New Year's Eve

It's 3:57 in the morning. The alcohol is mostly worn off by now, the sleep deprivation perhaps not so much. I've just hosted a pretty successful new year's eve party. I think I have a fun mix of friends, who got along with each other surprisingly well.

I feel like I should use this time to do a bit of reflection on the last year. In broad strokes, I think I've achieved a lot this year on paper, but am not so sure I've come away from it a better person. I think 2025 has been a year of vision and prophecy but 2026 needs to be a year of execution. I see paths ahead I just need to seize them and make them realities.

some visions of the future:

• doing research into evolutionary prompt optimisation during era gave me a glimpse of how powerful LM systems could be if harnessed within the right feedback loops/grounding. i predict that 2026 will be the year we start seeing substantive effects of ai on the economy (not necessarily automation, but more and more integration into work)
• Doing alignment pretraining work with geodesic has made me much more optimistic about deep character training as a route to robust alignment
• starting the idealists collective - it's just ideas right now, but I can't wait to get it started and taking off
• on a more personal note, i feel like events of the past couple of years have put me in a place where i feel pretty ready for a relationship, and i hope that in 2026 i will meet someone