(This is a Now page - “Think of what you’d tell a friend you hadn’t seen in a year.“)
Updated: Aug 11 2026, from Brisbane, Australia.
Work
Work’s been going great. I’ve really gotten used to the internal tooling and platform that’s used, as well as getting exposed to methods that should generalise well to other situations that I might see in future work. I’ve given some occasional presentations on older work that I’ve done which I’ve been able to port from Matlab to a web version using an LLM.
Getting Fit
I’m trying to reinforce and improve my existing control systems around fitness. Just making exercise a more obvious and appealing option.
Cat Cancer
Cat had cancer but is seemingly in remission after a big surgery and a number of doxorubicin injections.
Book Club
Book club’s going okay; my reading history’s on Goodreads. My past reads are a good indicator of what I like. I haven’t been reading as much as I’d like just because I’m so busy with general housekeeping and maintenance.
Solar Panels and Battery
Probably the most impactful singular home upgrade that I’ve done since moving in! I’ve only been drawing trace amounts from the grid since getting the system installed, and most sunny days I’m maxing out my battery. Given that we had intermittent power outages here every so often, the near-instant switchover from grid to battery means that even if that happens we’ll still be fine for quite a while even if the power stays gone. And if that outage ends up lasting multiple days, so long as those days are sunny, we might not even notice!
LLMs, Diffusion, GenAI
The most bonkers tech stuff at the moment. When I was working at UQ on computational linguistics, the sort of magic that scale gets you still seemed a while away. I’m using these tools on close to a daily basis at this point. It is annoying when AI content floods forums and websites, though. Youtube’s gotten really bad about this. There’s tools like MoneyPrinter which bulk manufacture content and drown out smaller channels that I’d be more interested in. These systems are going to be in an adversarial arms race against the algorithm, and it’s going to result in a worse product experience for everyone.
Becoming a Cyborg
I wear Shokz OpenRun headphones pretty much all waking hours; I keep a spare pair charging at my desk so I can swap them out when my active ones are low on battery. I use an app, ByVoice, to read notifications for me. This often makes me look like I am psychic, when I know what people are saying in a group chat or slack thread while in conversation with someone else! Unfortunately the app isn’t on the Google Play store any more - but it was made in 2015, so it’s entirely possible that it got delisted due to account inactivity or something.
Making my House Nicer
Turns out most of home ownership is chores and gradually trying to automate enough of those chores away so that you have the time and bandwidth to do things you enjoy. But it turns out that I enjoy making the house nicer. So that’s my new boulder to push indefinitely.