Sam's Digital Forest
Reflections, notes, resources, and ideas on things that currently interest me. Updated monthly: Archive. Last Updated: September 2025.
Things I Am Currently Thinking About
- Abstraction What is the proper level of abstraction that I need to model things I actually care about to make better decisions? How to do I measure the most impactful features to include? How can I ensure my models can be efficiently computed?
- UAV (Drone) Detection (x2) I am interested in exploring how to effectively monitor both benign and potentially adversarial UAV traffic, especially in urban envrionments.
- Reality-aligned Governance (x2) What would it look like to build policy frameworks that optimize for empirical outcomes and scale for the variation in constituents' abilities, motivations, and risk tolerance? I will write on this soon.
Things I Am Currently Enjoying
- Home Automation I have just moved into a new place and have started enjoying home automation. I have started simple with security cameras, lights, and an air quality monitor. I am somewhat concerned with security and privacy. I may explore this topic more deeply in an upcoming blog post.
- Cars Yes -- the Pixar franchise. I have never actually seen any of them in full, and watched all three recently. I found them quite fun.