← Home

You can read the daily log for the last few days below, or with the Atom feed. Browse the archives for more.

Subscribe to the weekly email digest. Check sample email out.

2025-08-10

2025-08-08

affinity

affinity - bookbear express

The idea that affinity can free you is simple. But people have complicated relationships with knowing what they actually like. Yesterday at dinner J used a metaphor for having the wrong job that went, Sometimes people think they should play basketball because they like dribbling. Which I interpret as, It’s very easy to think something is right for you because parts of it are pretty awesome. But what about the other parts? And what’s the main part, the crux of it all? Do you like that? You can like dribbling and shooting and passing and not actually like basketball.

the power of immediacy

The Imperfectionist: The power of immediacy #burkeman

In collecting all those articles and bookmarks, I’d been engaging in what the Substacker Harjas Sandhu, in an insightful post, calls “hoarding-type scrolling”. The hallmark of this behaviour, he writes, is “saving good posts for later instead of reading them now… I feel like a squirrel looking for fat nuts to stash in my little tree hole. The strangest part of it all? I have more saved content than I could possibly consume in the entire next year… thousands of hours of thought-provoking pieces to read and videos that might actually change how I see the world.”

The most obvious problem here, of course, is that you far less frequently get around to actually reading or watching – and thus letting yourself be changed by – the ideas you encounter. But the other problem is that it generates a huge backlog to slog through – so that even if you do get around to reading or watching, you’re no longer responding from the place of aliveness and excitement that first drew you in, but from a duller sense of obligation to clear the backlog, extract the important bits, and move on to something else.

This makes sense, because I think the reason we engage in all this hoarding behaviour is that it’s a more comfortable alternative to the uncomfortable intensity of actually living. To take an action is to risk that it might fail, or that it might succeed; that it might lead to big changes, or no changes at all. And it means using up a chunk of your finite time, and maybe also money, instead of just continuing to add to the list of things you potentially could do — which stretches off into the infinite future, where mortality doesn’t apply.

beauty as an average

My scar makes beach outings an ordeal. How can I care less about it? | Well actually | The Guardian #beauty #standard

Averageness is “the most important aspect” of one’s understanding of beauty, said Dr Neelam Vashi, an associate professor of dermatology at Boston University’s medical school, on the Apple News in Conversation podcast. It refers to how closely any given face or body matches that of the average person within their population. “Our population could be me looking at 1,000 images,” Dr Vashi explained. “What my brain does is looks at all of them, and then it makes a prototype [of beauty] in my head.”

Thanks to the prevalence of filters, photo-editing technology and AI-generated imagery, people’s prototypes now reference digitally altered inputs, said Vashi. This means scarred, middle-aged skin might not fit your brain’s idea of attractiveness, or even normality.

The good news: brains are malleable! Vashi cited a 2009 study in which researchers squished and stretched the faces of storybook characters and found that, after viewing altered images, children’s sense of what was beautiful subtly shifted toward the distortions.

So start with some amateur exposure therapy. Go to the beach! Go to the pool! Go to a communal spa or a nude spa (Korean spas, known as jjimjilbangs, are my personal happy place). Notice different bodies, faces, skin types, textures – not to compare, judge or objectify, but to observe.

Doing versus Delegating

Doing versus Delegating - by Matt Basta - Basta’s Notes

When we frame our successes and failures not in terms of the code but on the outcomes of the project, delegating gets more intuitive. If you’re evaluated on outcomes, you’re being measured on literally anything that goes into that project, not just time spent writing code.

Maybe you wrote some specs. Maybe you met with people about requirements and constraints. Maybe you talked with stakeholders to address details that don’t make sense. Perhaps you updated the roadmap to avoid extra work caused by a parallel project. All of these things matter just as much as the time spent coding, if not more. If your coding output is the bottleneck for your projects being successful, it’ll be valued more highly than the other skills. But if you’re a Senior engineer working towards Staff+, it’s understood that your coding skills are essentially at a point of diminishing returns.

You can instead spend your time doing things that help other people spend more time coding, and writing that code faster:

  1. Offering domain expertise to other engineers
  2. Making sure folks aren’t blocked
    1. effectively communicating project details and context
    2. code reviews
    3. answering questions
    4. connecting people across the company to address mismatches
    5. pointing out drawbacks
  3. Avoid problems (and avoiding time sinks)
    1. making sure everyone is working in the same direction
    2. making sure the output of the project is well-understood by stakeholders
    3. making sure the project sufficiently addresses the problems it intends to solve
  4. Tracking other projects with similar requirements or shared work
    1. avoiding duplicated effort
    2. avoiding conflicts between the projects
  5. Effectively spinning up other engineers on a project and distributing work (multiplying efficiency)
  6. Ensuring prerequisites are met
  7. …endless other items…

You can be the fastest coder in the west, but if these things aren’t done well, the project is probably going to go poorly. And if they are done well, the project will be done faster with others than if you did it yourself.

Tacit knowledge in programming

On bad advice #programming #software

Programming practices are mostly tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge isn't easy to share. An expert will relate some simple-sounding rule of thumb, but then grilling them on specific cases will quickly uncover a huge collection of exceptions and caveats that vary depending on the specific details of the situation. These are generated from many many past experiences and don't generalize well outside of the context of that body of experience.

Trying to apply the rule of thumb without knowing all those details tends to result in failure. Phrases like "don't repeat yourself", "you aren't going to need it", "separation of concerns", "test-driven development" etc were originally produced from some body of valid experience, but then wildly over-generalized and over-applied without any of the original nuance.

The way to convey tacit knowledge, if at all, is via the body of experiences that generated the rule. For this reason I find much more value in specific experience reports or in watching people actually working, as opposed to writing about general principles.

