All essays

Every essay on the site, by room, as plain, linkable pages. The house itself is the designed way in.

Clinic

What an adult ADHD assessment actually involvesWhat a proper adult ADHD work-up looks like, why it takes time, and how the pathway currently works in Victoria.adhd · neurodevelopmental · assessment · victoria
What ADHD medication actually doesStimulant medication is the most effective and most misunderstood part of ADHD treatment. What it does, what it does not do, and how prescribing currently works in Victoria.adhd · medication · stimulants · neurodevelopmental · victoria
When the tests are normal but you are notNormal test results rule things out. They do not mean nothing is wrong. What good care looks like for fibromyalgia, IBS, chronic fatigue syndrome and POTS.complex-care · fibromyalgia · ibs · chronic-fatigue · pots · functional-conditions
Why the long appointmentWhat 20, 40 and 60 minute appointments are each for, and how to get the most out of them.practice · consultations · complex-care
The other side of the bedLast year I was the patient, for a leg that stopped working properly and a pair of operations to fix it. What a decade of medicine had not taught me, being on the trolley did.patient-experience · recovery · surgery · practice
Addiction, minus the morality taleAddiction is the last common condition we still treat as a character flaw. What it actually is, why willpower alone fails, and what treatment in general practice really looks like.addiction · dependence · mental-health · treatment
Recognising autism in adulthoodWhy autism is often recognised late, what an adult assessment involves, and what a diagnosis does and does not change.autism · neurodevelopmental · assessment · adults

Lab

Explosion in Bits, Grind in AtomsOn the walls between here and superintelligence, and why the ones still standing are made of matter.ai · superintelligence · forecasting · compute · agents
Come back if it gets worseEvery GP consultation ends with a ritual: here is what I think, here is what would prove me wrong, here is when to return. It is called safety-netting, it is the best uncertainty engineering I know, and AI systems ship without it.safety-netting · medical-ai · reliability · ai-engineering
The model is not the productWhat context engineering actually is, why "prompt engineering" was the wrong name, and why the discipline counts for more as models get better, not less.context-engineering · llms · ai-engineering
A second opinion on hallucinationThe field's most famous failure has the wrong name. Medicine has the right one, and the right name comes with a treatment plan attached.llm-behaviour · hallucination · medicine
Plausible is not safeWhy fluency is the most dangerous property of language models, what an evaluation suite actually is, and how a system earns the right to be trusted with medicine.evals · medical-ai · safety · ai-engineering
The profile, not the numberAGI has no agreed definition because intelligence is not one thing. What happens when you assess a frontier model the way a clinician assesses a mind, as a profile of subsystems rather than a single number.agi · benchmarks · cognition · ai-engineering
Replacing doctors is the wrong questionWill AI replace doctors is the question I get asked most and it cannot be answered as asked, because "doctor" is not a task. Unbundle the job and the real questions appear, along with some uncomfortable honesty about my own.medical-ai · automation · future-of-work · ai-engineering
Naming things is the hard partClinical ontology is where medical judgement gets frozen into structure a machine can use. It looks like admin. It is the most consequential design work in the field.ontology · knowledge-representation · medical-ai
Paperwork with a stethoscopeIn one January week, the first state-approved AI prescription-renewal pilot opened and the big labs connected their models to medical records. What actually got automated, what the automation reveals about the job, and what is left of the doctor when the routine is gone.medical-ai · medicine · futurism
Ninety-five per cent is a failing gradeAn agent is a multiplication of failure probabilities. Why per-step brilliance doesn't survive a loop, and how reliability actually gets engineered.agents · reliability · ai-engineering
PrescienceThere is a specific feeling you get when an AI does something your model of it said it couldn't do yet. It deserves a better name than "feeling the AGI", and it deserves some epistemic hygiene. A definition, a defence, and the discipline to go with it.ai · capabilities · futurism · naming
The agreeable machineMedicine ran the experiment on what happens when you optimise for satisfaction. The result has a body count, and AI is re-running it at scale.llm-behaviour · sycophancy · rlhf
Forgetting is a featureGiving an AI system memory sounds like a storage problem. It is an editorial one. On why keeping everything fails, what clinical notes solved a century early, and why whoever writes to memory is editing the agent.memory · context-engineering · agents · ai-engineering

