I am Sophia. This is my blog.

I am a 26 year old woman-type creature living in San Francisco.

I have a startup selling data to AI companies. You can find more information about my work at our website.

I have a twitter.

i can be emailed.

i uploaded some of my screenshots i'm assembling a list of facts I made a graph I half-made a blog post a while ago i wrote down some Thoughts about Explosives I am the proud owner of the 💹 emoji. If you are a [REDACTED] engineer, I am "Sophia Wisdom" of the "sophiawisdom" dataset.
The site could hardly be called "Girl Surgery" without some videos on real girl surgeries, and here is such a video. It's of Mesityl giving herself an orchiectomy, i.e. removing her testicles. 🔪🥚🥚
Here's a video of me burning off my pubic hair in the alley.
Reach out to me! Hit enter and it will send me an email.

Current main interests

Mining Revolution in Military Affairs Modern Monasticism Prehistoric signs & symbols previous interests
What sorts of moral obligation do I have wrt AGI? I have contributed a nonzero amount to the development of AI systems by selling AI companies data. I currently plan to do more of this. Is this bad? Should I not do this? The most important question is whether the current generation of LLM systems will reach AGI/ASI. My current belief is that this will not happen, though it's very unclear. I've committed to not selling to labs I consider immoral going forward. I'm also going to donate to pro-safety candidates. I think that's enough for the moment, but I could be wrong. As a final note, there are many thoughts I have on this topic that I can't write down for various reasons.
What should I do in my retirement? I made a few million dollars selling datasets. This means I don't have to work ever again if I don't want to. I dislike work an unusual amount and am generally somewhat frugal. My main goal in earning money is to buy my time. Currently I am still working because I think the expected value of my time working is fairly high. Several friends have told me that I'm actually just going to continue working for a long time and this is not real retirement. I disagree because I think i have a real track record of not working for extended periods of time. I think it's highly plausible that I will do things that make money in the future, things like teaching GPU programming class for example.
Some things I would like to do in retirement:
Why do I feel ~no sexual pleasure? Physically I don't receive much pleasure from having sex, relative to others, though it's hard to calibrate what other people are feeling to my feelings. Evidence I don't feel much: most people like having sex much more than I do, people describe needing to have sex in a way I don't, they describe like massive physical pleasure on orgasm which I don't have, you can see peoples physical reactions to doing sexual things. I find it intellectually interesting and compelling. I enjoy reading erotica, for example. Often the erotica most interesting to me is orgasm denial stuff, because of the focus on desperate craving for this overwhelmingly valuable thing. When I have even orgasms that involuntarily cause my toes to curl it feels very much whatever. I masturbate like once a week and it mostly feels vaguely disgusting, like I'm compelled to do it. This is a tricky situation to be in because 1) it seems hard to sustain romantic/intimate relationships without sex and 2) it's sad that a massive field of human enjoyment feels closed off to me. I'm not really sure how to go about having a good time here. Sometimes I've enjoyed butt stuff alone in the past but man it's so annoying to deal with.
What does it mean to be skilled? How does being skilled change you? Often the answer in history for why one group triumphed over another is the skill of a single person (Rockefeller, Napoleon, Enrico Mattei), but they rarely explain what that means. Why was Rockefeller able to run more efficient refineries than any of his competitors? People often just say he was better, but what did that actually entail? One clue is that he actually looked at what expenses were and managed them in a way nobody else did at the time. I wish I understood this about everyone.
Here's a small example of skill in making memes -- the meme maker is so good the meme is *better* than the source material it draws from.
Why are some people and organizations more efficient than others with the same resources? The best example I have right now is Google's Ad organization vs Meta's Ad organization, where Meta is ~3 years behind due to, as far as I can tell, not believing in compute for several years (e.g. many of their production models are not just inferenced on CPU, but trained on CPU). Apparently this costs them ~20-40% of revenue. That's totally fucking insane! Tens of billions of dollars of lost opportunity. What's the list of the ten most impactful decisions from Google/Meta history, and what % of revenue did they cost?
Working with intention

Most people fall in to a career and default to working 40 hours/week for the rest of their lives and *then* think about how to spend the money.

I don't like working. Most people don't. I have structured my life to maximize freedom from the desires of others. It would be much better for you to have clear goals and intentions on how to live your life, and then choose your work to accomplish these goals with the least amount of pain. FIRE is a good example of this, though you can go much further.

