In the days around September 28th 2026 I had my AGI moment. I do not mean that someone announced artificial general intelligence. I mean the point where an AI did the kind of work I do better than I would have done it myself. This post is about how I got there, what happened in those days, and what I think it means for me from now on. ...
Three weeks in July and August 2026 with my brother, my first time in Asia. This is peak summer heat and Chinese school holiday season, so many locals travel inside their own country, although China is not yet a heavily touristic destination for foreigners. Generally, you do not have to be afraid of visiting China, also as a woman: it is one of the safest countries in the world, and on average safer than Europe.
Three weeks in May 2025 as a family of four: my parents, my brother and me. In hindsight the timing was the best decision we made. May is before the American summer holidays, so the national parks were nearly empty, and seeing Colorado, New Mexico and West Texas without crowds is something I can recommend to everybody.
Two full weeks in August, with two friends and a camping car. We drove up through Denmark and Sweden, did the Norwegian mountains and fjords, and came back down the south coast. The most important thing to say first: you have to like camping life. Two weeks in a camper with two other people is great if that’s your thing and fairly miserable if it isn’t.
Critical Mass, Length, Temperature Many systems and processes, whether in nature or society, can appear unchanging until they reach a certain transition point, after which their behavior shifts dramatically. Think of disease outbreaks, the spread of information in a network, or battery failures in electric vehicles. Let’s go through some examples. ...
Do you trust your calculations? This book review is about The Los Alamos Primer, the first lectures on how to build an atomic bomb, by Robert Serber. The review focuses on the basic calculations and physics knowledge of the Manhattan Project scientists. Since the Primer is a collection of 1943 lecture notes combined with Serber’s hindsight commentary, it corrects some of the original calculations and measurements by comparing them with modern values. This makes it fascinating to see how close, or off, the physicists were at the time. For anyone interested in the topic, I highly recommend reading both the Primer and The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, one of my all-time favorite books. ...
The Mystery of Inequality Why are some countries rich and stable while their neighbors are poor and chaotic? In their 2012 book Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argue that the answer is not geography, culture, or luck. It comes down to one thing: institutions. ...
What is it? Why is it interesting? Consider a toy example of a gamble. Someone offers you a game where a fair coin will be tossed: you will win 70% of the money you bet when heads comes up and lose 60% of the money you bet when tails comes up. Furthermore, you are offered the opportunity to play this game many times, although not arbitrarily often, say just once a day. Intuitively, this gamble seems favorable, especially when you are allowed to play it repeatedly. However, it becomes trickier when you ask yourself questions like, “How much of my total wealth should I bet?” and “What is the best strategy to maximize my long-term wealth, say over 10 years?” The Kelly Criterion provides the answer to these questions! ...