird but plausible: a combination that you see a lot of on the Forum.

A few months later I read another post, a case for Carrick Flynn in particular. It made a lot of sense, but while I don't remember my specific reservations I do remember not being convinced initially. After a lot of talking with Julia and others, however, this campaign did seem like a really promising opportunity. Six days later we made the donation:

I'm leading a non-profit team building a pathogen-agnostic early-warning system. As AI systems become increasingly capable substitutes for expert human biologist expertise, the risk that someone could engineer a pathogen to spread widely before detection is going up. We've made great progress and we're now running the world's largest metagenomic biosurveillance network, but there's still a huge amount that needs doing: we're hiring!

We're processing >50B read pairs of wastewater and nasal swab data each week (more than anyone else!) and will be more than doubling this in the next year. At the same time, we need to bring our end to end time down from ~12hr to ~2hr (massively parallel problem, should be possible to get <1hr).

This means we're looking for people who know how to build and scale processing systems and infra, and don't need a bio background:

• Software Engineer, High-Performance Pipelines: Engineering our metagenomic detection pipelines for speed, scalability, and reliability. (job description, ~L4-L5 equiv at Google, $165-190k)

• Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer: Own our AWS infra, which enables everything above (job description, ~L5-L6 equiv at Google, $195-220k)

Running an air purifier on a battery could be really useful in an emergency that combined a biological or nuclear threat with a power outage. Getting one that can run on 12V DC and attaching it to a LiFePO4 battery is about $188 (plus $164 for the purifier) for something that will give you 141 CFM for over a week.

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I've been thinking about DIY biohardening, primarily to reduce risks from environment-to-human threats, and a lot of what's out there assumes the power grid stays up. This doesn't seem like a good assumption: even if society does a fantastic job protecting essential workers and prioritizing keeping the grid up, I expect many more outages than we have today, and longer ones. If an outage means you lose positive pressure and get sick, that's really very bad!