Like most houses with solar, our house is capable of generating a lot of power, and it's basically useless [1] in a disaster. If the grid is down, the panels shut down automatically. This is a lot of value lost, since in a long-term disaster, electricity would be incredibly valuable (air cleaning, gas boiler or a tiny bit of resistive heat, sump pump, cooking, refrigeration, tools). When we installed a second round of solar in 2024 we considered either a battery backup or "best effort when the sun is shining" power. They priced out at many thousands of dollars and we decided it wasn't worth it, but recently three things have changed my mind:

I'm pretty worried about how AI might change the world a lot very soon. In some of these cases things go very wrong very quickly, in others things go very right very quickly, but I'm increasingly (relative to 2024) expecting a messy middle path where, whether we end up with a good or bad outcome, things might get weird for a while. Our supply chains are fragile, fulfilment is largely just-in-time, and if we'll suddenly need way more of some things they might not be available. Thinking a lot about biosecurity for my day job, I'm especially worried about how people, AIs, or some combination might release something to spread through the population.

What can we do about this? A few months ago Chris Bakerlee (program officer on Coefficient Giving's biosecurity and pandemic preparedness team) wrote up 10 big projects for reducing bio x-risk. Working on any of these professionally would be really valuable. Looking over the list, however, it occurred to me that most of them have solid actions we can do at the individual level.

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.