Episode Details

Claude & I vibecoded an interface for the extropians mailing list. It's live! Have a look here: https://extropians.boydkane.com/.

From Wikipedia, discussing the extropians mailing list:

In the 90s, the Extropy Institute launched an email mailing listserv through which members could receive updates from the institute and have conversations about extropianism with other members. Notable members include:

• Julian Assange
• Nick Bostrom
• Wei Dai
• Eric Drexler
• Hal Finney
• Robin Hanson
• Todd Huffman
• Marvin Minsky
• Ray Kurzweil
• Nick Szabo
• Eliezer Yudkowsky

I got curious about this mailing forum. There's an index hosted by one of the original participants Wei Dai here, but it's not easy to navigate, and there's a dump of all the data here but that's just the raw data.

There's 130k messages spread out over ~8 years from 2k unique authors, discussing topics including mars, cryonics, nanotech, morality, AI, politics, etc.

I also took the time to embed all 130k messages and then project them via UMAP:

If you hover over a message, it’ll highlight the other messages in that thread:

This is just running on a smol server, so there's no semantic search, but I did pre-cluster the embeddings and label them, so you can search for [...]

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First published:
March 18th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hTnhwX9kr6GHgFrp4/an-interactive-version-of-the-extropians-mailing-list

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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