My Experiences in Gray Swan AI’s Ultimate Jailbreaking Championship

A quick jaunt into the world of red-teaming turned into a month-long free-fall down the rabbit hole of AI psycho-warfare

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Ruby's Vocabulary Acquisition

I tracked every word that Ruby learned to say in the first 2.5 years of life, analyzing vocab compared to her brothers.

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Tenth Year Book Sales

In which I ignore how many copies of The Motivation Hacker I sold for six years, then "just" ask the AI.

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Christmas Gift Ideas – ChatGPT vs. Google

In which I have a magical Christmas shopping experience with the AI

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Meet Ruby

Photos from the first few weeks of baby Ruby's life

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Clark's Vocabulary Acquisition

I tracked every word that Clark learned to say in the first 2.5 years of life, graphing it and comparing it to Max's.

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Second Year Book Sales

I always love it when people share revenue data for their apps / games / books / works, and it's been two years sinc...

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The Motivation Hacker: Now in Paperback

Reader Raj Bapna has formatted The Motivation Hacker into a paperback, so you can now get one and do your normal boo...

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First Year Book Sales

I always love it when people share revenue data for their apps / games / books / works, and it's been a year since T...

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Aftermath: The Motivation Hacker

It's been almost six months since I published The Motivation Hacker, my book on how to get yourself to want to do wh...

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The Tetris Effect and Markov Paul Graham

My head obsesses. I get songs stuck in my head so badly that I have to leave the room when "I'm On A Boat" comes on,...

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Demo Day Done

A month before Y Combinator Demo Day, I resolved to be as productive as possible for 30 days, since they say that th...

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Startup Blogging

Here are the last six posts I've written for the CodeCombat blog over the past few months. Look at the view counts:T...

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CodeCombat in Y Combinator

Originally posted on the CodeCombat blog.What a crazy weekend! We launched our beta on Friday morning by posting to ...

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Just What's Up

Here are some of the posts I want to write: experiential sampling tools, the butter eating competition story, experi...

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Maniacs, Minimalists, and Mega-Hike

ManiacsInspired by my 120-Hour Workweek Epic Coding Time-lapse video, Bethany and Danny over at Beeminder have done ...

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What If You Could Copy Yourself?

There's a thought experiment people use when they think about possible future technologies like teleportation and cr...

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Probs Some Techie Millionaire Too Good for Shoes

This is the 2nd time I've seen this kid, both times with a burrito, and NO shoes. It's in SOMA, and he has a fancy b...

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Stress Fractures

During the hike up King's Peak (wild bachelor party, I know), I was a lithe gecko gliding up the trail. When going d...

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MealSquares, the Ultimate Lifehacker Food

I used to eat food. I still do, but I used to, too.You have probably heard of Soylent, the liquid meal replacement w...

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Calibrating Spending

When I was a kid, I didn't work. I got a tiny allowance ($5 per week, or maybe per month), and every now and then I'...

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Anonymously Admonish Me, Please

It's that time again where I become a better person. Help me out, would ya? Follow this link to give me anonymous ad...

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The Time I Flushed My New iPhone Down the Toilet

Here's an old post from 2011-11-21 I thought I'd save from Google+. It is just two years old and already my G+ histo...

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Unnecessary Things

After a reader asked about why I don't use shower products on the cold showers post comments, I started thinking of ...

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Cold Showers, Tested

A few months ago, I set out to test cold showers. Here's what I wrote for my experimental mission statement:People a...

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Help Me Become a Better Conversationalist

Watch out: I use "I" 54 times in this post, so this will be boring if you, like me, aren't interested in hearing me ...

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Mother-In-Law's Tongue, Areca Palm, Money Plant

These are the three plants I have out of my 99 things. I went to a plant nursery and bought them after my friend Dav...

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Willpower and Success Spirals

I was talking to a friend who seemed to be independently rediscovering what he called self-referential motivation: m...

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Badass Points

04:06. The wake light has gradually brightened to 20% brightness, but I cut it off early. It's time to rise, silentl...

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Spiraling Into Control

I wrote this as a guest post on the Beeminder blog — comments can live there.It’s dark. Warm. Safe. You’re in bed, a...

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Magic Towel Pull-Ups

For a few months in the beginning of 2012, the only exercise I got was doing 10-20 sets of pull-ups a day. I was hac...

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Breathing slower?

I was thinking of 1) setting something up where I could monitor my breath rate while working at my computer and 2) u...

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How to Really Make an Impression When Speaking Chinese

I just got back from a business trip to China, where I visited Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. I listened to and s...

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Murphyjitsu

Humans are naturally bad at predictions. Being bad at predictions, and figuring out how to make better ones, sounds ...

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Active vs. Passive Learning, or Production vs. Recognition

Here's another concept from language learning pedagogy (see also Extensive vs. Intensive Learning): the difference b...

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Extensive vs. Intensive Learning

In language learning, there's a slightly obscure but useful concept of "extensive reading" vs. "intensive reading". ...

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Getting better at making accurate predictions with PredictionBook

I use a site called PredictionBook to make predictions, say how likely I think they are to occur, and then later jud...

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Extreme Learning

Yesterday, I went down to the Institute for the Future for a workshop on "extreme learning". There were many diverse...

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Bantling: Name Your Baby With Algorithms

When Chloe and I were trying to come up with baby names, every conversation would go something like this:Chloe: "New...

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My .emacs

Emacs wizards will tell you that it is not merely a text editor, but an operating system; not just a way to work, bu...

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The 120-Hour Workweek - Epic Coding Time-Lapse

Last week I set out to see how many hours of programming work I could do in one week on CodeCombat, our multiplayer ...

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Upcoming Maniac Week

Starting Monday morning at 04:00, and ending the next Monday at 03:59, I'm going to see how many hours of CodeCombat...

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Telepath Logger Now Open Source

A while ago I was working with Yoni on Telepath, a project to make your laptop do passive machine learning on your e...

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Meet Clark

Now I have two kids. So far, it's pretty similar to just having one kid. The time and energy needed to sustain doubl...

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Fourth Year Book Sales

I always love it when people share revenue data for their apps / games / books / works, and it's been four years sin...

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Max's Vocabulary Acquisition

Max's vocabulary started exploding around 15-17 months old. I started writing down everything he could say (with und...

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Video: Max's Second Year

Max recently turned two, so I made another video! See also the video I made for his first year....

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Video: Max's First Year

Since Max turned one last week, I made a poignant video of poignancy showing him growing up over the past year....

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Surprises From Max's First Four Months

Baby Max is four months old today. I posted when he was one month, talking about what a difficult little demon he wa...

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Meet Max

We have reproduced! Max is one month old now. Here's his birth announcement photo, where he looks adorable:Apart fro...

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Wife and Husband

Chloe and I dated for six years. For three years*, we were long-distance. For five years, starting five months in, I...

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