Searching for contentment
In the fragrance of freshly worked wood⩘
The soft glow cast by shoji lamps⩘
The inspiration of good reads⩘
My heart is with the people of Ukraine
#StandWithUkraine
My contemplations about Ukraine⩘
Broken heart: Palestine, Gaza, the West Bank, Israel⩘
Abolish ICE! Restore Sanity!
When a pattern of human rights violations is so undeniably occurring and completely embedded within an institution, for decades, and with pervasive impunity, the only solution is to start over.… It has become clear that no amount of defunding, training or disciplinary measures will be enough. The extent and scale of the abuses and failures we documented lead to only one possible road to justice: ICE must be abolished.
– Opinion: It's time to abolish ICE⩘ by Amy Fischer, director of refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA, The Guardian, Oct 5, 2026.
Living in the Rockies
A beautiful moment of serenity during a summer morning walk.
Larger version of this photo⩘
More recent photos⩘
Kevin Roose, The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence
Well narrated by the author
An insightful look into the last decade or so of the development of AI, exploring the people, companies, and ideas that have driven things forward. While I was familiar with most of the stories told, it was interesting to get a further glimpse behind the curtains, though at times the level of detail left me feeling a little glazed.
I found this snippet from the prologue particularly telling:
I spent the next year interviewing people from the three companies leading the race to AGI—OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind—as well as a number of knowledgeable outsiders. I talked to true believers and apostates, skeptics and boosters. I pored over thousands of pages of internal company documents, chat logs, and emails. I tried to get the inside story of the race and figure out how it had all come about.
The story I found was not the one you've heard. It involves bitter rivalries, secret documents, and a technology improving faster than the people building it can understand, let alone control. It involves, above all, a small group of people who realized, years before it was obvious, that humanity's future might look far different from its past.
Roose did provide me with a better understanding of Reasoning Models than I had before. And the final chapter, Takeoff, was a bit … breathtaking as he described the period in late 2025 and early 2026 when the key models made big advances. But in the epilogue, I felt Roose lost touch with his neutral observer's eye as he described how, and this is my word, enamored he had become with the models he was using.
My bar is this: I believe AGI is a generally capable AI system that does useful things for me, and that is at least as intelligent, truthful, and reliable as a random stranger picked from a crowd.
By that standard, AGI-for-me is here. It probably arrived in 2024, with the release of o1 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and it certainly arrived in early 2026, when I started tinkering with Claude Code, Gemini 3, and GPT-5.3-Codex. There was no singular tipping point, no aha moment—just a steady accumulation of experience, and a point at which I realized I no longer treated the models as intellectual inferiors.
You'll notice that I don't consider consciousness a prerequisite for AGI. That's partly because philosophers and neuroscientists haven't yet solved the hard problem of consciousness, and partly because I think it's a red herring in these debates. AI models may become conscious or not; what matters to me is what they do, and how we relate to them.
That phrase, "how we relate to them" really caught my attention. Not "how we use them", but "how we relate to them", as if they are something other or more than technology tools.
I did find it amusing that the same day I finished listening to The AGI Chronicles, ending with Roose sharing his excited enthusiasm for the advanced models he was using, I came across this article: Kevin Roose's Buzzy New Book About the AI Industry Immediately Duplicated by Amazon Scammers Selling AI Lookalikes⩘ by Frank Landymore, Futurism. From the article:
Just a day after a new book about the AI industry's race to build a powerful artificial general intelligence hit the shelves, its author Kevin Roose discovered that a scammer was already trying to trick his readers – by using AI.…
Though the copycat boasts no reviews, Amazon lists it as the "#1 New Release" in the category of "Human-Computer Interaction."
What a strange time we are living through.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026; Bookshop.org⩘ ; audiobook: Macmillan Audio, 2026; Libro.fm⩘ .
See also: Why I dislike artificial intelligence⩘ .
More recent reading⩘
Contemplating
The Lion's Head Nebula
I don't like many of the images produced to the James Webb Space Telescope, mainly because of lot of them are, I think, in the infrared spectrum, so everything looks reddish. I much prefer the visible-light images produced by the Hubble telescope. But I really like this one (I've cropped it a bit to focus on the nebula). To me, it looks like a rough-cut diamond floating in deep space.
From a NASA explanation⩘ of the image:
At first glance the nebula's overall structure in Webb's infrared images, with both the NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid Infrared Instrument) instruments, may look quite similar to Hubble's earlier visible-light view. However, Webb's infrared vision highlights features like compact clumps of dust and a haze of ionized gas.
What an amazing universe we live in.
Astronomy Picture of the Day, Aug 26, 2026⩘ .
