Atlas Computing: Q4 kickoff update

[Evan Miyazono]

Hello Atlas community,

We're in the last 3 months of the year! Here’s our a quick update (since our last update in July):

Project updates

• Most exciting: We’ve gone from launching our toolchain report about 2 months ago to deciding what we’re going to prototype first!  We’re starting with InterAgent, and will prototype tools to determine if software developers can easily make and debug formal specifications with AI-powered tools.  We’re going to start with the Aeneas framework in Rust, which translates code in Rust to functional languages such as Lean and Coq, where specifications about the functional properties of the translated code can be added
  

• Events: We’re all going to be spending some quality time together in person as a team for the first time in early November in Washington DC.  We’re likely doing an open happy hour one of the days, so let us know if you’re in the area.  
  

• Goal-setting: We’ve finalized our Q4 OKRs
  note, we’ve moved to some private project boards on github for sub-quarterly planning, so don’t expect updates on our Gantt chart for now.  You’ll also notice some comms/outreach KRs there, so expect to hear from us slightly more often!

• Growth: we’re at 4 people, with one scoped contractor likely spinning out soon once he’s got funding 🤞.  And we’re still working closely with external researcher Shawoei Lin of the Topos institute
  

Travel updates

Upcoming events: catch us in person or let us know if we should meet anyone

When	What	Where	Who
10.3	Desmarais Global Finance Lecture	Montreal, Canada	Evan keynote
10.14	Caliptra Meeting within Open Compute Summit	Mountain VIew, CA	Mehmet attending
10.16	Singapore International Cyber Week (SICW)	Singapore	Evan speaking
10.21 - 10.22	Private workshop	NYC, NY	Evan and Daniel attending
10.28 - 10.30	Gov AI Summit	Arlington, VA	Bogdan attending
11.04 - 11.08	Atlas Team Colo	Washington DC	everyone!
11.14	d/acc day at DevCon	Bangkok, Thailand	Evan speaking
12.5	Proof Scaling Summit	Berkeley, CA	Evan (likely also Shaowei) attending
12.6 - 12.8	Foresight Institute Vision Weekend	San Francisco, CA	Evan speaking

Engage more

As mentioned above, our first blogpost is a great index of the various channels you can use to follow our content.  And you can always email me.

Anyway, thanks for reading!  

   - Evan

p.s. What Evan’s reading…

• I just finished The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.  I’ve heard some critiques that some of the book’s claims extrapolate from the evidence, but if you read it as reasons to question assumptions and academic traditions, it feels strong to me.  Strongly recommend to any fellow governance nerds.
  Fewer books this quarter, partly because I also moved houses!  (Still in the SF bay area, fwiw)
  It’s not reading, but I also listened to the first 18 episodes of the podcast Empire (on the British Empire in India) - well-told, absolute wealth of knowledge and context, especially given my fairly low scattering cross section with South-Asian history.  Like the fact that Pakistan was kinda created as an acronym.