2026-05-31 21:00:00
When Lily was about two she told me she wanted a song about "no". This was ten years ago, and I don't remember why she wanted this, but I made something up:
This is a song about no.
This is a song about no.
This is a song about no, no, no.
This is a song about no.
The song goes... No no no no no no no no no.
The song goes... No no no no no no no no no.
The song goes... No no no no no no no no no, no, no.
This is a song about no.
It's useful anytime the kids want a song about something I don't know a song about. For example, it often served as a song about "turtle". Of course the more syllables the subject has the harder it is to sing, but that just makes it more fun.
I applied my nascent music writing skills, and tried to set it down in dots:
Julia adds:
Oh I remember why it was invented. This was when Lily was still sharing a bedroom with us (out of necessity), when she was around 20 months. She would demand songs about various things as part of going to sleep. You were asking her, "Do you want a song about frogs?" But that night she answered "no" to all suggestions. So you asked, "Do you want a song about no?"
"... Yes."
So you sang this in the dark.
2026-05-30 21:00:00
My older two kids (12y, 10y) like contra dancing, but but have been increasingly unhappy with the available opportunities: a family dance is "too boring", and BIDA is "not enough kids my age". What they wanted was a regular dance, but just kids. So we had one!
We invited people ages 9-13: I really wanted to keep the age range narrow so the kids got the feeling of dancing with people their own age. I set up a spot for parents to hang out in another room, or they were welcome to drop off and head out. The lower age limit meant Nora (nearly 5) was watching from the sidelines, and a few other younger siblings stayed home. I did allow two 8yo younger siblings who can hold their own at a regular evening dance.
Overall, I think of this sort of age restriction similarly to advanced contra dances or Galhalla: while I love that we have a default of "everyone welcome", there are also benefits of limited-admission events. I think it's good to have occasional events for a more specific crowd.
With the table turned on its side (first time doing that!) we had a clear area of 7ft x 21ft:
This width would be tight for a contra dance with adults: you normally want a minimum of 8ft per set. For example, the Cambridge Masonic Hall (where BIDA is) is 47ft wide, and is comfortable at five sets (9.4ft/set) and danceable but squishy with six (7.8ft). Luckily, the kids are on average less than 7/8 adult size, so the width was not an issue. The length was just right for the crowd (~20 kids) but a larger group would have needed to take turns.
Andrew called, and while many kids are on the short side it was still helpful to stand on the couch for a better view:
Of the ~20 kids, all but one had contra danced before, and most of them had been many times: children of contra dancers, plus a few friends. You might think we'd have a room of experts who could dance regular evening fare, and they certainly thought so! But actually we had a group who didn't understand quite the extent to which the adults around them had been helping them through dances. This was a very hard crowd to satisfy! They were intense dance snobs ("We want to do real contras!" "This was great, but next time I want harder dances!" "Can we do a dolphin hey?" "Moneymusk!!") but did not reliably remember their roles, or distinguish left and right. Andrew did a really good job picking dances that felt like "real contras" and not "family dances", without pushing the difficulty past what the crowd could handle.
We did a snack break in the middle, which was definitely the right call. Chips, grapes, crackers, someone brought lemonade, and I made eclairs.
I organized an acoustic open band, which grew from two people to five over the afternoon, including two kids. Garth and I have been jamming some lately, and while he's still new to contra it was great to have him on piano. I played fiddle for most of the time (except when Jeremy stopped by for a bit), and while it isn't my strongest instrument it does carry well. I've started wearing an earplug in my left ear when playing fiddle energetically, something I learned from a former boss, and my ear feels way better these days.
We didn't amplify the band, but I did have a mic for the caller. It would probably have been possible to do without this, but not good for Andrew's voice.
Overall, I'm really happy with how this went, and my kids are pushing hard for another one soon. If you're in the Boston area this sounds like it could be a good fit for you or your kids, let me know so I can tell you about future ones?
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2026-05-29 21:00:00
I like my far-UVC Aerolamp a lot, but haven't been using it much: each time I wanted to get it out I needed to put it up on a tall stand, and ensure it wasn't going to get knocked over. This evening I attached it to the wall, which is great:
It's very light and uses a 1/4" photo mount, so I used these simple cheap tiltable ones. The goal is to get it as high as possible for safety, and angled down so you're not wasting half the output on the ceiling. They were $9 for four, so if you are in Boston and want one I have three more. It unscrews easily, so it's not hard to take down when I need it portable again.
