mesaoptimizer

The world may be cruel, but we don’t have to be.

Now

As of 1st November 2026,

I’m taking a break for about a week from university work, to relax and recover from burnout. The break mostly consists of reviewing my more interesting Anki flashcards and reading:

• 

  How To Think About AI by Richard Susskind (Oxford University Press, 2025)

  A short, non-technical guide that brings AI out of the computing laboratory and into everyday life, challenging us to think differently about what it is, what it can do, and what it should be for.

• 

  You Can Just Do Things by Cate Hall (Harper Business, 2026)

  A practical guide to agency: the learnable capacity to see and act on the degrees of freedom life offers, instead of waiting for permission.

• 

  A Vulnerable System by Andrew J. Stewart (Cornell University Press, 2021)

  A history of information security in the computer age, from the field’s early researchers through the creation of the internet to vulnerability markets, data breaches, and nation-state hacking.

• 

  Knowledge Graphs by Aidan Hogan, Eva Blomqvist, Michael Cochez, Claudia d’Amato, Gerard de Melo, Claudio Gutierrez, et al. (Morgan & Claypool, 2021)

  A comprehensive and accessible introduction to knowledge graphs: graph-based abstractions of data now broadly deployed to integrate and extract value from diverse sources at large scale.

Things I’m thinking about:

• An interactive mathematics laboratory. I’ve been thinking about what one would look like, following Farmer’s proposal. I’d like to make one for type theory and formal logic, or for category theory or cryptography, mainly because it would help me learn mathematical domains that I find interesting.
• Quality of AI-generated prose and design. One of the biggest weaknesses of current SOTA open-weight models is that the quality of their prose and design is abysmal. I’m unsure how one could remedy this, but I’m certain that there have to be ways. My first thought is to give the model examples of high-quality prose or high-quality UI/UX, but that does not seem like a very good strategy.
• Jev. I’ve been playing around with Jev, TypeSafe’s model for fast typed decisions, to see how it can be useful in agent harnesses.
• AI-targeted SEO. I’m seeing it become more and more common, and am considering solutions to systematically defend against its effects.

Contact

The best way to reach me is on Signalmesaoptimizer.45; I’m also reachable by emailcontact [dot] site [dot] new [at] mesaoptimizer [dot] com.