2026-08-28 21:00:00
I've had several conversations with people over the last few weeks that have highlighted how far apart my view of the near future is from many people I talk to. Here are some things I might tweet if that was the kind of thing I did:
AI has a very real chance of getting us all killed. I think it probably won't because I expect a lot of people to work very hard to avoid that outcome.
AI is so quickly approaching (or exceeding) expert human abilities across so many areas that most people should be planning for 1-3 more years in which they can productively contribute. Use the time well!
But also don't live your life in a way where if it takes longer than that you're destitute; there's still a lot of uncertainty in how quickly this plays out.
We are already seeing AI speeding up the development of AI, as it substitutes for human expertise. As the remaining human contribution gets smaller I expect this to compound dramatically, and we'll see rapid improvement even compared to today.
I don't know if the metaphor is "goalpost moving" or "frog boiling" but if you dropped a top model into 2006 it would very clearly be "AGI".
If you think AI isn't improving rapidly you're doing some combination of not applying it to hard enough problems, not giving it enough context/tooling/tokens, or not using top models.
I'm worried about the environmental impacts of data centers, in that I see plausible near futures in which the world produces vastly more energy than it does today and almost all of it goes into powering computers.
Many paths to appropriately serious action run through warning shots, and we've been getting some. So far they look like hacks, and there will be more. Aside: information that should not become public is increasingly dangerous to keep.
Lots of people have plans to make the world better by improving X to improve Y to improve Z, where it's Z that matters. If Z is more than 3y out, consider finding a different plan.
If AI goes well I think the world could be extremely good. The bottom 10% living far better than the top 10% do now. This is the promise that gets people working so hard to build something so dangerous.
I'm being a bit lazy here because the tweet format means I can make bold claims without backing any of them up. If you think I'm wrong on any of these, happy to give arguments in the comments.
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2026-08-25 21:00:00
The standard recommendation on time out duration is one minute per year of age, often capping out at 5min. In my experience (n=3, not independent) this is much longer than needed; I typically do about a minute regardless of age. The important thing is that the punishment is predictable and immediate, not that it's strong.
We typically put kids in time out in three ways. The most common way is when we count to three but they still don't listen:
Anna: Lily, get out of my room.
Lily: You said Nora could be in here, so I can be too.
Anna: Dad!!
Me: If Anna says you need to get out of her room, you need to get out of her room.
Lily: This isn't fair.
Me: That's one.
Lily [huffs]
Me: That's two.
Lily: [huffs]
Me: That's three; time out.
We don't usually get all the way to time out. Typically "that's one" would have been enough: it shows that we're moving from our normal mode of interaction to "actually this is just something you just have to do."
Another way kids will go in time out is in persisting after a warning:
Nora: [throws a toy wildly in the living room]
Me: No throwing indoors. If there's any more throwing that will be time out.
[short time passes]
Nora: [throws another toy]
Me: That's time out. No throwing.
I wouldn't count in this case because there's no ongoing activity to stop, and they were already on notice that doing more would be time out.
Finally, someone might go in time out with no warning if they do something sufficiently egregious, like escalating to violence:
Nora: You're a stinky face!
Anna: [whacks Nora]
Me: That's time out. No hitting.
In each of these cases, however, they might only spend a minute in time out. What seems to be important is that the time out is a consistent, clear, and immediate signal of parental disapproval. It doesn't need to be particularly unpleasant in itself; knowing that I'm unhappy with them seems to count for a lot.
Other thoughts:
Time out is having to sit on the stairs. While they're in time out we ignore them. They can't bring toys or books with them, and it's pretty boring, which is part of why it works.
Julia adds that this extends to the cats:
There's a rule "don't interact with people who are in time out" which I've now started enforcing for cats too. One of our kids spends timeout snuggling the cat if at all possible, and loudly exclaiming over the cat so as to convey she's enjoying it. I've now started coming up, telling the cat "[name] is in time out, so we're leaving her alone" and carrying the cat away.
If they went in time out because they were refusing to do something, they do still have to go do that thing after. This is a kind of forfeiting ill-gotten gains.
If they're clearly upset I'll have them stay in time out until they've calmed down.
Simple separation is often enough. If the kids are fighting I might ask one of them to leave the room.
I often see parents give commands they don't really need to, where they could instead let the kids work it out or decide that it's not important. If there's nothing to enforce it can't lead to a time out.
I do need to be careful: if I ask them "are you going to clean up this game before moving on to the next" then it would be wrong for me to threaten them with time out if they said no.
2026-08-24 21:00:00
For the last twenty years I haven't paid much attention to my State Senate race: Pat Jehlen hasn't had a close race since she won the seat in 2005. I think she's done a lot of good work: while allocating credit is hard, more people want to live here than did two decades ago, with more high-paying jobs, better schools, and being a better place to walk and bike. The biggest missing piece has been building housing to keep up, because a larger number of people with the same pool of houses means some people aren't able to stay. I know so many people who've had to move away to find a place they could afford to live, and Jehlen's skeptical attitude towards housing construction was my biggest complaint.
She's retiring now, however, which opens the field to new candidates, and an opportunity to get someone in office who is solidly enthusiastic about construction as a component of housing affordability. Looking over the candidates, Burhan Azeem is a clear standout here. He massively improved Cambridge zoning as city councillor with the Multifamily Housing Ordinance, cofounded Abundant Housing Massachusetts, and his housing page has policies I do think would work.
To make housing cheaper you need to let people build more of it, which means increasing density. If you do that in isolation then you're setting yourself up for massive transportation issues, as more people try to use the same limited amount of space to park and drive their cars. Density has to be paired with strong public transit, and in fact makes transit better for everyone by supporting high frequencies and broad coverage. If you look over what he proposes I think he's again a really solid candidate, and much better than any of his competitors.
Finally, I think he's really good on AI. I expect our society's handling of AI to be the largest issue over the next few years, and while MA doesn't have the leverage of CA here, there's still a lot that can be done. Of the other four candidates, three haven't focused on AI, but State Rep Erika Uyterhoeven has. Comparing their approaches, Uyterhoeven has pushed for privacy protections and improving the procurement process, while Azeem is pushing for oversight and testing to influence what the AI firms build and release. If you expect AI to be like other systems the government might buy then I think Uyterhoeven's approach makes a lot of sense. Because I expect AI to be very different here, substituting for human expertise and agency, and having enormous effects across society, I'm much more supportive of Azeem's approach. We have to change what gets built and how it's tested, not just what MA buys.
(I also had a great conversation with him when I met him a few months ago, talking about how we can improve air quality in our schools, and I think everyday clean air is very important for both general health and pandemic prevention.)
The primary is in a week, and if you're in Somerville, Medford, or the relevant parts of Cambridge (Ward 7 Precinct 1, Ward 8 Precinct 1, Ward 10, Ward 11) or Winchester (Precincts 4, 5, 6, 7) I encourage you to vote for Burhan Azeem.
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2026-08-20 21:00:00
In May 2025 I met Yo Shavit, who was working on national security policy at OpenAI and was thinking about how to prepare for a future in which models could seriously assist attackers in creating pandemics. We had a call, and when I shared notes with my team their main response was: "maybe start with not making models that can do that?"
Which is, in many ways, fair: by continuing to push the frontier in biological capabilities, OpenAI's actions were making things worse on many of the problems SecureBio is trying to solve. But OpenAI stopping wouldn't have resolved the problem: other firms were pushing quickly too, and the economic incentives strongly favored rapid capability advancement. Making the world more resilient to pandemics needed to be a high priority regardless, especially in light of models' increasing ability to help people with biology.
When I thought about what our initial conversations might turn into, however, my primary concerns were whether that might (a) compromise SecureBio's ability to independently assess and criticize OpenAI's work or (b) make the world less safe via reducing model developers' motivation to improve safeguards. I do think there's something to both of these, which I get into more below, but it seemed well worth it to talk with Yo about how we could work together.
