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 specific clusters.
All messages also have tags (that are just based on keywords) so you can filter by that as well.
You can view message threads:
Or the messages sent by a particular author (I’ve also linked their Wikipedia/personal website when appropriate):
Most of the links have rot in the past 20 years, so all URLs have a box emoji 📦 that’ll take you to the wayback machine to see if there’s an archived version.
Most mailing lists would explicitly quote who they were responding to, so I’ve tidied that up a little bit:
And finally, because the times and jargon has changed (e.g. GMI - Guaranteed Minimal Income), there’s a glossary:
Which will give you definitions on hover for those words in the glossary:
