A Reasonable Approximation

Sabbatical

About a month ago I left my job. I plan to take the next six months (until December) as a sabbatical.

Partly because I don't think I've taken more than two weeks' holiday at a time since 2012, when I got my first real job. It'll be nice to have a longer break.

Partly because, man, the world is not standing still. 2026-2031 is going to look very different from 2016-2021, and probably I should spend a bit of time orienting to "what do I even do with my life, going forwards". It's not impossible for me to do that while I have a full time job, but I do think I'll be better at it without one.

I don't plan to make any long term commitments until December. But some things I'd like to do in that time:

• See if I can help with AI notkilleveryoneism.

  • Do some kind of study course.
  • The slightly-more-concrete fields that I think I'm most likely to get into are mech interp (possibly working directly with my girlfriend), agent foundations, and brain-like-AGI safety.
  • I don't want to pay much attention to "what can I get paid for" right now. That seems like it would distort my thinking, and my sense is that the funding landscape is likely to look very different in six months anyway. If it turns out that I think I can do something worthwhile but I can't get paid to do it, I'll have to figure out what to do about it later.

• Blog more. (Vaguely aiming for 10 posts before December, including this one.)

• Write some fiction.

• Get better at LLM-assisted coding. (I'll probably need to start paying for an LLM subscription. I'm a little sad about that because I don't want the labs to get my money, but I don't think that being a lonely holdout here would help much.)

It's been a month and I've done… approximately none of that. Partly that's because I've spent 2-3 weeks out of four either on holiday, preparing for holiday, or recovering from holiday. But I think it's time for me to buckle down a bit. I'm going to try "get something productive done approximately every weekday". "Productive" can include studying, writing, coding, home improvements, or anything else that either I or my girlfriend decides counts. I don't yet know how much I need to do to count. For today, writing this blog post was sufficient.

I'm also open to taking on some short term paid work, if anyone wants to offer it. I'm open to writing code (especially Haskell), book reviews, literature reviews, tutoring, probably other stuff that doesn't come to mind right now.

This is my first long period of self-direction since… arguably "since ever"? It'll be interesting to see choose what I do with it.

Posted on 15 June 2026