[9/4] 2026 Goal Progress

The usual round of writing up progress on the goals I declared. This week, the family dog at my parents' place passed away, and the whole family got together for the first time in ages.

Health

Still no gym. But somehow it turned into a "lifting the kids" workout week

Still haven't made it back to the gym this week. Rehab is the only thing I've kept up.

Instead, I had a ton of chances to play with the kids. I was picking them up and carrying them around, so I guess it kind of counted as strength training.

I also walked a LOT. All things considered, it ended up being a pretty active week.

My daily rhythm is all over the place

Forget sleep quality — the bigger issue is that with the temperature swings and everything, I still end up sleeping until around 8am.

And at night I've drifted to going to bed around midnight to 1am. Getting later.

So yeah, pretty scattered.

Quitting smoking: the time-lock box only lasted three days

The smoking thing is... not great.

The time-lock box fizzled out after about three days. That's my reflection point for the week. Not hiding it.

I think I'm still going too easy on myself when it comes to quitting.

Work

New fiscal period. I presented the technical strategy across the group companies

The highlight of the week: the fiscal period changed, so I gave the technical strategy presentation for this term, including the group companies.

It was a fairly out-there strategy presentation, honestly. But members actually formed a picture of it in their heads, and quite a few of them had already started moving on it. Made me think we have a really good organization.

And I need to keep catching up and keep pulling from the front. It was the kind of week that got me fired up again.

Giving AI a "park." My thinking on harnesses has shifted

On AI adoption, it's less that things moved forward in a big way and more that my mindset has changed quite a bit.

The way "harness engineering" is meant right now feels like humans putting a harness on things via prompts and so on.

These days people talk about loop engineering. Loop engineering is one method, sure — but the harness itself is never going away.

So there's that familiar image, right — a human holding a dog's harness and controlling the dog.

But instead of that: imagine releasing AI into something like a big open park, where inside that space they're free to do whatever they want.

Each agent understands its own harness for itself. And within that structure, each of them does its own loop engineering. Do that, and you basically get a village of AI agents.

And from the perspective of the humans managing it, the threat side stays controllable to a certain degree.

That's the structure I've been picturing, and it's what I've been announcing internally when telling employees to go use AI.

The problem: without a human, AI doesn't move at all

The ongoing problem is that without a human involved, AI doesn't move at all.

There are things that run on their own to some extent, but those feel like workflows. They're not agents.

So this term I want to relentlessly increase that side of things and seriously start building "AI employees."

Money

The move to SBI Securities is done. But zero profits taken so far

The move of all my funds to SBI Securities is complete, and I'm actually trading.

But I haven't taken profit on a single position yet.

Volatility has been pretty wild lately, and I haven't hit a percentage I'd be satisfied with, so I'm sitting on my hands.

The crypto bot: down a few tens of thousands of yen over 3.5 months, which I think is kind of impressive

The crypto auto-trading bot has been doing reasonably well in September, but after getting back to break-even it's drifted into the negative again.

I've been running it for about three and a half months now. It's not in the green so I can't celebrate, but being down only a few tens of thousands of yen is, honestly, kind of impressive to me.

It's following AI's instructions entirely, so the position sizes stay small.

If a human were doing this, they'd probably think "let me get my money back faster" and size up, get jerked around by emotion, and be exhausted going "ugh" every single day.

None of that exists when it's fully automated. It's easy.

Cutting costs is maxed out. Income is just a normal raise

I've pretty much squeezed everything I can out of cutting costs, so nothing new there.

On income, it's just the normal kind of salary raise, I suppose.

Duolingo: 249 days. But only 5 minutes a day

On the overseas move prep: Duolingo is at 249 days straight as of today.

But the volume is honestly down to like 5 minutes a day, so I want to push that up a bit.

On the four areas — speaking, reading, writing, listening — a guy named Kei Tanaka, who went to Goldman Sachs, said he deliberately does all of them every day, scraping together gaps in his schedule for about two hours total.

If someone that busy can do it, there's no way I can't — so I want to improve how I use my in-between time.

Also, lately my thinking has drifted toward a house in Japan, near family, where we can keep a pet.

Other

The family dog gave us a reason to get together

The thing that stuck with me this week: the dog at my parents' house passed away.

Because of that, the entire family got together and had a meal for the first time in a long while.

Work has been busy and I hadn't been able to go back home much, so I really felt that the dog was the one who gave everyone that chance. And it was genuinely good.

It was sad, but it made me realize we need to see each other plenty while everyone in the family is still healthy.

Something shifted in my head a little.

Wrapping up

Next week marks a full two months since my hand surgery, and it looks like I can safely get back to my usual exercise routine.

• Restarting the gym
• Starting parkour with my son
• Actually doing stretching properly

On work, I've got a few ideas that could bring about a dramatic change, so I'm going to start on those and roll them out internally. Going hard on that.

The quitting-smoking thing lasted three days, but next week I can move my body again. From here it's just doing it.