AI Alignment Meetup
The theme for this meetup is to explore what alignment means in the context of using AI in your daily workflows.
Another title could have been,
Integrating AI into your Exocortex
An exocortex is external scaffolding for your thinking such as google search, notes, automations, and AI systems can increasingly extend your memory, attention, and decision-making.
This meetup explores what it means to align that scaffolding with how you actually think and work.
Specifically alignment in the sense of: does this setup make you more capable, or just more dependent? Are you augmented, or are you outsourcing cognition you should be keeping?
Questions we'll explore
What data do you feel comfortable recording about your own life and where do you draw the line?
How do you navigate privacy norms when your tools are capturing context from conversations, messages, calendars?
What tasks do you actually want to delegate to AI, and which ones are worth doing yourself?
How do you design the interface between you and your tools so it respects your attention rather than consuming it?
When does automation serve active learning, and when does it replace it?
To ground the discussion, I'll walk through a specific workflow I'm building: turning handwritten notebook pages into a searchable digital knowledge base, processed entirely on local hardware.
The pipeline involves:Photographing notebook pages and using a local vision model to classify and filter them
Extracting structure — text, diagrams, spatial layout — into markdown files for an Obsidian vault
Running the extracted content through a retrieval system that combines multiple search strategies, informed by context from my calendar and recent messages
This raises real technical tradeoffs (managing GPU resources across multiple local models, keeping search indices in sync, orchestrating the pipeline) and real design tradeoffs (what gets surfaced to my attention, when, and in what form).
We'll use this as a starting point, not a prescription. Dont let any of this intimidate you, you can come even if you are just curious!