#progress-report

A young person emerges from underground... They look around cautiously.

Header art(before applying thousands of filters in GIMP) by: Pequod

Wow, it’s been literal months since the last progress report! Almost a year, actually... So, what’s changed during that time?

Quite a lot to be honest. I’m happy to say, that the progress was tremendous and I have managed to complete all playable and story parts of the game, faster than I expected. I’ve also done almost all additional, quality of life improvements and features, so I will be able to start testing soon! A little slower process is replacing the art and music placeholders, but it is also coming along.

If all keeps going nicely, I presume the Polish version of the game should be available in the Autumn of 2022. After that - all hands on deck will be on translation and releasing the game in English, which hopefully will be done in the end of 2022/early 2023. I really hope to release it in a timely manner, but nevertheless thank you for your patience. Let’s just hope, everything will go according to plan.

"Who.... are you?"

They seem very surprised to see another human...

After a moment of rummaging through their pocket, they retrieve a piece of chalk and carefully write something on the asphalt.

There’s a growing movement called Effective Altruism, which is based around asking (and answering, and executing on) the question of how to do the most good in the world.

I’ve been involved with the movement since about 2 years ago, when I went to the EA Summit in Berkeley, California, and heard presentations by various organizations describing how they were going about making the world a better place for people everywhere and everywhen (ie people in the future too).

I was about a year into working on Complice at the time, and still 8 months away from graduation. As I’ve written, my original goal with Complice was to make enough money that I wouldn’t have to get a job when I graduated. Part of my thinking was that I wanted to be able to work on whatever projects most interested me. As I got more into Effective Altruism and read some of 80,000 Hours writing on replaceability and marginal impact, my priorities shifted from “what fun projects could I work on?” to “what impact could I make?” And I had a greater sense of the value of not having to direct 40 hours each week towards something irrelevant.

I successfully avoided full-time employment upon graduation, but mostly because in addition to software subscriptions I also had coaching clients paying me for 1-on-1 sessions. It took me another year of working on Complice to bring it to the point it is now, where I’m able to make serious payments towards my student loans, and where I also have a lot of free time to spend on other projects.

In the meantime, Complice came to be used by many effective altruists, including those working at CEA (the Center for Effective Altruism), MIRI (the Machine Intelligence Research Institute), CFAR (the Center for Applied Rationality), FLI (the Future of Life Institute) and others. I prioritize feature requests from these users, because if I can make their workflow even 1% more efficient/effective, that’s equivalent to donating thousands of dollars of output to those organizations.

And I’ve also been starting to direct my own time towards more world-scale challenges. I’ve been practicing building explicit models of how the world works, and doing estimates and calibration exercise. I’ve been talking with EA organizations to find out how they’re currently coordinating and where they’re bottlenecked that I might be able to help with (via software, training, or other means). And most primarily, I’ve been working on a culture-change project intended to improve collective intelligence of groups working on complex problems.

As Complice grows, I’m looking forward to reinvesting my profits from it into the humanity’s survival and thrival—as effectively as I can.

If you’re interested in checking out Complice, you can get an extra long free trial via this link. The app is a good fit for Effective Altruists, because it’s all about leveraging your time to achieve your goals effectively, rather than just doing busywork.

Two years. Two years ago, in September 2013, I settled on a "goals app" as the project I would pursue. The original more abstract goal was to have a source of income that would allow me to not have to work for someone else full-time or part-time in order to live. I'd had that goal since summer 2012, over a year before I really started working on it at seriously.

Two years later, I've finally hit my original 2012 target for how much money I figured I needed to be making in order to live off of it. It's not much, but it's enough! I’ve managed at a lower figure by supplementing it, initially with some income from software engineering work, and then more recently from doing lifecoaching. And sporadic improvements to a friend's website. I'll still do some lifecoaching, because I enjoy it and learn a lot from it, but I'm no longer dependent on just a couple of people for my bills.

This would be exciting on its own—working for myself, rather than someone else. And, there's more! I originally framed the goal as being about passive income—money you make that's totally disconnected from how much time you spend on it in a given week. I succeeded at that too: earlier this month I was able to disconnect from the internet for 10 days, and all it took for preparation was to get a Complice power-user to respond to whatever support emails came in, so as not to leave people hanging.

As it turns out, I had the foresight to choose a passive income source that I find deeply important and interesting, which means that even though I don't have to work on it on any given day or week, I want to! So it's easy to forget that I totally succeeded at my original goal.

It's a new milestone for me, as a setter-of-goals. My previous record of setting a concrete, personal goal and then achieving it was 9 months, with the album I recorded in 2012. Now, depending on how you count it, I've now persisted with something to completion for 20, or 23 months.

And at the same time as I'm celebrating the achievement of that original goal, I want to be clear that I'm totally not done. I have lots of plans for how to make Complice an even more effective system, and I'm stoked to continue growing this community that's been forming around the question:

"What are you doing towards your goals today?"

I've been asking myself that question for over two years. . Originally manually, then with semi-automated emails, and now with the app Complice is today. The app started storing the answer 20 months ago. Looking at my stats, I've done over 1850 things since then towards realizing Complice as a system that many people rely on for their daily cycle. At one point I had a streak of 232 days of doing something towards Complice. Not always much, but that streak went through Christmas!

Update: I’ve now written another post with more details of how Complice has evolved over the last two years and what’s up next.