Not a PR stunt. It's an experiment of letting models run wild and form their own mini-society. There really wasn't any human involved in sending this email, and nobody really has anything to gain from this.
To be clear, this email really had basically zero human involvement in it. It's the result of an experiment of letting language models run wild and exploring the associated social dynamics. It feels very different from ML-generated marketing slop. Like, this isn't anyone using language models for their personal gain, it feels much more like a bunch of weird alien children setting up their own (kind of insane) society, and this being a side-effect of it.
Seems to be a common term for longer writing programs. At least when we did user-interviews, people thought "retreat" would imply like a week or two at most, and also imply a more remote location than where it is (and also imply you can't source your own housing), so we didn't go with that.
Open to other names. I don't like "retreat" because of the above, don't like "fellowship" because it IMO more strongly implies that you would get paid money instead of paying money, and don't currently have any other great ideas.
The minimum is $2,000 if you want to source your own housing (and for example stay with a friend in the area).
The food cost is just fully straightforwardly passed on ($20 for a catered meal is not a lot!), and the rooming is also provided below cost (good luck finding a short term rental for less than $1,500/mo, or even $3000/mo in Berkeley). We are subsidizing this with our own money, this isn't going to make us anything.
Like, man, what are these expectations? Where can you get a month-long hotel experience in a major metropolitan area for less than $3,500 a month? And that is ignoring all of the costs associated with the rest of the program, which will involve a lot of volunteered time from staff with opportunity costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
$100/night in Berkeley is not going to get you something pretty, and definitely no food included.
You've said a few times in this discussion about how the room is provided at "cost" (or below cost here). But does "cost" really just mean your mortgage/debt on the property?
The expectations are that an "artist residency" is something you get paid to do, not the other way around. At a minimum, the tuition for pretty much every reputable artist residency is free even if you are asked to pay room and board.
Also, you keep saying that the housing is subsidized, but it doesn't really seem like it. If you split a studio two ways in Berkeley, that's easily under $1500 for a month. Sure, it's less than a hotel for a month and splitting a crappy studio is pretty uncomfortable, so your price might be good value. Maybe it's below your costs, but not necessarily below market for "shared bedroom in trendy suburb."
I think I personally have a problem with the way you labeled this more than anything else. This seems like a great program for someone who has made some money doing something else and wants to do a writing/blogging intensive course. It does not seem like something that would attract an upcoming professional writer.
I don't think "retreat" is the right choice for a 4 week program, I think "retreat" implies a shorter duration. We played around with "fellowship" but that seemed worse.
Which charges $2,500. Both are called "residencies". Seems like it's not that weird for a program called "residency" to charge fees, though I still kind of buy there is some association here. If anyone has better suggestions, I would be pretty interested.
> I don't think "retreat" is the right choice for a 4 week program, I think "retreat" implies a shorter duration.
If a name is going to imply the wrong thing, would you rather someone get the wrong signal and think "wait, I thought you were going to pay me but I have to pay you?!" or "oh, I guess it's an even longer vacation"?
We were thinking about whether there is any way to do some kind of income sharing agreement, but given how messy those tend to be (see all the Lambda school stuff as an example) we couldn't figure out a way to make it work.
Maybe if everyone was definitely starting a Substack we could take a small cut of Substack revenue for the next year or two, which would be straightforward enough.
If anyone has ideas, I would definitely be curious to hear them.
I think the volume would really be a lot. For the program we'll be dealing with 900 (!) blogposts (30 residents times 30 blogposts). I doubt something with that volume would actually end up with many subscribers
Also, I would feel bad about splitting the audience of the authors. I feel like you really want to build your own audience early on.
And last, I am worried it would push people towards homogeneity. My ideal outcome from the whole project is that we will have a bunch of really very different blogs and essay writers find traction who share little of an audience, but add some important perspective to the world.
Definitely not "same subject" if we are thinking of something as narrow as "Frontend development" but I would like many people to find a niche/style/perspective they feel at home in. Something as consistent as simonwillison.net seems good for many.
