# Now <div class="pills-container"> <span class="pill">Last Updated: April 11, 2026</span> <span class="pill">Location: Metro Manila, PH</span> <span class="pill">Inspired by <a href="https://nownownow.com/about">Derek Sivers</a></span>. </div> ## What's keeping me busy Most of my time right now is split between AI safety work and a few side things I can't seem to stop doing (having side quests keep me sane, I think). Here's the rough breakdown. - I spend 55% of my time doing AI safety-related work. - Leading AI policy reform research at [AI4PH](https://ai4ph.substack.com/about). - Facilitating the [Technical AI Safety Course](https://bluedot.org/courses/technical-ai-safety) at [Bluedot Impact](https://bluedot.org/). - Researching how AI impacts women-led MSMEs in the Philippines at [The Asia Foundation](https://asiafoundation.org/). - Organizing and facilitating the [AI Governance Accelerator](https://www.aisafetydiliman.com/program/ai-governance) at [AI Safety Diliman](https://www.aisafetydiliman.com/). - Designing alignment benchmark environments as a continuation of [this project](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15zlRwVakF_iYSKgeasfOgS8GdBoyuFG7b_fWkGNIpiU/edit?usp=sharing) from [AI Safety Camp](https://www.aisafety.camp/). - Independently upskilling in cooperative AI, reading papers, and helping people find opportunities in AI safety. - I spend 25% of my time doing other work outside of AI safety. - Building the [Policy Observatory](http://policyobservatory.org/) out of frustration with how inaccessible government documents are. I think policy input should be more democratized, and this is my attempt at doing something about it. - Researching grad schools, mostly to figure out whether doing one is even the right call given how urgent the field is right now. - Helping friends with job hunting. The job market has been really bad, so I try to help out even with just resume review or interview prep. A few orgs have started reaching out to me to refer people to their vacancies because I've been doing this so much. I guess I'm accidentally headhunting (lol). - Independently upskilling in economics, business, and linguistics (mostly because I keep running into gaps in these areas when doing governance work). - I spend the other 20% doing things like going to the gym, watching movies, and having coffee chats with different folks. I've learned over the past year that intentionally making space for learning (via things I read or people I talk to) has accelerated my upskilling more than grinding alone ever did. ## Media that helped update my mental models 1. AI systems do not need to be very very smart in order to disrupt the world to an irreversible scale: [What Multipolar Failure Looks Like, and Robust Agent-Agnostic Processes (RAAPs) (Critch, 2021)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LpM3EAakwYdS6aRKf/what-multipolar-failure-looks-like-and-robust-agent-agnostic) 2. Most of the time, it's better to have a general direction than a specific goal: [Explore More: A Bag of Tricks to Keep Your Life on the Rails (Tekofsky, 2024)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uwmFSaDMprsFkpWet/explore-more-a-bag-of-tricks-to-keep-your-life-on-the-rails) and [Don’t just have a job role. Have a movement role. (Balderson, 2026)](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Poc5zPAnCwwPKuXe7/don-t-just-have-a-job-role-have-a-movement-role) 3. Success means being at the top 1% of what you do among others at your level, and you get there by never letting yourself work within silos: [Tips for Empirical Alignment Research (Perez, 2024)](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/dZFpEdKyb9Bf4xYn7/tips-for-empirical-alignment-research) 4. Anything I do, especially learning, should not be done passively: [Social Tinkering: Why Collaborative Curiosity Beats Vibe-Coding (Morris, 2025)](https://blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/social-tinkering-why-collaborative) 5. Taking time to process stuff isn't necessarily bad and could be a superpower if utilized correctly: [You're a Slow Thinker. Now What? (Hatta, 2025)](https://youtu.be/WsKi3DMqi2g) ## What I'm still learning I've always been a self-directed learner, but I'm learning that **feedback loops and mentorship are force multipliers**. I've learned that my bottleneck is not due to capability, but because of (my lack of) visibility. To fix this, I need to work on: - **Asking people for help.** I'm really *really* bad at asking people for help and knowing when I need help. I tend to get stuck and iterate alone, rather than try to escalate my blockers to someone. In retrospect, this has only slowed everything down. - **Getting ideas to work quickly.** Fast prototyping means faster feedback. That means learning how to scope an idea in less than a day, and prototyping them within the next 24 hours. - **Shortening my feedback loop.** I realized, after spending 40% of my life in meetings and socials in the past 3 months, that I do not share anything. I can go to a 4-hour networking event and leave without anyone knowing what on earth I do. Naturally, since no one knows what I'm doing, no one is also able to give me feedback. Anyway, I'm changing this by sharing more work in progress. I need thoughts from human beings outside of myself. - **Scoping discipline.** I've noticed that I can fill a week with real, legitimate work and still produce nothing I'm proud of. The issue is that I'm doing a lot of leader-type work without protected thinking time. I think that produces shallow output. I'm actively working on protecting focus time (async work) slots rather than optimizing for coverage.