2026-03-03: A new journal, evolution tricks, AI behaving, git & ssh, remote setup, writing tools
2026-03-02 — 2026-03-02
Over the past fortnight Dan’s popped out two new posts and gone back over nine older ones — enough to keep him off the street. Big idea bit is that he’s started a new “Alignment Journal”, meaning he’s keeping a running log on how to get clever systems to do what you meant, not what you said. On the theory side, “evolution strategies” and “genetic programming”, which is just letting a computer try a heap of dumb guesses, keep the good ones, and breed the next lot — like picking the best rams, but for code. On the practical side he’s been fettling his tool kit: git tricks for wrangling file changes, SSH (a safe way to log into another computer), plus Remote Desktop and a few Markdown editors so his notes don’t turn into a junk drawer. And there’s a bit of life admin in there too — time use, his “Now” page, and a London update, because apparently the lad does leave the house sometimes.
1 Newly published
1.1 New project: an Alignment Journal
Dan’s gone and helped start a proper open-access journal for AI alignment — basically a place where people can put their research on “how do we stop smart AI doing dumb or nasty stuff” without it being locked behind paywalls. In this post he explains they’re not just publishing things, they’re mucking around with different ways of doing peer review, to see if you can get better feedback and fewer old-boy games. He and another editor, Jess, are running it for a year as a trial, then they’ll look hard at whether it’s actually doing any good. If you’ve ever thought science can be a bit of a closed shop, this is them having a crack at making it more open — and they’re asking people to submit, review, or just keep an eye on it and call it as they see it.
1.2 Evolution strategies
Picture training a neural net without doing any of that backprop maths at all — you just jiggle the weights with random noise, see what scores better, then nudge the weights that way. That’s what “evolution strategies” are, and Dan lays out the basic loop with Gaussian jiggles, plus the neat “antithetic” trick where you try +noise and -noise so a lot of the rubbish cancels out. He also bangs on (usefully) about how you’re really optimising a blurred version of your real goal, and the blur knob is that sigma value — too big and you chase the wrong thing, too small and the noise goes feral unless you run heaps of tries. Then he clears up the Bayes confusion: the distribution you sample from is just a search gadget, not some heartfelt belief about the world. Worth a look if your “model” has ugly bits like if-statements, simulators, or other stuff that makes gradients impossible, but you can afford lots of forward runs in parallel.
2 Updated
2.1 Git tricks
Most folks pick through merge fights file by file; Dan’s got a sneaky way to tell Git “nah, take ours” (or “take theirs”) for the whole mess in one go, and he’s even made fish shortcuts so you don’t have to remember the spell. He also clears up why Git’s weird names like refs/heads/… aren’t magic — they’re just little signposts pointing at a commit, and they shift as the branch shifts. Handy when you’re cleaning up branches and tags, or pinching a folder out of a big repo without dragging the whole lot home. Bit of tidying round the edges too.
2.2 Time management
Funny thing about time: the minute you start tracking it, you can either get smarter or just start gaming the numbers. Dan’s big point here is “don’t Goodhart yourself” — don’t turn your timer into a new way to muck about, use it to spot what’s actually chewing up your day. He’s keener on tracking that doesn’t snoop on your typing too, so open-source tools like ActivityWatch get a guernsey over the creepier ones. Then he goes full ‘autoblackmail’: set a rule, and if you don’t do the thing, you cough up cash — because your brain hates losses more than it loves goals. It’s a bit ruthless, but it works when willpower’s running on fumes.
2.3 ssh
Turns out SSH isn’t stuck being that fragile little TCP thing that drops dead the second your internet has a sook. Dan’s banging on about two sneaky paths: you can tunnel SSH through HTTPS so it looks like normal web traffic (handy for airport or hotel ‘no fun allowed’ Wi‑Fi), and you can run it via QUIC, the newer plumbing behind HTTP/3 that can stay steadier on rotten links. The clever bit with QUIC is you don’t have to rebuild your SSH gear — you stick a proxy in the middle and off you go. If you’ve ever had a long remote job die at 98% because the line blinked, you’ll see why he’s interested.
2.4 Markdown editors
Here’s the funny bit: Markdown’s meant to be “just text”, but the minute you want proper maths, it turns into a tool-picking headache. Dan’s basically saying the editor matters less for pretty headings and more for whether it can show equations without you wanting to throw the laptop in the dam. He’s lined up options from the fancy stuff like VS Code and Typora, right down to little command-line viewers, plus this Mist thing where you can share a draft by URL and muck around together. Handy if you’re writing anything technical and you want it to feel smooth, not like you’re fighting the software the whole time.
2.5 London
London’s not really one city, it’s a stack of odd little worlds with their own rules — and Dan’s leaning hard into finding the truly “only-in-London” bits, not the postcard stuff. The fun trick here is he’s using signals from real people (like those wildly split TripAdvisor reviews) to sniff out places that are either magic or a total stitch‑up, which is exactly where the good stories live. He’s also clocked the day‑to‑day survival angle, like how finding a decent coffee can turn into a weird little quest in a town that reckons it runs the world. And he’s chucking in practical local intel too — like where you can roll in with a Brompton without getting side‑eyed.
2.6 Remote Desktop
Remote desktop’s a moving target now — the “least-worst” pick changes depending what fresh hell each tool’s shipped this year, from dodgy privacy to junky UX. Dan’s basically keeping a cheat-sheet of which protocol speaks to which, so you don’t waste a day trying to make the wrong client talk to the wrong server. He’s also clocked newer options like RustDesk and even gamer gear like Moonlight.
2.7 Intentional language
Funny thing: we’re hopeless at dry logic, but give it a “who’s breaking the rules at the pub” story and our brains nail it. Dan reckons that’s why talking about a machine like it “wants” stuff can be a handy shortcut—just don’t start seeing ghosts everywhere. He even wonders if the same trick makes “workers” and “capital” easier to think about, like two mobs with plans.
2.8 Now
Dan’s put a name to the bit that matters: not just “can the AI predict stuff?”, but “can it take the wheel?” That’s what he means by causal agency (when a system’s choices actually steer what happens next) and AI disempowerment (how to stop the thing from quietly grabbing more control than you meant to hand over). He’s also trying to be a real human in Melbourne while he’s at it — living in that cohousing mob, wrangling a shopfront into a gig spot, and still doing the odd DJ mix when life lets him. Makes it sound less like a bloke in a lab and more like someone building a life around the scary bits he’s thinking about.
2.9 Genetic programming
Genetic programming’s the old “breed bits of code till it works” trick, but Dan’s blunt: it usually loses to backprop these days. The clever bit is where the real juice went — evolutionary strategies, which is less ‘copy nature’ and more ‘use random tries (Monte Carlo) to tune big neural nets’, and that can actually keep up.