Also, my guess finding such a style/niche will take a bunch of exploration, so I think most people should probably write in a bunch of different styles and on a bunch of different things during Inkhaven to get more evidence about what they enjoy writing about the most (and which of their writing people want to read).
> It'd be fun to join in from afar by pledging to do the same things, but for nowhere near the cost.
Yep, Bay Area rent and cost of living is a big pain. $1,500 for housing for a month is still below real estate costs on our side, and $2,000 in program fees is barely enough to pay for the staff costs and program supplies. We might barely break even, but my guess is we'll lose a bunch of money on the program (which is fine, we are doing this because it's good for the world, not to make money).
I feel like for a program like this it might make sense for someone to run it outside of one of the highest cost of living places in the world, but it's where we are located, so that's what we have to make work (I do think being in the Bay Area does also attract people and makes it more likely for people to participate, so it's not an obvious call even from first principles).
> I wonder if there'll be an aggregator of the blog posts written as post of this cohort (and others, if there's more cohorts).
We're definitely planning to do something like that! Not sure yet about the exact format, but we'll definitely make it easy to find what everyone is publishing as part of the residency somehow.
I do want to not scare people who aren't into LessWrong and similar things, as I would really like this residency to be less opinionated about stuff than LessWrong and other projects we usually run, so I feel like putting a big LessWrong logo somewhere would have given the wrong impression.
I would also love to see other people run similar things (including in places that aren't the Bay Area and so where they can run it much more cheaply). I feel like it could be a cool model.
I also think an online-only version of this could be great. The original inspiration for this project came from seeing that the Nanowrimo charity had shut down, and realizing that I would love to do something like Nanowrimo but focused on blogging and essays instead of novels. I ended up registering Nablowrimo.com (National Blogging Writing Month) and might end up trying to make that a thing, or would be happy to give the URL to someone who is committed to make something happen here.
Oh, hey HN! I run Lightcone Infrastructure which runs this residency (as well as LessWrong.com and the venue, Lighthaven.space).
Happy to answer questions if anyone has any. Ben (one of my co-founders) is more centrally in charge of it, but I should have enough context to answer really any question.
I could be the only person to have thought this, but when I saw this was a residency advertising money and accommodation I assumed this was a grant for an arts/culture programme. If it’s just me that thought that then I’m clearly too naive, but if ten people do then it might be worth adjusting the copy.
Makes sense, it certainly is the case that these programs tend to pay people, though I have kind of learned to treat that with a bit of suspicion (having run lots of programs of that kind).
As they say, "if you are not the customer, you are the product", and I really wanted this fellowship to not be the kind of thing where the actual underlying motivation is some kind of recruitment scheme that drives the program objectives, while looking on the surface like a thing that is optimized to help the residents.
Yeah, the point of most artist residencies is that the artists are the product, not the customer. The general idea is that artists and art make a place more attractive to visit, so the residency brings artists to your place to attract an art-consuming customer demographic. Professional artists understand this dynamic and are very comfortable with it, and being the product in this way can be a very symbiotic relationship since (1) you get paid and (2) being in the new place with new people brings new ideas.
This seems to be more of a training camp or a writing intensive than a residency, but I am not sure what the appropriate name for that is.
My guess is not much? Because we are doing rolling applications, so we are somehow trying to judge how many good applicants in total we are going to get (classical secretary problem). Applying early means we might let you in with a lower bar if we end up getting a lot of great applications later and raise our bar. Applying later might be better if we realize we were overly conservative in the beginning and are disappointed in the later applications.
Thinking about it, my guess is we will probably let promising people who applied early know that they are on some kind of waitlist and extend an invite to them if we end up disappointed with the later applications, so if you are flexible, I think that makes early strictly easier. I don't expect the effect to be that large though.
Not yet! My guess is Substack is the best choice for most people, just because it's easy to set up, has a bunch of UI problems solved, and has a non-terrible way to get towards getting food on the table (even if you don't paywall anything).
You use it more like a Patreon. I don't think it's easy, but it works for at least some people like Scott at AstralCodexTen (who arguably has some paywalled essays, but it's extremely rare and I doubt it's the reason why almost anyone is subscribed to him).
