State of The Projects
10 things I'm doing
1. Health
My top priority is to get/stay healthy. I’ve written about my endeavors to do so in my post about a fatigue-defying six-mile run and in Every challenge is a gift. Since writing those posts I enjoyed yet another week of ideal exercise levels and notched a new record 10k run pace of 8:50/mi, capping off a series of steady improvements.
My goal is to regain trust in my body’s capabilities and resilience. I lost that trust during my year+ of post-viral complications, and accordingly lost my ability to take risks across all aspects of life for fear of adverse consequences to physical and mental exertion. To prove that I’m free from that adversarial regime I must demonstrate my ability to exercise unrestrictedly without consequence, which is why I take the steady execution of my exercise routines so seriously.
All signs now are positive, though I did get side-tracked by a two-week vacation, sailing around the Mediterranean with my grandma, mom, and brother. At first I did stay active, running through Madrid…
… but then I got sick 🫤. Thankfully I have evidence that it was a regular-old communicable disease (sorry brother), but still I’m not quite recovered, so my resilience-demonstration engine is temporarily out of commission. Still I am unconcerned. As I have written, each new challenge is an opportunity to demonstrate the skillful navigation of some new area of life’s terrain. I’m sure I’ll be back to my routines in no time.
I also climbed a mountain in Corsica. Due to my lack of planning and the hard deadlines involved in securing transit off the island this ended up being one of the most intense hike/runs I’ve ever done, and I might still be recovering from that too.
2. Harmonic
I continue to consult with The Josh Bersin Company on their line of AI products for HR professionals, maintaining and extending software that I’ve built over the years which handles data sync and access control, connecting a diverse corpus of research reports and datasets to an array of content-ingestion backends.
Recently my work has become more collaborative as I now work side-by-side with another engineer whom I recommended to the company and with a new technical-strategy leader. Together we’re working to launch new products and to build out our AI-retrieval stack.
3. Sneaky Town
The Sneaky Town V4 Tournament Set™ is now complete:
These boards are the culmination of many months of work, and years of work on the game itself. For the first time, Sneaky Town’s aesthetic vision is fully realized. My list of potential customers is growing too!
And yet, I only have four boards. And I don’t really want to give them to people cause then I wouldn’t have any. So I have created this beautiful thing that’s not getting played very much. Unsatisfying. Despite my strong desire to focus on other things, I am weighing whether to crank out a new set so that I can fulfill my standing orders and get this game into people’s hands. We’ll see.
4. Album
I’m working on my second piano album. As shown above, the songs are all recorded and ordered, and I’ve completed mastering too. Now I just need to:
finalize transitions (easy)
finalize song and album names (hard)
make album art (hard)
distribute / market (doable)
bonus: compose and publish the videos of each recording
Not unexpectedly this project has taken longer than expected, but the finish line is in sight. And I am enticed by its binary nature: once I publish, the project is complete and available to the entire world forever. But that binary nature also makes it harder to publish, as there’s so much room for perfection. Standard advice is that perfectionism is bad, but I am unable to act otherwise: I care too much about these songs and the effort that went into recording them.
5. Seattle
I have two more months in Seattle before I need to figure out my next living situation. I hope to spend lots of time with my friends here, and to take advantage of the improving weather. Backpacking, climbing, and hosting on my house’s newly umbrella’d roof are all in order.
6. America
I am participating in my friend Daniel’s American History Reading Group, along with my dad and 100+ other Americans across the country. We’re reading Land of Hope by Wilfred M. McClay which tells the inspiring story of America’s political history - just in time for America’s 250th birthday on July 4th! I’m a few chapters in and am already more in touch with the exceptional nature of the American political experiment and the great virtues of this nation’s founders, and am feeling quite patriotic.
I also felt a little transgressive reading this in London Heathrow Airport, especially during the sections on America’s military victories during the Revolutionary War.
7. Career exploration
As my health has improved, I have once more began thinking about future career moves. I am considering a range of possibilities, including:
Product/HCI development at a startup (the path where I have the most experience and options)
Academic AI research
Non-academic AI research
My aim is to eventually find a full-time position that I can anchor my life around. But I also aim to take it slow on the way there and to use the present period to explore new possibilities via networking, reading, and working on related projects.
Accordingly I am now spending dedicated time on these kinds of exploration activities. It’s been a slow start but I think networking will be helpful and I aim to prioritize that in the coming weeks.
8. Intention-aligned productivity software
In service of my “strategic exploration” sessions I’m working on software that will help me specify and execute upon arbitrary intentions, in the lineage of (but substantially different from) my human-programming tool Methodable and my living personal systems. As of now I have a CLI command that rearranges the windows on my computer, opens a project document, starts a timer, and periodically checks in with me (like in the screenshot above). In ideal form this software will self-modify, continuously adapting itself to best elicit and serve my intentions via value-driven interactive experiences.
This project is dual-purpose: I want to build tools that help me succeed at my exploration goals, but more so am interested in exploring this product area itself and adjacent career directions. I’m excited that Forethought, a prominent research nonprofit focused on ensuring beneficial futures with AI, has published sketches of “Angel-on-the-shoulder” software which are in the same neighborhood as my own ideas. And I’ve also been chatting with one Brian who’s working on a related project: creating a phone that cares.
This feels like fertile ground, but I want to make sure that my focus on building abstract tools does not detract from my more concrete aims, so I might prioritize this project a bit lower for the time being.
9. Meditation
I’m once again meditating every morning, this time using Henry Shukman’s fantastic “The Way” app. Despite all my projects and strivings I wish to stay present and enjoy life as it is, and I find these meditations to help me do that.
10. Blog
Last but not least is the blog. I’ve written 17 posts so far this year, the most successful of which has been my story of overcoming fatigue. That post has been read nearly 4,000 times, garnered many positive comments, and inspired two strangers to follow suit with similarly positive results.
Upcoming plans are (tentatively):
To continue documenting my recovery from post-viral fatigue, and, if everything goes well, to compile everything into a “here’s how I recovered” post
To write about interesting areas of AI research and other areas of research and product development that strike my fancy
To launch my piano album
(as per usual) to continue writing about whatever else currently inspires me
I won’t lie, publishing on a weekly schedule is quite difficult, but so far I’m following through with the commitment, as evidenced by the embarrassing number of posts I’ve sent out at 11:59PM. In fact, I’m so committed to my arbitrary deadlines that I paid 18 euros for Starlink in order to post about my habit systems from deep within the Mediterranean Sea. Make no mistake: the mail always goes through!
Awesome stuff Daniel. The engineering stuff is a bit beyond my pay grade 😂 but that board game has so many gorgeous touches. Glad to hear your health is better and excited to hear more from you! (and catch up with your posts now that I'm returning to Substack more)