The past two weeks have been rough, with an otherwise-lovely baby whose ability to sleep has been shattered by a 'sleep regression', with upwards of 7-8 wake-ups every night 😵‍💫

With this and busy days at work, my capacity for deep thought, or thought of any kind, has been low. Very, very low.

I've still been skimming articles on DeepSeek, but lacking the technical mental capacity for those, I've been enjoying more long-form philosophical pieces that I can read over a series of breaks, like:

• Gradual Disempowerment, Systemic Risks from Incremental AI Development, which provides a thorough depiction of how AI could cause 'misalignment' in our economic, cultural, political, and geo-political systems. I'm most of the way through and find this a thorough, if not always watertight, analysis.
• Antiqua et Nova: Note of the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, a Vatican document that I have found inspirational in its thoughtful exploration of the overlooked spiritual dimension of AI, in a moment where I feel an increasing technical pessimism. It's full of passages like:

Since AI lacks the richness of corporeality, relationality, and the openness of the human heart to truth and goodness, its capacities—though seemingly limitless—are incomparable with the human ability to grasp reality. So much can be learned from an illness, an embrace of reconciliation, and even a simple sunset; indeed, many experiences we have as humans open new horizons and offer the possibility of attaining new wisdom. No device, working solely with data, can measure up to these and countless other experiences present in our lives.

Very much a worthwile and recommended read for anyone as deep into exploring AI as I have been.

I've still been thinking a lot about the rapid development of software that AI enables, which I think could play a powerful role in how business software is made in the future, but admittedly I've largely been building for personal use. I found a resonance in this post arguing that the age of personal computing has mostly meant personal hardware, and that AI could unlock personal software to actually realize the dream of widespread personal computing.

In my weird headspace, I've started jumping randomly into episodes of Casper & Mandrilaftalen, a hypersurrealist Danish chat & sketch show from 1999, a marvel of madcap creative energy, with episodes full of absurdist sequences like this one, inexplicably with English subtitles).

I'm struggling to complete posts - 4 now in draft - but hoping a strategy of carving out time in the evenings will pay dividends.