Autumn 2026
Locations: I’m in Berkeley, California, where I’ve just rejoined Macroscopic to work on AI safety and large-scale philanthropy. I’ll be here at least until Christmas, when I’m returning to London for the holidays.
Projects: I’ve finally been able to overhaul some parts of my website I’d been meaning to for a while – my sidenotes feature is a lot less janky now, and there are some fun easter eggs in the gallery. And the cities, restaurants, and shows pages have been made much more interesting, with Fable and Astra’s help. (I’m somewhat in two minds about using AI agents to build my website, but at the moment I’m happy with delegating coding to them so long as I keep editorial control; I draw a hard line at having them do my writing for me.)
On my mind: At the start of the summer I reflected on how AI development was making this a wild time to be alive. The physical world still isn’t showing many marks of this technological progress, but AI safety broke through to the mainstream this month, first with NYT front pages, and then even the NY Post (in an inversion of a line from Warriors that always makes me laugh). And, to repeat an overused phrase, this is probably the least crazy things will ever be.
I’ve been trying to take more thoughtful photos lately, and I enjoyed this very neat piece on how much information a photograph contains. Toby Ord’s website also has some beautifully restored images of the Earth from space!
Media consumption
- I played poker semi-seriously (though still not for money…) for the first time this summer. The game is much richer and more complicated than I had realised. I’d never heard of the idea of a “range” before, but it’s a neat concept – what matters is not the hand you actually hold, but the full set of hands you might’ve done, since strategies (in the game theoretic sense) specify actions at every node of the game tree. I feel like there are some nice analogies between this and real-world problems, but I’ve not played enough poker yet to notice them.
- Fittingly, I also played a bit of Balatro – I really like how the old-school colours, music, and typography all come together for a very retro but not dated-feeling package. With Slay the Spire 2’s multiplayer mode, rougelikes are growing on me.
- I’ve watched two Korean-language dramas recently: the film Past Lives, which has amazing music (and got bonus points in my book for referencing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and also a few episodes of Twenty-Five Twenty-One (which is funny and heartwarming, but could’ve done much more creative cinematography when jumping between the two time periods, I think).
- I went to my first music festivals over the summer! They were great, and the mud at Reading wasn’t even that bad. Next, Glastonbury?