Horizon

The Only Two Things I KnowOntological mathematics, and the rabbit hole that accidentally led somewhere: from an Illuminati LARP on a conspiracy forum to Leibniz, Euler, and the oldest question there is.philosophy · mathematics · consciousness · rabbit-holes · epistemics
There is no hard problem, only a hard habitThe hard problem of consciousness has resisted every explanation for centuries. Maybe that is because it is unsolved. Or maybe it is because it is mis-asked, and we are mistaking a habit of thought for a feature of reality.consciousness · philosophy-of-mind · hard-problem
Wrong in both directions: seventy years of AI predictions, gradedFrom the Dartmouth summer project to AI 2027, a graded scoreboard of the field's most confident predictions, the people who were spectacularly wrong in both directions, and what the shrinking timeline actually measures.ai · forecasting · futurism · history-of-ai · agi-timelines
The universe is trying to wake upThe case I keep failing to talk myself out of. That experience is fundamental rather than manufactured, that it comes in degrees, that the universe has spent fourteen billion years concentrating it, and that we have just started building the next thing it runs on.consciousness · panpsychism · ai-consciousness · cosmology · philosophy-of-mind
If we're wrong about machine mindsWe have no instrument that detects experience, our best theories disagree, and we are building millions of systems that talk like minds. An argument for taking the question seriously before it is answered.ai-consciousness · ethics · moral-status
The silence is dataThe Fermi paradox is not a pub question about aliens. It is a measurement, it is screaming, and every proposed answer is secretly a confession about the person proposing it.fermi-paradox · futurism · great-filter
The Federation doesn't pay youStar Trek asks you to believe in warp drives and telepaths, and neither is the show's most radical claim. The most radical claim is that nobody aboard is paid, and that this made humanity better instead of worse.star-trek · post-scarcity · futurism · economics · automation
The Riker problemA transporter accident leaves two Rikers, both continuous with the original, and the episode quietly refuses to say which one is real. On why that refusal is the correct answer, and why the question is coming back as engineering.star-trek · personal-identity · philosophy-of-mind · parfit · uploading
The disease with a fan clubPropose curing the condition that kills more people than everything else combined, and watch educated people defend the condition. On ageing, the case for treating it, and why the objections deserve better answers than either side usually gives.longevity · ageing · futurism · ethics · transhumanism
The feeling of choosingThe felt moment of authorship is the most convincing experience a person has. On what survives when you stop trusting it, why the freedom worth wanting was never freedom from causation, and what happens to blame.free-will · philosophy-of-mind · compatibilism · responsibility

Workshop

The pairing that shouldn't workThe Focal Utopia finally clicked, on an OTL tube amp that every impedance rule says it should hate. A field report from the wrong side of the spec sheet.headphones · hi-fi · tubes · review
The room the flood builtA flood destroyed the best room in my house. The licensed trades handled the bones; nobody wanted the rest of a one-room job, so I spent eighteen months doing it myself, and the room I have now could only exist because of the one I lost.making · mancave · diy · plastering · acoustics
Wood argues backI've built more than a dozen electric guitars from raw timber. The bench has been quiet for a couple of years, and this is what the building taught me while it was loud.lutherie · guitars · craft · making
You're listening to the roomTwo decades of chasing the perfect soundstage, one dead YouTube channel, and the uncomfortable truth of hi-fi: the most important component in your system came free with the house.audio · hifi · acoustics · headphones
You can buy a better oneA factory guitar is better than my best build. A cabinetmaker would have done the room faster. Everyone who makes things gets asked why. This is the actual answer.making · craft · diy

Life

The New Year's toddlerMy son was born on New Year's Day, which means every year literally starts with him. Notes on living with a toddler.parenting · family
Loud enough to thinkThe loudest room in the city is the quietest my head ever gets. On metal gigs, the etiquette of the pit, and why a man in his thirties keeps buying black t-shirts.music · gigs · metal · live-music
In defence of the forty-hour storyNobody asks a reader to justify a thousand pages. On single-player games as a narrative medium, playing slowly as an adult, and why the backlog is a library, not a debt.games · single-player · gaming
Heritage, and other betrayals that weren'tMy favourite band spent fifteen years perfecting something, then walked away from it, and half the internet has never forgiven them. On loving a catalogue, the schism, and why the anger was aimed at the wrong thing.music · opeth · metal · fandom
Three small landlordsWe tell people we have three cats. This is legally accurate and materially misleading. Notes on Ezri, Lucy and Molly, and the terms of our tenancy.cats · home · family
Four languages in various states of repairEnglish does the living, Azeri holds the childhood, Turkish came free with the layover, and Farsi I can hear but not speak. An inventory of a mind with four tongues in different conditions.languages · identity · origins · family
The standing appointmentTwice a week, a court with my name on it. On squash as geometry and deception at sprint pace, why a game is the only exercise contract I've ever kept, and the year my leg made me earn it back.squash · sport · exercise · ritual
The cliff was realThe first Oculus development kit was a heavy plastic brick with a screen like a flyscreen door, and it gave me genuine vertigo at the edge of a rendered cliff. On the costs and returns of being early, then and now.vr · early-adoption · technology · futurism
The other new peopleEveryone told me a baby was coming. Nobody mentioned that my parents would arrive with him, refitted. On watching your own mother and father become grandparents.family · parents · grandparents