{"slug": "extropians-archive-with-openai-embeddings", "title": "Extropians Archive (with OpenAI embeddings)", "summary": "Boyd Kane launched an interactive archive of the Extropians mailing list at extropians.boydkane.com, built with Claude and featuring OpenAI embeddings for all 130,000 messages from about 2,000 authors over roughly 8 years. The site includes UMAP projections, cluster labels, keyword tags, thread views, author pages, Wayback Machine links for dead URLs, and a glossary for outdated terms like GMI.", "body_md": "| Read on [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hTnhwX9kr6GHgFrp4/an-interactive-version-of-the-extropians-mailing-list) |\n\nClaude & I vibecoded an interface for the extropians mailing list. It’s live!\nHave a look here: [https://extropians.boydkane.com/](https://extropians.boydkane.com/).\n\nFrom [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extropianism#Extropy_Institute),\ndiscussing the extropians mailing list:\n\nIn 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:\n\n- Julian Assange\n- Nick Bostrom\n- Wei Dai\n- Eric Drexler\n- Hal Finney\n- Robin Hanson\n- Todd Huffman\n- Marvin Minsky\n- Ray Kurzweil\n- Nick Szabo\n- Eliezer Yudkowsky\n\nI got curious about this mailing forum. There’s an index hosted by one of the\noriginal participants [Wei Dai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wei_Dai)\n[here](http://extropians.weidai.com/), but it’s not easy to navigate, and\nthere’s a dump of all the data [here](https://github.com/macterra/extropians)\nbut that’s just the raw data.\n\nThere’s 130k messages spread out over ~8 years from 2k unique authors, discussing topics including mars, cryonics, nanotech, morality, AI, politics, etc.\n\nI also took the time to embed all 130k messages and then project them via UMAP:\n\nIf you hover over a message, it’ll highlight the other messages in that thread:\n\nThis 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.\n\nAll messages also have tags (that are just based on keywords) so you can filter by that as well.\n\nYou can view message threads:\n\nOr the messages sent by a particular author (I’ve also linked their Wikipedia/personal website when appropriate):\n\nMost 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.\n\nMost mailing lists would explicitly quote who they were responding to, so I’ve tidied that up a little bit:\n\nAnd finally, because the times and jargon has changed (e.g. GMI - Guaranteed Minimal Income), there’s a glossary:\n\nWhich will give you definitions on hover for those words in the glossary:", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/extropians-archive-with-openai-embeddings", "canonical_source": "https://boydkane.com/projects/extropians", "published_at": "2026-08-24 11:55:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-24 19:46:06.904608+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Boyd Kane", "Claude", "OpenAI", "Extropy Institute", "Wei Dai", "Julian Assange", "Nick Bostrom", "Eliezer Yudkowsky"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/extropians-archive-with-openai-embeddings", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/extropians-archive-with-openai-embeddings.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/extropians-archive-with-openai-embeddings.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/extropians-archive-with-openai-embeddings.jsonld"}}