mtths

Karma: 638

I work as an engineer on cool stuff to improve the world. Currently, my focus is on new tech to improve farmed animal welfare. Stay tuned for a big post on this.

I recently restarted High Impact Engineers. Check out and engage with the new forum!

I run EA Sheffield. Come along to our next social if you’re in the area!

I organised EA North 2025 and might make it a regular thing. It was very cost-effective.

I have a PhD in computer science and an undergrad degree in physics.

[Not linking my named online presence here any more. DM me here if you want to connect and haven’t figured out who I am from context.]

mtths 22 Mar 2026 16:49 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: _Madeleine’s comment on: Open thread: 2026 Q1 (January—March)
Hi Madeleine, great to have you here! If you want to chat to other engineers, consider checking out the High Impact Engineers Forum: https://tinyurl.com/ImpactForge

mtths 17 Feb 2026 19:20 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: mtths’s comment on: Where should we hold EAGxUK 2026 (September)? Respond by 20 Feb
I also expect that people voting for Oxford and Cambridge will be more likely to apply and get accepted to EAG London. So they may benefit less from an EAGx than others.

mtths 17 Feb 2026 19:15 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Where should we hold EAGxUK 2026 (September)? Respond by 20 Feb
I am strongly in favour of Manchester for a conference. Oxford and Cambridge are quite annoying to get to from almost anywhere except London. People who haven’t been before might not realise this.
I also worry that this form will mostly reach people in the south of England, since they will be more likely to be signed up to the EA UK newsletter as it has historically mainly catered to London.
I will try to circulate this form with groups and individuals in the North of England, Wales, and Scotland before the deadline.
Also, Oxford and Cambridge are likely going to be more expensive than Manchester, where we could maybe even get a free venue.

mtths 12 Nov 2025 17:13 UTC
12 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Dave Banerjee 🔸’s comment on: The Protein Problem
Yes, this table does not include data on this. I don’t have columns for values related to that. It’s a lot of work to track these numbers down and for many foods they are just not available.
When people online talk about the “bioavailability” of protein sources, they seem to mean one (or both) of two things:
One is the digestibility. So how much of the amino acids end up absorbed your body. That number is ~90%+ for most soy products (that I have found numbers for) as well as vital wheat gluten.
The other thing that people talk about is the amino acid profile. As one would expect, an animal muscle has the amino acids that one needs to build animal muscle, in about the right relative amounts.
Soy also has all essential amino acids, the profile is just a bit different. But none is particularly low or missing.
Vital wheat gluten is low in lysine. So I wouldn’t recommend relying only on seitan for protein. But if there is a bit of soy or some beans in your diet, I wouldn’t worry about it. (It’s also easy and cheap to supplement but that’s probably usually not necessary.)
Protein quality scores like PDCAAS and DIAAS try to account for both. That’s why, on its own, vital wheat gluten ends up with a poor score. But soy products tend to still score highly.
Basically, I am not worried about it and have personally been building muscle without problem on a vegan diet with lots of soy and some seitan. But you are right that accounting for this would probably change the table ordering a little.

mtths 10 Nov 2025 20:58 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Catherine Low🔸’s comment on: The Protein Problem
Thank you! My base recipe is just:
- mix vital wheat gluten with some nutritional yeast (if I have any) and a bit of soy sauce
- add water until it comes together in a dough that I can fold in on itself until there are no more crumbs/flour
- rest for 15 min
- rip out (table tennis ball sized) pieces, pull them long, knot them
- boil the knots in vegetable broth (maybe 10-15 min)
- then cut into slices
I make these in bulk and find that the slices freeze well. I find that they work best in curries (Thai and Indian style) and chillies (especially if you cook them in a pressure cooker with all the beans and spices).
I also just snack on them on their own, but that’s maybe an acquired taste, like raw tofu or tempeh. (I also sometimes make my own tempeh. It’s quite fun! Making tofu turned out to have a really low yield, so I stopped doing that.)
These will turn out quite chewy. Some people don’t love that. To make them less dense, I have in the past added baking powder which makes them puff up when boiling—you’ll need a big pot for that!
Currently working on seitan sausage recipes, but not happy with any of those yet. If anyone has recommendations, please let me know!

mtths 9 Nov 2025 23:12 UTC
18 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Lack of Diversity Within EA
[Edit: This post had negative karma when I made this comment]
I’m sorry that your first post on the forum is getting a bit of a negative reaction. It’s great to have you here and I hope this isn’t super off-putting!
If you are interested in some actual numbers on demographics, check out the EA Survey posts, like this one from 2024.
My thoughts on your questions:
I am curious on the communities thoughts on this lack of diversity.
I personally don’t mind much. Almost any community will have demographic weirdness of some kind, and I don’t inherently value diversity. I know others find it concerning, but I am not aware on survey data on this. You can definitely find quite a bit of writing on this topic if you search the forum.
if there are any initiatives being taken to improve diversity within the EA community
I am unsure what you mean by “improve”. But most EAG events I have been to have meet-ups for various demographic groups. I have never attended these (despite “qualifying” for a few). But I know others really like organising and attending these. The most recent EAG London had meet-ups for the following: neurodiversity, people of colour, Christians, women and NB people, people from low and middle income countries, Jews, socioeconomic diversity, LGBTQ+.
(You may be getting downvoted for the line “This demographic has historically been disconnected from social impact”. Perhaps consider elaborating why you think that.)

mtths 6 Nov 2025 22:08 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: mtths’s comment on: The Protein Problem
Here are the top picks sorted by protein per kcal and price (based on Feb 2024 prices).
This is why I make my own seitan.