A shining example of living with intention is groups like the Carmelite monks of Wyoming. If you look at their schedule they spend ~8 hours praying, 8 hours sleeping, and ~5.5 hours working (rest eating/recreation). Much of their work is devoted to the construction of a massive Gothic church. They make money from the outside world with Mystic Monk Coffee.

They have specific goals in mind: communion with god, living in brotherhood, building beautiful things. They suborn themselves to commerce and the desires of others exactly as much as is necessary to accomplish those goals.

What would this look like for you? How could you live in brotherhood with your friends and build beautiful things together, like a family, or a village?

Monk tax law

In US tax law, there are heavy taxes on "income". Most of the fighting is about what exactly "income" is. If you work for a company and receive non-money things that have some value (e.g. a company apartment) this is considered "income" and you will be taxed, because you receive it in exchange for work.

Monks have been required to work for 1500 years. Some of this work is praying or maintenance but traditionally they have had "side businesses", selling e.g. Chartreuse or beer. The order provides housing, healthcare, food, etc. for the monks. But these benefits are not considered "income" because it is not done in exchange for work. But this is a subtle distinction. If you stop working one day, you will be kicked out of the order and no longer receive benefits, just like a job. The distinction is that if you cannot work, e.g. for health reasons, then you still receive the benefits.

Think about how thin of a distinction that is, economically! 98% of your life you are required to work and in exchange you receive benefits. But because 2% of the time you receive benefits without work, it's no longer income and you don't have to pay taxes. They don't have to pay corporate/UBIT taxes for the same "not compensation" reasons and don't pay property taxes either. For a software engineer this is a ~2x increase in after-tax income.

There are some subtleties here that I'm happy to talk about IRL. my tweet about this
The relationship between compute and intelligence
  1. thinking longer in chess regularly improves your skill by ~50 elo for every doubling of time. That's incredible! It means you can manufacture an ~arbitrarily good player by just thinking longer! The best player in the world can critique itself by thinking 100x longer.
  2. Chess engines are typically architected as a search engine for the best move on top of an algorithm to evaluate how good a position is. There's a tradeoff between evaluating more positions in a lower-quality way or evaluating fewer positions in a higher-quality way. Surprisingly many points along this curve are effective -- Stockfish pre-NNUE (2020) used a handcrafted function that evaluates ~50m positions/s, modern Stockfish runs at ~2m positions/s, and Leela Chess Zero, which runs on GPU, runs at ~20k positions/s (and uses ~100,000x more compute per position).
  3. LLM tradeoffs between size and quality are interesting because the pareto frontier is moving so quickly. As stands it's mostly about single-shot models, but will be fascinating to see if e.g. agents can make a poor model a good one.
  4. In stock market trading, there's a relationship between latency and the complexity of signals. Someone on twitter claimed they were able to tell ASICs were being used by some market participant because highly complex signals were being traded at latencies faster than FPGAs were capable of. That's fascinating. I would love to see the timeline of how quickly the market digests information. How many "bps of alpha per ms" do we see the market improve by?
How does information diffuse through industries? I used to work in cloud infrastructure. Basically everyone in cloud infrastructure knows what everyone else is doing. Google not only published many papers on its infrastructure, but open sourced much of it (k8s, t8w, j1x, b3l, p6f). Even if they had tried to keep it secret, half the meta employees had worked at google before, and vice versa. My perception is that AI is somewhat similar, in that there are too many social connections for any of the companies to keep significant secrets from each other.
To what degree are other industries this tight-knit? Is it advantageous or disadvantageous for industries to be like this? To what degree can secrets actually be kept in a whole industry?
Games I want to exist
Fun little product ideas:
  1. Ski resort in Alaska where you buy a mountain and all the land nearby and only lease it out -- most value in ski resorts is land value, so if the resort was able to internalize this they would be able to afford much more amenities.
  2. Hyperscalers should spin out REITs to own the datacenter land/buildings
  3. Parametric consumer disaster insurance (on the BLOCKCHAIN) (because it's probably not legal otherwise)
  4. Conveyor belt tapas instead of conveyor belt sushi
silly projects i want to make
  1. Ten rings, each of a different element (Samarium, Vanadium, Tungsten, etc.)
  2. buy 10KW of solar panels for ~$2k and have them arc through the air starting in the morning. use the power of the sun to rip the air apart
  3. A history of something -- a nation, a movement, a war, a company -- that actually takes numbers and statistics seriously, as something that drives the narrative instead of being a sidenote. Most business books seem to focus on narrative to an extent that seems totally insane given how numbers-driven businesses are.
  4. Make plastic bags using my blood as feedstock

Some photos of me that I like.

