đâ⏠Kitten. Ella loves cats, but our frequently-moving lots-of-travel apartment-bound lifestyle wasnât supportive of it. We recently figured out a solution though - fostering! We get a kitten for a few weeks, Ella gets her dose of cat, and if it doesnât work out weâre not stuck flying a pet around the country.
We got Binx (pictured; not our choice of name) last Friday, and weâre holding onto her for three weeks. Kamal immediately made a market as to whether weâd end up keeping her.
â°ď¸ Vacation. We took a weekâs vacation in the Sierras. No real plans other than to spend a lot of time hanging out and maybe a trip or two to Yosemite.
The first five days we both loved; the last five days were still pretty good but we started to feel like we wanted an activity of some sort. Surfing or skiing next time, we think.
đď¸ DC. Ellaâs finished her training for the fellowship and is now chatting to possible âmatchesâ, possible thinktanks to join. There are a couple of really exciting contenders, and the more we chat about it the more likely I think it is that I spend the bulk of my time in DC the coming year.
đ Stanford. I was invited to give a guest lecture to a Stanford graduate class, on Anthropicâs research agenda. Slides! It was fun, and I discovered I could prepare a reasonably compelling lecture one day in advance, and deliver it largely off-the-cuff!
An hourâs public speaking with one dayâs prep is not something I was able to do even two years ago. I think the main enabler is being comfortable enough in the subject area that I could speak for many hours on the topic; with that in place, finding one hour of good material is easy.
đ¨âđź Work. Nothing new and public to show from Anthropic this newsletter. But internally - I got promoted, hired my first report (the other folks on my team I inherited), & went through my first feedback cycle from the managerâs side.
Recommendations
âď¸ Fantasy. I have somehow read eight fantasy novels this month. Highlight: Mask of Mirrors, a heist novel based in a fantastical Venice. Think Lies of Locke Lamora (also great), but with a female author. Lots more relationship than fight scenes, more dresses and tarot than swords and sorcery. I really enjoyed it.
My Goodreads with all the other stuff is here.
đ SpaceX. Something about the Starship launch has got me reading/watching a lot of spaceflight material. I think Casey Handmerâs posts on Starship staging are what convinced me it was a big deal, but my interest has spidered out from there to hour-long technical videos rocket engine startup dynamics.
I came very close to flying out to Texas for the launch, but instead settled for getting up at 6am to watch the stream. I woke Ella up for the second one, something apparently only justified by the fact it blew up.
đ ď¸ Random Youtube. This 30 min corporate documentary on a Swiss tunneling project was great.