In an ideal world the incentives on phone manufacturers would be to optimize useful lifetime, but instead people buy phones based on their as-new performance. Which means phones charge to 100% even though that's bad for the battery.

Every time I get a new phone it feels a bit like magic: I no longer need to think at all about battery life. This lasts for a few years, and then at some point my phone doesn't always make it through the day. Some amount of this is normal, but some of it is just bad battery management: new phones should come set not to charge past 80%.

Charging a lithium-ion battery to 100% wears it out much faster than stopping at 80%, and when a phone is new 80% of the battery is usually plenty. With past phones I've just grumped about it, but Pixels now have a setting: battery and charging > charging optimization > limit to 80%:

Assembling a tour in an unfamiliar area is hard work as a contra dance band (or caller). You need to figure out when the dances are, whether the schedules align, who the bookers are, how far out they like to book, and probably other things I'm forgetting. This is enough work that many tours that would be great just don't happen.

One thing I've been on the receiving end of a few times is bookers offering a tour. This is so great, and I wish more series would give it a try! It's generally much easier for organizers to offer than for bands to put it together: you often know your fellow organizers and can put together a single block of dates to offer. If the band says no, you can offer it to another.

Fifteen years ago, when Julia and I were living in a studio apartment, she got me a keyboard. It was a used Yamaha P85, and a significant expense for us at the time. I loved it, and unlike the penny whistles, accordion, and stroh violin I was exploring, it had a volume control. Almost immediately our cat knocked a potted plant onto it, and I needed to take it apart to carefully clean it.

Since then, however, I've had no issues, save one: clacky keys. Over time the keys were getting louder, especially the "A" below middle "C". Something had clearly worn out inside. It was an acoustic noise on an electronic instrument—playing live the audience couldn't hear the clacks over the amplified sound—but having odd percussion on "A" wasn't ideal. Still, I applied my normal approach of trying not to care, which saves me lots of time and money, and didn't let it bother me.

Lily has been increasingly fooling around with the piano, which I'm happy to see: this is also how I learned to play. She asked me about the clacks, and when I explained what I thought had gone wrong she asked if we could fix it. I said I was happy to try, and we got to work:

In 2017, after getting laid off from a startup, I spent a while looking into AI risk:

Many people I respect have started to think that AI risk is the most valuable place to focus EA efforts. For example, 80000 Hours ranks it first on their "list of global issues", taking into account "scale, neglectedness, and solvability". On the other hand, I have a lot of friends working in machine learning, and none of them think AI risk is worth working on now. This level of disagreement is very strange, and kind of worrying.

After playing for a dance weekend in South Carolina where casual conversation among non-tech people included earnest speculation over the likelihood that AI gets us all killed, I thought it might be a good time to look back at when this was really speculative.

Summary: I talked to the right people, heard some incredibly prescient ideas, and got the bottom line wrong.

Walking to kindergarten with Nora this morning, I asked if she wanted to practice crossing the street: once she got good enough, she could walk to school on her own. She didn't want to practice today, but she asked if she could walk the final block herself since there were no more crossings. I said sure, hugged her goodbye, and she set off:

In 2005 I bought an accordion on eBay for $38 (plus $42 shipping). It arrived surprisingly in tune, but I made up for that by playing it badly. It sat next to my bed in the Fishbowl, a large triple I shared with David and Lucas sophmore year: