What I'm Up To Now, Besides No Good

As of mid-2025, I'm officially out of Tumblr! I've had a long, wonderful journey there but I'm so eager to explore what's out there and collaborate on other projects for a while. I'm especially interested in the future of work and ways of using AI to bring people closer together rather than further apart. If you're around SF and are exploring ways to build a better future, I'd love to have a chat!

Some personal and friends' projects I've been building:

• AIMibot - the AI tamagotchi, for us grown-up kids :) a little voice wearable that acts like a cute pet, grows as you talk with it, and comes in six different tribes
• Framework Zero - an infrastructure layer to integrate human preferences into autonomous organizations, with the thesis that we're heading towards a fully automated future and we need it to be one where human preferences at mass can be represented. I've been particularly interested in the digital twins piece where agents that know about your preferences can represent you. We finished the Dagihouse accelerator and have been doing an event series on post-labor economics, with plans to launch an open-source community soon
• a fanfic generator - like webtoons but for fanfic!
• Two Degrees - a platform for matchmakers to better matchmake their friends. Our thesis is that people are sick of dating apps right now, and for good reason! We think intros from friends and people in your network are a much better way to meet, it just takes a better tool to do so :)
• FicWorld - Inspired by the Bookworld paper, this is a story-making experiment to create emergent fiction by making every character their own agent, with their own memory stream, personality, backstory, personal thoughts and emotional state, responding to a world driven by a World Agent and weaved into stories by Plot Agents and Narrators.
• Idea Factory Automator - a joke project to autogenerate a hundred product ideas in any topic and deploy them all at once
• An autonomous agent for my friend's beef jerky startup
• Various projects for Frontier Tower, where I'm on the AI floor

Some other little things I've built in the last few months:

• an epub summarizer for long books
• imessage semantic search - for when you can't remember who said what in your texts
• tweet to printful - convert any tweet into a print-on-demand card
• poetry recommender - get a poem for your taste from the poetry foundation
• celebrity lookalike app - see who you resemble in the CelebA dataset
• tumblr vibes generator - get a personality analysis and image vibe for your tumblr blog

Some of my ongoing non-coding goals:

• make a comic series about my cats Meow Meow and Aggy, the most agentic frenemies in a hacker house in SF
• start up an actual substack for posting my writing
• finish Dan Carlins's Supernova in the East series and a bunch more of his old ones - currently on a Pacific theater and modern Chinese history kick
• read and figure out my favs of the last few years of astralcodexten's book review contests (a repo up to 2023 here, complete 2024 collection here, the 2024 finalists)
• ACX-style book reviews are one of my absolute favorite ways to dive into a subject I don't know much about, but don't have the time to read a 500-page book on. They're so more engaging and insightful than LLMs or Blinkist and the best ones offer not just a summary but pull together an incredible array of historical context and critical analysis like this one on The Weirdest People in the World or this one on The Educated Mind.
• work on my epic fantasy novel series about a world where colossal kaiju are harbingers of cataclysmic natural disasters, yet leave behind in their wake elemental ores that grant humans superpowers. Great kingdoms rise and fall in their struggle for dominance until the Once and Future War ends with the annihilation of the Imperial family and The Sunless Throne. tldr; Vengeance is a patient ore, and it never forgets.

You can follow along a running log of my random draft-tweet thoughts here. I also publish a sporadically-updated substack called everythingireadtoday that rounds up fun longreads I've found around the web - these are usually in economics, sociology, tech news, science, psychology, progress studies et al, but really just about anything that I find interesting.

Books I'm reading as of 2025:

Current/finished non-fiction reads:

• Abundance (Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson)
• Humankind: A Hopeful History (Rutger Bregman)
• Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China(Evan Osnos)
• absolutely engrossing, so many wild stories of some inspirational figures I'd never heard of like the blind peasant lawyer and the peasant girl who founded China's largest dating site
• In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work (Kyla Scanlon)
• Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse (Timothy P. Carney)
• Ways of Seeing (John Berger)
• Where Good Ideas Come From (Steven Johnson)
• The Lost Art of Listening (Michael P Nichols)
• ThinkerToys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (Michael Michalko)
• The Wayfinders (Wade Davis)
• Jane Austen: Game Theorist (Michael Suk-Young Chwe)
• Wild Problems : A Guide to the Decisions that Define Us (Russ Roberts)
• 30 Second Philosophies (Julian Baggini)
• The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
• How the World Made the West (Josephine Quinn)

Current/finished fiction reads:

• The Mars House (Natasha Pulley)
• Zoey is Too Drunk for this Dystopia (Jason Pargin)
• The Bee Sting (Paul Murray)
• Intermezzo (Sally Rooney)
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)
• Wild (Cheryl Strayed)
• The Best of Greg Egan
• Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage (Alice Munro)
• Demon Copperhead (Barbara Kingsolver)
• Jade Legacy - The Green Bone Saga #3 (Fonda Lee)
• Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)
• Valuable Humans in Transit (qntm)
• A Deadly Education (Naomi Novik)
• Intermezzo (Sally Rooney)