/now/

/now/[1] is a monthly updated page that lists some of the projects I'm working on, media I'm engaging, and hobbies or other activities I'm doing.

Updated 2026-08-01

👩‍💻 Coding

🏔️ Hiking & Mountaineering

Misc. Projects

Media

Books

Music

Movies

Podcasts

🎮 Video Games

Articles I clipped:

Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

A few years ago, I stumbled upon Mastodon and it reminded me of the early days of Twitter. Back in 2006, I followed a small number of folks of the nerd variety on Twitter and received genuinely interesting updates from them. But when I log into the ruins of those older platforms now, all I see are random videos presented to me for reasons I can neither infer nor care about. Mastodon, by contrast, still feels like social networking in the original sense. I follow a small number of people I genuinely find interesting and I receive their updates and only their updates. What I see is the result of my own choices rather than a system trying to capture and monetise my attention. There are no bogus notifications. The timeline feels calm and predictable. If there are no new updates from people I follow, there is nothing to see. It feels closer to how social networks used to work originally.

Team uses AlphaFold AI to redesign gene-editing proteins to make them safer

In a recent issue of Nature, researchers described modifying the AI protein-folding software AlphaFold to help identify key areas of gene-editing proteins responsible for off-target effects. Those areas were then modified to reduce the problems.

Your harddrive is probably full

In software:

  • We don’t optimize software until it’s too slow, so it tends to always be kinda slow.
  • We incur technical debt until working with the code is so painful we feel we must refactor it, or in less experienced developers, start over. Thus most codebases are pretty messy.

Outside of software:

  • We don’t expand road networks until they’re unbearably congested
  • We don’t mind our diets until we have to buy bigger pants

I’ve gone from having a full time job, to being self-employed, and despite having no obligations and nobody to tell me what to do, I still feel just as busy, if not more so.

My schedule seems to be another harddrive that is full.

In most of these cases, waiting until we’ve reached the pain point where we’re forced to confront the issue makes solving the problem a much bigger ordeal than if we’d addressed them along the way.

At the same time, premature optimization is seen as a bad thing.

How can we reconcile these two facts?

The solution is perhaps to weaponize Jevons paradox and impose real constraints to optimize against, constraints that are smaller than the sum of all available resources.

This is very obvious when we’re taking about personal finances, where we call it a “budget”, but repeatedly surprising elsewhere.

The bottleneck might be the air in the room

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory put people in a chamber and varied only the CO 2. At 1,000 ppm, performance dropped significantly on six of nine decision-making measures compared with a clean-air baseline of 600. At 2,500 ppm, seven of the nine fell substantially, some into a range they called dysfunctional. A separate study out of Harvard found cognitive scores declining as CO 2 rose, with the steepest losses in exactly the domains you called the meeting for: strategy, planning, and using information under pressure.

We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America

The ultimate risk is almost too dark to contemplate in much detail. As the logic and culture of casinos moves from sports to politics, the scandals that have visited baseball and basketball might soon arrive in politics. Is it really so unbelievable that a politician might tip off a friend, or assuage an enemy, by giving them inside information that would allow them to profit on betting markets? Is it really so incredible to believe that a government official would try to align policy with a betting position that stood to earn them, or an allied group, hundreds of thousands of dollars? That is what a “rigged pitch” in politics would look like. It’s not just wagering on a policy outcome that you suspect will happen. It’s changing policy outcomes based on what can be wagered.

My colleague Julius

It took us some time to understand that each of Julius’s contributions needed to be completely reviewed and corrected by another team member. If it was not our field of expertise, it had to be checked externally. We quickly had a non-written rule stating that no document from Julius should leave the team before being proofread by two of us.

But Julius excelled in formatting, presentation, and meeting management. Regularly, my boss would come up to me and say, “We’re really lucky to have this Julius! What talent! What a contribution to the team!”

I tried, without success, to explain that Julius understood nothing of what we were doing. That we had reached the point where we sent him to useless meetings to get rid of him for a few hours. But even that strategy had its limits.

FactChecking Trump’s Election Security Speech

“The White House promised a bombshell, and they delivered a dud,” David Becker, the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit, said in a July 17 press conference. “There was absolutely nothing here that was news, nothing here that even calls into question past elections and certainly not the 2020 election.”

How to Recognize and Deal With High-Conflict People

A high-conflict person isn’t just someone who’s difficult, prickly, or having a bad day. What sets HCPs apart is a specific, predictable pattern of behavior. Eddy identifies four traits:

  • A preoccupation with a target of blame.
  • All-or-nothing thinking.
  • Unmanaged emotions.
  • Extreme behaviors.

Last Rights

if we get 27 states to ratify the Congressional Apportionment Amendment, then we can make some real progress towards fixing Congress without Congressional buy-in. This solution is not a new idea. It comes up every few years and gets little traction. My hope in writing this piece is that it gets more traction now.

  1. This Now page is inspired by Derek Sivers, who began nownownow.com. ↩︎