🧪 RAND fundraise
RAND researcher Ella Guest and Beth Barnes, the founder and head of research at METR will lead the research efforts for Project Canary.
Ella’s big news from the last few months is that she raised $40 million to fund a new AI evals project at RAND!
There’s not much more I can say about this right now other than it was a lot of effort and I’m incredibly proud.
✈️ Bicoastal Life, pt. II
Back in July, I said we’d decided to rent a place in SF as well as our place in DC, and split out time between them. And we have! We got the new place in early September, and we’ve been back and forth between them since.
It is a lot more comfortable than spending a week a month in a hotel. It’s also nigh-on identical to both our old SF apartment and our current DC apartment 😅. Reason being is that Amazon & Chinese furniture companies will sell you any piece of furniture you want in blue velvet and distressed wood, they’ll do it cheap and they’ll deliver quick.
🎨 Wall art
As with the last two times we’ve decorated apartments, wall art continues to be contentious. The compromise this time was pairs:
Respectively: Dancing Fox & Kleine Welten; the Astronomer & Solar Spots; Hopetown & Burton.
The one exception to the pair thing was this relief map that we both love:
🤖 Anthropic
Much like with Ella and RAND, there’s not much I can say here other than to point at public info and say it’s going incredibly well. We announced another $4b fundraise last month, and - as mentioned in July - Claude continues to do more and more of my job. If you’re an engineer and haven’t used one of the Claude-enabled editors, you are missing something enormous here.
📖 AstralCodexTen
I was reflecting a few weeks back about which blogs have had the most impact on me, and the answer is overwhelmingly SlateStarCodex and its successor AstralCodexTen. It’s maybe the highest signal-to-noise commentary on the internet, with the only real competition being Matt Levine (and I think he’s limited by his format).
And so, some personal favorites:
Secret of our Success; about the limitations of isolated intelligence
Whither Tartaria; about, really, the importance of signaling
Albion’s Seed; about how the US came to be the way it is
There are also posts which I don’t think that much about because the ideas contained have since become fundamentals in how my social group thinks.
🧱 Tidbits
🤩 Absolute favorite films of 2025:
My Old Ass, which reduced every mid-30s woman in the cinema to tears. In a good way.
Anora is going to win so many awards and rightfully so. Much more of a comedy than the trailer lets on. Ella says it’s the best movie she’s seen.
😍 Memorably good films of 2025:
The Substance is weird as hell, and not something to see with your children, parents or colleagues.
Conclave is almost great but has one too many (sigh) deus ex moments. The performances are still fantastic.
Heretic is similarly almost-great but again the plot asks a little too much disbelief of the viewer.
Mars Express is my favorite animated film in a long time. In Ella’s words though, the ending is very, uh, French.
🎬 Los Angeles: we ended up in LA a couple of times this year for various events, and we both liked it dramatically more than we were expecting. It might be our favorite city (but not favorite enough for us to sacrifice our career impact for).
Highlights are the weather, being huge enough to contain many distinct smaller cities, and the Getty Center, which is the best art museum either of us have been to.
Lowlights are LAX (unsurprisingly) and the fact we asked for a compact rental car and got given a full SUV ‘because no-one in LA wants to drive compacts’. We managed not to kill anyone, but never felt comfortable in it either.
🌋 Lassen: we spent a couple of days in Lassen with friends. It’s gorgeous and it’s unique and we’ve never hiked to a volcanic area before. And we’ll never hike to one again because wow does sulfur smell terrible.
🎄 Merry Christmas!
