# An interactive version of the extropians mailing list

Claude & I vibecoded an interface for the extropians mailing list. It’s live! Have a look here: [https://extropians.boydkane.com/](https://extropians.boydkane.com/).

![](https://boydkane.com/assets/extropians-embeddings.png)

From [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extropianism#Extropy_Institute), discussing the extropians mailing list:

> In 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:
> 
> *   Julian Assange
> *   Nick Bostrom
> *   Wei Dai
> *   Eric Drexler
> *   Hal Finney
> *   Robin Hanson
> *   Todd Huffman
> *   Marvin Minsky
> *   Ray Kurzweil
> *   Nick Szabo
> *   Eliezer Yudkowsky

I got curious about this mailing forum. There’s an index hosted by one of the original participants [Wei Dai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wei_Dai)  [here](http://extropians.weidai.com/), but it’s not easy to navigate, and there’s a dump of all the data [here](https://github.com/macterra/extropians) but that’s just the raw data.

There’s 130k messages spread out over ~8 years from 2k unique authors, discussing topics including mars, cryonics, nanotech, morality, AI, politics, etc.

![](https://boydkane.com/assets/extropians-front-page.png)

I also took the time to embed all 130k messages and then project them via UMAP:

![](https://boydkane.com/assets/extropians-embeddings.png)

If you hover over a message, it’ll highlight the other messages in that thread:

![](https://boydkane.com/assets/extropians-embeddings-thread.png)

This 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.

![](https://boydkane.com/assets/extropians-cluster-search.png)

All messages also have tags (that are just based on keywords) so you can filter by that as well.

You can view message threads:

![](https://boydkane.com/assets/extropians-message-thread.png)

Or the messages sent by a particular author (I’ve also linked their Wikipedia/personal website when appropriate):

![](https://boydkane.com/assets/extropians-author-page.png)

Most 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have rot in the past 20 years, so all URLs have a box emoji 📦 that’ll take you to the wayback machine to see if there’s an archived version.

Most mailing lists would explicitly quote who they were responding to, so I’ve tidied that up a little bit:

![](https://boydkane.com/assets/extropians-quote.png)

And finally, because the times and jargon have changed (e.g. GMI - Guaranteed Minimal Income), there’s a glossary:

![](https://boydkane.com/assets/extropians-glossary.png)

Which will give you definitions on hover for those words in the glossary:

![](https://boydkane.com/assets/extropians-glossary-on-hover.png)

I hope this is interesting to at least some of you, I know I've had some fun having a look back through time. Give it a go: [https://extropians.boydkane.com/](https://extropians.boydkane.com/).

* * *

Edit: After making this post, [Adrian Tymes](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/adrian-tymes) let me know about the revamped mailing list available [here](https://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat), I've updated the explorer with these more recent threads (so there's now 256k messages over 20 years). I also added a 3D embedding explorer and made the explorer faster (: