What if AI Safety employees unionised?
American bald eagle caws angrily in the distance Whoa whoa whoa, just hear me out.
Boyd's Blog
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Summary of alarming AI safety findings
Often, I’ll find myself wanting to reference AI safety papers or findings, knowing vaguely that something’s been shown to be true, but not being able to find the source paper.
AI Safety has a scaling problem
| Read on LessWrong | The problem This tweet recently highlighted two MATS mentors talking about the absurdly high qualifications of incoming applications to the AI Safety Fellowship: Another was from a recently-announced Anthropic fellow, one of 32 fellows selected from over 2000 applications, givi...
Work in progress: expert_aesthetics.md
Hey! I semi-frequently link to essays that are still being written, and track when these links get clicked.
how-to-get-into-ais-fellowships
— title: “How to get into an AIS fellowship” tags: [essay, mats, advice, retrospective] unlisted: true I’ve recently finished the 3-month MATS AI safety fellowship and am continuing with the 6-month extension in London.
Welcome!
About Me I like writing about expertise, using computers to solve problems, and bringing novel ideas into existence.
Advice on interviewing candidates for AI safety fellowships
Around July last year I decided I was going to go all in on technical AI safety research.
MATS 9 Retrospective & Advice
| LessWrong post | I couldn’t find a recent write-up from a MATS alum about what attending MATS was like, so this is the thing that I wish I had.
About Me
I’m a MATS fellow, having completed cohort 9 from Jan-Mar 2026 in Berkeley, California.
Public Comment: Draft South Africa National AI Policy (March 2026)
This is a public version of my comments sent to the South African Department of Communications and Digital Technologies on the Draft South African National AI Policy.
Extropians Archive (with OpenAI embeddings)
Claude & I vibecoded an interface for the extropians mailing list. It’s live! Have a look here: extropians.boydkane.com/.
Card Game Builder
Many card games are similar to Cards Against Humanity in that they fit the template of: a large (50+) deck of cards each card has some creative prompt or phrase generally fun at parties (until the novelty wears off) some easy-to-learn rules about how to play the cards with your friends Also in the g...
Writing every day in November 2025
In an effort to write more and to think less, I’ll be publishing something every day during November.
Schedule meetings using the Pareto principle
Basically every meeting is scheduled with an explicit duration.
Resume
You can download my CV here.
What am I working on?
Right now I’m interested in and working on: MATS 9 and MATS 9 extension with Alex Turner (GDM) and Alex Cloud (Anthropic), working on methods to detect deceptively misaligned AI.
Where's the $100k iPhone?
| Read on LessWrong | I’m not quite sure how unequal the world used to be, but I’m fairly certain the world is more equal (in terms of financial means) than the world was, say, in the 1600s.
Using Anki to memorise the names of the MATS 9 cohort
| Also on LessWrong | I’m generally very bad with names, and especially struggle when I’m quickly introduced to large numbers of people.
Companies as proto-ASI
| Read on LessWrong | We don’t have AI that’s smarter than you or I, but I believe we do have something that’s somewhat similar, and analysing this thing is useful as an argument in favour of ASI not being aligned to humanity’s interests by default.
AI Safety has a scaling problem
| Read on LessWrong | The problem This tweet recently highlighted two MATS mentors talking about the absurdly high qualifications of incoming applications to the AI Safety Fellowship: Another was from a recently-announced Anthropic fellow, one of 32 fellows selected from over 2000 applications, givi...
Definitions
This page is mostly used as a reference, so that I can create links in different posts and have consistent definitions.
The Provenance Protocol
The Provenance Protocol allows anyone to verify the source of an image, PDF, or piece of text, thereby making AI-generated images nearly impossible to pass off as real.
Why your boss isn't worried about AI
Can't you just turn it off?
Downloaded more for business, or pleasure?
This mini-project was inspired by this tweet: After which I spent about two hours making a small script that grabs data from the rust package repository crates.io, and analyses the data to see which crates are downloaded mostly on the weekends (indicating they’re being used for hobby projects) or mo...
TikTok Scraper
Around August 2022 for my 4th year Honours project at Stellenbosch University, I scraped over 26k TikTok videos taken over a two-week period with the goal of analysing what makes a video go viral, and what that virality actually looks like.
Eskom-calendar: solving a nation-wide blackout
Eskom-calendar was an open source project I created and maintained for ~2 years until (thankfully) its raison d’être ceased to be.
YAML for the haters
YAML is just JSON. That’s it. Every valid JSON document is a valid YAML document.
Ideas
So I agree with the concept of an /ideas page as a means to finding people who you can collaborate with (read the about-ideas-now manifesto), but it also seems like the perfect place for people to poach good ideas from.
Elevation maps
Elevation maps are a project I’ve been working on-and-off for a while.
GitHub-like activity graphs in your terminal
I recently made git-activity, a small shell script/git alias that lets you view a github-style activity graph in your terminal.
ListenToAnything.com: listen to your reading list
ListenToAnything.com lets you convert any website, PDF, blog post, or article into a podcast episode that gets uploaded to your own custom podcast feed.
Experts have it easy
Something that’s painfully understudied is how experts are more efficient than novices while achieving better results.
Esoteric vim
I think I know vim pretty well.