2025-08-06

What the heck is ADHD

What the heck is ADHD? #adhd #mentalhealth

A good article summarizing the latest research

As a result, the field began to fracture into specialized theories. You can roughly place these theories of ADHD into four buckets :

1. Executive dysfunction. One of the earliest and most enduring views. ADHD involves difficulty managing internal control systems like planning, remembering what to do next, or stopping an automatic response. This explains impulsivity and disorganization, but not motivation issues or mood swings.

2. Delay aversion. This view proposes that some symptoms of ADHD arise not just from difficulties with cognitive control, but from how people react emotionally to waiting. Delays don’t just feel boring but can be unbearable. This can lead to choices that prioritize immediate relief, like quitting a task early or avoiding anything that involves waiting.

3. Default mode interference. The brain has a default mode network that becomes active when we’re not focused on the outside world. In ADHD, this system seems to stay active even during tasks, creating interference – like background noise interrupting a conversation. This might help explain those mid-sentence lapses or zoning out during simple tasks.

4. Dopamine models. ADHD has been linked to how the brain handles dopamine, a chemical involved in reward and motivation. In many people with ADHD, the brain appears less able to anticipate rewards or maintain interest over time. This can make long-term goals feel flat and distant.

And to complicate things further, theories of ADHD operate at different levels of explanation:

  • Genetic: ADHD has a strong inherited component. No single gene causes it, but many genes each with small effects seem to contribute to it.

  • Neurobiological: Brain networks involved in attention, timing, and reward seem to behave differently in ADHD, sometimes more variable, less connected, or slower to mature.

  • Cognitive-behavioral: ADHD traits affect how people think, learn, respond to feedback, and regulate effort.

  • Environmental: Stress, trauma, classroom and work demands, sleep, and parenting style might all interact with ADHD traits.

  • Evolutionary: ADHD traits such as hyperfocus, hypervigilance and hypercuriosity might have once been adaptive in nomadic, high-stimulus environments, and might have become mismatched to modern life.

Today, most researchers agree that ADHD isn’t explained by any single mechanism. Instead, we see integrative frameworks that suggest ADHD arises from multiple interacting systems, shaped by genetics, brain development, and environment.

So... is ADHD a thing? Yes and no.

So yes, ADHD is a thing. But it’s likely not one thing. It’s currently a useful label for multiple, interacting processes that vary from person to person, giving clinicians a way to support patients, educators a lens to support students, and researchers a map to explore.

The explosion of theories isn’t a failure of science but a sign of a complicated, deeply human condition we’re still working to understand.

The real question isn’t whether ADHD is “real.” The question is: can we get comfortable with that complexity so people can find what actually works for them?

2025-08-05

stay on your phone

stay on your phone - by Adam Aleksic - The Etymology Nerd #social-media #phones #dumb

The No Phone Person is an elusive creature. They tend to be educated, upper-to-upper middle class, and endearingly pretentious. They’re off social media, will answer emails a few times a week, and usually have a “dumb phone” that can only take calls and texts. When they’re not at “phone free parties,” they’re probably frolicking in a meadow or something. Good luck finding them.

As much as I hate to agree with a Silicon Valley billionaire, though, I think the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is correct in identifying this as a form of “reality privilege.” A blue-collar single mother working two jobs is not going to have the time or energy to seek out in-person events or alternative forms of media. She’s going to put her kids to sleep and have thirty minutes to scroll TikTok before going to bed and then returning to work the next day.

This disconnect is turning non-algorithmic time into an upper-class status symbol, which I find highly concerning.

For one, it’s the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand and pretending like the algorithm doesn’t exist. Whether you like it or not, our culture is still being shaped by these platforms, and they won’t go away by themselves. All of our music and fashion aesthetics are either defined by or against the algorithm, which means that even the “countercultural” tastes of the No Phone People are necessarily influenced by it. Engaging with algorithmic media—in a limited, deliberate manner—is thus important to understanding your experience in society as a whole.

Not engaging, meanwhile, makes you vulnerable to being blindsided by sudden social or political shifts. Each Reddit argument and YouTube comment war is an epistemic basis for understanding the current state of cultural discourse. If you ignore those, you lose touch with reality as most people experience it.

If you have “reality privilege,” and you care about society, don’t just disengage; use your privilege. Educate yourself, and stay online strategically. Broaden your being-in-the-world so we can eventually fight back. And then you should totally go listen to that new record you just bought.

Cory Doctorow on AI Assistants

Pluralistic: AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot (04 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow #ai #assistant

on automation blindness

It's not like people are very good at supervising machines to begin with. "Automation blindness" is what happens when you're asked to repeatedly examine the output of a generally correct machine for a long time, and somehow remain vigilant for its errors. Humans aren't really capable of remaining vigilant for things that don't ever happen – whatever attention and neuronal capacity you initially devote to this never-come eventuality is hijacked by the things that happen all the time. This is why the TSA is so fucking amazing at spotting water-bottles on X-rays, but consistently fails to spot the bombs and guns that red team testers smuggle into checkpoints. The median TSA screener spots a hundred water bottles a day, and is (statistically) never called upon to spot something genuinely dangerous to a flight. They have put in their 10,000 hours, and then some, on spotting water bottles, and approximately zero hours on spotting stuff that we really, really don't want to see on planes.

So automation blindness is already going to be a problem for any "human in the loop," from a radiologist asked to sign off on an AI's interpretation of your chest X-ray to a low-paid overseas worker remote-monitoring your Waymo…to a programmer doing endless, high-speed code-review for a chatbot.

on the economic and labor implications of AI assistants

The AI bubble is driven by the promise of firing workers and replacing them with automation. Investors and AI companies are tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) betting that bosses who can fire a worker and replace them with a chatbot will pay the chatbot's maker an appreciable slice of that former worker's salary for an AI that takes them off the payroll.

