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Three days in Novato

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Monday, 02:49

The neighbors’ lights are on.

The cheap blackout curtains I rush-ordered from Amazon a few months ago are too small for my windows. I pay the price in lost sleep and headaches that start before my morning alarm.

Good enough, I’d tried to convince myself while installing them, teetering on a swivel chair I use as a step stool when I am too lazy to get the actual step stool from the closet. At night I won’t be able to see this depressing beige. I won’t see how many dark creases this has from being folded too tightly and stored for too long in a warehouse in a town I’ve never seen.

Representation in a convoluted media landscape is an increasingly fraught path we must keep walking

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

spoilers: Stranger Things, The Pitt

On Thanksgiving Day last year, after a lifetime of actively avoiding anything described as “supernatural horror” and nine years out of the Stranger Things loop, I finally succumbed to overwhelming social pressure and gave the hit series a chance. I promised a friend I’d join them for the New Year’s special theatrical release of the Season 5 finale, so I had about a month to catch up on 40 hours of material. This was doable, I figured: even if I didn’t personally enjoy the show, it was a good opportunity to study a cultural phenomenon that captured a billion-dollar global market and launched the careers of multiple big-name stars in Hollywood and music.

Machines of loving taste

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Long overdue thanks: to Stephanie Dukich and Manasa Karthikeyan for organizing and running the reading group and lecture series Death to Spotify Forum: Decentralizing Music from Capitalist Economies (SFGATE: sold out in 24 hours); to Bathers Library for being the hottest underground club in Oakland every Tuesday night; to the guest speakers and discussion group members for sharing their personal and motivating reflections on how and why we listen to and talk about music; to Zareen Choudhury for sending me the class information and leading the charge socially to prioritize intentional media consumption; to Mercury Cafe and Mother Tongue for fueling and providing space for my writing; to my friends and loved ones for believing in me and being lights that guide my path in our brave new world.

All the world's a stage, and all the humans and machines merely players

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I used Open Paper to help me parse through the papers and technical reports I referenced in writing this blog post. Thanks to Saba, all my readers can use code VALSTECHBLOG for 50% off the Researcher Plan. Thanks to Ashi (check out her blog) for connecting us!

“The tragedy of the AI commons”

In 2021, computer scientists and philosophers Travis LaCroix and Aydin Mohseni published The Tragedy of the AI Commons. They described how the World Economic Forum had “identified almost three hundred separate efforts to develop ethical principles for AI”, but in large part because there was no way to enforce these guidelines, studies “suggested that such declarations have little to no practical effect”. Referencing ecologist Garrett Hardin’s 1968 formulation of the tragedy of the commons, they identified a core social dilemma (“no one has an individual incentive to cooperate, although mutual cooperation would lead to the best outcome for all those involved”), developed a stochastic evolutionary game theoretic model to simulate models of cooperation at research population scale, and concluded with a set of morals, including “Lowering the cost of cooperation increases the likelihood of cooperative success” and “Small, decentralised groups may benefit sustained cooperation for responsible AI research”. Importantly,