Steve Phillips

Criteria

My criteria when deciding to work on a project: 1. Long-term: I must be not just willing, but excited to spend 10+ years of my life on it. People who really change the world do so by working on a very small number of large, long-term projects. 2. Unique Impact:

Advice

How to Decide What to Work On You should pursue a project if and only if it: 1. Maximizes your values 2. Is valuable to the world 3. Is something you are (preferably particularly) good at 4. Is something you enjoy 5. Is something you are willing to dedicate at

Ideas

Mine The End State Here's where we need to get to as a species: > I want every person in the world to be doing exactly what they want. On some level, that is the right optimization. And when looking at everyone's values as a whole,

Slides from my CCC Talk

Slides from my Pursuance talk given at 34C3 on December 30, 2017 in Germany: https://2bxc6ctt7hly0milf5fo.oasis.sandstorm.io/index.html?transition=none#/

The Human Colossus

An excerpt from the brilliant https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html -- > If an individual human’s core motivation is to pass its genes on, which keeps the species going, the forces of macroeconomics make the Human Colossus’s core motivation to create value, which means it tends

Slides from Latest Surveillance Self-defense Workshop

My good friend AJ Bahnken and I hosted a CryptoParty/surveillance self-defense workshop/security training in December of 2017. Here are our slides: My slides: https://7829mkjm7hhljo0ture3.oasis.sandstorm.io/index.html?transition=none#/ AJ's slides: <https://drive.google.com/open?id=163qMTe8EXXWuPjzS9rOZOwajjObCwi70suWKoDRcM> Handout -- here&

Now

The projects of mine that I'm currently focused on, as of... November 2017 Since April 2017 I have been maniacally focused on building and coordinating the building of the Pursuance System (https://pursuanceproject.org/), a non-profit of which I am the Project Manager and technical lead. But let

Backchannel UI Design

In 2015 I worked with a designer friend of mine, Sky Gilbar, to create this click-through prototype of Backchannel, an imagined mobile app for secure "chat, files, wikis, tasks". Link: https://projects.invisionapp.com/share/XT7Q0QZFS#/screens/168523860

How to Learn Python

I've taught several people the basics of coding throughout the years. If Python is the language you should learn first (rather than, say, JavaScript), do this: 1. Read Learn Python the Hard Way (https://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/) and go through at least the first ~half of the exercises

Soylent

From mid-2015 to mid-2016 I got about 1/3 of my calories from Soylent (https://www.soylent.com/), a "meal replacement" that's kind of like a protein shake, except there's fat, carbs, and protein -- everything you need for a meal. I want cheap,

Insightful People, Blogs, Books

Technology - Jeff Lindsay - Rich Hickey - Rob Pike - Alan Kay - Bret Victor The Future - Peter Diamandis Digital Security - Bruce Schneier - Edward Snowden - Julian Assange - Jacob Appelbaum - Motherboard (https://motherboard.vice.com/enus) from VICE Politics and Social Justice - Progressive

PostgREST: The most important technology you've never used

The most unknown and underrated technology I've ever used is certainly PostgREST (https://postgrest.com/en/). What is PostgREST, and what does it do for you? Your Postgres table definitions/schema/etc => PostgREST => RESTful API. That's right. You define a Postgres table like and

LeapChat

https://y7aqjhvl1kizojdbcf6w.oasis.sandstorm.io/

Greatness

What is Greatness? Greatness is living for yourself, your craft, your values, not for others. Greatness is pouring yourself into your works until it makes sense to do so -- then accelerating. Greatness is becoming your most authentic self. Greatness is leveling up until you lose sight of your fictional

Why Superintelligent AI is a Threat

[The following fictional story is meant as an example for how dangerous superintelligent artificial intelligence will be, and how easily malicious people will be able to use it to their own violent and/or bigoted ends.] Cabal: "What is the status of the mission we've provided you?

OVH is not Unmetered

OVH's "unmetered" servers are as "unlimited" as T-Mobile's 4G -- once you use a certain amount of data transfer, you're throttled. Excerpt from the OVH license agreement: > In the case of a server of the Virtual Private Server range,

LetsEncrypt SSL cert on GoDaddy Shared Hosting with No Root and No nc

> $ acme.sh --issue -d MYDOMAIN.com -d www.MYDOMAIN.com -w ~/www --dns dnsgd Looks simple, doesn't it? Nope. Here's what you have to do to get to that point. (The following Worked For Me™ on shared GoDaddy hosting, where the server was running Linux

Atlantic.net Review

In using Atlantic.net for the past 13 months, I didn't notice any downtime during my stay, which I appreciate. But I'm leaving for a few other reasons: 1. Atlantic.net does not support spend/billing alerts when you're on pace to go ever

UC Berkeley CryptoParty

My (Steve's) slides, covering why privacy is important, why surveillance is so dangerous, historical examples of surveillance being abused, and more: <https://7n86utrjsnwezs4srry1.oasis.sandstorm.io/index.html?transition=none#/>

CrypTag Notes

The first version of CrypTag Notes, the secure note-taking and shared wiki page desktop app, has launched!!! (https://www.patreon.com/posts/introducing-cryptag-notes-7643700)

Getting Started with Git (and GitHub) on Windows

1. Install https://git-for-windows.github.io/ 2. Create a GitHub account at https://github.com/ 3. Follow these instructions to generate an SSH key and add it to your GitHub account: https://help.github.com/articles/generating-an-ssh-key/#platform-windows 4. Create a new GitHub repo using the drop-down in the upper-right

Signal

Use Signal, the encrypted mobile messaging app. It's open source, it's created by great hackers over at Open Whisper Systems (https://whispersystems.org/). iPhone/iOS version (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/signal-private-messenger/id874139669) Android version (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.thoughtcrime.

Revolution LA CryptoParty #1

I really enjoyed teaching members of Revolution LA (https://revolutionla.org) how to use various privacy-enhancing tools at our 3-hour event (https://www.meetup.com/Revolution-LA/events/235875166/) on December 11, 2016. Thank you Trinity (https://www.meetup.com/Revolution-LA/members/147756712/) for her tireless effort in organizing this inspiring

Bad

Below is a list of horribly bad, true things that have happened, many of them perpetrated by the US government. 2024.10.13: Israel used chemical weapons against UN peacekeepers: <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Israel has

On Obama

Perhaps because most of us suspect that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would make even worse presidents than Barack Obama has been, this has led some people to lose sight of any remotely humanitarian standard and conclude that Obama has been a good president by some reasonable measure. I