The people who find AI fun or useful or surprising are centaurs. They're making automation choices based on their own assessment of their needs and the AIs' capabilities.

They are not the customers for AI. AI exists to replace workers, not empower them. Even if AI can make you more productive, there is no business model in increasing your pay and decreasing your hours.

AI is about disciplining labor to decrease its share of an AI-using company's profits. AI exists to lower a company's wage-bill, at your expense, with the savings split between the your boss and an AI company. When Getty or the NYT or another media company sues an AI company for copyright infringement, that doesn't mean they are opposed to using AI to replace creative workers – they just want a larger slice of the creative workers' salaries in the form of a copyright license from the AI company that sells them the worker-displacing tool.

AI companies are not pitching a future of AI-enabled centaurs. They're colluding with bosses to build a world of AI-shackled reverse centaurs. Some people are using AI tools (often standalone tools derived from open models, running on their own computers) to do some fun and exciting centaur stuff. But for the AI companies, these centaurs are a bug, not a feature – and they're the kind of bug that's far easier to spot and crush than the bugs that AI code-bots churn out in volumes no human can catalog, let alone understand.

The New Yorker on Longevity Science

How to Live Forever and Get Rich Doing It | The New Yorker #longevity #anti-aging

This is a good overview of the current landscape of longevity science and its proponents.

Our bodies, technically speaking, are just really fucking complicated. The Buck’s Eric Verdin told me, “Peter Diamandis says we’re thinking linearly in an exponential world, and we’ll be able to solve all these problems. But the biological problems to solve also get exponentially harder as you go deeper.” Even the indicators are baffling. Hearing loss has been linked to dementia, as has failing to floss. An impaired sense of smell is more strongly predictive of all-cause mortality than heart disease. And the mysteries do multiply the deeper you go. People who have four organs that are “youthful” for their age are much less likely to experience kidney disease or arthritis, yet those with seven youthful organs—which must be even better, right?—have a greatly heightened risk of diabetes and Parkinson’s.

In trying to live longer, we’re fighting our own imperfection: every time a cell divides, a few thousand mistakes can be introduced into its DNA. We’re also fighting the entropic forces—time, gravity, and oxygen—that ravage pretty much everything. The authors of a seminal paper in Cell distinguished twelve hallmarks of aging: such signs of impaired self-regulation as DNA instability, mitochondrial dysfunction, chronic inflammation, cellular senescence (when burned-out cells start oozing toxic sludge), and stem-cell exhaustion. Though the authors noted that all twelve hallmarks “are strongly related,” they could not establish whether the indicators were diverse expressions of one fundamental process or whether they evolved independently.

2025-08-04

Are we in an AI Bubble

The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now) #ai #bubble #economy

I’ll just repeat that. Over the last six months, capital expenditures on AI—counting just information processing equipment and software, by the way—added more to the growth of the US economy than all consumer spending combined. You can just pull any of those quotes out—spending on IT for AI is so big it might be making up for economic losses from the tariffs, serving as a private sector stimulus program.

To me, this is just screaming bubble. I’m sure I’m not alone. In fact I know I’m not alone. I’m thinking especially of Ed Zitron’s impassioned and thorough guide to the AI bubble; a rundown of how much money is being poured into and spent on AI vs how much money these products are making, and surprise, the situation as it stands is not sustainable. Worrying signs abound, and not least that so far, the companies benefitting most from AI are those selling the tools to simply build more of it (Nvidia, Microsoft), or who have monopolies through which they can force AI tools onto users en masse with limited repercussions (Google, Meta). Consumers routinely evince negative sentiment towards AI and AI products in polls, outweighing enthusiasm. And meanwhile, what I’d say is the only truly runaway, organically popular AI product category, chatbots, largely remain big money losers due to the resources they take to run.

As such, these massive valuations feel fishy. I asked Ed for his thoughts on Microsoft’s $4 trillion earnings report. He said:

Microsoft broke out Azure revenue for the first time in history, yet has not updated their annualized revenue for AI since January 29 2025. If things were going so well with AI, why are they not providing these numbers? It's because things aren't going well at all, and they're trying to play funny games with numbers to confuse and excite investors.

Also, $10bn+ of that Azure revenue is OpenAI's compute costs, paid at-cost, meaning no profit (and maybe even loss!) for Microsoft.

Look, I’m no prophet, clearly. I’ve predicted that we were probably witnessing the peak of the AI boom nearly a year ago, and while I think I was right with regard to genuine consumer and pop cultural interest, obviously the investment and expansion has kept right on flowing. It’s to the point that we’re well past dot com boom levels of investment, and, as Kedrosky points out, approaching railroad-levels of investment, last seen in the days of the robber barons.

I have no idea what’s going to happen next. But if AI investment is so massive that it’s quite actually helping to prop up the US economy in a time of growing stress, what happens if the AI stool does get kicked out from under it all?****

2025-08-03

How to travel

How to travel #travel #tips

Janan Ganesh has a nice set of tips for travel

First, the journey itself. Carry-on is a mistake. The time saved in baggage claim at the other end isn’t worth the stress of finding overhead storage space. Even for business class passengers, with their dedicated lockers, it is still better to move around an airport unencumbered. This is meant to be a break, not arm day.

Beware the “authentic” experience. This is the ultimate intellectual trap. At least in countries with a decent-sized middle class, “real” life will be less distinctive than the visitor hopes or imagines. In much of south-east Asia, it is authentic behaviour to spend time in malls. First, because these are air conditioned. Second, because countries with fresh memories of being poor tend not to regard material consumption with ennui or distaste. By all means, in Bangkok, ride the canal boat. But don’t kid yourself that it is truer to local experience than taking mass transit from a suburban new-build to a nine-hour office shift. In a Gulf city, do visit the “old town”. But remember that it is the old town precisely because it is divorced from how lives are lived now. 

If an Asian visitor cycled through Paris in a striped top and an onion necklace, saying “ooh là là” at intervals, we wouldn’t think, “There goes someone who has mastered the local culture.” We’d know that real Parisians are doing banal things. But westerners, especially the educated ones, can make the same error of over-romanticisation in other places. It is the supposed suckers in the tourist traps who are often clearer-headed about what they want and are getting out of their trip.

It is a point that flows into the largest of all lessons about travel. Don’t expect it to be educational. At worst, it can go the other way, in that you over-index what you happen to see in person. (“I went to Russia and it was sweetness itself,” was a widely heard sentiment between the 2018 World Cup and the war in Ukraine.) It is better to be merely ignorant of a place than confidently wrong about it. If you travel a fair bit, those who don’t can go all sheepish and deferent around you. This advantage is unwarranted, which isn’t to say I make no use of it.

Power and Heirarchy

Pt4: Power Hierarchies #power #heirarchy

Loved this article, even though I only read the ChatGPT summary, which I am reproducing below

This article explores the nature of power hierarchies, emphasizing that rulers depend on key supporters whose loyalty must be maintained through resource distribution. It discusses how status and identity are deeply intertwined with navigating multiple overlapping hierarchies and how toxic power dynamics, such as those in cults, isolate individuals by cutting off other sources of status and identity.

Key Takeaways

• Power depends on maintaining loyalty of key supporters by distributing resources strategically.

• Status is relative and context-dependent, shaped by multiple overlapping hierarchies.

• Toxic power, like in cults, isolates individuals by restricting access to alternative hierarchies, causing trauma upon exit.

Theme Wise Breakdown

Misconceptions About Historical Power

The author reflects on their initial naive belief that kings ruled absolutely, only to learn that historical rulers had precarious positions dependent on keeping their councils and armies loyal. Using the example of Roman emperors, the author highlights the constant threat of being overthrown or assassinated if key supporters were dissatisfied.

Rules for Rulers: The Role of Keys in Power

Summarizing CGP Grey’s "Rules for Rulers," the article explains that rulers cannot govern alone and must rely on "keys" — people controlling military, finances, etc. The ruler’s primary job is managing treasure flow to keep these keys loyal, as keys can defect if rivals offer better rewards. This creates an incentive to minimize the number of keys to maximize loyalty, explaining why dictators purge former allies after gaining power.

The Fractal Nature of Hierarchies

Power dynamics repeat at every level: each key manages their own subordinates similarly, balancing resources to maintain loyalty. If a key fails to satisfy their subordinates, they risk being overthrown themselves, creating a fractal pattern of power maintenance.

Benedict Arnold: A Case Study in Key Loyalty and Betrayal

Benedict Arnold’s story illustrates the consequences of a key feeling undervalued. Despite his heroism, Arnold was repeatedly denied deserved promotions and recognition, leading him to consider defecting to the opposing side. This exemplifies how keys may overthrow or abandon leaders who do not reward them properly.

Status as Hierarchy Competition

Status is not absolute but depends on which hierarchy one is competing in. People gain status by possessing what others in their relevant social group value. The author notes that status is more visible when gaps between ranks are large (e.g., celebrities) but often subtle and overlapping in everyday life, leading to plausible deniability about rank differences.

Navigating Multiple Overlapping Hierarchies

Individuals simultaneously compete in many hierarchies, some large and some niche. People tend to care about status in hierarchies relevant to their social circles. The author shares personal examples from polyamory, where jealousy arises when others encroach on one’s status in specific hierarchies, but comfort is found in having unique advantages in others.

Identity as a Product of Hierarchy Competition

The author reflects on how much of personal identity is shaped by social positioning within hierarchies. Preferences and self-concepts often serve as strategies to secure social safety and status. Even seeming immune to status is itself a high-status position. The author acknowledges that identity is largely strategic but hints at some genuine aspects to be discussed later.

Formative Years and Hierarchy Selection

During development, people explore which hierarchies they can succeed in and gravitate toward those that fit their traits. For example, athletic ability might lead to joining a sports team, while personality traits might align with certain social groups. This process shapes social identity and status.

Status Competition in Everyday Life

Social interactions often involve subtle battles over which hierarchies to prioritize. People try to pull others into hierarchies where they rank higher by emphasizing their expertise or values. Avoiding low status in unfamiliar hierarchies explains why people stick to familiar social groups or niches.

Toxic Power and Cults

The author discusses cults as extreme examples of toxic power, where leaders isolate followers by cutting off access to all other hierarchies. This monopolization of loyalty prevents subordinates from gaining alternative sources of status or identity, making them more exploitable. Cults justify isolation as a gift or sacrifice for a greater goal.

Trauma of Leaving Cults

Leaving a cult is traumatic because individuals transition from a narrow, controlled hierarchy to a vast world of many hierarchies where they lack status or skills. Betrayal by trusted leaders compounds this trauma, as does the loss of identity and social support.

Frame Control and Hierarchy Manipulation

Cults use frame control to keep followers within their hierarchy by denying legitimacy to outside influences. This control is a form of power that prevents followers from recognizing or accessing alternative sources of value and status.

