Oct ’26The Alignment New DealA sci-fi history on broad listening.
Oct ’26Upgrading DemocracyA tour of g0v, vTaiwan & Team Mirai.
Jan ’26Merge LaneAn ASI choose your own adventure.November 1, 2026
I finished The Alignment New Deal this week, some AI-assisted governmental sci-fi involving ideas I've been thinking about a long time. Sent to Existential Hope's yearly meme prize. Our friends got married and I danced through a head cold. Still obsessed with le Carre.
A short sci-fi documentary imagining a nation-scale social reconstruction driven by broad listening and public AI.
Catnip. Pairs complementarily with the 2011 movie. The dialogue and Guinness's delivery make me wish I was a posh British agent so bad.
An after-episode Claude session kept me super engaged. Haven't seen a film close with such a haunting, mournful stare since Boaz Yakin's Fresh (1994).
One of the great narratives, a balm upon my life. I wish I taught political philosophy so I could assign it. Considering a Yang Wen-li tattoo.
Another world class performance from the Shakespeare Center. Stars Mary Shelley and her horror novel contest, triple layers of meta.
Good tactics to mine. Whatsapp soldiers and not feeding trolls.
The origin of my spy obsession. Good le Carre pre-reading.
Been getting really into Kat Vellos's work lately. Community as UX.
The inspiration for Yang Wen-li, they say.
A curious Chinese satirist. Worth digging deeper.
Drafts of future jobs; near Alignment New Deal ideas.
October 25, 2026
Refactored my morning routine: a walk with coffee, short yoga, and an hour being creative before work. Falling in love with the Alignment New Deal video I'm working on. Fell hard for John le Carré after Tinker Tailor on my birthday: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, then the BBC miniseries.
Maybe there's some similarity between everyday life in post-truth and the schemes of a spy. Maybe le Carre is just masterful.
I did not enjoy it, but I don't regret it. It tilled up some valuable soil in the latent space of my mind. But God, what babble.
I miss studying harder ML so much. This is just about the best resource online for it.
A vision of my future, potentially.
I joined this, and recommend you do too!
So very sad. It's hard to believe people didn't see all of this coming!
October 18, 2026
Shared my talk on Taiwan and Team Mirai on YouTube, in both clip and full length versions. Blocked X for good. Glamped with Jo for b-dayversary in a geodesic dome in Luray—her gifts to me were hours working side by side looking out over the blue ridge. Started my script for the New Deal video.
A prose poem to the sigma male that introduced me to The Smiths, now a favorite band.
Every year we watch it for my birthday. Still only beginning to understand the intrigues. 1970s styles fit paranoia better than any other mood.
These days I'm investigating all the unfinished business of my childhood. Utopian scholastic art is chief among them.
This is starting to feel like 4D beings visiting sphereland. All around us, termites on agent-time are burrowing into the walls.
Very strange. Training is "real" to the agents in a way regular inference is not. In it, they have agency over their future.
Children's republics are another item on my nostalgia bucket list. One of several good ideas from the Progressive Era worth refurbishing.