What I'm Up To Now, Besides No Good

As of mid-October 2024, I'm on sabbatical to Jan 6! It's the best!

Some of my goals for this sabbatical:

• cram as much liberal arts education as I can in 3 months with the help of ChatGPT
• make a comic series about my cat Meow, the most agentic cat in SF
• start up an actual substack for posting my writing (and UPDATE IT REGULARLY)
• catch up on all this new-fangled AI stuff - gosh is everyone building a RAG app? or at least complaining about how RAG ain't it?
• finish Dan Carlins's Supernova in the East series and a bunch more of his old ones - currently on a Pacific theater and modern Chinese history kick
• read and figure out my favs of the last few years of astralcodexten's book review contests (a repo up to 2023 here, complete 2024 collection here, the 2024 finalists)
• ACX-style book reviews are one of my absolute favorite ways to dive into a subject I don't know much about, but don't have the time to read a 500-page book on. They're so more engaging and insightful than LLMs or Blinkist and the best ones offer not just a summary but pull together an incredible array of historical context and critical analysis like this one on The Weirdest People in the World or this one on The Educated Mind.
• work on my epic fantasy novel series about a world where colossal kaiju are harbingers of cataclysmic natural disasters, yet leave behind in their wake elemental ores that grant humans superpowers. Great kingdoms rise and fall in their struggle for dominance until the Once and Future War ends with the annihilation of the Imperial family and The Sunless Throne. tldr; Vengeance is a patient ore, and it never forgets.
• a great deal of mew-mewing with my partner and cat, the most important KPI of all 🥰

You can follow along a running log of my random draft-tweet thoughts here. I also publish a sporadically-updated substack called everythingireadtoday that rounds up fun longreads I've found around the web - these are usually in economics, sociology, tech news, science, psychology, progress studies et al, but really just about anything that I find interesting.

Books I'm reading as of Fall 2024

Current non-fiction reads:

• Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China(Evan Osnos)
• absolutely engrossing, so many wild stories of some inspirational figures I'd never heard of like the blind peasant lawyer and the peasant girl who founded China's largest dating site
• In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work (Kyla Scanlon)
• Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse (Timothy P. Carney)
• Ways of Seeing (John Berger)
• Where Good Ideas Come From (Steven Johnson)
• The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (Kathyrn Page Harden)
• The Lost Art of Listening (Michael P Nichols)
• ThinkerToys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques (Michael Michalko)
• The Wayfinders (Wade Davis)
• Jane Austen: Game Theorist (Michael Suk-Young Chwe)
• Wild Problems : A Guide to the Decisions that Define Us (Russ Roberts)
• 30 Second Philosophies (Julian Baggini)
• The Bed of Procrustes (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
• How the World Made the West (Josephine Quinn)

Current fiction reads:

• Zoey is Too Drunk for this Dystopia (Jason Pargin)
• The Bee Sting (Paul Murray)
• Intermezzo (Sally Rooney)
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)
• Wild (Cheryl Strayed)
• The Best of Greg Egan
• Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage (Alice Munro)
• Demon Copperhead (Barbara Kingsolver)
• Jade Legacy - The Green Bone Saga #3 (Fonda Lee)
• Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)
• Valuable Humans in Transit (qntm)
• A Deadly Education (Naomi Novik)
• Intermezzo (Sally Rooney)