Final Reflections on Status, Anxiety, and Identity

The author connects social anxiety to low status, noting that rising in status reduces anxiety and increases confidence. They also question how much of the self is constructed through social strategies versus genuine preference, concluding that identity is mostly strategic but not entirely so.

Dating Like a Savarna

Dating Like a Savarna | The Swaddle

I found a reference to this article in the book Meet The Savarnas, which I began reading last week. The book is wonderful and a must read, especially for folks who are oblivious to caste (due to their privilege) or haven't been exposed to anti-caste literature.

One of the most hallmark features of Savarna culture is its distinctive sameness, which is exemplified in the world of online dating.

A certain aesthetic language and cultural sensibility have come to be positioned as markers of taste and refinement – to the exclusion of people who don’t or can’t adhere. It’s unrecognizable as particularly Savarna culture because of its ubiquity: whether it be the lanky boy with a head full of curly hair who busks at Church Street in Bangalore, the spoken poetess who is perennially in a bindi and a saree handed down from her grandmother (which she never fails to mention), or the Djembe-carrying shayar sahab who runs his own drum circle in Pune and quotes Juan Elia in Urdu (because Faiz is too mainstream after the CAA/NRC protests) – it’s an aspirational aesthetic. One that draws heavily from US popular culture and White, Western social imaginations and that, through unspoken codes, belongs exclusively to Savarnas.

These archetypes gather on the servers of Hinge, Bumble, and Tinder, where romance, belonging, sex, and intimacy are all wrapped up in the neoliberal technocratic promise of an app that can deliver it all – especially if you pay the extra money for a premium upgrade. But in a caste-segregated society, technology is no match for what a thousand generations of social conditioning have normalized.

Decades of half-hearted reservation implementation has nonetheless, against all odds, created a very small class of SC/ST/OBC youth who have had a similar quality of education and exposure to pop culture as most urban elite Savarnas. Although these micro-communities also end up in the dragnet of dating apps – because there is no caste-based filter on the apps yet (something that is sure to come as more Dalit and Bahujans get on it) – their experiences on these apps are still different. Ultimately, speaking the same pop culture language and smooth English gets you only so far and no further.

I remember a few years ago, a close friend had matched with a Brahmin girl. Their conversation had organic chemistry and she decided to come to his place. The first thing she noticed upon entering his flat was a portrait of Babasaheb near the doorway. “Ey, why do you have this? Bhimtas have this in their homes” was her immediate reaction. He froze at the slur but somehow managed to tell her that she was correct about why the picture was there. It then dawned upon the girl that he was not Savarna. She exploded with anger and accused him of trying to “trick” her into a relationship, of not being fully “honest.” As she poured her derision and fury upon him, he stood there silently, with his head hung and burning with a shame familiar to all marginalized caste folks. Traditional patriarchal power tropes in reverse, she threatened that she would call her brothers and they would come to beat him up. He begged for her forgiveness. She softened and then patronizingly counseled him to not try and dupe Brahmin girls like this. He agreed cringing inside, but hoping to avoid any further untoward scene. She made him book her an Uber to take her home. He stayed off dating apps for years after that out of internalized trauma that he did not dare unpack.

2025-08-02

ARR as an often abused metric

How Much Money Do OpenAI And Anthropic Actually Make? #arr #ai #startups #revenue

If you're an avid reader of the business and tech media, you'd be forgiven for thinking that OpenAI has made (or will make) in excess of $10 billion this year, and Anthropic in excess of $4 billion.

Why? Because both companies have intentionally reported or leaked their "annualized recurring revenue" – a month's revenue multiplied by 12…

…

These do not, however, mean that their previous months were this high, nor do they mean that they've "made" anything close to these numbers. Annualized recurring revenue is one of the most regularly-abused statistics in the startup world, and can mean everything from "[actual month]x12" to "[30 day period of revenue]x12" and in most cases it's a number that doesn't factor in churn. Some companies even move around the start dates for contracts as a means of gaming this number. 

ARR, also, doesn’t factor seasonality of revenue into the calculations. For example, you’d expect ChatGPT to have peaks and troughs that correspond with the academic year, with students cancelling their subscriptions during the summer break. If you use ARR, you’re essentially taking one month and treating it as representative of the entire calendar year, when it isn’t.

Sidenote: I want to make one thing especially obvious. When I described ARR as “one of the most regularly-abused statistics in the startup world,” I meant it. ARR is only really used by startups (and other non-public companies). It’s not considered a GAAP-standard accounting practice, and public companies (those traded on the stock market) generally don’t use it because they have to report actual figures, and so there’s no point. You can’t really obfuscate something that you have to, by law, state publicly and explicitly for all to see with crafty trickery.

These companies are sharing (or leaking) their annualized revenues for a few reasons:

  • So that the tech press reports them in a way that makes it sound like they'll make that much in a year.
  • So that the tech press reports a number that sounds bigger and better than the monthly amount. For example, calling a startup a "$100 million ARR" company (like vibe-coding platform Lovable) sounds way better than calling them an "$8.3 million a month company," in part because the number is smaller, and in part because, I imagine, it might mislead a reader into believing that's what they've made every month. Yes, saying the ARR figure does that already.
  • So that investors will believe the company looks bigger and more successful than it is.

In any case, I want to be clear this is a standard metric in non-public Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses. Nothing is inherently wrong with the metric, save for its use and what's being interpreted from it.

2025-08-01

High Agency and Owning the Outcome

Impact, agency, and taste | benkuhn.net

I think of finding high-leverage work as having two interrelated components:

  • Agency: i.e. some combination of the initiative/proactiveness to try to make things happen, and relentlessness and resourcefulness to make sure you’ll succeed.
  • Taste: you need a good intuition for what things will and won’t work well to try. Taste is important both “in the large” (picking important problems) and “in the small” (picking approaches to solving those problems that will work well); I usually see people first become great at the latter, then the former.

