5: volte-face

• To my surprise as much as yours, I got a job.

  
  "Traitor!" you roar from your foetid stalls. "Sellout!" you slur through your cabbage. "You set an absurdly high tacit asking price in a piece written a mere 3 months ago" you interject. grossly.
  

• Silence, rabble. I didn’t apply, and unfortunately the offer roughly matches, including intangibles.
  

• I had anyway started to worry about the future of consulting, and research, and teaching, and life.
  

• It’s fun! Startup air, where execs have to do pieces of 11 different jobs. But unlike a startup in that pure thought is the main product: I do things like read a book of Zola in 4 hours to meet an urgent deadline. I also manage 5 editors. I am also head of AI integrations. I have never thought this hard about AI. I am becoming good at it.
  

• I don’t know anything about videos. I don’t like videos. Naturally there’s nothing so practical as a good theory so I began by reading this quite insightful critique of Youtube as final dismantling of the concept of authenticity (pbuh). We are now surely the most dialectically sophisticated channel in the WORLD
  

• My colleagues are extremely thoughtful, extremely driven craftsmen.
  

• I was working on Pacific Time (-8 hours to local time) for two weeks, which was deeply disorienting and made me think constantly of being 17. But there are indeed irreplaceable beautiful moments to be had at 3am when everyone else finally goes away and you remain, by far the loudest thing that exists.
  

• Haven’t got my O-1 yet but it should be two weeks. Shockingly fast really. I have, however, lost all respect for this visa after seeing the process. The only talent common to every O-1 is kissing ass and falsifying themselves.
  

• California taxes are unbelievably high, more than double my UK setup. Pls send unlicenced financial advice.
  

• I am in Paris 4-12th Feb, come have dinner.

Wait don’t you own a company

• Yeah but 1) I’m not cucked by investors so I can do what I want, 2) Misha is being very supportive.

• And Arb is doing well off a few generous grants from the Schmidtiverse and McCordiverse.

• This year we are Building things.

Wait weren’t you moving to Cambridge

• Yes; no.

• Got an insane journal rejection from ACM, two idiotic blogpost rejections(!) from ICLR, and an exhausting conference rejection from ICLR. I am done with them.

Writing

• RIP to an acquaintance who lived a sort of model, post-scarcity life.
  

• I have begun my first ever short story collection. Be sure to open the associated Colab for each story.
  

• This was more work than I wanted but worth it. It’s a beautiful effort. Auch wenn ich wüsste, dass morgen die Welt zugrunde geht, würde ich heute noch einen Apfelbaum pflanzen
  

• France
  

• Pop-punk

New words

• Sloptimiser: one who has shaped himself into a pure agent of Engagement, a mere conduit for the Youtube Apparatus. Get used to it.

• 内卷: involution. The process by which a society disappears up its ass. The process by which minor problems expand to fill mental room which large ones are solved. The process by which moloch is fed. Get used to it.

• A move-37: an AI being superhumanly creative; an RL leap. Get used to it.

Gav