I'm not sophisticated enough to have noticed improvements in the main phone camera in the past 5-10 years, but distance shots are still not very good. The next generation Pixel Pro was supposed to have an improved "telephoto" camera, and when Google Fi offered me a sufficiently good deal [1] I decided to upgrade.

Going from the 10 Pro to the 11 Pro the telephoto camera goes from a 1/2.51" sensor to 1/1.95", and since this is a diagonal measurement this means bringing in ~65% more light. But does it actually take better pictures?

I wandered around taking pairs of pictures, all at 10x. Of this, 5x is optical zoom and the remaining 2x is cropping: I'm showing the pictures as Google Photos gives them to me. All hand-held: while a tripod would likely improve high-zoom pictures, I'm interested in real-world performance which is all going to be hand-held. Every set is the 10 followed by the 11 (taken back-to-back), cropped to 1100x1100.

I started with some well lit things; here's our garden, ~35ft away:

The kids have been excited about Pig Latin a lot lately. I noticed that there are a few words that are also English words, or homophones thereof. With some help from Claude, especially in figuring out which words would work well and in checking my work, here's a poem about a pie and a naughty plover:

I weigh ache bay, each pay I pay,
Oh say eats whey, each way ice lei,
Away ate play, eye way: a prey
I'll weigh, eat whey, all way: a day.

Oh whey, oh neigh! I may I pay!
Away outstay, overplay ate whey
All whey of whey, I may I pay!
Ooh, yay, I slay eat tray outlay!

I weigh, eat whey, all whey, ashtray,
I weigh, underplay, all whey, eyes pay!
Eat sway, eat stray, I weigh eat whey!
Oh say, Old Bay? Owe whey, I may!

I weigh Amway oh say outstay!
I weigh I flay? Oh neigh, away!
I weigh a stay, I weigh I lay,
I weigh owes day all whey a day!

Several months ago I wrote a program to normalize your clipboard, removing fonts / colors / sizes and mostly leaving semantic information: anything that can't be represented in Markdown was dropped. Now that I can have walk me through things, however, I've made it available as a free app on the Mac App Store:

Cross-posted from my SecureBio Notebook.

This is a lightly-edited version of a memo that I presented at the Summer 2026 Biosecurity Summit outside of DC. While others at SecureBio often see things similarly, I'm attempting to present my view and not a SecureBio "house view".

The Goal

We need to be robust to adversaries who want to cause very large-scale harm with biology. This includes actors (human or AI) who want to kill all humans, cause short-term incapacitation or long-term civilizational collapse, or who have strategies for sparing some while they harm others. There are multiple reasons an actor might have these targets aside from being directly omnicidal, such as reducing response capacity during an AI takeover.

In It May Be Possible to Improvise A High Grade Bioshelter, Adin Richards discusses the possibility of improvising defenses against an environmental threat such as mirror bacteria. He gives an exploratory overview of why it might be possible to apply materials and equipment people often already have in their houses to pressurize all or part of a house with filtered air. It would be great if this were possible, but with all the ways for an improvised system to fail I'm pretty skeptical.

I decided to try a simpler version, testing how much I could positively pressurize a single room with a relatively powerful HEPA air purifier (AirFanta 3Pro. This is close to a best case, since most people won't have something as good as an AirFanta.

I avoid Twitter (𝕏) for similar reasons to drugs: I think it would change me for the worse, and I would be unable to give it up.

After staying off Twitter reasonably successfully for years, I cross-posted my AI Tweets there a few weeks ago. I had something very Twitter-shaped to say, and I thought it was important to get out, so I do think this was worth it. And it all went well: none of this is complaining about the comments I got there.

Coming back a few times to check notifications, however, it's been very good at baiting me: Tweets that are confidently wrong in cases where I have relevant and uncommon knowledge. The pull to dive in and share what I know is very strong! Then this bleeds over to the far broader case where people are wrong, and you have a large potential time sink.

If it were just the time sink, I'd stop resisting. I spend some time on HN and Reddit, and to the extent that Twitter could substitute for that by showing me things I was more interested in, that wouldn't be an issue. The real problem is the culture.