A common trait of high-agency people is that they take accountability for achieving a goal, not just doing some work.

There’s a huge difference between the following two operating modes:

  1. My goal is to ship this project by the end of the month, so I’m going to get people started working on it ASAP.
  2. My goal is to ship this project by the end of the month, so I’m going to list out everything that needs to get done by then, draw up a schedule working backwards from the ship date, make sure the critical path is short enough, make sure we have enough staffing to do anything, figure out what we’ll cut if the schedule slips, be honest about how much slop we need, track progress against the schedule and surface any slippage as soon as I see it, pull in people from elsewhere if I need them…

Found this on another blog which has some good commentary on the original essay

Striving for “inevitability”, as Kuhn frames it, isn’t about achieving perfection or eliminating all risk. That’s clearly impossible in most nontrivial areas of human endeavor. Instead, I think the real value lies in cultivating the mindset itself.

Adopting this agentic mindset takes conscious effort, especially initially. It means spending more time up-front planning, anticipating, and communicating, which can sometimes feel less immediately productive than jumping into writing code, or whatever the immediate “work” may be. However, investing time in up-front strategic thinking consistently pays off later. Having a strategy results in less frantic firefighting, fewer deadline slips, and a generally calmer, more predictable process for delivering impact.

The benefits of cultivating personal agency are beyond “merely” delivering reliable outcomes to achieve some abstract team/company/personal OKR. There’s a certain confidence and personal satisfaction that comes from knowing you’ve done the work to truly understand the problem, anticipate hurdles, and steer yourself toward success, rather than hoping things work out or leaning on someone else to keep the project unblocked. Agency also generalizes well across different domains of life. Developing agency in a professional context usually results in a higher ability1 to exercise agency in other contexts (e.g. personal, social, relational). Professional contexts are a good environment for developing agency too: in healthy workplaces, there is a clear feedback loop and ample opportunity to exercise agency.

Newsletters and RSS

Curate your own newspaper with RSS #rss

RSS solved the distribution problem a long time ago. It is really sad that it's been sidelined now, and we have to depend on email to bypass the enshittification of distribution platforms. But at least these outlets are realising the issue with giving up control over their own distribution.

These intermediary platforms between news organizations and readers are undergoing a type of predictable decay Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”: rip off others’ work while expecting high-quality journalism to magically continue to appear, even as journalists are starved of audience and revenue.

The newsletter strategy aims to bypass these rapidly enshittifying intermediaries and instead establish more direct relationships with subscribers. “I don’t intend to ever rely on someone else’s distribution ever again,” wrote Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel on Bluesky.3 Although email has undergone some enshittification of its own,b its fundamental nature as a protocol rather than a platform has provided one essential prophylactic to enshittification: the escape hatch. If your email provider suddenly inserted ads two sentences into every email, you could easily switch providersc and still receive emails from everyone you previously emailed. As a result, email has become a go-to refuge for news outlets fleeing their abusive relationships with deeply enshittified platforms they grew reliant upon.

But the surge in newsletters has been overwhelming. Whether it’s writers like me who’ve never worked in a traditional newsroom, journalists who’ve left or been laid off from traditional jobs, or established newsrooms entering the newsletter business, there’s a newsletter around every corner. Instead of subscribing to a single newspaper for columns and articles by a dozen journalists, now you have a dozen separate newsletter subscriptions, with articles appearing haphazardly in your email inbox amid bills, business communications, marketing spam, order confirmations, and two-factor authentication codes.

Male Anxiety and the morning routine

How male anxiety built the hyper-optimised morning routine | British GQ

This article has a hilarious beginning.

It’s 3.30 a.m. Besides a few night-shift workers, insomniacs and ravers, the world is unconscious. Not Mark Wahlberg. His alarm has just gone off, jolting him into life for a long morning of eating, praying, working out, and sitting in his cryo recovery chamber. Not far behind him is Apple CEO Tim Cook, whose eyelids flicker open at 3.45, so he can tackle some of the hundreds of customer feedback emails in his inbox before starting the meat of his day. At 3.52 exactly, the fitness coach and influencer Ashton Hall – whose elaborate, Patrick Bateman-esque morning routine has recently gone obscenely viral – is up and at it, ready for several hours of fitness, dunking his face in iced Saratoga mineral water, and rubbing said face with banana peel.

Now it’s 4 a.m., and the ranks of the successful and productive are really getting going. Robin Sharma, the self-help guru and author of The 5 a.m. Club, is up — “4 a.m. is the new 5 a.m.”, he told GQ recently — for a “victory hour” of “meditation, visualisation and prayer”. Disney CEO Bob Iger is ready to begin his morning workout. At 5, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel is centring himself for 45 minutes of meditation, JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon is flicking through the first of five newspapers, and Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur turned longevity obsessive, is checking his inner ear temperature “to assess if anything is amiss” heath-wise.

This is funny, given how, historically, a marker of male success was being able to afford to do as little as possible, especially before noon. Glamorous aristocrats and playboys were more likely to be in the casino than the gym in the early hours of the morning. Sprezzatura, the Italian concept of effortless, nonchalant grace, was coined in the 16th century and has been invoked ever since. So why has one masculine ideal, of effortlessness and indulgence, been overtaken another, of ceaseless hustle culture?

but the reason cited doesn't seem like a good diagnosis

In a word: anxiety. Anxiety hums in the background of all these morning routine videos. Even the hyper-precise time stamps and jerky editing instil a baseline level of tension. This new age of male anxiety comes from male success being a rarer beast than it once was.

