Good Times In Alyssa's Life
Third-party names: Rob Brazell (negative context, "meltdown"), Peter Thiel, Elle Benjamin. Addressed partly to Milo ("The month I started dating you").
(Note: Few people knew about any of these things, either now or at the time or both, so I don't think my main motives were that other people thought it was cool or that I could show off)
- That time when I went to Burning Man, and the pump for the airbed broke while I was inflating it. After about five minutes, I figured out that I could inflate it by just blowing into it manually. I did this for about fifteen minutes and then it was full. It was wonderful, I had gotten to sleep through my own free will!
- That time when I was first kicking off MetaMed myself, after we had restarted from an early co-founder's departure (September 2012). I had just graduated from college, it was very exciting, and we could make such great progress - in a few weeks we were incorporating the company, getting money from investors, hiring people, setting up a website, starting our first big project for a famous customer, etc.
- Fall 2018's Borlaug Camp (and the long e-bike ride to and from it), which was a forerunner of the current Progress Studies conferences. Beautiful (physically, in Sebastopol CA), great ideas, got to see friends and enjoy discussions with top people in tons of fields. So much cool stuff to do, so much potential for humanity. (This wasn't happening at the conference itself, but that month was, by coincidence, also my introduction to "drugs and alcohol exist", which was new and exciting.)
- Going to the old New York Less Wrong meetup group, which was and partly still is my core social scene: <https://x.com/alyssamvance/status/1520649298651729920>
- That time in 2014 when I spent all day climbing from Oakland up to the top of the Berkeley Hills, which is about two thousand feet up. I went higher and higher, getting more tired, hour after hour… and then I got to the \top\ at the end of the day, and I could suddenly see the whole Bay (on the other side of the ridge) as the sun was setting. Miles and miles and miles.
- That time in 2010 when I got to know Peter Thiel somewhat as a college student. For years, the defining fact of my life had been being oppressed by my parents and not being able to do anything, and now I thought I was being introduced to the club of Cool, Capable Adults who Did Things and Got Taken Seriously.
- In summer 2024, I spent a bunch of time (in consequentialist terms, probably too much) being obsessed with getting FP8 AI training working. In theory, this is a new hardware feature that lets everything run twice as fast with the same GPUs. (In theory.) Tons of frameworks say they make this "easy". I spent months banging my head against the wall, off and on, until I finally grabbed some code that would just let me implement all the layers myself. And it worked!
- Friday, June 13th 2008, my last day of high school. The minute it ended, at 2:40 PM, I just took off in a random direction and walked the two miles home, whacking through the woods, far enough away that no one could hear me singing to myself. So many years and it was finally over.
- The month I started dating you, August 2022, was overall really great. There was my new relationship, of course, but also it seemed like we had this awesome opportunity with Balsa to kick out the dumb people in the Democratic Party, backed by Silicon Valley, and take over the US political system. We asked for people willing to help us and like two hundred reached out. It was ambitious and exciting and promising.
- Various things I did with a close friend, especially the week we went on vacation together during Christmas 2020.