2025: submarine flow

Lists

• Arb review

• 300 takes on the year in AI

• My favourite essays of all time

• The cyberpunk thread is one of the more potent things I’ve ever done.

• New blogs

• New albums

• New deaths

• New essays

• Papers

• Where: Tallinn, Bristol, Paris, Bristol, London, Bristol, London, Stockholm, Arlington, SF, Berkeley, Menlo, Berkeley, Bristol, London, St Leonards, Fochabers, London, Kensington, Sevenoaks, Taunton, Kensington, Vinoř, Tachov, Annapolis, Tallinn, Oxford, Prague, Bristol, Nettlecombe, Tallinn, Bristol, SF, Berkeley, NY, Williamsburg, Bristol, Fredrikstad, Bristol, SF, Bristol, Dublin, Fochabers, Banff

Writing

• january: AI firms. Story, story. Sellout. Newsletter.

• february: Pelly.

• march: . Newsletter.

• april: Against early 2025 LLMs. RLVR.

• may: HCAST. Newsletter.

• june: Model psychology. Ambition. Theism. Shelley.

• july: Classics. Glasgow. HAAISS. Newsletter.

• august: What are You? Anthropogeny. Macdonald. Huang.

• september: New Music. Keyserling. Newsletter.

• october: In favour of late 2025 LLMs. Estonia. Using AI. Recent history. NY is too large for my mind. Manifesto. Holes in maths. Nabokov.

• november: lots and lots of writing and rewriting on my big editorial. China. Jailbreaks. Politics. Holes in reason. Newsletter.

• december: This.

  • Shallow Review

  • “gestalt” editorial

  • Peregrine

  • Breakthroughs

Highlights

• Finally started using LLMs properly.

• Took a block of 70 days off, including 6 entirely offline. Was magnificent. Read a bunch of Hegel effortlessly.

• The Fabric Book was lots of work (eating into my funemployment) but came out beautifully.

• Working on the podcast was great fun

• Peregrine had wow moments. Coliving with your intense startup colleagues is a great thing to try once.

• Lifted a giant 100kg mattress up two flights of stairs with Misha and Simyon with my shirt off. Gasping from bronchoconstriction and giggling.

• Started writing fiction

• EXP was incredible, the biggest type 2 fun ever.

• The Curve was top 3 conferences ever I think

• NY for a month, my first real visit. Sublime, the only time in my life I’ve gone out every night.

• Singing at Marie's Crisis. Pace the google reviews, there are many shockingly good singers there. Frank Mills, The Origin of Love, Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered. Spend $50 on 4 drinks. Completely destroy my voice with belting, deep ache for a week.

• Got really into history for the first time ever. It’s really easy to do novel work if you only care.

Stats

• 85 KLOC (c. 10k actually manually typed)

• 771 conversations with Claude. I wrote 40,000 words, it wrote 790,000 words back. (I was using o3 between May-Aug. Sonnet 4.5 was the turning point.)

• 36 people trialled, contracted or employed

• 24 flights

• 18k words in the diary, 278k in the blog, maybe 20k on Twitter, about 50k to chatbots, about 500k in the knowledge base.

• $130k regranted at Manifund

• I only saw three new films.

• 169k calories burned in exercise (half NEAT)

• only 35 books

New friends

• I met up with Peli for the first time ever in March and we ended up hanging out and working together about 15 times.

• Serious fun and/or fun work with Abi, Petr, Sam, David, Rob, and Ulkar

This year I decided to get into Hegel.

This year I at last quit worrying about productivity.

After 7 years, I finally like thinking about AI and using it.