Arguably, all those popular morning videos are put up by folks who are arguably successful by most metrics. What exactly is making them anxious? I can understand the urge to consume this kind of content and aspiring to an ambitious and elaborate early morning routine, and that stemming from anxiety. But that doesn't seem to be the argument the author is making.

AI is a Floor Raiser, not a Ceiling Raiser

AI is a Floor Raiser, not a Ceiling Raiser - Elroy #ai #programming

Learning: /images/learning.png

AI Assisted Learning: /images/ai-assisted-learning.png

Is fitness culture making us sad and boring?

Is fitness culture making us sad and boring? | Dazed #exercise #fitness #culture

Ethan was over-exercising before today’s social media fitness challenges, like 75 Hard, existed. Still, he exhibited a similarly regimented discipline: working out multiple times a day, sticking to a restrictive diet and swapping social events for “self-improvement” activities. While the broad consensus is that 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week (or half as much if it is intense) – which can equate to about 8,000 steps a day – is enough to lower the risk of premature death and many diseases, this is rarely the message we see plastered across gym inspiration posts online. As fitness influencers proudly proclaim their gym “addiction” causes them to work out twice a day every day and high schoolers gloat about skipping prom for a workout, getting sucked into extreme gym culture can pull your goals and aspirations away from being well-rounded, interesting and socially connected. So, is over-exercise culture making us sad and boring?

Over-exercising can also look like using the gym for mood modification, or even emotional avoidance. We see this when people talk about post-breakup “glow-ups” or post about fighting off “sad girl” season by going to the gym twice a day. “I live such a lonely and boring life that I just spend hours at the gym and go twice a day because I have nothing else better to do and no one to go home to. The gym is one of the only things that can distract me from this void,” exercise influencer @liftwithspooky wrote on TikTok. In the comments, there are hundreds of people who share the same routines, and perhaps even go to the same gyms, but never speak to each other. A large part of this has to do with many treating exercise as a means to an end, instead of a potentially enjoyable and connecting experience itself, downplaying rest days and the importance of rest and leisure.

The mainstream aesthetic-driven approach to going to the gym is, unfortunately, inextricably tied to wellness and diet culture. We often talk about what exercise can do for our bodies, before how it’s enriching our lives and energising us for other things. For this reason, over-exercising tendencies can easily slip through the cracks. “When you talk to a doctor, nobody complains to you about exercising, even though you're overexercising,” says Ethan. “You can hide the brutal reality of it in a self-serving way so that you get to have the aesthetic appeal that you want to develop.” In the midst of a beauty backslide, where we’re seeing a broader return to conservative, skinny ideals, there’s currently a hyper-focus on gaining and maintaining muscle. “This can lead people to make exercise have this really giant role in their life,” says Dr Ertl. “Poor body image continues to be a factor that's linked with exercise addiction and disordered eating generally.”

Competitive Exams in India

Would you pass the world’s toughest exam? | The Economist #exams #india #unemployment

This article explores the intense and highly competitive railway entrance exams in India, one of the many such exams in India for public sector jobs. The breadth of coverage is very extensive, and the stories are moving. It just left me sad and the desperation and absurdity of the situation.

Since India started liberalising its economy in the 1990s, its GDP per head has increased eightfold. The country now has the world’s fastest-growing large economy.

Yet many Indian graduates struggle to find work. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) nearly a third of them are jobless. Walk-in interviews draw massive crowds. At the start of this year a video went viral showing thousands of engineers queuing to apply for open positions at a firm in the western city of Pune (local media reported that only 100 were available).

This is partly an indictment of the education system, which has been criticised for its outdated curriculum and tendency to prioritise rote learning over critical thinking. But it also reflects the fact that the private sector is simply not creating enough jobs for the growing number of graduates, while public-sector jobs continue to be cut.

For all the buzz around India’s unleashed entrepreneurial spirit, government jobs remain stubbornly popular. They promise a position for life, regardless of competence – a sharp contrast with the precariousness of the private sector. They come with pensions and other benefits. Some offer the chance to augment income through corruption.

Indian society accords public-sector jobs a special respect. Grooms who have them are able to ask for higher dowries from their brides’ families. “If you are at a wedding and say you have a government job, people will look at you differently,” said Abhishek Singh, an exam tutor in Musallahpur.

The worldwide nursing crisis

The shocking hit film about overworked nurses that’s causing alarm across Europe | Film | The Guardian #nursing #unemployment #caregiving

This is ostensibly a movie review but I learned more about the nursing crisis than the movie itself.

The world could face a shortage of 13 million nurses by the end of this decade. For her new film, Swiss director Petra Volpe imagined the consequences of just one missed shift on a busy night at a hospital, and found herself making a disaster movie.

With Late Shift, Volpe aimed to shine a light on the frontlines of the looming healthcare catastrophe through the eyes of the dedicated, exhausted Floria. Played by German actor Leonie Benesch, the young nurse shows an initially acrobatic grace in her workday, whose first half resembles a particularly hectic episode of the restaurant kitchen series The Bear, but with life-and-death stakes.

