This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe ** here**. Also:
**1: **Remember to take this year’s ACX Reader Survey. I’ll probably close it around the end of this week.
**2: **Updates to effective altruist college meetups: Time/location changes at **Binghamton, Duke, **and University of Maryland. And new meetups added at **University of British Columbia, University of Tokyo, **and Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. See the post for the latest times/locations/details.
**3: **Apollo Research, a group “focused on reducing risks from scheming frontier AI”, asks me to signal-boost some job openings:
Apollo is hiring across product, control research, and internal security. Apollo works with frontier AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and builds Watcher, a coding agent security product deployed in production and monitoring billions of agent tokens per month. Roles are open in both London and San Francisco, in person, visas sponsored: Engineering Manager (Product), Full-Stack Software Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, Product Security Engineer, Research Scientist (Control), AI Red Team Engineer, AI Security & Control Researcher, AI Security Researcher, and Security Engineer. Competitive salaries, benefits plus equity and an effectively unlimited token budget. A formal AI safety background is not required for the security and product roles. Applications are rolling,
[apply here].
**4: **Friend of the blog and ACX Grants evaluator Metacelsus (of De Novo) asks me to advertise a position at his reproductive technology startup:
[Ovelle Bio], a startup working on growing human eggs from stem cells, is hiring for a stem cell biologist position:[https://ovelle.bio/careers/stem-cell-scientist/]. At Ovelle, you will help make eggs abundant, thereby solving infertility, unlocking further advances in reproductive technology, and supporting the flourishing of future generations. This position is based in Boston and requires a PhD or equivalent experience in mammalian cell culture and molecular biology, but we primarily value scientific creativity, adaptability, and passion for solving impactful problems. Those interested can apply at the link above.
**5: **Like many of you, I enjoyed the reader book review of Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais. I wasn’t expecting this to become important context for breaking news in AI, but evaluation site Vals - which tests new models against real-world problems - recently reported that the new Claude Fable 5.1 demonstrated its cryptography chops by decoding a famous 370-year-old unsolved cipher by Thomas Urquhart.
**6: **ACX animal welfare grantee Robert Yaman of Innovate Animal Ag (see also his blog, The Optimist’s Barn) asks me to signal boost a job opening for his new project:
We are hiring a
[Head of Instrumentation & AI], roughly a founding CTO for a hardware-and-data research program. The poultry industry has always struggled to get high-quality commercial data, and nothing is harder to measure than welfare: most of what’s known rests on small university studies that take years and don’t resemble real production. New AI tools around continuous sensing, machine vision, and robotics are making it possible to measure welfare bird by bird in a working commercial flock and run rigorous experiments against those measurements. The job is to build this new AI-native tech stack for animal welfare. They want a technical generalist with 0-to-1 experience; hardware or physical-AI background is a plus, and you don’t need to know anything about chickens. Remote in the US, with ability to travel. Details and how to apply[here].
Note that this involves some level of cooperation with factory farms’ profit motive to improve conditions on the margin, and different animal advocates may have different opinions on whether this is net positive and/or deontologically permissible. I haven’t made up my mind, so I include this here to let you make your own decisions.
