now
focus
Finishing the PhD thesis — final chapter drafting and the August 2026 submission. In parallel, articulating what I keep calling token engineering into a small set of public artifacts (this site, a first essay, a few figures) so that the past decade of watching the frontier stops being something I only say in private.
Slower-burn: early spinout planning with a fellow PhD student, and the first few commits on a poker harness repo I've been meaning to build for a year. I have a paper under double-blind review; details when decision time arrives.
building
- the token-economy essay, plus this site as its home
- OpenClaw — my personal agent harness; ongoing craft, not a project
- a poker-engineering harness repo, currently scaffold-stage
- the remaining thesis chapters, one careful revision at a time
in the ears
while working — nothing, or brain.fm brown noise, or binaural beats. i can't work to music; i'd listen to it.
music, away from the desk — billy strings, since discovering him almost exactly a year ago and immediately becoming a 0.3-percentile listener on spotify. Away From the Mire (Live) is the current favourite song, full stop. standing top four: radiohead, pink floyd, dire straits, and now billy. alt-rock and psychedelic rock all the way down, with a long detour through 90s britpop and 2000s indie that i still haven't come back from.
podcasts on rotation — dwarkesh, lex (guest-specific — the peter steinberger episode was an instant listen), all-in, diary of a ceo, cheeky pint. ai explained for medium-form. anything elon's on.
playing
- tale of two wastelands — fallout 3 + new vegas merged, with a mod pack on top. a shared playthrough with my partner.
- starfield on ps5 — some solo hours, waiting to do it properly together.
- schedule I — 100 hours solo, now running co-op with two friends.
- poker — intentionally off. it becomes the whole day if i let it. the point of the poker harness repo is being able to come back to it without it taking over again.
obsessed with
tesla, spacex, xai — the exponential-progress watching. optimus, tera fab, the x+xai-going-public piece. treating the whole musk ecosystem as an early indicator and showing up for every milestone.
american football, specifically the tactics — chris simms and mike florio on pft live for commentary. i care about the play-calling chess more than the games themselves. madden's in-game tutorial is genuinely awful; i keep thinking about what an ai-native coach layered on top would look like.
thinking about
- whether apps-as-software-alone go to zero faster than i'm planning for.
- what the half-life of a harness design actually is, once frontier models shift weekly.
- how to measure the ROI of improving a harness vs. switching to the next model underneath it.