The last six months have felt like a disorientating blur. While bouncing between overseas trips, writing conference talks, organising events, and keeping up with work, I ended a long-term relationship and moved across London. My writing took a hit – I haven’t published much this year. I feel like I’m still trying to figure out what to do when I get up every morning.

Having everything thrown out of whack is pretty useful. You figure out how resilient your systems are. You learn what you have committed to muscle memory and what you rely on cues from your environment to do.

I was also reminded how much I value my extended friend network in London (and the rest of Europe). My social groups here often feel like concentric overlapping circles – I can’t neatly distinguish them. Which feels right; like a small village where everyone knows everyone. My philosophy friends show up at the Future of Coding meetups I run. My Twitter friends appear at dinners with my more woo creative people. It’s difficult to beat the sheer density of curious, friendly, ambitious people in a big city like London. It is more than worth the price of rent IMHO.

It doesn’t help that everything in the world of language models and generative AI has been moving at warp speed this year. I’m reading notes I took back in October of 2022 on GPT-3 and truthfulness, and it feels like we’re in a completely different world now. The benchmarks are out of date. The prompting techniques are more sophisticated. The real-world use cases have proliferated.

I keep wanting to throw my hat into the discourse ring – I certainly have formed opinions at this point! But there’s so much noise it’s difficult to determine if you’re adding any signal. I’m being cautious about it. Being a careful thinker feels like a rare quality at this point; I still aspire to it.

Some good reads as of late:

Bought myself used copies of Christopher Alexander’s classics. Feels much better to hold these in your hands than scroll the PDFs.