The kids have been excited about Pig Latin a lot lately. I noticed that there are a few words that are also English words, or homophones thereof. With some help from Claude, especially in figuring out which words would work well and in checking my work, here's a poem about a pie and a naughty plover:

I weigh ache bay, each pay I pay,
Oh say eats whey, each way ice lei,
Away ate play, eye way: a prey
I'll weigh, eat whey, all way: a day.

Oh whey, oh neigh! I may I pay!
Away outstay, overplay ate whey
All whey of whey, I may I pay!
Ooh, yay, I slay eat tray outlay!

I weigh, eat whey, all whey, ashtray,
I weigh, underplay, all whey, eyes pay!
Eat sway, eat stray, I weigh eat whey!
Oh say, Old Bay? Owe whey, I may!

I weigh Amway oh say outstay!
I weigh I flay? Oh neigh, away!
I weigh a stay, I weigh I lay,
I weigh owes day all whey a day!

Several months ago I wrote a program to normalize your clipboard, removing fonts / colors / sizes and mostly leaving semantic information: anything that can't be represented in Markdown was dropped. Now that I can have walk me through things, however, I've made it available as a free app on the Mac App Store:

Cross-posted from my SecureBio Notebook.

This is a lightly-edited version of a memo that I presented at the Summer 2026 Biosecurity Summit outside of DC. While others at SecureBio often see things similarly, I'm attempting to present my view and not a SecureBio "house view".

The Goal

We need to be robust to adversaries who want to cause very large-scale harm with biology. This includes actors (human or AI) who want to kill all humans, cause short-term incapacitation or long-term civilizational collapse, or who have strategies for sparing some while they harm others. There are multiple reasons an actor might have these targets aside from being directly omnicidal, such as reducing response capacity during an AI takeover.

In It May Be Possible to Improvise A High Grade Bioshelter, Adin Richards discusses the possibility of improvising defenses against an environmental threat such as mirror bacteria. He gives an exploratory overview of why it might be possible to apply materials and equipment people often already have in their houses to pressurize all or part of a house with filtered air. It would be great if this were possible, but with all the ways for an improvised system to fail I'm pretty skeptical.

I decided to try a simpler version, testing how much I could positively pressurize a single room with a relatively powerful HEPA air purifier (AirFanta 3Pro. This is close to a best case, since most people won't have something as good as an AirFanta.

I avoid Twitter (𝕏) for similar reasons to drugs: I think it would change me for the worse, and I would be unable to give it up.

After staying off Twitter reasonably successfully for years, I cross-posted my AI Tweets there a few weeks ago. I had something very Twitter-shaped to say, and I thought it was important to get out, so I do think this was worth it. And it all went well: none of this is complaining about the comments I got there.

Coming back a few times to check notifications, however, it's been very good at baiting me: Tweets that are confidently wrong in cases where I have relevant and uncommon knowledge. The pull to dive in and share what I know is very strong! Then this bleeds over to the far broader case where people are wrong, and you have a large potential time sink.

If it were just the time sink, I'd stop resisting. I spend some time on HN and Reddit, and to the extent that Twitter could substitute for that by showing me things I was more interested in, that wouldn't be an issue. The real problem is the culture.

When I look at why I expect the world to change a lot in the next few years, and why other people expect slower changes, I think a big component is disagreement on the extent to which AI will affect non-computer work. Sure, programming has sped up massively with Claude Code etc, and models like Astra seem posed to make similar changes to work with spreadsheets and other common business tools, but what about work that doesn't include computers at all?

The classic picture of AIs doing things in the world is robots, but I think a more realistic picture of the near future is computers telling people what to do. Leaning into the way the world has become very scifi, we could call this "teleoperating" people. Many things that are hard for robots are very easy for people, there are strong economic reasons that push towards teleoperation, and this bypasses many legal and social limitations on what AI can do. We should expect this to lead to large and rapid changes in the physical world.