More recent contemplations⩘
Fighting for American democracy
We must use our time and our space
on this little planet that we call Earth
to make a lasting contribution,
to leave it a little better than we found it,
and now that need is greater than ever before.– John Lewis, 2020
———
"If to belive in freedom and equality is to be a radical,
then I am a radical."– Patsy Mink, the first Woman of Color and first Asian-American woman elected to Congress, served in the United States House of Representatives from the state of Hawaii, 1965 - 1977 and 1990 - 2002.
———
"So what do those of us who love American democracy do? Make noise. Take up oxygen…. Defend what is great about this nation: its people, and their willingness to innovate, work, and protect each other. Making America great has never been about hatred or destruction or the aggregation of wealth at the very top; it has always been about building good lives for everyone on the principle of self-determination. While we have never been perfect, our democracy is a far better option than the autocratic oligarchy Trump is imposing on us."…
I write these letters because I love America. I am staunchly committed to the principle of human self-determination for people of all races, genders, abilities, and ethnicities: the idea that we all have the right to work to become whatever we wish. I believe that American democracy has the potential to be the form of government that comes closest to bringing that principle to reality. And I know that achieving that equality depends on a government shaped by fact-based debate rather than by extremist ideology and false narratives.
– Professor Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American⩘ , Sep 15, 2025.
———
Swearing an oath to our constitution
United States Constitution with its preamble "We the People"
Government of the United States of America
Photo⩘ by Joseph Sohm⩘ ; licensed via Shutterstock
I admire the leadership of retired Maj Gen Paul Eaton who is speaking up in defense of our constitution and against the ongoing effort to politicize our armed forces.
Maj Gen Paul Eaton has sounded the alarm, saying in an interview with the Guardian that the effort to bend the higher echelons of the military to the US president's will was unparalleled in recent history and could have long-term dire consequences. He warned that both the reputation and efficiency of the world's most powerful fighting force was in the balance.
"There is an active effort to politicise the armed forces," Eaton said. "Once you infect the body, the cure may be very difficult and painful for presidents downstream."
I'm hoping that many people, both military and civilians, listen to his message.
Trump push to politicize US military 'reminiscent of Stalin', top general warns⩘ by Ed Pilkington, The Guardian, Jan 5, 2025.
More recent contemplations⩘
Woodworking
A note about the image at the top of this page
The Windtraveler—a shoji lamp I created in the shape of a deltoidal hexecontahedron—is made of 60 deltoid-shaped faces (like kites) framed in maple. Each five deltoids meeting at the more pointed bottom tips form a pentagon, creating a total of 12 pentagons, which is a dodecahedron. Each three deltoids meeting at the broader top tips form a triangle, creating a total of 20 triangles, which is an icosahedron. Within each deltoid frame are thinner 1/4 inch inner frames made of mahogany, with additional strips that run from the top tip to the bottom tip of each deltoid forming 120 right angle triangles, which reveal a hexakis icosahedron. The inner mahogany frames are backed by washi, a traditional Japanese paper, which creates a gentle shade for the light cast by the light bulbs within to pass through.
More about this project⩘
More woodworking⩘
My journey
Love nature. As a kid, I just wanted to be out playing in the woods that surrounded our small town home. When younger, I lived a few places around the world and visited several others … then found a place in the foothills of the Rockies and my heart was home. When I'm out walking, I snap photos and post the better ones on this site to preserve the opportunity to revisit some of these exquisite experiences. Photos⩘
Love reading. Growing up, I carried armloads of books home each week from the library. Now tend to carry around a virtual stack of audiobooks. I deeply appreciate authors, narrators, and translators. Since 1999, I've been posting reviews on this site, in the more recent years focused on just those books I appreciate the most. I listen to or read a lot of genres, fiction and nonfiction, and particularly appreciate well done speculative fiction. Reading⩘
Love woodworking. A passionate amateur, I revere wood. My main focus has been shoji lamps in the shape of polyhedra. I love the light that glows through washi and deeply appreciate the folks who make these papers. I'm entranced by the dance of polyhedra patterns, and keep notes on my website about the experience of making some of the lamps. I've also made a fair bit of our furniture, and have done some woodworking to fix up our old home. Woodworking⩘
Love our beautiful, fragile planet. I'm deeply concerned about our climate and all the life we are carelessly and rapidly degrading and destroying.
Photo credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring
Awed by space and astronomy. Photos of spiral galaxies melt my heart and also inspire me to wonder whether I'm originally from another planet in another galaxy far far away. See also: Our home in this wondrous universe⩘
Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Value privacy. I think online privacy should be the default state. Because it's not, I try to protect at least some of my privacy online, especially against greedy corporations.
See also:
Why I dislike artificial intelligence⩘
Privacy Is Power by Carissa Véliz⩘
Keystones: Respect, compassion, empathy, acceptance. We're all in this together.
