The Case for a Grantmaking Fellowship

an edited transcript of a conversation on the last day of inkhaven.

5 min read

work in progress: selling to works in progress

[unfinished as of yet — do not read until this tag is removed for full effect]

2 min read

Obliquity

about what different self-effacing ends require

2 min read

Diffusion is all you need

arms races aren't won on r&d alone

2 min read

Genealogical anxiety redux

Intuitions about the scope of our reasons for moral uncertainty

2 min read

Indonesia loses 2,000 lives to Zojirushi every year

Pressure cookers are consistently faster for cooking rice than standard rice cookers. Why is their adoption so uneven?

2 min read

Context on Christiano

What informs Christiano's defense of democracy? (2/2)

2 min read

On Thomas Christiano's Democracy

a practical problem with Christiano's defense of that democracy's value isn't just practical

10 min read

Genealogical Anxiety

Not all defenses of critical genealogy are created equal

7 min read

cyber risk redux redux, contra peter wildeford on mythos

[written quickly as a part of inkhaven — draft notes]

2 min read

Intermission

I am two thirds of the way through inkhaven.

2 min read

Michael Sandel has written one book

A communitarian worldview in five hundred words.

2 min read

Back from the brink of irrelevance

Ideal theory is useless. There might be one big exception.

3 min read

Cyber risk redux

Called it

2 min read

Developments in Canada's AI Landscape February - April 2026

A lot has happened in the past two months in Canadian AI.

2 min read

Politics Fast and Slow

a neglected axis

2 min read

Lessons of History

Alberta is approaching compute the way it did oil. This sets us up to repeat the politics of the past.

2 min read

Lament for a province

Quebec's prospects for hosting and powering datacentres are more limited than they might seem.

2 min read

Lessons from AI benefit sharing from cold war negotiations over satellites part two

the track record is mixed, n=1, but it seems reasonable to aim for model access even if race dynamics heat up

4 min read

Negotiating AI Benefits: Lessons from the ITU

Part one

3 min read

Context Collapse

[Note: this piece is an update on my newsletter, and is quite different from the rest of the writing on my blog.]

3 min read

Compute build-out psychodrama

Canada has an abundance of clean energy. It's AI infrastructure build-out will be powered by natural gas.

2 min read

Canada's AI Sovereignty now depends on dependence

What mythos means for middle powers

2 min read

Creating reasons to bite bullets

Population ethics offers no right answer, but maybe we can make one up

2 min read

Population Ethics: Political not Metaphysical

the whole project failed and thank God for that

3 min read

AI Sovereignty Needs Complements, not Substitutes

Thinking on Canadian AI sovereignty is getting better, but it’s still missing the full picture.

2 min read

Published (hidden)

Featured

Waterloo

The region of Waterloo Ontario is known for being exceptionally, improbably, good at cultivating entrepreneurial and technical talent.

3 min read

Invariable Geometry

Middle powers should harmonize their AI deployment regulation

2 min read

Late Bloomers

Notes on Leicht on middle power AI adoption

4 min read