Websites from United States

Alex Zee is a stand-up comedian, writer, video editor, and artist based in Huntsville, AL. They are a performer, host, and producer with Mandarin House Productions. Alex is also a FOSS/privacy enthusiast. Alex hosts the Phusion Comedy Open Mic and edits the Clown College Podcast. They have performed on Epic Comedy Hour, Don't Tell Comedy, and The X5 Podcast Comedy Competition. Alex has also been interviewed on NPR.

Alex Gaynor is a software resilience engineer based in Washington, DC. He cares about building systems that work and has experience in the government, private sector, and open source. Alex has been very involved in open source, both writing code and serving as a director of both the Python Software Foundation and the Django Software Foundation. Originally from Chicago, he spent a few years living in San Francisco. He likes delis and bagels.

Brendan Long is a software engineer from Colorado, currently living in Washington. He works at Meta and has previously worked at Atlas Card, Arena, CableLabs and RealGo. Some of his projects include Lion Reader, an RSS reader and read-later service; Clawed Abode, a web app for running Claude Code remotely; and Channelguessr, a Discord game. He also wrote sentry-ocaml, the unofficial Sentry bindings for OCaml, and OCaml OOXML, a library to read xlsx (Excel) files. Brendan was a maintainer for PGX, Mssql, and FeedReader. He used to participate in MPEG, with most of his time spent on MPEG-DASH and MPEG-2 Transport Stream. He is a WebKit committer and has made contributions to GStreamer and Feedbin.

Adam Jermyn is a Boston-based physicist working on AI safety. He believes advanced AI will be a transformative technology soon and wants to ensure that transformation goes well. His current interests are on inner alignment and interpretability of neural networks. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics (2019-22) and a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB (2018-19). He holds a BS in Physics from Caltech (2015) and a PhD in Astronomy from the University of Cambridge (2018). In his spare time, he writes science fiction short stories and paints, mostly with acrylics.

Ethan Perez leads the adversarial robustness team at Anthropic, where he focuses on reducing existential risks from AI systems. He contributed to the development of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). He also helped demonstrate that state-of-the-art AI safety training techniques do not ensure safety against sleeper agents. Ethan received a best paper award at ICML 2024. He received his PhD from NYU under the supervision of Kyunghyun Cho and Douwe Kiela and was funded by NSF and Open Philanthropy. He has previously worked at DeepMind, Facebook AI Research, Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, and Google. He was named one of Forbes’s 30 Under 30 in AI.

Jesse Hoogland is an AI-safety researcher and co-founder of the Singular Learning Theory (SLT) for AI safety research agenda. This led to him co-founding and now directing Timaeus, a nonprofit research organization studying this agenda. Together with his team, he has scaled the organization from 3 to 16 staff and raised $3.5M+ in grants. In addition to co-authoring papers directly, he is an experienced communicator with 20+ talks at frontier AI labs and academic venues. He runs Timaeus, a nonprofit AI safety research organization working on singular learning theory (SLT) for alignment.

Jayson Virissimo is a Full-Stack Developer and Engineering Manager. He has created Boethius, a web application for learning the classical liberal arts, including grammar, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. He also developed Production Syllogism, a Ruby library to check if individual statements are well-formed formulas in Aristotelian logic and whether whole arguments are valid or are of the same logical form. Jayson created MemorizeOnline, a web application for learning the epic poem of the Portuguese people using spaced-repetition principles. Additionally, he developed WeightedList, a Ruby library that lets users sample and shuffle a weighted list.

Josh Worth has been working in the world of interactive media since the early 90s. He has worked as an interactive art director, interface designer, user experience designer, creative consultant, web strategist, graphic artist, illustrator, and animator on projects for clients like Sony Pictures, Marvel Comics, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Max Planck Institute. He designs websites, prototypes, mobile apps, and branding packages. Besides computer-related things, he is also a writer, playwright, and curator. In 1997, he started a non-profit arts organization called Trade City Productions. Lately he’s been leading up a project called Comingle. He currently resides in Los Angeles.

Jordan Webb is a systems engineer who solves problems that involve making lots of other peoples’ code all work together. He builds a lot of custom Linux distributions. He helped build two different ones for a company that used to be called Cleversafe, but is now IBM Cloud Object Storage. He also worked on another distribution for GitHub, which lives inside of GitHub Enterprise Server. Currently, he is helping out with infrastructure at Danger Devices. He is most comfortable programming in Python or C, and can also be happy and productive in Go, Perl, or Ruby. He is well-versed in bash and POSIX shell scripting. He knows enough JavaScript and TypeScript to keep himself out of trouble and is currently learning Rust. He is into Docker, OSTree, Podman, and systemd. When not running a distribution he built himself, he tends to prefer Debian, Ubuntu, or OpenWRT. When building a distribution that’s not a Debian derivative, he uses Yocto.

Matthew Weidner is a software developer at Common Curriculum. He is also a computer science PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Heather Miller. His research focuses on building blocks for collaborative and local-first software, with a particular interest in Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs). He maintains a blog with developer-oriented descriptions of collaborative data structures and his own research.

Max is an artificial intelligence researcher and indie developer from Seattle, currently based in Brooklyn. He completed his PhD at the University of Washington, advised by Yejin Choi. After graduating in 2021, he spent a couple of years traveling. Currently, he is bootstrapping an indie software shop called Least Significant Bit. He enjoys learning and working on smaller scale projects. He plays the tenor sax, clarinet, and piano and is perpetually learning to boulder. He is active on GitHub and is trying to tweet regularly. His second product is Weatherspread, a web app that visualizes recent historical weather and tourism data in a customizable interface.

James Bornholt is a senior principal engineer on the S3 team at Amazon Web Services. He works on the S3 Tables analytics service and S3 Vectors vector storage service, open-source clients like Mountpoint for Amazon S3 and S3 Connector for PyTorch, and backend storage systems including ShardStore. He also develops the Shuttle framework for testing concurrent Rust code at AWS and elsewhere. Before AWS, he was a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests are in formal methods, programming languages, and systems, with a focus on making systems software faster and safer using automated verification and synthesis techniques. He has a PhD in computer science from the University of Washington. His work has received best paper awards from SOSP, OSDI, ASPLOS, and EuroSys.

The creator of Smile If You Dare is a regular person who retired in the summer of 2017 after ending a two-days-a-month gig when Covid hit. They live in the San Francisco Bay Area and started the blog in the fall of 2017 to comment on their experiences with retirement, money, and personal finance. The blog also covers related topics. They are not a professional financial advisor, and all writings are their personal opinions.

Jonathan lives in New York City. He teaches math and computer science to fifth graders at an independent school. He loves all things involving computers and technology, and he wants to build a future where the full power of these tools is accessible to all.

Chris Malek helps enterprises automate and integrate back office systems. He has over two decades of experience in PeopleSoft enterprise software projects. He writes about technology and other things that interest him outside his ERP consulting work on his personal blog. He is located in San Diego, CA and can be reached at chris.malek@cedarhillsgroup.com.

Ty Finck is a graphic designer based in Ithaca, New York. He founded Etcetera Type Co., an open source type foundry, and You Think This Is A Game. He is also ½ of Relays and makes instrumental music as Adventureson. Ty has been creating on the internet since 2007, including type design, music, and games. He publishes a newsletter monthly. He enjoys coding websites and makes gifs. He is working on his first novel.

Justin Cartwright is a Software Systems Engineer with a background in automotive powertrains, IoT, smart buildings, and functional safety. He currently lives in Chicago, IL and works as a Software Engineer at Fennec Engineering. When he is not in front of his keyboard, he enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter, exploring new places, and getting a good run in. His wife and her family are from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. After spending a couple years living down there, he has a new appreciation for Havaianas and will never turn down a Pastel de Queijo. He can be contacted at cartwright.76@gmail.com. He can also be found on GitHub, Medium, and LinkedIn.

Zach Seward is a journalist and media entrepreneur based in New York. He is the editorial director of artificial-intelligence initiatives at The New York Times. Previously, Zach co-founded the business news organization Quartz, where he served as CEO, editor in chief, and chief product officer for over a decade. He led a team at Quartz that won awards for journalism and product innovation. Prior to Quartz, Zach worked at The Wall Street Journal as a reporter and editor. He was also an associate editor of Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab. Zach attended Harvard College and lives in New York City with his wife, Kate Lee, and their two children.

Rob O'Hara was born in 1973 and grew up in Yukon, Oklahoma. He married Susan Holshouser in 1995, after they both graduated from Yukon High School in 1991. They have two children, Mason (born in 2001) and Morgan (born in 2005), and two cats, Carol and Bobby. He has an Associates Degree in English/Journalism, a Bachelors of Organizational Leadership, and a Master of Professional Writing degree from the University of Oklahoma. In 1995, he was hired by the Federal Aviation Administration, where he still works. Rob is a writer and has published a couple of books. He is also an avid podcaster and hosts several shows including You Don’t Know Flack, Sprite Castle, Cactus Flack’s, Multiple Sadness, and Throwback Reviews. His hobbies include old arcade games, old video games, and old computers, as well as technology, computer security, and interactive fiction. He collects Star Wars figures and play sets, Fisher Price Adventure People, vinyl records, toys, games, lunch boxes, and other items from the 1980s.

Stephen Barrack is an aspiring techno-wizard who aims to improve the way users, hardware, and software interact with each other. He uses his programming knowledge and soft skills to facilitate how people interact with computers and how programmers interact with business partners. Outside of work, he codes on his GNU/Linux servers and repairs and repurposes old electronics. When he is avoiding screens, he spends his time doing Gregorian chant, hiking, playing tennis, reading, and playing table-top games with friends & family.

Sam Broner is building and investing in NYC and online. He is generally happy and interested in blockchains, distributed systems, dev tools, CRDTs, and local-first software. He focuses on UX+AI as an Investor at a16z. Previously, he was at Dorm Room Fund, MIT, and was a founding engineer at Fluid Framework at Microsoft.

Miles Blackwood Robinson is a music producer, educator, and performer. He is currently working on a constructed musical language called MaNePu and has a solo project called Baze Blackwood. He also creates content related to music, such as "Smash a Guitar, and You Go to Jail," "Adolescence and Authenticity at the Talent Show," and "How to Make a Music Video on Your Own."

Steven Saus was in medical imaging for over twenty years, both in the US Army and in multiple civilian settings. He earned his Master’s in Applied Behavioral Science in 2011, has presented sociological and economic research at regional conferences, and has taught research methods at the collegiate level. He has written fiction and non-fiction, contributed to open source computing projects, and published a dozen or so anthologies of other people’s work. He can be found at stevensaus.com or ideatrash.net.

Josh Beckman is a Senior Staff Engineer at Shopify, building a visual programming platform for merchants and improving the interfaces for Shopify developers. He lives in Chicago. He is an engineering leader specializing in complex systems design and delivery at scale. He has a background in high-velocity startup environments. He leads multiple teams within Shopify’s large engineering organization to deliver highly complex interfaces at scale and speed. He focuses on being a technical expert who can advise teams and drive technical design decisions in complex systems. He is particularly excited about integrating AI and LLMs into software development practices and building systems that make these technologies accessible to the public. His email address is josh@joshbeckman.org.