Now

Last updated: January 1, 2025.

This page, inspired by the now-legendary post by Derek Sivers, contains a quick overview of what I’m doing right now. I try to update it every couple of months.

New website

I just finished revamping this site by migrating it to Hugo! I made a bunch of changes and improvements along the way — you can read more details about it here.

Work

I’ve been working at Via since 2018, doing all sorts of different and interesting stuff, mostly related to algorithms and data science and then building interesting and useful products around these things. Lately, alongside managing a team of very talented folks, I am spending a lot of time on more “core” engineering projects, with a focus on system design, performance, visibility and efficiency at scale.

Thinking about AI

Like everyone else in tech, I’ve been thinking a lot about AI in the last year or so. My natural reaction is a combination of skepticism, fear and FOMO: skepticism because I’m definitely not convinced that the current LLM technology is going to get us to “AGI”, fear because I don’t think the people and interests pushing for that have thought through what it would mean for our collective humanity, creativity and desire for meaning in our lives, and “FOMO” because that’s what hype does to you.

Conlangs

Linguistics was one of my earliest passions, and I maintain a passion for languages and linguistics which in the last decade has mostly manifested in my learning Hebrew after moving to Tel Aviv. When I was younger, I was very interested in constructed languages, or conlangs as they are known by the nerdy community of folks online who like to create them. Lately I have found myself drawn back to this strange hobby, perhaps as a salve to the persistent feeling of doom that pervades a lot of the LLM-focussed discourse online these days. Conlangs, like art or music or human connections, will never be automated away by AI, since they are a fundamentally human construction. Reading about an LLM-generated conlang would be a similarly soulless exercise to looking at an AI-generated image.

Reading and listening

Books

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (finally got around to reading this excellent book)
• History of the English Language by Kevin Stroud (originally a podcast, but I’ve been reading the transcripts cause I could never get the hang of podcasts)
• History of Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Music

• Here in the Pitch by Jessica Pratt
• Chaos for the Fly by Grian Chatten
• Ys by Joanna Newsom