Now
Just finished my first week at Chemify. Paradise. All these years I told myself and others that story about leaving science to git gud at programming, always hinting that there would come a time etc. Well the time has come. The software engineering challenge is perfectly scoped. There is an array of microservices, apis, tools, databases. They all do something or other, all works in progress, mvps etc. But this is all the shadow of the hardware stack, which is an evolving, dynamic, human-in-the-loop deep tech chemistry robotics stack where you can, to a first approximation, fire a request for a family of chemicals and which will, with some huffing and puffing and a lot of human intervention, provide you with the chemicals you requested, or suitable substitutes.
Now its just a question of iterating, polishing, improving. And I am invited in with a mandate to do as much of that as I can (under the generous rubric of ‘data engineer’– i mean its all information technology isn’t it, its nothing more or less than an assemblage of data packets). I like this mandate more than ‘software engineer’– there are plenty of people in the company, scientist or programmer, who are concerned with engineering the software. They all consume and produce data.
Meanwhile, I have been keeping up with my dancing and singing. Today with UZGANG we recorded an album in the Pyramid at Anderston. What a sound in there. And on Friday I got to stand in the middle at Sacred Harp and get wayfairing stranger blasted at me from all directions. And the rest of the time I’m listening to Saved! by Lingua Ignota on repeat. I think it’s going to be my album of 2026. (My album of 2025 was Inca Taqui.)
I got a flat near the center– just across the river, on Bridge street. If I lean out my window I can see the Lauriston to my left and Central Station to my right. Heaven. Need to finish renovating my kitchen.
I’ve been spending a lot of time recently vibe-coding with different agents, trying out different tools. Very exciting time to be in software. I assume the year I last touched code was 2025. The unprecedented times continue apace. But it is a great pleasure to have so many anachronistic hobbies, to stay connected to the thread of deep history while looking out into the unknown future.
Archive: 2024-12-22
I got offered a job for JPMC, which is apparently the largest company in the world (according to Forbes 2024). Which was a bit unexpected, but I thought it would be an interesting opportunity to study egregores in a more hands-on manner. When I worked in molecular biology, I spent a lot of time watching helicase unwinding DNA and imagining the dreams and schemes of those tiny machines. Now I am such a little machine, iterating on my instructions in a vast incomprehensible entity. I use the moments normally lost to the transaction costs of beurocracy to practice shorthand (actually Quickscript) and write little opaque notes to myself. It is a thoroughly pleasant existence, I can see why humans are so eager to find a great other to obey. Couldn’t be me though, mores the pity.
Living in Glasgow Southside. I was always weary of returning to my homeland, but I think Glasgow is the one place here I could comfortably call home for a while. There is a great music scene, I have seen some of the best punk gigs of my life already since returning. Regular interesting experimental music. Some art. Some nice people, though the nightlife atmosphere is very disorienting to me now, my cultural codes have been scrambled. I have been asked three times since I moved here if I’m German. So it goes I suppose.
I have started waking an hour earlier each day and writing. Mostly science fiction. After writing so long with AI augmentation, I honestly didn’t think I’d still be able to do it on my own, but I have found the spell of the dark mornings and a candle and a pen and paper have drawn words out of me quite freely and fluidly. Very refreshing after so long in front of a screen.
o3 was just demoed. Another benchmark falls. And some of the latest models I have tested have made plausible attempts at my own benchmark– writing the opening of book VII of The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spencer. Janus is sharing Finnegan’s Wake style products on X. What is to become of us? I’m studying history when I find a spare moment, reading Braudel and thinking always of acceleration and singularity.
Greetings from the thickening years at the beginning and the end of history.