I explained how we were building an early warning system to flag outbreaks, especially engineered ones that could otherwise spread widely before detection. I described how metagenomic sequencing lets you see what nucleic acid sequences (DNA and RNA) are present in a sample, without choosing in advance which sequences to look for, and how we were piloting this on wastewater and nasal swabs. Over the next few months we discussed opportunities to accelerate our work, he introduced us to OpenAI cofounder Wojciech Zaremba, and both Yo and Wojciech left OpenAI PBC (the for-profit) for the OpenAI Foundation (OAIF). We continued talking to them in these new roles, and these discussions, plus a lot of due diligence, led to the $17.2M OAIF grant which we announced today. I'm incredibly excited about this grant, which will allow us to expand our monitoring system, reduce our turnaround time substantially, [1] and generally reduce the risk that something could spread widely before detection.
Which brings me back to the two concerns I mentioned above. On (a), independence, SecureBio has two divisions, Detection and AI. This grant funds Detection, while the AI side of SecureBio evaluates models from many firms, including OpenAI. The grant does not give OpenAI or OAIF any formal control over what anyone at SecureBio can say publicly about any models. That was important to us, but it was also key to OAIF: Yo was very clear that they did not want to influence SecureBio AI's work, and wanted to review our policies to make sure they were sufficiently robust.
That said, we should pay attention to incentives. While it looks to me like OAIF is making its own decisions, the two organizations are closely linked in a way that goes beyond the shared "OpenAI" name: the OpenAI Foundation's endowment is a ~1/4 stake in OpenAI PBC, and they have almost identical boards. Might the AI side of SecureBio pull punches in criticizing the PBC to increase the chances that OAIF gives Detection more money in the future?
SecureBio has systemic controls to mitigate conflicts of interests, including separate leadership, budgets, and deliverables, and the AI team has written up public docs on their principles and conflict of interest policy. But I think the strongest evidence here is from April, when the AI team was looking at GPT 5.5. The grant was at what I would consider its most sensitive stage: we had been working on it for months with very positive signals, but we still didn't have an answer. This was public internally, and AI leadership was looped in, but there was never a question of this affecting what the AI team published, and in their assessment they documented a range of concerns. The biggest was that across several benchmarks the model would appear to refuse a dangerous question by deflecting, but actually it would go on to provide the requested information by giving a highly-transferable related solution. On these benchmarks the safeguards were illusory, and the AI team released their evaluation while the grant was pending.
This concern with incentives, however, is not new with this grant. When the AI side evaluates a company's models, that company typically pays for the evaluation. For example, OpenAI PBC covered SecureBio's costs for the GPT 5.5 evaluation above. This is common with AI evals, and it's a tighter connection than this grant because there's no AI-Detection division insulating evaluators from financial incentives.
Still, this is a place where it takes continued effort to uphold standards, and if there's any indication that funding for Detection is being used as a lever to pressure our AI team on evals, I'll say so publicly and use whatever leverage I have to stop it (up to and including resignation). But I'm not expecting this, and I think the real worry is a subtle drift towards being more generous without anyone explicitly asking for anything. This is also a concern with funding from Anthropic employees, since SecureBio also evaluates Anthropic's work (ex). So if you see SecureBio put out anything unfairly positive towards OpenAI or Anthropic, or unfairly negative in overcorrecting for these incentives, please say so.
On (b), the question is whether this will let model developers take more risk. If we help them sleep better at night, knowing defenses are stronger, will they just push ahead faster during the day? I want us to be a complement to the frontier firms' internal safeguards, but what if we become a substitute?
A world sufficiently robust against catastrophic biorisk, where it doesn't matter what models are willing to explain because real-world protections are a full substitute for model safeguards, would be a fantastic place to be. We and many other projects are working towards that world! But there's a ton of work to get there. The worry is that AI firms perceive risk as lower and ease up on their safeguards when the risk is still unacceptably high.
I think this is directionally real, but as a direct substitute it's small compared to the reputational, legal (liability + risk of directives), and moral forces pushing firms to invest in safeguards. This grant will allow us to flag attacks earlier, but doesn't come close to mitigating the full impact of an attack and only covers one of several paths to large-scale biological harm. The first-order positive effects of making the world more robust to catastrophic biorisk are really very likely to outweigh the second-order effects of reducing safeguards; if I thought the other way around it would suggest that I should instead do or fund work (virus hunting?) that visibly increases risk in order to motivate others to step up, which seems like a terrible idea.
