A little more about me.
I look forward to getting up in the morning. There are problems, obviously. They’re quite good at finding me. But curiosity usually gets there first.
AI gives me the same feeling I had when I first saw a website in Netscape in 1994: I want to understand it, play with it, and see what I can make. Occasionally, something useful comes out of this.
Getting fired was a promising start
In 1994, I was training to become a stockbroker when a neighbour’s son tried to explain the internet to me. Shortly afterwards, at a Chamber of Commerce meeting, I saw the community of Powell River’s website running in Netscape. I’d gone there to find clients. I found something considerably more distracting.
Every spare hour went into learning about the web. My career as an investment advisor ended with me being fired, for the first and only time. An excellent career move, though I can’t take credit for initiating it.
I started Win95 In Touch, a newsletter about Windows 95 shareware you could download over a slow modem. More than 120,000 people subscribed. CNET, then preparing to launch Download.com, offered to buy the list and have me keep writing the newsletter under its name.
That was my way into the web. More than three decades later, I still want to be in the middle of whatever’s happening, learning and making things, rather than watching from a safe distance.
What I do with all this curiosity
I’m an AI engineer at Toyo, where I build workflows for our pilot customers and help develop new capabilities for our AI agents. That includes working on the software around the models that lets them use tools and carry out work across business systems.
For one customer, we’ve built what looks like a straightforward weekly company update for the executive team. Underneath, it draws on Slack messages and threads, Notion documents, and activity across GitHub and Linear. It brings together decisions made, decisions still needed, and blockers, along with a person-by-person account of what happened that week. There’s a surprising amount of work involved in answering “So, how’s everything going?”
Another workflow monitors 28 competitors across X and the web. It alerts the team to changes in their competitors’ API documentation, helping them keep up with new capabilities and changes to existing endpoints without having to check 28 companies themselves.
That work draws on a lot of years spent figuring out how people use products, where they get stuck, and what would make their lives easier. Before joining Toyo, I led product marketing and AI deployment at Precision Nutrition. Earlier chapters included Intuit, Adobe, and MetaLab. That experience comes with me when I’m deciding what to build with AI.
The projects on this site are some of my experiments outside work. My LinkedIn profile has the more orderly version of my working life, with dates and job titles behaving themselves.
A few minor compatibility issues
- No coffee. No tea. I don’t like hot drinks. If I wake up ten minutes before a meeting, a splash of water on my face is the entire preparation process.
- Not on Instagram. I left Facebook about six years ago. My enthusiasm for technology doesn’t extend to every available way of wasting an afternoon.
- Desktop, please. I’ve resisted “mobile first” since my Intuit and Adobe days. I don’t love phones. I dictated these notes at a 52-inch curved Dell monitor, which should give you some idea of how the negotiations are going.
The other rabbit hole
Then there’s consciousness. What is it? Why is there anything it feels like to be us? And are we quite sure matter is the starting point for everything?
Those questions keep me reading, listening, and asking more questions about God, atheism, and what the hell any of us actually are.
These are some of the people I keep coming back to:
- Alan Watts
- A storyteller who could make a difficult idea feel like a conversation you didn’t want to leave. The voice alone would keep me listening. Fortunately, he also had rather a lot to say.
- Sam Harris
- The mind behind Waking Up. I’m interested in the meeting point between his neuroscience background and his exploration of consciousness through meditation. His wife Annaka’s book Conscious takes the question of what consciousness might be in some fascinating directions, too.
- Bernardo Kastrup
- He’s persuaded me that mind is fundamental, and that what we call the material world emerges from it. His work has changed how I think about reality itself. That’s quite a lot to ask of someone’s reading material, but here we are.
- Donald Hoffman
- His proposal that perception is more like a useful interface than a window onto reality gets under my skin in a good way. I’m following his efforts to put consciousness at the centre of a mathematical model of reality.
- Rupert Spira
- His exploration of nonduality brings the question back to immediate experience: can we recognise the awareness that’s already here? I find both his approach and his way of explaining it captivating.
- Alex O’Connor
- Formerly Cosmic Skeptic. I’m drawn to his willingness to take religious questions seriously without pretending to believe the answers. His conversations range from arguments about God to consciousness and nonduality. Doubt doesn’t have to end the conversation.
Things I’ll happily watch again
I was going to pick five favourite films. This has gone about as well as limiting myself to one project.
- Back to the Future. Time travel and a DeLorean. I’m not sure what further justification you need.
- Toy Story. That feeling of seeing a whole new kind of movie. Still magic.
- Her. So many good predictions about AI. Some of them are getting uncomfortably good.
- Ex Machina. Also predictions about AI. Rather less reassuring ones.
- Classic horror. A long-standing weakness. The morning optimism survives.
- Midsommar and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. I like a film with a flair for the absurd, especially when it’s deeply unsettling.
- Stanley Kubrick. The atmosphere in his films feels thick enough to lean against. I’ll take pretty much anything he made.
My people
My partner, Tina, puts up with me, my quirks, and the films I drag her to. I think our first movie date was The Killing of a Sacred Deer. She looked horrified afterwards. I’d like to think it was entirely the film.
My sons, Alec and Connor, both have wonderful heads of hair. I used to have one of those. I’m told their eyebrows are rather good, too.
They’re both software engineers, though they took different routes. Alec got into technology first. Connor reached the end of an electrical engineering degree and decided he wanted to work in software. A thorough way to narrow down the options.
Alec likes to challenge me outright. Connor can register much the same objection with a quietly raised eyebrow. Tina particularly enjoys this part of family dinner. They haven’t started explaining technology to me yet, but they do occasionally remind me that there’s an outside.
What makes me proudest is the people they’ve become: intelligent, kind, and curious young men who take responsibility for their lives. They’re honest about how they feel and what’s getting in their way, and they don’t make excuses. I recognise the curiosity. The rest I get to admire. They do a father proud.
Tina’s boys, Cole and Ethan, are around the same age as Alec and Connor. I’ve known them for eight years, and getting to know them and watching them grow into the young men they are has been a real joy. Cole’s a commerce graduate who’s spent some time in tech and is now exploring real estate development. Ethan’s now in Portugal starting his professional basketball career.
What’s especially lovely is how well all four get along. Connor and Cole were even roommates for more than a year and have become really good friends. Between the four of them, the conversations are fascinating. Tina and I have become very appreciative eavesdroppers.
