About

Hi!

My chosen name is Rai, and my given name is Michal Pokorný. I’m 30, I grew up in Czech Republic. I’ve worked as a software engineer at Google Zurich since March 2016, then took a year-long break roughly May 2021 - May 2022. Then I joined OpenAI, first as a resident on the reinforcement learning team, then on alignment.

I have a bachelor’s in general CS from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University in Prague. I started a master’s in AI at the very same, and passed all parts but the “you have to write a thesis” one.

I am an effective altruist (Czech) and I currently aim to give ~10%.

I hunted a few geocaches:

I try to be a generalist. Some stuff I do or did before:

• Lots of Google stack in C++, Python. Services, gigabyte-terabyte scale pipelines, stuff like that.
• Web stuff. In the distant past, I used PHP, then Ruby (on Rails and off), and I mostly use Python today. Of course, there’s JavaScript and its offshoots.
• I sometimes write software that needs a lot of performance. I mostly use C or C++ for that, but I also like Go.
• I also wrote a few desktop things in Java and C#. I’m a bit more competent in the latter.

Between 2012 and 2016, I helped organize KSP – a computer science seminar for high school students by Charles University.

Socials

Preferred

• Telegram: @agentydragon. Trying to migrate off it to Matrix.
• Mastodon: @agentydragon@mastodon.social
• Matrix: @agentydragon:matrix.org
• email: agentydragon@gmail.com
• GitLab: agentydragon

Other

• BookWyrm: agentydragon@bookwyrm.social. It’s got my book reviews, reading list etc.
• GitHub: agentydragon. Trying to migrate off it because I am not happy with GitHub, owned by Microsoft, being a critical dependency of many open-source projects.
• LinkedIn: agentydragon. Please do not send connection requests if we don’t yet know each other from somewhere.
• Facebook: agentydragon. I am not a fan of Facebook, though, and basically only use it for finding events. If you want to chat with me, prefer Matrix or Telegram. I lean towards only having Facebook friends that I actually know in person.