July 2024

Despite the regular drizzle, this summer is looking splendid. The tories are out of power. London is out in force enjoying the warm weather. I’m temporarily funemployed and thoroughly enjoying doing almost nothing.

I decided to leave Elicit back in April, and worked my last day there in June. The team was lovely, but living a life halfway between San Francisco and London was not. I realised I needed to work somewhere with more in-person collaboration, more senior designers, and on the same time zone as me. Fortuitously, I met some people who run an AI prototyping agency here in London and found our interests aligned. I’ll be joining them at the end of July.

Until then I’m touching grass, prototyping new ideas for language model interfaces, writing things, shrinking my bedside book pile, improving this website a bit, and getting married somewhere in the middle. I now have a lot of thoughts on the trad femme world of weddings, but I’ll save it for a proper post.

Currently working through John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, which is fat but satisfying. I’m not usually a rock-lover, but McPhee’s storytelling and prose is beautiful enough to make plate tectonics, basins, granite, sediments, and conodonts seem compelling.

Annals of the Former World

John McPhee

A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the geology of North America, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years. Tales of rock structures and the geologists trying to figure out what they’re telling us.