Brief conversation with Nigel Shadbolt and Sir Roger Penrose before going onstage to talk about artificial intelligence for an hour. Sir Roger was just back from Vienna; Nigel, I think, from the States. I’ve been speaking in Dublin and Berlin over the last couple of weeks. And I said, I’m rolling down the shutters for a few months. No more talks for a bit — I want to sit and think. And they both said, Yes, that’s the thing. If this is a thing you can do, to speak in public about the things you’re interested in, then you can get caught up in it, and spend all your time talking instead of thinking. And I do it much less than they do, because, well, they’re them and I’m me. And, also unlike me, they probably also get paid for it.

Rolling down the shutters for the summer.

I was expecting heavy weather in Hay, so I put a heavy black workshirt on over my Praetorian Hoodie from TAD. Sudden brutal sunlight led to me keeping my shades on during my second, solo talk of the day. Afterwards, the woman operating the camera told me I was by far the coolest-looking presenter at How The Light Gets In that day. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my eyes were like pissholes in the snow and I’d showed up dressed for the usual Welsh monsoon.

I’m deliberately posting this late in the day, as it took me way too long to get back from Hay yesterday and, well, fuck it.