Now

Spring 2026

(Skipping “Winter 2025/6” and jumping to “Spring 2026”, because I realised I didn’t really like naming a “now” post about the season which just ended.)

I’m in Oxford at the moment, and will be here for most of the next three months – though after that, probably almost not at all. And there’s a lot I want to squeeze out of this last stretch of living within a 10min cycle of friends! Even though I’m spending most of my time revising for Finals, I think this vacation might have been one of my favourite periods here so far – there’s something quite satisfying about the mini-routines of studying and socialising I’ve been settling into without any impositions from lectures or tutorials. Reminding myself of the impotence of the demandingness objection then talking about the latest drama and memes from AI safety Twitter over lunch; deriving the consistency of the OLS estimator (for the dozenth time) before hosting board games at Babel; climbing & Szechuan food on Cowley Rd after struggling through arguments against S5 as the correct modal logic.

Revision can be tedious, though, and this has reminded me that I’m grateful that the job I’ll end up working in will, very likely, be something I find meaningful and enjoyable. It’s a huge win if the thing you spend ~40h/week on can be an activity you actively like (as opposed to finding it neutral or negative, which I’d guess is the position of most people in the world, and very likely the majority of humans who’ve lived¹).

Things I’ve been up to

• I really like Damon’s concept of Seasons of Growth. There are so many potential areas for personal development, but focusing on specific ones for a fixed time seems like a much more manageable way to make progress, since you can set up new habits & systems before moving on, without an indefinite comittment. If I was going to name my season for the last few months, it’d be physical health:
  • I started lifting, and it’s been fun!
  • I switched around my supplements and started taking extra protein.
    • I’d been under the false impression that protein was unnecessary for vegans. But although you won’t become unwell from protein deficiency on a plant-based diet, it does become difficult to gain any muscle mass without shakes/similar, if you’re not very deliberately trying to maximise protein in meals.
    • Andy Masley has a detailed writeup but my main takeaway was that it’s sensible to have a shake with 50g soy protein + 5g creatine / day, and you can get these super cheap (& probably with tolerably low heavy metal content) from places like Bulk.
• Besides cutting through nutrition marketing hype, I’ve been using Claude a lot more for making personalised software – e.g., a revision schedule planner, and a pipeline to fact-check my flashcards.
  • A lot has changed in the last year; LLMs are now generally at least as good as me at solving economics problems, although game theory seems to be a consistent blind spot for them.
  • And they’re much better at writing emails too – I’ve been applying for a few jobs recently, and in work tests I often felt like I didn’t provide much uplift above what Claude could do. It’s not that my submissions were bad, either; I made it to the final stages!
    • I think a substantial part of this can be explained by the fact that in a work test, the human is lacking in deep context, which levels the playing field for context-poor LLMs. So I expect that if I were in the job full-time, my value-add over Claude would be greater.
    • In any case, if I were running a hiring round now, I’d definitely want to baseline my screening stages with LLM responses, and maybe even add their submissions into the candidate pool for blind marking.

Media consumption

• Some wonderful essays Randy wrote about the Guatemala holiday x hackathon.
• Music:
  • Saw Florence + the Machine live in London. It was fun, but felt more rehearsed than Lorde’s; a little on the self-indulgent side with several sections reminiscing on breaking her foot last time she performed in London.
  • Listening through more albums in full: Harry Styles’s latest; Charli xcx’s Wuthering Heights West End Girl from Lily Allen (which grew on me a lot – the narrative arc and voice notes reminded me somewhat of Adele’s 30).
• A bunch of TV shows and movies which you might call “realist relationship drama”, or something like that? More portable than real people-watching, and still gives you interesting things to think about. Some highlights:
  • 500 Days of Summer (excellent soundtrack, and lovely in its honesty – both in the portrayal of Tom’s heartbreak, and (implicitly) Summer’s non-unreasonableness)
  • State of the Union (the UK version was almost perfect, but the American season no good at all – much too caricatured, and terribly un-funny)
  • One Day (although again, at times tiresome in how crude the caricatures were)