Aside: I'm very happy to lend it to people putting on events, as long as you'll be careful with it. For example, it went to YTS this year.
It comes with a very blue cable, and to make it less obtrusive I got a cheap white one to tuck up in the molding:
I don't have a convenient switched outlet, but remote-controlled outlets have gotten so cheap these days that it seemed worth setting one up. I put it pretty high up and labeled it, so guests wouldn't mistake it for a regular light switch.
It keeps my elevated air purifier good company.
Here's what it looks like covering the living and dining room:
I chose to put it on the dining room side because the living room has more existing air cleaning capacity (3x AirFanta 3Pro).
My ceiling is only 8'5", so the highest I can get the lamp is 8'1". If people are standing, per Illuminate it hits ACGIH 8-hr limits after 6.3hr, so I'm planning to run it for at most 5hr/day by default. Because dose falls inversely to with distance squared, however, if people are sitting (ex: eating around the table) then the additional 15" of height reduces the worst-cas edose by a factor of 2.4, which keeps you below safety limits in basically any plausible scenario.
I'm glad to have it set up semi-permanently, and this should save time setting up for EA Dinners and other crowded gatherings!
2026-05-25 21:00:00
Julia and I had been giving half since 2014, but in 2025 we drew on our savings to donate 81%. It looks to us like we're in a critical window for keeping the introduction of very powerful AI systems from being disastrous, and we want to do what we can while we still can.
Here's what that looks like in the context of our overall spending:
On savings, there are two things going on. We're drawing down our
regular post-tax savings to donate more (-$72k) but we're still
putting money into retirement accounts (+$51k). It nets to -$20k,
though mixing pre- and post-tax numbers into one sum isn't really
correct.
table...
Category
pre-tax
post-tax
total
Donations
$0
$142,488
$142,488
Taxes
$0
$35,808
$35,808
Housing
$0
$24,264
$24,264
Childcare
$0
$42,636
$42,636
Medical
$2,712
$4,800
$7,632
Food
$0
$11,568
$11,568
Other
$0
$12,000
$12,000
Savings
$51,564
-$72,000
-$20,436
We've been prioritizing donations for a long time, but it feels very different now because of the AI boom. Some of this is that people who've made money in the boom will likely be giving more soon, and so money spent now can help set up organizations to spend future money more effectively. But more importantly, this is a key window of opportunity: transformative AI is coming very quickly, for better or worse. We want to push hard for "better".
If you compare to previous years (2024, 2022, 2020, 2018, 2016, 2014), we're donating a lot less than we used to in absolute terms:
table...
Adjusted for inflation:
2026
2024
2022
2020
2018
2016
Donations
$142,488
$77,088
$440,004
$294,000
$183,900
$197,832
Savings
-$20,436
-$28,128
$86,664
$115,500
$23,376
$24,324
Taxes
$35,808
$42,504
$186,672
$66,000
$64,680
$67,140
Housing
$24,264
$34,920
$49,332
$48,456
$42,852
$30,324
Childcare
$42,636
$53,436
$73,332
$41,256
$26,496
$56,268
Food
$11,568
$9,156
$9,168
$11,256
$11,688
$3,732
Medical
$7,632
$8,052
$9,480
$9,756
$11,628
$5,136
Other
$12,000
$12,504
$13,332
$7,500
$17,460
$4,788
Until mid-2022 I was working at a big tech company, optimizing to maximize donations, and now I'm at a non-profit. This means we're giving a larger fraction, but of a smaller amount:
I feel good about this change. I'm now building an early warning system for engineered pandemics, which is urgent and important as AI increasingly substitutes for advice from expert virologists. It does mean donating much less than I would have if I'd continued in big tech, but I think this was well worth it. While money can enable important work, I see a lot of projects that primarily need dedicated people to bring them into existence, and I'd be excited for others to switch to direct work.
Even though we're drawing down our savings to donate, our net worth rose 18% over the last year (adjusted for inflation). This was driven by stock returns on our retirement savings:
Now, retirement savings growing via stock returns is how it's "supposed" to work: if we give away all the gains then we'll have much less at retirement. But I see ~three futures as AI becomes rapidly more capable:
Things go very poorly, long-term savings are mostly useless, and we really wish we'd done more.
Things go very well, the world is very wealthy, we don't need the additional money.
Somehow, AI ends up being not that big a deal, and the world is still pretty normal financially.
It's really only in that last world where our savings translate into us having a better life, and as AI continues not hitting a wall I see the chances of ending up in a basically normal world getting pretty small. While we shouldn't donate to where we'd be destitute if we're wrong, we're not in danger of that. [1] So I think we should continue to draw down our non-retirement savings to donate more during this critical period.
Writing this post also got me thinking about our retirement contributions. We're both contributing the maximum, which I think often makes sense even if you don't expect a normal retirement, from a perspective of protecting savings. Since we're in a good enough position financially and donating seems very urgent, I now think we should stop contributing to have more to donate going forward.
2024: I think there's a good chance we'll have switched from giving 50% to some form of salary sacrifice. If we do, our pay, donations, and taxes will all be a lot lower.
I did this for a little while. I started at a 10% reduction, and then when Julia's work decided to no longer support voluntary salary reductions I went to 75%. Then a few months ago I decided to stop since I wanted more flexibility in targeting donations.
2024: Childcare should be similar: the nanny share is working and I expect we'll do something similar at least until our youngest starts kindergarten in Fall 2026 (and will show up in the 2028 update).
Yup, still doing a nanny share with our former housemate. While there was a bit where our nanny left and it took us a few tries to find someone who worked out, this is now going well again. We haven't decided what we'll do for afterschool when our youngest starts school in the Fall.
2024: I'd like to hope I have a better way of accounting for housing and savings in general and have gone back and redone all my previous numbers under the new system, but since that sounds like a ton of work I doubt I'll have done that.
My prediction that I would be lazy was correct. This post represents zero accounting improvements, only more data due to the passage of time.
2024: I put about a 10% chance on AI, war, or other major events in this timeframe changing things enough that everything is weird in hard to predict ways.
The world is appreciably different from two years ago, but not in ways that strongly impacted our spending.
My odds that the world has changed substantially are up significantly, maybe 55%, primarily due to AI. I'd put about 10% on futures where things go very badly, where I'm not here to write a followup and you're not here to read one. Then maybe 10% on really good futures where there's no need for me to work on biosecurity and I can do music, dance, and blogging full time. And 35% on weird futures where we're not dead but it's not clearly good either. Don't put a lot of weight on these numbers!
Childcare costs will be down a lot, because all three kids will be in school. But we'll still need to pay for afterschool, holidays, and vacations. Our oldest will be in 8th grade, so no college costs yet. Back in 2018 I was thinking that sometime around 2028 I might be moving from earning to give to direct work (due to the effective 100% marginal tax rate), but I ended up doing this earlier and for non-college reasons.
We won't be pulling from savings to fund donations because we'll have finished giving away our remaining non-retirement savings. But with so much lower childcare costs we'll probably still be able to give over 50%.
We don't have any expensive house projects. With how much the world could change soon I want to keep options open, and not lock up money in the house.
We're still living in the same house, and our housing costs will have gone down slightly because rents will have gone up a little (in a combination of real and nominal terms) but our mortgage is fixed-rate.
Our shared car is a 2013 Honda Fit, and while these are great cars there's a decent chance it won't last much longer. Might need to make a substantial payment here.
[1] Our house is 2/3 paid off, if we used savings to finish it off
that would leave ~$1M saved. At a 4%
safe withdrawal income this would be $3.3k/month. We also rent
out several parts of our house, totaling $4.8k/month, which brings us
to ~$100k/y of raw income. This would need to cover taxes, health
insurance, utilities, house maintenance, food, etc, but almost
everyone lives on far less. I think the largest risk is that we get a
non-extinction future that's still quite bad, but I have trouble
seeing moderately higher savings making a large difference there.
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2026-05-24 21:00:00
Cars and trucks are getting bigger, and I had a vague sense that fuel economy regulations were partly to blame. Looking into it, it's hard to say how much is regulations vs people wanting to buy vehicles that look rugged, but the regulations really aren't helping.
