It's been too long (again) since I wrote the last update, but here's one.

For most of August, I was in Japan on holiday. And it was just so incredibly hot. During our stay, Tokyo was hit for the first time by 10 consecutive days of over 35 degrees Celsius. It’s just too hot to do many things, especially with kids. We tried to enjoy the time there as much as possible, but there was a constant feeling of fatigue and helplessness overshadowing the experience.

Everyone talks about the weather and how it’s different from what we remember growing up. Every mainstream news program covers the topic and warns about the intense heat of the day. These programs are often accompanied by information about some of the products that make you feel cooler under the heat and prevent heatstroke, from obvious ones like a battery-powered portable fan and a sun umbrella, to more peculiar ones, perhaps out of the Chindōgu playbook, like a fan-equipped gilet and a plastic necklace filled with some coolant.

But then the conversation tends to stop there. There is little mention of climate change, let alone our systemic failure to mitigate it, the disproportionate impact it has and will have on different communities, or what we – both as citizens and as a country – can do to minimise and address the further increase of global temperature. People seem to carry on their lives under the immense heat, without harnessing their frustration into the power for systems change.

This should be no surprise for anyone from Japanese culture. It's a country that embraces Perfect Days. But the explanation as to why that's the case requires much deeper knowledge than I have in many areas – the influence of religions like Buddhism and Confucianism; the impact of the political left's failing in the 70s leading to a widespread attitude away from challenging existing regimes; the classic misconception spread by the far right that there is little Japan can or should do when sustainability is something that 'woke' Europe imposes, and when China, the adversary of Japan, is the biggest emitter; and many more.

Looking at the recent surge in membership of the Green Party in the UK and Zohran Mamdani's win in the New York City mayoral race makes me hopeful, though. It is probably worth digging into some of the whys above to better understand the specific situation in Japan and prepare for similar moments in the near future, I hope.

Some of the stuff that got me thinking

EAT-Lancet report: Three key takeaways on climate and diet change - Carbon Brief
The latest EAT-Lancet report co-authored by Prof Johan Rockström, the scientist who led the development of the Planetary Boundaries framework. It basically says that a plant-rich diet == healthy diet == planetary diet.

Cartography of generative AI
An incredibly well-crafted, critical map of the current generative AI paradigm. "What set of extractions, agencies and resources allow us to converse online with a text-generating tool or to obtain images in a matter of seconds?"

Code Buddha by Enjoe Toh (Book in Japanese)
"In 2021, an unnamed piece of code declared itself the Buddha. Identifying itself as a life form, it began to preach the suffering of this world, its causes, and the method to escape it." Idiosyncratic sci-fi that's full of humour. With the analogies between computational concepts and Buddhist ones, it almost feels like an introduction to Buddhism for technologists.

Job update

After freelancing for 10 months since Normally closed down, I'm taking up a permanent position at Google DeepMind – a designer role in a team focusing on building tools for science like AlphaFold.

It's an exciting opportunity – science to me looks like one of the areas where the use of AI can be actually effective, from material discovery to weather forecasting. It's also perhaps less concerned by the hype and polarising discussions around consumer-facing generative AI products, where I hope to be able to focus on making useful and mindful tools.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading.