At the moment I’m in Antigua Guatemala for a hackathon x holiday, and it feels like a world away from chilly but Christmas-y Oxford!
Some recent projects
- Built an “Ideological Turing Test”
game, with Claude writing almost all the code. My first time properly using
a CLI agent (rather than just a chat interface), and I’ve been won over.
- If you haven’t read the Opus soul document yet, you should! It’s interesting, and emotive in places.
- Ran three AI strategy workshops at OAISI.
- Went on a lengthy quest in search of an overhead book scanner, and finally tracked one down
at the curiously-named School of Advanced Study.
- It’s a clever device – saves you the inconvenience of turning the book upside down for each spread, and also corrects for page curvature by projecting a laser onto the paper and measuring its reflection to post-process appropriately.
- The model I was using apparently costs about £10,000, though it was still about 3x slower than the 1000 pages/hr that Google’s custom-built setup managed about 20 years ago…
- More generally: there must be loads of specialised machines out there that are geared to a very particular task, but impractical for ordinary people to get their hands on. This is one of the things that seems very cool about hackerspaces!
- Wrote a lot of Christmas cards, and even sent some of them by snail mail.
- I was wondering if there were things I should consider doing to improve at the skill of card-writing,
so tried to find some personal blogposts about it, but this was (predictably)
basically impossible. Almost everything I came across was either generic listicles from
cards companies trying to get traffic to their sites, or affiliate link-filled advice which didn’t tell
me much I didn’t already know. But I’m sure that I could in fact get lots better at writing messages for
cards, and that some people out there know how to!
- Many have pondered whether Google search is getting worse. It’s certainly true that results are usually very dominated by heavily SEO-optimised content on places like Medium or W3 schools.
- When you’re looking for classic essays about a particular topic, LLMs are often good at recommending what to read (e.g., on UI/UX). But it’s much harder to search the small-scale indie web, sadly.
- I’m torn on whether to routinely take photos of the letters I write. They get lost in the post more often than I’d like (~10%?), and I expect that in future I’d be interested to look back over them – but one thing I think is precious about letters as opposed to emails or texts is that once you put them into a postbox, they’re really out of your hands and there’s no reason (or way) to ruminate on what you wrote.
- I was wondering if there were things I should consider doing to improve at the skill of card-writing,
so tried to find some personal blogposts about it, but this was (predictably)
basically impossible. Almost everything I came across was either generic listicles from
cards companies trying to get traffic to their sites, or affiliate link-filled advice which didn’t tell
me much I didn’t already know. But I’m sure that I could in fact get lots better at writing messages for
cards, and that some people out there know how to!
Media consumption
- 139,000 minutes of music this year, Spotify tells me, supposedly across 354 genres! Lorde’s concert was incredible, with Japanese House beforehand great, too.
- One thing I thought about afterwards: why don’t more ambitious/pushy parents get their children to try to
become pop stars? It’s a lot of fun (source: Charli xcx’s Substack), you can get rich, and presumably it’s quite trainable.
- I do have a few hypotheses, but curious if they’re correct. I guess to some extent K-pop does have this?
- One thing I thought about afterwards: why don’t more ambitious/pushy parents get their children to try to
become pop stars? It’s a lot of fun (source: Charli xcx’s Substack), you can get rich, and presumably it’s quite trainable.
- The addictiveness of Factorio only lasted for about 50h of gameplay, and then it started feeling just like work. To my surprise, Civ 6 didn’t even reach the 5h mark before I’d had enough.
- Watched my first Wes Anderson film (Grand Budapest Hotel) and loved it; The Phoenician Scheme was a very enjoyable watch too.
Discoveries made in 2025
- Rewards credit cards are a thing and it’s possible to get them!
- e.g. if you’re in the UK: Amazon Barclaycard, Amex Everyday.
- I get the impression that they’re both much more widespread and generous in the US.
- You can quite reliably swap money for utility, and I wasn’t doing this enough before.
- If you buy the idea of consumption smoothing, then it might not make sense to save much money while a student or early-career professional (perhaps just excepting some small emergency buffer). I knew the theoretical result for a while, but hadn’t really followed it in practice until this year.
- Relatedly, you can buy gifts for friends even when it’s not their birthday / Christmas, and it will make both you and them feel good!
- As a renter, the reasonableness of your landlord makes a big difference to your quality of life. It’s probably a good idea to invest a decent amount of time into getting references on them before you commit to somewhere.
- Personalisation & data collection aren’t always bad.
- Previously I’d disabled features like search history for privacy reasons,
but I think on balance they’re worth having.
- Future-you might be interested in what its past self was up to, and allowing data like browsing history or health metrics to be collected & preserved is therefore quite valuable, even though the price might be Big Tech also having that data about you.
- Also, it’s often just convenient for Google Maps to know which places you regularly travel between, or for Gemini to be able to add events to your calendar from email, and so on. I expect as AI agents get more capable, there’ll be increasingly large upsides from allowing personalisation / granting more data access.
- That doesn’t mean I’ve given up on privacy! There are some steps you can take with much lower costs than giving up browser history or personalisation – e.g., blocking third-party cookies & other trackers – and these seem like clear wins.
- Previously I’d disabled features like search history for privacy reasons,
but I think on balance they’re worth having.
(… and many other discoveries besides, of course)
To start next year?
- Maybe I should pick up weight training again? Sounds like it has a lot of benefits (though am unsure how much of those are unique to weight training, vs shared by all kinds of exercise).