About

Earthrise, taken by the Apollo 8 crew.

The Author

The author is a Finnish student doing a master's course in computer science at Cambridge. The author is interested in AI alignment, programming (particularly functional programming and Lisp), startups / entrepreneurship / any ambitious building of things, good novels, and anything that affects the long-term future of human civilisation.

The author does not usually talk in third person.

The Blog

Content on this blog can be divided into four categories:

• Book reviews, with a focus on "review" as in "overview": I usually write more about what the book says, including a lot of my own scattered thoughts which should in no way be attributed to the author(s) of the book, rather than whether I liked it and whether you should read it.
• General posts. When struck by a more pretentious mood, I call them essays.
• Posts about math/science concepts. Writing these posts is probably more helpful for me than reading them is for you.
• Posts that serve no purpose, but I find them funny. These posts are (perhaps misleadingly) tagged humour.

The best way to explore this blog is probably the posts page, which has links to every post on the blog along with short descriptions. Alternatively, you can skim titles in the archive.

Blurb quotes

For promotional purposes, the blog header includes a particularly insightful quote from a past blog post. On the advice of my marketing team, this quote is occasionally changed to keep it fresh. Past blurb quotes, with links to sources:

• "You laugh at iterative statistical curve fitting, but it might not be too long before iterative statistical curve fitting is laughing at you"
• "Utilitarianism says sausages are a moral issue" – this blog solves morality
  
• "Nuclear war is bad" – this blog analyses global issues
  
• "Maxwell's equations are scary" – this blog explains physics
  

Suggestions of other blurb-worthy quotes that advance this blog's image are welcome, whether it's from a past post or your head.

Comments

Comments and (especially) critiques are welcome.

Technical

This blog uses MathJax to display $$\LaTeX$$ math notation in a browser. If you're seeing weird syntax and dollar signs in place of equations and symbols, this isn't working; switch to a computer if you're on a phone or tablet.

Elsewhere

Other public places on the internet where I exist or have existed, usually under the username of "LRudL":

• GitHub
  
• Effective Altruism Forum
• LessWrong
• AI Alignment Forum

I have been asked to cross-post many of my posts to LessWrong, and also intend to cross-post non-introductory EA-related posts to the EA Forum. Cross-posted posts often have more comments and discussion on these forums than on this blog.

Contact