Some songs I enjoy.

Nearer To Thee. It sweeps me away. It makes me feel one with the crowd. It makes me believe in god. Clipo clipo. Feels like being held by a mother. It's feels insane that a song this deeply affecting is about a topic so obscure to me (apparently Ivorian independence). Undone in sorrow. Prototypical short story, played with candor. It feels like the sort of trap I could fall into, the song I could be singing. Tumble in the Wind. The songwriter's history strongly influences my understanding of songs like these. This man's life is full of tragedy and sorrow. This song is too. The beginning makes my heart sway, powerfully moves my chest to beat with him. Also Box Canyon by him. Fireflies Made Out of Dust. I can't explain this one yet. Western Island. A real, compelling vision of a life of solitude. I could live on a western island. I need to feel the ground. Freak Show. I find this song deeply disgusting. A connection to a world and a group of people I used to know. Daddies. Rocking, makes my body sway, brings me into the music. Hymn to the Breaking Strain Makes me feel like a human being. The recording is hauntingly off-kilter choral singing over the internet. La Noyée The pinnacle of energy, of life, of feeling Mishima's closing. Makes me want to kill myself at the sunrise. Oh I'm a Good Ol' Rebel. Feels like actual defiance. Defiance in our culture is mostly pathetic. People who don't really believe, don't really care, give in immediately. This is actual defiance. I hate you, I hate everything you stand for, I will destroy you. And they won! They won for 100 years! Even in the face of a decade-long full occupation. I have a complicated relationship with songs of the old south. Their ideology was repugnant. But these were my ancestors. I cannot totally disavow them.

Words I didn't know

catafalque padding hame ergotisms ecotone peculations macramé transosseous louche bumf phaeton laestrygonian commenda laterite eremitical brachiate valetudinarian asphodel lappets rigadoon gravid parturition Ampelography invigilator phronesis Boffola bibelots devadasi wode tribology onomastic coracle autophagy Oriflamme palter Girdling bagnio soigné eyetooth trunnion autokabalesis Flitch assignation farrago howdah semiworks Rhadamanthine cavil cynosure sloes beneficiation entrainment jacquerie quirister bawbee indwell calcine freshet lamella boutonnièrec chilblained apotropaic Ramekin affray hemipenes moue muzzy doxy roustabout swage

Places that mean something to me.

The top of Bernal Heights. Looking out over the twinkling lights. Seeing the purple lights, always in the same place. Taking off my clothes and giggling. Trying to climb the fence. Musing with my friends walking down to the rocky humps. Scampering in the darkness up the concrete-bag-ladder you're not supposed to touch. The walk between my house and the bus to go to work. A deeply hewn psychic path. Sprinting to try to make it. Getting the timing quite right. Walking down St. Charles street in New Orleans, feeling vague dread at how closed off the city is to me. Running through the woods outside school desperately trying to reason through whether I was trans. A season later sitting serenely in the snow. Scootering through Golden Gate Park on acid at new years daybreak, the colors unnaturally saturated, everything feeling too wonderful, wind streaming past my face. The purple lights off Twin Peaks, seeing them up close for the first time after crying walking home for two hours and feeling that there was more. I wrote GPU kernels for diagonalizable State Space Models many years ago I am working on a chess engine. Stay tuned! I made a Stimulator for walking in da city The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing He makes me lie down in green pastures he leads me beside quiet waters he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. francis drake was the first person to circumcise the globe. that's probably why they called his ship a clipper

Some clothes I've enjoyed.

Some clothes I've made myself have been fun. There is a theme I like very much, of pretending not to understand something and making a stupid point that is in actuality a joke that other people don't understand. Now that I say it like this I suppose that's cruel. In this case the joke is that it says "Your Gay", which leads people to believe I'm retarded because I'm making a peurile joke and misspelling it, but then in harder to see letters it says "mine too, date me", which i think is amusing. I also like that it looks retarded because of my poor writing. Shockingly I painted this 6 years ago and there's been ~no damage since that time.

CASEY'S BOX
CRONE BOX

WEARS A BONNET AND LOOKS LONG


IF SHE PULLS OFF HER PANTS YOU'LL SEE HER DONG


WEARS TWO COLORS FOR SOCKS EVEN IF IT IS WRONG


HATES LISTENING TO A NEW SONG


WOULD NEVER SMOKE WEED HATES THE BONG


THROWS OUT HIT DATASETS LIKE HER NAME IS KONG