My program that uses whistling to control a synthesizer is now available in the Mac App Store:

It's free, no ads, and open source. If you have a mac and like to whistle, give it a try? You need an external mic, headphones (wired, to minimize latency), or both; I recommend the former.

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:

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:

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.

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.

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.