It feels like every time I sit down to start writing, something in my life pops up and takes me out of my focus. There's been a lot of that this year, sometimes good, sometimes not so much. Transparently there's also a lack of willpower too; a lot of what it means to be a writer has changed nowadays. I found myself asking, for a variety of reasons, what's the point? I've come to the conclusion that the point is that I write because I enjoy it and it's cathartic. It doesn't have to be more complex than that, though I definitely have made it so in the past.

This year has been a weird one. While I've started a bunch of side projects, my main work around doing research around AI and use cases for Arcana has taken up most of my time. It's a bit slower and more "spikey" than I'd like—enterprise deals take a lot longer than I thought to close, especially with Fortune 500 companies, but nothing's perfect in life, and that includes jobs that you have made up.

Personal life-wise, I've spent most of the year at my parents' house. A one-week visit has turned into a few months and counting. I initially came to check in on my parents after an international trip where they both got sick, but while I was here, my father had a massive heart attack. It was a bit touch and go for a few days, but luckily he's pulled through and is on the mend. The problem is that the mend is actually quite a long road of cardiac rehab, tests and ultrasounds, doctor's visits, and convincing him to take his blood pressure meds.

While none of this is ideal, I've been working to see the positive. On the bright side, I spent most of the beginning of my adulthood sheltered for a lot of this responsibility. But it's inevitable for anyone. People get older, their health gets worse, and you must make a conscious decision of how involved you want to be. Some people are pretty laissez-faire for whatever their reason is, valid or not. The first night my dad was in the hospital I remember looking at him with a tube helping him breathe and monitors beeping and told myself that I would be there to help out as much as I can. Because he would do the exact same for us. It made me realize too that there's a different relationship between parents and their kids, and vice versa. There's a built-in asymmetry to the relationship. For parents, caring for their children is both instinctive and expected. For children, caring for their parents later is much more of a choice.

Anyway all those changes have given me a lot of time over the past few months to just hang out, play with my dogs, walk, and think. It's been nice but a bit boring, frankly. But that's okay—probably even good. We're not nearly as bored as we should be nowadays. With a constant stream of near-instant gratification through phones, computers, video games, and whatever other digital devices are out there, it feels impossible to be bored by accident. You need to make a real concerted effort to actually be bored now. Which sounds insane.

But just as constraints beget creativity, boredom begets ideas. I rediscovered the spark I was missing around writing and publishing online. I've been writing a ton over the past few years but have had a subconscious block around actually publishing any of it. But being away from a big city, my friends and peers, and interesting people reminded me why publishing is valuable too. It's sort of a homing beacon for people who have the same interests as you. The Internet has a really weird way of herding people who like the same thing together. Nearly every social platform is designed around this principle. It's so ingrained into the Internet that it's practically a law like gravity. If you publish, they will come, to paraphrase the great Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams.

I've been writing all of this stuff anyway, so I might as well start putting some of it online. There aren't many rules because the one thing I hate about writing is rules. I do plan to write a lot about work and AI and enterprises etc etc, but also things like film, sports (I've gotten very into soccer again), digital culture, personal health & wellness, and more. The whole point is to keep this very open-ended. Maybe even books since I've started reading those again a lot more.

A few things I'm working on:

Chinese open-source models are catching up to models from U.S. frontier labs much faster than expected. That leaves businesses with a pretty straightforward tradeoff: pay for the smartest model available, or use something that gets the job done for a fraction of the cost. My argument is that the pace of model development matters less than the pace of AI adoption in both countries. That's what will determine the winner in the future AI economic war.

Some AI slop is good, or at least better than plenty of the drivel people already post online. I keep finding myself watching or reading it and not minding it nearly as much as I expected. I want to figure out where the line is between the good stuff and the bad.

The economy and business world feel starkly different compared to six years ago. You're either "in" or out in the wilderness of the permanent underclass. There's a game being played and we're all on different levels. I want to write about how much more of our economic and daily lives that game now controls, and whether the better move is to stop playing it.