Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again

Sat 27 September 2025

The current discourse around AI progress and a supposed “bubble” reminds me a lot of the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic. Long after the timing and scale of the coming global pandemic was obvious from extrapolating the exponential trends, politicians, journalists and most public commentators kept treating it as a remote possibility or a localized phenomenon.

Something similarly bizarre is happening with AI capabilities and further progress. People notice that while AI can now write programs, design websites, etc, it still often makes mistakes or goes in a wrong direction, and then they somehow jump to the conclusion ...

Being Productive

Fri 13 September 2024

Recently I was asked which habits and practices were the secret to my productivity. I figured my answers might be of wider interest. Let me know what works for you!

Why should you listen to my advice? Aside from my papers, in each year of the past decade I've authored ~1k pull requests with ~200k LoC of deltas, with a similar number reviewed:

You can tell when I'm on holiday :)

Learning

My first recommendation is to learn as much as possible, about the entire stack you work with - in AI, ...