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.
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.
2026-08-08 21:00:00
A few days ago I took the kids to Canobie Lake amusement park. It's the closest one to Boston, and while it's not a serious roller coaster park I don't actually like roller coasters (and the kids aren't pushing for them yet). We went on a Wednesday, and going midweek was a good use of a vacation day: the lines are so much shorter.
I've done this a few times before, but this was my first time taking Nora (5y). Last year she was still highly dependent on naps, so we would have had a very short day. I did set expectations with the older two that bringing Nora might mean leaving early, but her stamina was impressive: we were there open (10:30am, though we got there ~10min earlier) to close (7pm). Very glad we brought her: she had so much fun, and her joy was infectious.
I had all three in bright colored broad brimmed hats with a strap under the chin. Normally when going out in the summer they can choose between hats or sunscreen, but for this trip I required the hats specifically because they are so much easier to pick out in a crowd.
Lily (12y) and Anna (10y) had their comm watches (which Verizon did not end up breaking after all), while Nora stayed with one of us (usually me, a few times Lily) the whole time. This sort of day, where you're repeatedly separating ("that ride is boring" / "that line is too long" / "that ride is too scary") and meeting up ("let's do the teacups together!") is a fantastic use case for the watches. Parks renting watches would make a lot of sense, but probably doesn't work because then they'd be encouraging splitting up instead of condoning it (liability issues).
We left the park to get pizza at Romanos for lunch, as in past years. The kids are much more likely to eat this than park food and it's also much cheaper ($20 with tip for the four of us). It takes a bit more time out of the day, but when you order ahead it's actually pretty close vs waiting at the park (line + prep). And a mid-day break to do something non-stimulating in an air conditioned room was great!
Nora was very thrill-seeking, similar to Lily at the same age. There was only one ride Lily wanted to go on that Nora declined. Several intense rides that Nora really wanted to go on were 48"+ and she's still 44", but she was very excited to be able to go on some 42"+ rides solo. One she did fully by herself, including the waiting in line, which she was very proud of.
Normally Lily wants to be the caretaker big sister for Nora, pushing me for more responsibility and being excited to show Nora everything. At the park, however, Lily wanted to do more things by herself, especially when we first got there, and wasn't allowed on the 48" max little kids rides (they post 48" to keep off the big kids, but all or almost all have a 6" grace window, which Anna just squeaks under). This freed up Nora for Anna, who really enjoyed getting to show Nora all her favorite rides.
Overall, it was a busy day. Here's Nora's list:
Carousel
Teacups
Wave blaster
Flower power
Over the rainbow
Skater
Mini bumper cars
Caterpillar
Mini bumper cars
Jungle bounce
Lunch at Romanos
Castaway Island water park: lazy river, messed around a bit
Kiddie canoes
Rowdy roosters
Wipeout
Haunted mine
Carousel
Carousel
Mini cars
Teacups
Obnoxious tiny boats
Mini jeeps
Mini tanks
Boston harbor patrol
Boston harbor patrol
Train
Boston harbor patrol
Watched Lily on the Boston tea party
Canobie 500
Rowdy roosters
Mini bumper cars
The way the water park fits into the rest of Canobie Lake is pretty awkward. It's mostly a dry park, with a good day's worth of options especially for younger kids. The wet portion is a set of waterslides, a lazy river, a toddler pool, and a huge play structure that sprays water everywhere. The kids like the lazy river, would love the water slide if it didn't have such a huge line (we went on a very hot day), have all outgrown the toddler pool, and mostly find the play structure overstimulating and unpleasant (as do I). We took some time at the water section after lunch; I'm not convinced it was worth the hassle of changing clothes, but Anna disagrees.
The haunted mine ride worked out strangely. I thought it might be too intense for Nora, but she assured us she was ready. Lily told her it was fine to hold hands if she needed support. Over the course of the ride, Lily got more and more freaked out while Nora remained happy and interested. By the end, Lily was shrieking and asking Nora for hugs to feel better. I think it's possible it was not a good fit for Lily, but she might have just enjoyed being scared? I don't plan to bring it up until it's next decision-relevant, in case it prompts bad dreams.
Of the 20 distinct rides, 13 were circular (most motion in a small space), 6 were some other kind of tracked movement (motion in a slightly larger space), and 1 (bumper cars) was free movement. Though this isn't a perfect breakdown, since Rowdy Roosters (circular) and the Canobie 500 (other track) did allow a little free movement perpendicular to the direction of travel.
I asked the kids if they had any thoughts to add:
Nora said to ride the Kiddie Canoes. I asked if this was her favorite, and she said no, just one she happened to think of.
Anna said she was glad she went on Wipeout, but even though Nora loved it she wouldn't generally recommend it for little kids. She told me that when she was six she went on it once and didn't want to go on it again for years. For younger kids she recommends the rides where you "sit on little things and they go around in a slow circle and a lot of the times you can ring bells or do other things while you're on the ride". She was glad we brought water bottles. She was also glad we brought swim suits, and enjoyed the water stuff. She warned that the rain fortress was a little intense: "water coming from literally everywhere; wear goggles!" She really liked the reentry hand stamps, and the fried dough ("a little bit expensive, but very powdered sugary").
Lily: "Save rides with the longest lines for the end of the day, or when lots of people are at the water park. Ride Ice Jet, Zero Gravity, Turkish Twist, Psychodrome. Bring water bottles. A hat with a strap was very helpful for identification: I could easily spot Anna and Nora from a distance because no one else had hats like that."
Admission was $184.38 with fees, because I bought three $45 "Good Any Day" tickets in the December sale (saving $10/ticket) and then bought Nora's $43 day-specific "Under 48in" day-of. Driving from Somerville was ~$20 in gas and depreciation for 63mi. Overall monetary costs of $56/person counting lunch. The largest cost isn't monetary, however, but the opportunity cost of taking a day off work (now that I'm working on something I think is important). Since my deal with myself is that I take the same amount of time off I did when I was earning to give, though, it's more about the marginal day off, and I'm not sure what that would have been. Overall, very glad we went, and likely to go again next year!
2026-08-05 21:00:00
When you have a lot of browser tabs open it can be very hard to tell them apart, especially if they're from the same site:
Since monitors are wide and websites are tall, we should very clearly
put tabs on the side in a vertical stack. I was a heavy user of these
in Firefox, and when I switched to Chrome I used their experimental
--enable-vertical-tabs flag. When they removed it I
wrote a post about how I
love side tabs and switched back to Firefox:
I did end up switching back to Chrome as my primary browser (no post, sorry!), valuing speed and stability (relative to the Firefox of the time) more than side tabs.
When I started at Google in 2012 I asked the Chrome team if they could restore support for it, or at least make it be the kind of thing extensions could do. They told me that while they got this request a lot from Googlers, real users generally find it too confusing. And they were trying to build a "great defaults, no options" culture, to keep Chrome simple.
They've finally come around, however, and have added a "Show Tabs Vertically" option:
It does exactly what I want:
I suspect they came around on adding it because competing browsers supported it natively, and they were worried about losing users. I considered switching over this but it wasn't enough to get me to move: I trust Google's security team the most of these, and browser security is critical. Still, I'm glad others did, and now I have my favorite UI back after fifteen years!