Explore transformational models
I have been fascinated by models all my life: how a diagram, a notation, a simulation can make an invisible process suddenly visible. Powerful AI lets me act on that fascination. An idea now becomes a working model in hours rather than months: real variables, interacting over time, running live in your browser.
That changes how we can learn. Instead of reading about evolution, inflation or inequality, you move the levers yourself, watch the consequences unfold, and come to your own conclusions. This is a fascinating shift: it will transform understanding and explanation. Have a go yourself.
The Economics Lab: interactive economic models
Every economic theory is a model: a deliberate simplification you can argue with. These let you argue with your hands: move the levers, watch twenty years unfold, and see which stories survive contact with their own arithmetic. All models are wrong; these are useful.
The Monopoly Machine
economic model
Why does the game always end with one winner? An inequality sandbox with taxes, inheritance, basic income and jubilees. Change the rules, watch the destiny change.
The Babysitting Economy
economic model
The famous Capitol Hill babysitting co-op, live: too little scrip and nobody dares go out, too much and nobody will sit. Recessions, made small enough to touch.
The Business-Card Economy
economic model
Warren Mosler’s kitchen-table parable: why taxes give money its value, and why the parents’ deficit IS the children’s savings. Four levers, one unbreakable identity.
The Dutch Economy
economic model
The Netherlands in honest round numbers, through three lenses: the EU rulebook, the investor’s ledger, and the what-if of a currency of our own. Includes the €10 billion mortgage-deduction switch.
The Artificial Scarcity Machine
economic model
One lever: how restricted is access? Five stories, from a blockbuster drug to a designer handbag, and one number to remember: for every euro the owner captures, how much value for everyone is destroyed?
The Transfer Flywheel
economic model
The same billion, given to different hands. The poor spend it onward, the rich file it away: watch spending ripple down the parade of incomes, and see the trickle-down test fail in person.
Climate Positivity
leverage calculator
What you can save as a private person, next to what you can shift through your work. Pick an action, pick a profession, and watch the private choice vanish against the professional one: the gap runs to a thousand times and far beyond.
Playing with AI: turning an idea into something that exists
The surprise of these tools is not that they answer questions. It is that a stray notion, an old song, a small daily habit you wish existed, can become a real thing in an afternoon. Two of mine.
No Worries Mate
music video
An AI reproduction of a song I wrote and played with my high school band, Midnight Mojo. Video made with Sora, December 2024.
Otherwise
daily nudge
One quote a day to shift your thinking: a small daily crack in the frame. Built with my friend Chris, and now on the App Store.
Learning machines: live demonstrations of how AI learns
One thesis, three engines: competence condenses out of randomness through selection, reinforcement, and gradient descent. Each demonstration starts from nothing and learns in front of you — no tricks, no pre-trained shortcuts.
Weasel
cumulative selection
Dawkins’ 1986 program, live: blind mutation plus selection assembles a line of Shakespeare in sixty generations, and the Monkeys toggle shows why randomness alone never would.
MENACE
reinforcement learning
A tic-tac-toe machine made of matchboxes and beads that learns to win: 1960s machine learning, rebuilt in your browser. It learns from you, too.
nano-Karim
gradient descent
A tiny language model trained from scratch on my own writing. Watch it go from symbol soup to my style, attempt by attempt. Style without thought, made visible.
nano-Shakespeare
gradient descent
The same tiny model, raised on Shakespeare instead. Same architecture, different soul: the data is the destiny.
The Cash-Flow Game
reinforcement learning
An AI bookkeeper learns which invoices to pay early and which to stretch, and beats three benchmark strategies at a Dutch company’s books.
The Cash-Flow Game — live
reinforcement learning
The same network, untrained. Press start and watch it learn in sixty seconds — from paying every invoice the moment it arrives, to beating the best human rule of thumb. Nothing is replayed: it is training in your browser as you watch.
The Routing Apprentice
reinforcement learning
A neural network teaches itself delivery-van routing by trial and reward, and beats the classic textbook method by five percent.
Connect Four
self-play (AlphaZero-lite)
The full DeepMind recipe in miniature: self-play only, no human examples. It made itself effectively unbeatable overnight.