11 Apr 2026
culture
Borges has a very short story about an empire whose cartographers kept producing larger and larger maps, until they built one the size of the empire itself. the following generations, less enchanted, saw it was useless and abandoned it to the weather. maps are useful precisely because they are reductions. when the pursuit of fidelity destroys the compression it destroys the point.
13 Mar 2026
tools
so this post is comprised of a few thoughts that converged into a tool.
07 Mar 2026
reading
For various reasons, i found myself away from ‘work work’ for the past couple of weeks, and also mostly away from a laptop, and because of that, first of all i feel rusty and out of touch with the research areas (and some aspects of agentic coding). we’ll see how to come out and fix that: i can double click on this feeling and say that a] it’s probably mostly ‘fake’ in the sense that stuff is indeed moving fast, but two weeks away isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things, and is more a result of being on the bleeding edge than anything else, and b] that this feeling is pretty much motivating and useful, so yay, let’s try to utilize it. And second of all, my mental energy flowed elsewhere i suppose. A nice thing about being away is that i had the mental space to think about grander things! So i’m writing about some great books.
18 Feb 2026
tools
I needed a way to make diagrams for posts and papers. The requirements were simple: something I could mostly just ask Claude to create, something that looked decent for scientific work, and something I could edit afterward — not a PNG I’d have to regenerate from scratch every time I wanted to move a box.
11 Feb 2026
tools
A friend who drives a lot asked if there was an audio version of my posts. There wasn’t. So I looked into it — and it turned out to be absurdly easy.
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11 Feb 2026
agents, health
I’ve been noticing something about how I work with Claude. It’s not dramatic — no moment where the model led me off a cliff and I realized too late. It’s more of a drift. The models have gotten good enough that my default reaction to most outputs is “yeah, that’s probably right.” And most of the time it is. But “most of the time” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
06 Feb 2026
agents, tools
Opus 4.6 came out ~20 hours ago and I wanted to get a feel for it. It also seemed like a good chance to follow up on some of the ideas from my previous post — specifically, building small tools that help me stay more engaged with my own work rather than just producing output.
03 Feb 2026
agents, culture
How can someone who enjoys thinking — enjoys the cognitive load — use coding agents and LLMs to foster continued learning, and not skill degradation? And what are some useful mental frameworks to have in mind?
29 Jan 2026
agents, health, evaluation
In the last couple of months we’ve been working on a health agent. It was my role specifically to deal with the messy answer to the tough question: “is it good? worthwhile? valuable?”
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26 Jan 2026
culture
“The Entertainment is real, and it’s called Instagram Reels.”
23 Jan 2026
agents, evaluation
A foundation model I’ve been working on recently got published in Nature. For a while I’ve wanted to write this. Now the paper is finally out so I have to do it in a timely manner, and I also have to start investing more thought in the upcoming projects (some are similar). So what is this? I think the honest answer is something between a post-mortem of a successful project and some exploration towards the future. Exploration about the question that lived in my mind when I was working on this project: “how do we know it’s actually worthwhile?” I think it comes up often in these kinds of research works.
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17 Jan 2026
agents
The landscape is shifting in recent years — it’s a cliche to start texts like this these days, but the fact that it’s a cliche doesn’t make it any less true. In 2019, the folks at Andreessen Horowitz wrote this about data (in a piece titled The Empty Promise of Data Moats): “Instead of getting stronger, the defensible moat erodes as the data corpus grows and the competition races to catch up.” (Trying to prove some data has value — I’ve experienced it firsthand.)
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16 Aug 2025
meta
For a while now I’ve been collecting too many things to read and think about, mostly in twitter ‘saved links’.
This is a place for me to silently collect together things I enjoyed reading / other content I’ve enjoyed and sometimes jot some thoughts about it. It’s built in a way that won’t make me feel too committed, should be kind of under the radar, low friction, minimal effort.