Marriage & Recurse

Tiny forbidden castle (Bruges, Belgium — August, 2025)

Hi everybody,

Welcome and hello. This is the monthly digest you signed up for by Max Forbes — indie developer, AI researcher, mediocre essayist and photographer, newfound autumn enjoyer and now… Recurser?

My digest is anything but monthly, for which I—as usual—beg your forgiveness. This one is coming super late in October, so you may receive November’s as early as next week, if I can manage.

As usual this digest has two parts: meatier posts, then smaller notes (garage, microblog). These span what’s new on my website from June through September.

Posts#

I published a few more essays in The PhD Metagame series. I really like the one about the word “interesting” because it’s such a specific problem, and one that takes a lot of nuance to work around.

The PhD Metagame

The Cursed Word "Interesting"

People calling ideas "interesting" was perhaps the greatest challenge I regularly faced in communicating about research.

Aug 26, 2025

research

Knowing What's Important

An emergent skill of mastering any craft—using software, cooking, even gaming—is knowing what's actually important.

Sep 2, 2025

creating & thinking

The PhD Metagame

Your Advisor Has Five Impossible Jobs

Manager, PI, PM, Tech Lead, and Teacher.

Sep 11, 2025

research

Garage & Microblog#

I’ve been brushing up on my computer science fundamentals, for reasons that will be obvious soon. I’ve kept a bunch of notes actively in the Data Structures post below. It’s been, to my surprise, quite fun! I think maybe learning well-understood things that have correct answers is actually quite soothing for the mind. (It probably also helps if you already learned them once before.)

News: Marriage#

I got married! Somewhat to me and my wife’s surprise, it was—cloyingly cornily, I really apologize for this—the best day of our lives. It’s a unique form of bliss to spend a whole day cherished and celebrated by dozens of your favorite humans.

We took a honeymoon trip hiking the Alps in the Austrian state of Tyrol. It was—accidentally, embarrassingly—maybe the hardest thing I have ever done. Blisters and aches exploded everywhere. Turns out, in your thirties, you do need to train for this stuff, even if a guidebook somewhere says what you’re doing is only “moderate,” and even if you’re getting absolutely smoked by retirement-aged German hikers left and right.

Near one of the several peaks we dutifully trudged.

News: Recurse#

I am currently mid-batch at the Recurse center. It is about as great as everybody says it is.

I held off applying to Recurse for a year and a half of living in NYC. In hindsight, this was stupid of me. Recurse is an enormous and thriving community, utterly full of energy. They emphasize how focused and committed you ought to be during your time there (your 12-week batch), and align everyone on a shared goal. This goal is expressly, “become a dramatically better programmer,” but I think it actually manifests as “let yourself dig deeply and collaboratively into any computing rabbit hole you stumble across.”

They dialed in how to run the space by doing it for over a decade. I think rigorously maintaining the focus through explicit goals, a few social rules (basically not being irritating), and forbidding guests in the space keeps this mood of focus.

So, as with everyone else who has drunk the kool-aid, I encourage you: if this sounds like something up your alley, consider applying.

This is already a long update, so I’ll cut it off. Take care, and talk to you soon. Hopefully next month.

– Max