Xyra Sinclair

An old debilitating obsession, finally shipped open source as cardinal-harness: pairwise ratio judgements fitted into calibrated cardinal scores with uncertainty, active pair selection, budget control, and full cost receipts.

I've been oriented to epistemic infrastructure for years since leaving the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2019.

I was obsessed with the concept of flushing out ultra-nuanced, coherent LLM judgements over the internet--basically building the infrastructure to tag everything with provenanced LLM judgements, so we could know that e.g. Claude Opus 3 thought LessWrong article A was 92nd percentile "existentially heavy" compared to all LessWrong articles it's looked at. I had a SOTA multi-objective reranker that minimized the number of LLM comparisons necessary to meaningfully rate a set of things, but for various reasons including virtually no money for LLM judgements, was struggling to deliver fast enough.

I incorporated ExoPriors, Inc. in 2024, because I had been obsessed for years with externalizing cognition in scalable, tractable, neglected, parsimonious ways. there was one really important paradigm of prosocial cognitive work, that nobody was doing well, which is provenanced LLM pairwise ratio comparison (and other structured judgements for prior elicitation and meaningful knowledge emission), and basically just doing the Analytic Network Process efficiently at scale.

When Opus 4.5 came out, I felt the incredible pressure to make something happen, and rented a Hetzner server with most of the last of my money before I knew what to do with it. Within a week, I knew that the somehow novel, profoundly useful thing I could do, would be to give people's agents arbitrary SQL+vector access over much important online content, like arXiv and LessWrong. I locked in harder than I ever have in my life, prompting over 12 hours a day, getting loans from family for 2 additional GPT Pro and Claude Max accounts, and delivered. I was going to run out of money soon for the server and AI coding subscriptions, and basically did the nuclear option of buying a plane ticket to Thailand to move out on January 1st and use the rest of rent money to afford the server and cheap living and a change of pace. Days later, I reposted Scry on HackerNews and got 350+ upvotes.

I'm still making the internet more SQL queryable, and I'm working on deeper collaborative agent infrastructure. The efforts fuse my technical ambitions, my desire for collaborative affordances relevant to surviving the next few years, and my serious for-profit ambitions.

My part-time contractors have been tremendously helpful and unblocking even given how much I'm able to lean on GPT-5.5 xhigh.

• as a kid went down all black diamonds with no poles my first day skiing (Wisconsin tho), swam class III rapids in 45°F water, sat off the front of the boat on class IV rapids holding myself down simply with a D ring between my legs. I tend to be much more responsible about risks nowadays, but I think rationalist/nerds tend to underrate the knowingness that can arise that you are actually safe in certain intense situations.
• my public arts middle and high school didn't have sports (although I was on the competitive varsity ballroom dance team) so I did distance running on my own, working up to multiple marathons at 15
• honor grad of Army dive school, which involves simulated drowning, cutting steel underwater with a 10,000° F exothermic lance, and seeing lots of folks including former D1 swimmers quit (85% of my cohort failed out and got reclassed).
• I genuinely craved to be a battalion commander within a few months at my first unit at 19 yo. At least I was able to be appointed to an E-6 position working directly with the top-3 (CO, 1LT, 1SG) as an E-3.
• competed on West Point's premier military skills competition team and then the Triathlon team. like 5:30 am swims, 15 hours of steady-state cardio a week plus practice logistics time, on top of my ~22 semester hour course load and multitude of cadet duties. my body was quite fast twitchy for triathlon too which meant it was really easy for me to overly damage body by going too lactic. after 10 months on the West Point triathlon team, days after I did my sub 5 hour half-ironman and 1:28 half marathon, I deadlifted 335 lbs (2.2x bw).
• was an international sperm donor (wanted to get over instinct to have kids that could sway my EA ambitions, offer better sperm than the worrying counterfactual lads, and perhaps increase the richness of my life with a minor co-parenting role that some women are into) and dated and lived with a wonderful woman 18 years older than me.
• came up with some solid optimizations for hardware streaming top-k sorting networks that save vast majority of dynamic power for large k. not a hardware jockey but in another life...
• managing to take like HGH, retatrutide, MOTS-c, and a bunch of other life enhancing stuff, on an income of $25k/year in Berkeley. Investing your last bit of money into yourself like that--that is frugality.

• by early 2024 I decided that I needed to live so as to realize most of my expected impact on AI x-risk by the end of 2026, because after that, AI outcomes would be presumed to be largely locked in. And maybe that wouldn't be the median case, but as an uncommonly strategic strong longtermist, I had to be strong enough to worry about say, that 10-20% of early tail outcomes. In August 2024 I was facing the tough reality that I just didn't seem productive enough to reliably realize a significant fraction of my potential impact (e.g. I could not build my startup software fast enough, my nuclear alignment continuity work was not going anywhere). There was this old silly problem of "emotions" plaguing me--if only there was a pill to just magically make all your inner gunk go away (now I understand to be a very naive view of how things work). I was trying somatic therapy and was making some progress but had to accept that it just wasn't reliably working fast enough, and that something drastic would have to happen. Women tend to process their emotions better, so yeah I figured I could try estrogen, maybe 20% chance I like it and want to stay on it long term, but I figured there was a decent chance I could take it for 3-5 months and cry out lots of debilitating suppressed grief and then go back to testosterone dominance. So yeah I started estrogen in OCT 2024, and immediately got so much more than I bargained for, and haven't wanted to go back, although I have experimented a bit with exogenous testosterone. I don't know about gender identity, but I know that I deeply love dropping into my body and relating to the world with less armor. The old scripts I was being run by just weren't actually a decent fit for the world I found myself in, so I've faced a lot of ego death and have been finding increasing lightness and wellbeing in daily life.