I'm not sophisticated enough to have noticed improvements in the main phone camera in the past 5-10 years, but distance shots are still not very good. The next generation Pixel Pro was supposed to have an improved "telephoto" camera, and when Google Fi offered me a sufficiently good deal [1]...
The kids have been excited about Pig Latin a lot lately. I noticed that there are a few words that are also English words, or homophones thereof. With some help from Claude, especially in figuring out which words would work well and in checking my work, here's a poem about...
Several months ago I wrote a program to normalize your clipboard, removing fonts / colors / sizes and mostly leaving semantic information: anything that can't be represented in Markdown was dropped. Now that I can have walk me through things, however, I've made it available as a free app on...
Cross-posted from my SecureBio Notebook. This is a lightly-edited version of a memo that I presented at the Summer 2026 Biosecurity Summit outside of DC. While others at SecureBio often see things similarly, I'm attempting to present my view and not a SecureBio "house view". The Goal We need to...
In It May Be Possible to Improvise A High Grade Bioshelter, Adin Richards discusses the possibility of improvising defenses against an environmental threat such as mirror bacteria. He gives an exploratory overview of why it might be possible to apply materials and equipment people often already have in their houses...
I avoid Twitter (𝕏) for similar reasons to drugs: I think it would change me for the worse, and I would be unable to give it up. After staying off Twitter reasonably successfully for years, I cross-posted my AI Tweets there a few weeks ago. I had something very Twitter-shaped...
When I look at why I expect the world to change a lot in the next few years, and why other people expect slower changes, I think a big component is disagreement on the extent to which AI will affect non-computer work. Sure, programming has sped up massively with Claude...