This chart is the core of it:
This is what manufacturers were looking at when they decided to build today's cars. To figure out the target fuel economy for a vehicle you first calculate its "footprint", which is the area between the wheels. On our 2013 Honda Fit that's 4.8ft side-to-side and 8.2ft front-to-back, for a footprint of 39sqft. Then you ask if it's a car or truck. This tells you which curve to use, and where along it to look.
Looking at the chart we can now see why it's hard for Honda to sell a Fit today. The best Honda could do for a five-seater non-hybrid hatchback is maybe a CAFE rating of 44mpg. [1] This puts them 23mpg short, and if Honda was a one-model car company they'd expect to owe $3,910/vehicle in fines: $17 per 0.1mpg shortfall. Since the regulation is about an average across all the cars they sell the actual effect is both lower and more complex, and maybe something like $2k.
Aside: the fine structure here is a sad artifact of us thinking in miles-per-gallon instead of gallons-per-mile. Going from 25mpg (0.04 gpm) to 50mpg (0.02 gpm) saves as much gas as going from 50mpg (0.02 gpm) to infinite (0 gpm). But the penalty for being below a target is calculated on the gap in miles-per-gallon and not gallons-per-mile. If you miss a 50mpg (0.02gpm) target by hitting 25mpg (0.04gpm), or miss a 75mpg (0.013gpm) target by hitting 50mpg (0.02gpm), you pay the same fine even though the first involves burning much more counterfactual gas: over 10,000 miles the first burns 200 gallons more than its target while the second only burns 67 more.
What did Honda do? They discontinued the Fit, and replaced it with the HR-V. It's bigger and heavier, and looks like it was trying to be a "light truck". Combined with its larger footprint that would give a much lower target: 49mpg instead of 67mpg. It still doesn't hit that, but it's less of a penalty. And then it doesn't actually count as a light truck, though I don't know if that was the plan from the beginning or a compromise they had to accept.
Overall, this regulatory structure taxes manufacturers more for making small low vehicles, the kind that are easiest to make fuel efficient. Here's where I would write that this is counterproductive and we should stop, except we sort of already did. In 2025 the penalty for non-compliance was set to $0 as part of the OBBBA. This means in some sense manufacturers are free to make small cars and trucks with achievable mileage. Except the rest of the structure is still there, complete with the distorted incentives, and ready to be reinstated by a future government.
If at some point there's political will to improve this situation, and a carbon tax remains off the table, I'd like to see a return to the simpler Ford-era system where targets didn't scale with vehicle size. But then I'd need to understand why they switched to this system (if it's crash safety we should legislate that directly) and it's not clear that continued regulatory whiplash is worth it.
[1] The closest to 67mpg would be something like the first-gen
Honda Insight. This got very close, but seating only two people
with a lightweight construction that would do very poorly in modern
crash testing. If you're willing to make it a hybrid, which does add
significant cost, it is possible: the the Jazz
e:HEV (essentially a hybrid Fourth-generation Fit) would probably
come in around 72mpg.
2026-05-23 21:00:00
If you ask the internet how to prepare pasta you'll hear two things:
You must salt the water.
You must serve it mixed with the sauce.
I disagree on both.
I've been cooking pasta since I was a kid, and I prepare it the way my mother (who grew up in Rome) did:
Cook it way less than it says on the box, until it's no longer crunchy but not further.
Time dinner so that the pasta is the last thing to be ready, where you're eating it within 5min of it coming out of the pot.
Serve it in one bowl, with the sauce in another.
The primary goal is to keep the tastes and textures distinguishable, merging only as you chew. The pasta resists your teeth; the sauce flows. The sauce is rich and flavorful; the pasta is a hearty foil. Secondarily, by combining only on each person's plate you can handle a range of preferences in sauce-to-pasta ratio, and different dietary restrictions (ex: a separate vegan sauce).
Some people love pasta that finishes its cooking in the sauce, pulling in the flavor, and I do think it's neat that pasta can do this. But it's the opposite of what I want, since it makes the dish more homogenous.
On salting, I'm targeting a level of salinity in the mouth while also maximizing contrast between the pasta and the sauce. That means cooking the pasta in unsalted water, while making the sauce saltier than would be tasty if eaten on its own. I think unsalted pasta has ended up with a bad reputation because people are unwilling to make the sauce salty enough to bring the combination into balance.
I don't know how people ended up thinking there was only one way to cook pasta, but to my taste the standard approach is a big missed opportunity.