> Check the calendar.

You notice that your 11-year blogging anniversary is coming up tomorrow. This isn’t a surprise, but it is stressful, as you’ve had a busy month and procastinated writing the post until the night before.

You also remember a hazy promise to yourself from last year, that you would write weirder posts and explore different forms of writing. With some disappointment, you realize you haven’t done that. Maybe you can kill two birds with one stone.

> Reflect on the past year.

Oh no, that’s scary. You’d rather not.

> Remember that historically, you have gotten more out of introspection than you have lost, and should be following long-term rewards when you see them.

Okay, fine. You pull up the past year’s worth of posts.

2025-08-18-ten-years.markdown
2025-11-16-authentic-imperfection.markdown
2026-01-29-mh-2026.markdown
2026-03-11-anthropic-amicus.markdown
2026-05-17-ai-chill.markdown
2026-07-12-tech-ceo-gamers.markdown

This matches the number of posts you wrote last year. You remember how you used to post once a month, and now you’re posting once every two months. You’re not sure how to feel about this, but it’s not fear, disgust, or shame. That’s good.

> Check view counts for your posts.

Why do you care about this? You remember you used to check this more closely, and now don’t check it at all. It feels devalued, which is a weird thing to say when the attention economy has never been higher.

You realize that as views have become driven by how well it trends on social media rather than anything else, the less you care about organic view counts of your site. The social media websites tell you how many people have viewed it, and that’s a good enough proxy. There’s no SEO, there’s no goals of making this a business, and the base numbers are laughable. If you did want to make it a business, your first step would be giving up on a personal domain and converting everything to a Substack. You’d rather not.

> Check time you’ve spent writing posts.

This one you do follow, if only as a measure of how much effort you’ve put into this hobby. Your time tracker brings in the time as 51 hours, 11 minutes.

> Consider the topics your posts have covered.

With some dismay, you noticed that most of your posts have been about AI in one way or another. It’s not surprising, since AI continues to do increasingly concerning things, without obvious signs of slowing down, and model misbehavior does not feel handled. You continue to think it’s weird that some people you know who directly work on making models more capable also express concerns on whether the technology they’re building should exist. Perhaps in abstract, you can see the logic in wanting to be the person in charge, but does that logic work when you’re one of thousands of generic engineers or researchers?

Others have pointed out this tension. It doesn’t seem useful to dwell on it. In practice, people come to their own conclusions on the matter, and it seems better to focus on doing something about it rather than convincing people to work on AI safety. There is a difference between being right and doing something about it.

You expect to keep writing about AI, but also plan to write about other things. You’d rather not become one of those people whose entire life is about AI, even if you do like the subject. You remember a conversation in SF, where you mention the weird feeling of going from discussing how much current LLMs assist bioterrorism, to realizing you don’t have enough oranges and should do a run to the grocery store. This dichotomy was cosmically hilarious, but you’re not sure the humor works. Maybe you’re just weird. But you knew that already.

> Put a pumpkin on your head.

What pumpkin?

Also it isn’t even Halloween.

Also, the last time you carved a jack-o’-lantern was 20 years ago.

> Explain in detail why your second sentence didn’t have a comma after “Also”, but your third sentence did, and what this was meant to convey.

See, this is why no one likes meta stuff.

> So I shouldn’t tell them that you left out a comma after the “See”, then spent 2 minutes thinking about the flow of the sentence, before putting it back in?

Whose side are you on?

> Wrap this up.

It is that time, isn’t it? Until we meet again.