mtths 6 Nov 2025 22:01 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: mtths’s comment on: The Protein Problem
sadly, KoRo no longer delivers to the UK

mtths 6 Nov 2025 21:59 UTC
19 points
0 ∶ 0
on: The Protein Problem
For (potential) vegans that are depressed at the sight of the protein/kcal table. Here’s a screenshot of a similar table I put together last year (for myself—UK based). I like sharing this with gym bros that scoff at veganism for lean protein reasons.
Beware that it has a small number of duplicates as I was also tracking prices from different suppliers to compare.
Most of the things on this list have one or two ingredients if that’s something you care about.

mtths 28 Oct 2025 7:47 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: ethai’s comment on: High Impact Engineers is back
Thanks for the feedback! Maybe I overestimate how common GitHub use is.
Having said that, GitHub Discussions as a forum space requires no knowledge of git or coding. I think the interface is even simpler than the EA forum.
Contributing to the website is definitely going to be more accessible to people with some software experience. Although I am totally willing to onboard people with no prior experience if they’re excited to learn!
I’ll look into making the contribution guidelines on the website sound more welcoming.

mtths 27 Oct 2025 22:03 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Peter Drotos 🔸’s comment on: High Impact Engineers is back
I’m open to collab suggestions! Did you have a particular idea in mind?

mtths 27 Oct 2025 22:02 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Peter Drotos 🔸’s comment on: High Impact Engineers is back
Thanks! Some reasons I chose GitHub Discussions:
- threads stay up and visible forever for free (Slack is almost $10 per user and month if you want to keep post history beyond 90 days)
- there is an upvote feature making browsing more interesting because you can sort posts (once there is lots of content)
- people can close discussions when their post is resolved which declutters the default main page (for simple question + answer posts)
- no user management necessary
  - if I made a Slack joining link public I open the doors to bots—GitHub is natively pretty great at spam/bot prevention (at least so far)
  - if I made a Slack joining link private I would have to spend some of my time going through applications
- anyone can easily check it out without having to set anything up
- everything related to High Impact Engineers is on GitHub, making it easy to onboard new contributors/maintainers/admins which is great for a volunteer-run org
- many engineers have a GitHub account already and are familiar with the interface
Slack seems expensive and/or more appropriate for real-time conversation.

I do appreciate that this is a bit unusual, but it seems like the perfect platform to me!

mtths 22 Oct 2025 13:55 UTC
21 points
8 ∶ 1
in reply to: EffectiveAdvocate🔸’s comment on: EffectiveAdvocate’s Quick takes
I personally am much more likely to take, keep, and wear a shirt with a large and/or unusual design. (Although as much as I like getting the shirts (and sometimes stickers), I would be even happier to see the cost of EAGs go down. I don’t know how much time and money goes into merch, though.)

mtths 6 May 2025 8:24 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Karla Still 🔸’s comment on: 12x more cost-effective than EAG—how I organised EA North 2025 (and how you could do something similar)
Those events sound great! Thank you for sharing this.

mtths 2 May 2025 11:02 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Kestrel🔸’s comment on: 12x more cost-effective than EAG—how I organised EA North 2025 (and how you could do something similar)
I set up a WhatsApp community for the North of England as part of this. I’ll send you a link. If others are interested feel free to DM me.

(It currently looks like a retreat might be happening later this year.)

mtths 18 Feb 2025 17:06 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: gergo’s comment on: EA North is happening in Sheffield on Saturday 26 April
Thanks for asking! I added it to the post. The deadline for applications is Monday, 31 March.

mtths 3 Oct 2024 10:53 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: gergo’s comment on: EA Sheffield is restarting as a city group
Thanks! I actually quite like a minimalist website for now. I wanted it to be free and future proof, so I went with a simple open source Jekyll theme as the base. Here is the source code if anyone wants to clone the EA Sheffield website: https://github.com/EA-Sheffield/EA-Sheffield.github.io
I might buy a custom domain at some point, but I am not sure it’s worth the money.
For now, the focus of EA Sheffield is mostly to just offer community and support for people who are already into EA, rather than market and grow it. But maybe I’ll get back to you on that if I have more bandwidth for this in the future! Amplify sounds interesting—good luck with it!

mtths 7 Aug 2024 17:54 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: ThomNorman’s comment on: animal welfare outside of EA—numbers and thoughts on UFAW 2024
Thanks for sharing your experience! Maybe this was unusual for animal related events.

My experience with academic conferences comes mostly from non-related computer science conferences.

mtths 22 Jul 2024 22:05 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vanessa’s comment on: animal welfare outside of EA—numbers and thoughts on UFAW 2024
It doesn’t feel particularly different from other academic conferences to me. Most researchers don’t reflect on what they think the most important research is and then go out and find the funding and institution to do exactly that. Instead, you usually apply to lots of PhD/postdoc positions that are vaguely in your field of expertise and you take what you get. Such positions often come with funding for some particular kind of work. I am not surprised that there is money in research on precision livestock farming, for example. I expect this is a bit different once you get tenure, but most research is done by early-career researchers (because there are so much more of them).
I assume the people there like animals a bit more than the average person. They probably chose their undergrad (veterinary science/biology/...) because of that. Then, at the end of their undergrad they would have chosen their final project from a limited list of possible projects offered by a limited number of labs (at a uni that they picked years previously for probably different reasons). And then, when they were applying to PhDs, they likely prioritised projects that were somewhat related to that undergrad project. Sadly, a lot of researchers stumble into their speciality like that.

(This is my personal impression of how academia works. I am not aware of any proper research on this.)