i spent this summer @WSJ covering tech! some highlights of my reporting:

geese watching

no no no, you don’t understand. i’m tpot adjacent, which is rat adjacent adjacent, which is EA adjacent adjacent adjacent. don’t put me in the all-in gulags! i eat meat!

!!!!!!!!!!! Longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Poetry nationalbook.org/longlist-fo…

really helpful "emergency newsletter" from 80k hours about the current moment and how we can start thinking of navigating it - recently practicing thoughtful monitoring of the situation and more talking to people in my life!! us2.campaign-archive.com/?e=…

We profiled Jacob Coxon, the "normal researcher" who quit Anthropic and caused a firestorm, tracing his journey from high school math whiz to London rationalist to self-proclaimed "doomer." with @AmrithRamkumar @berber_jin1 @bzcohen: wsj.com/tech/ai/jacob-coxon-…

Worrying about recursive self-improvement in 1996 is very impressive, but few know that George Eliot, of Middlemarch brilliance, wrote about the threat of RSI leading to human obsolescence way back in 1879 (!) She glimpsed this idea at the very start of the second industrial revolution, just by contemplating an automated weighing machine at the Bank of England. From "Shadows of the Coming Race":

bro theyre gonna do mccarthyism to effective altruists

wow this happened and we put it in the newspaper wsj.com/tech/ai/americas-gre…

new sf run club called “pacing the frontier”

me to my claude agent when it tries to use a broken api: stop trying to make fetch happen

You know, @OpenAI, I heard a rumor @AnthropicAI solved alignment and they're publishing in two weeks.

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three year doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are releasing their inhibitions and feeling the rain on their skin. No one else can feel it for them, only they can le

personally i am not really impressed when a computer is good at math — since a computer is math . i am a lot more intrigued by things like , for example , a rat being an exceptional cook — since that’s not really expected

*entirely mishearing the openai situation* wow yeah i love the strokes

In the Times this morning- Henry Farrell James Evans and I on why we desperately need the social sciences to understand AI and its impact , just at the moment when the admin is trying to destroy them nytimes.com/2026/09/06/opini…

my best friend got me these books, plus stole some pineapple for me from a school event. very excited about The Little Magazine, very excited about friendship and fruit and school

I'm very disappointed to learn that WIRED had shut down Made in China, the newsletter my editor Louise and I created together. We published 52 issues in the past year, broke a ton of exclusives, had immense fun, and built a voice that truly care about China, the good & the bad.

first-day-back-on-campus-posting

how i feel explaining my summer to the first years i led on backpacking trips

Tried to write about this moment in AI right now. The agent hacks, the universal lack of control, the weirdening & slopping of culture. The feeling that the industry is speeding toward something it can’t even decide is good and lecturing that it is inevitable. theatlantic.com/technology/2…