Happenings
This is a long one. Lots happened this month! Next month should be quieter.
Parents visit. For the one-year anniversary of my leaving the UK, my parents came to visit for two weeks! We did a few days around San Francisco before heading off to Yosemite for a week.
It was a great trip overall, but I spent a lot of time frustrated at how bad California weather was this September. I’d just got done with a year of telling them about blue-skies-five-days-out-of-six, and then for most the entire time they were here it was cloudy. Bah.
The other, even more minor thing we got frustrated by was that after a long, hot summer, Yosemite is pretty dry. Back in spring everything’s was much more green, and the snowmelt means all the rivers run full. By the end of summer, it’s still gorgeous but you notice all the places waterfalls should be.
My parent’s main frustration meanwhile was the prices in SF’s FiDi, which make even London’s prices look tame. Especially since they visited right when the Great British Pound is the weakest it’s ever been. West Coast tech comp and British mining pensions have different takes on ten-dollar pints.
Anthropic retreat. And right after Yosemite, Ella and I took a few days in Santa Cruz at Anthropic’s annual retreat.
I spent most of it at the bar, drinking coffee (morning), lemonade (afternoon) and beer (evening) with whoever was about. As someone who was very much antisocial for the first 20-odd years of my life, the last twelve months have been a real revelation.
Ella meanwhile was happy because she got to spend three days surfing somewhere that wasn’t Linda Mar.
DC. And then right after the retreat, I went to DC for a few days for an AI technical policy workshop. It was 15-odd people from a variety of backgrounds who were all a bit worried about where this AI thing is going, and what might be done about that from a policy perspective.
Theres’s not much I can say publicly on this one. Meta-level though, it was great to see folks looking around, seeing that no-one else was doing much about a problem, and then deciding to do something about it themselves.
Also: to my surprise, DC feels much more like London than DC feels like San Francisco.
Work authorization. While we’re still waiting to hear back about our green cards, we only needed to be on the pathway in order to get one of the big benefits: work authorization for Ella!
For those not in the loop: we’re both in the US on my work visa, and from the perspective of the US government that’s a disappointing failure of labour market protectionism. Ella therefore was banned from working this past year, until now!
Recommendations
Abundance Agenda. My intellectual ingroup has been thinking about politics more and more the past few years, and Sarah Constantin’s pitch for the ‘Abundance Agenda’ is the piece I’ve liked the most. It leans hard into the idea that the fix for everything is growth.
I’ll admit I might like the piece because I’m in the choir it’s preaching to.
There’s also Zvi’s piece, which is (reasonably?) a lot more angry and egocentric but which is possibly better rhetoric for it.
Cornbread. Cornbread is one of my favorite American things. It’s like cake, but with texture! I’m told by my colleagues it’s meant to be a side rather than dessert, but for my birthday I made Kenji’s recipe and was really happy with how it turned out.
I used masa harina rather than cornmeal because damned if I could find fine-milled cornmeal, and chilli flakes because desserts with heat are deeply underexploited.
The Gone World. Sci-fi horror has been my favorite genre of fiction the past few years, and the Gone World is a great example of it. I actually read it a year or two ago, but revisited it this month because I was having such trouble finding good SF horror anywhere else.
A review from one of my colleagues: ‘it made me feel bad, in a not-good way’.