Separately but relatedly, there's also a "political cover" angle, where the PBC might point at this grant (even though it was made by OAIF) to say that they're doing something, taking off some external pressure. To the extent that this reduction in pressure lets them avoid costly actions that would do more to reduce risk, this is a loss, and it's my largest concern with this grant. Philanthropic funding should not be a license to act recklessly, and if they offer it as an excuse we shouldn't accept it. Please keep the pressure on OpenAI, and all the other frontier firms, to slow down and prioritize reducing the risk that their work leads to catastrophe. Even more important than pressuring firms, however, is advocacy for thoughtful AI regulation: this is a coordination problem where it's not in any individual firm's interest to slow down even though it is in humanity's interest collectively.
On balance I think this grant is strongly positive, and I'm much more worried that we won't do the best possible job pushing this work forward than that our efforts will let OpenAI and others ease up on their own work.
[1] Allowing me to finally answer a question that I asked
four years ago, a few months before I quit
Google to join the project.
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2026-08-17 21:00:00
In raising my three kids I think a lot about how to cultivate independence. I want them to grow into people who can handle unfamiliar situations, including interacting with strangers as needed, and I think this has been going well: people often comment on how competent and self-sufficient they are for their age (though I think they're still not that far along the spectrum compared to what's possible or historically normal).
In supporting this growth, sometimes they're strongly motivated to do something by themselves, and all I need to do is figure out the minimum they need from me. Which might be nothing! Other times, however, I'll give a small push.
This weekend I brought them along to Mentone AL where Kingfisher was playing for contras. Dinner was in the dining hall, and for dessert they served peach cobbler with ice cream; Nora (5y) asked if I would get her some. I don't like to set artificial hurdles, but I'm also not going to pass up a good natural one and she was clearly going to be highly motivated by the goal. With an older child I would have considered saying if they wanted dessert they'd need to get it themself, but that seemed a little too strong. Instead, I told Nora that I was still eating, but if she wanted dessert now she could go get some. She did.
She waited in line, talked to the server, got some peach cobbler with ice cream, and then promptly dropped it. This was not what I was planning to teach! It also posed a challenge beyond what I thought she was ready for, and risked other people needing to do extra work to make up for my lazy-appearing parenting. I came over, helped clean it up, and sat back down. She got a new bowl, brought it back to the table, took a big bite, and then looked like she was going to cry:
Me: What's wrong?
Nora: I don't want my dessert.
Me: Why?
Nora: I don't like the brown stuff, I just want the ice cream, but the brown stuff is all over the ice cream.
Me: What should we do?
Nora: Can you go get me a new one that is just ice cream?
Me: I'm still eating, but if you tell them that your papa is going to eat the other one and you want a new one with just ice cream I think they'd give you that.
Nora: [cheers up essentially instantly] ok!
She waited in line, explained what she wanted, and got a bowl just the way she liked it:
I asked her about it in writing this post, a few days later. She said she felt bad when she dropped her ice cream, would have preferred I had just gotten her ice cream, and really enjoyed eating the ice cream. I think this is a pretty good illustration of how this approach to parenting works in practice: not perfect or necessarily appreciated at the time, but good enough and building skills they'll need.
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2026-08-10 21:00:00
In 2015 I made a little webapp that would use the NextBus API to show predictions for the MBTA:
A few years later they moved from NextBus to their own API, and it stopped working. Back in those days programming required effort, and since there were other apps that did almost what I wanted it wasn't worth it for me to update it. But now that we have genies (for better or worse) I had Claude one-shot the fix:
A decade ago I built jefftk.com/nextbus/ which is no more, but the code still exists at ~/code/nextbus . It was a thin wrapper around the MBTA nextbus API, but when they redid their API to no longer use nextbus it wasn't worth it for me anymore. Could you get it working again?
And it does:
Switching back to this as my daily driver, I especially like that it will show me how stale the prediction is, so I have a better sense of how much to trust it.
What set me off on wanting to revive this was being grumpy that the predictions API doesn't do a good job with inbound at Ball Square. Now that I have my own tooling, I'm working on this too: Claude wrote me a logger and in a week or so I can have it compare a few prediction approaches and implement.