Agentic AI and the new "semantic web"

Pluralistic: Delta's AI-based price-gouging (30 Jul 2025) #agents #ai #semantic #website

As an aside, this reminds me of one of the AI industry's most egregious hoaxes-du-jour: the pretense that "agentic AI" is just around the corner, and soon we will be able to ask a chatbot to (e.g.) comparison shop across multiple website for the best airfare and book us a ticket:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/06/17/apple-may-look-late-to-ai-but-its-aiming-for-something-different

This absolutely totally does not work. You should not give your credit-card number to a chatbot and ask it to go out an buy you anything, lest you end up paying $30 for a dozen eggs and buying tickets to a baseball stadium in the middle of the ocean:

https://futurism.com/openai-new-ai-agent-food-stadium

AI agent demos are so dismal that AI companies are no longer claiming that "agentic AI" will involve chatbots that nagivate the web as is. Rather, they're claiming that every website will eventually re-tool so that it can be reliably and predictably addressed by an AI agent, with all of its user interface elements well-labeled and/or addressable programatically, via an API.

This is a remarkable sleight of hand! First of all, re-engineering every website to embrace a common set of labels and API fields is a gigantic engineering feat – formally called "the semantic web" – that has been attempted since 1999 without any meaningful progress:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

In fact, the first viral article I ever published online was "Metacrap," a critique of semantic web efforts. That essay is now 24 years old:

https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm

2025-07-31

Slop as a way of life

Slop as a Way of Life - by Drew Austin - Kneeling Bus #slop #ai #enshittification

Yesterday morning, I walked past the small grocery store on my block and heard REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” emanating from inside. I’d usually ignore that kind of thing but here it suddenly struck me as absurd—it was 9:30 am on a weekday and there was absolutely no reason for that song to be coming out of an empty grocery store. Not even annoying or dissonant, it was just the least appropriate accompaniment for the moment, in its own subtle way. And of course there was no reason for it—no person had chosen the song and the process that led to it playing then had no audience in mind.

…

The popularity of “slop” as a concept points to something significant about how we experience digital culture in 2025, just as “algorithms” did last decade. In each case, the term’s usage gets less precise as it’s overloaded with everything we hate about the internet. And while the word itself becomes less meaningful, it reveals more about how we feel. It’s tempting to define slop as Potter Stewart did pornography (“I know it when I see it”) but that would just further obfuscate an already murky concept. Today, “slop” implies AI more than anything else, and primarily refers to the AI-generated content that is flooding the internet. The subtext is that slop is being dumped on us against our will—that it’s something that happens to us—but that lets us off the hook far too easily. Most of the slop we see is still made and distributed by real people, often with no AI assistance. If AI is able to suddenly pump slop into our environment it’s only because we already turned on the faucets ourselves. Just think about all the garbage content that people you actually know send you via text, or the DMs that feel like they’re from bots but are actually from real people driven by platform incentives (Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc). The arrival of AI slop is simply the culmination of a long process of cultural slopification, and one of AI’s unexpected functions has been to launder the human slop so we can pretend we didn’t create it.

I call the REM song I heard slop because it’s a good example of this process: The automation of personal music listening, a process accelerated by Spotify but long underway in places like the supermarket aisles, is ultimately a process of “learning to care less about details and perceive distinct things as interchangeable,” as I wrote last year. In slop utopia, there is no right or wrong place or time for anything to happen, because context has been eliminated. The end result of this process, as Liz Pelly has described, is an opportunity for AI content creation, which barely registers because the human-made content with which it coexists has already become fungible. The appearance of AI slop is not something new, just a sign that an ongoing slopification process has been completed.

The Living Fossils Compendium

The Fossil Record So Far - by The Living Fossils #evo-psych #psychology #mentalhealth #evolution

The Living Fossils blog is one of the most high-value blogs I have discovered in the last year or so. They just posted a recap of their posts under the most common thematic categories. This is a great set of links!

2025-07-30

Hope admist the climate crisis

Less rain, more wheat: How Australian farmers defied climate doom #farming #climate

A great Reuters investigation on how Australian farmers overcame climate change to get record wheat harvests. Normally climate news is always doom and gloom, with this being a rare exception.

2025-07-29

Monk Mode

The growing allure of running away to a monastery | Dazed #wellness #spirituality

As a growing number of young people embark on spiritual journeys, including those attending church and turning to prayer, the idea of ‘disappearing into the woods’ is becoming more compelling. “Given the political climate, technology and expenses, it’s a very romanticised ideal that I think people are drawn to,” says MC. Where once crunchy yoga and meditation retreats may have appeased the crowds, some people are turning their attention to traditional religions like catholicism. Across social media, people are using the term #MonkMode with wellness connotations similar to a 75-day challenge, promoting disappearing as a new way to “level up” and come back as a “completely unrecognisable version of yourself”. Somewhat ironically, instead of focusing on the faith, there’s a certain level of wellness culture embedded in the discussion. There are “monk schedules” for building your work routine and #MonkMode inspo pics for bare-bones living.

2025-07-28

People who dislike agentic AI coding

HN: on Claude Code is a Slot Machine

Spotted an interesting comment on HN.

I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding:

  1. people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc)

  2. people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they want, rather than knowing)

  3. people who never cared for programming itself, more into product-building

To make the distinction clear, here are example groups unlikely to like AI dev:

  1. people who programmed for ~25 years (to this day)

  2. people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started)

I'm not sure if I'm correct in this observation, and I'm not impugning anyone in the first groups.

2025-07-27

Why are we all so weird about cheating?

Why are we all so weird about cheating? | Dazed #relationships #cheating #infidelity

Writer Amanda Montei highlighted the nonsensical ways we attempt to punish and scold those who have cheated in her essay on the film Babygirl for her Substack newsletter, Mad Woman. She mentions that when Romy (Nicole Kidman) reveals her affair with Samuel (Harris Dickinson) to her husband, played by Antonio Banderas, he yells at her and asserts that she has jeopardised their children and kicks her out. Montei simply asks, “How exactly has she hurt her children?” By having the kind of sex she actually wants to have? By acting and living for herself and not her children or husband? These are very different situations, obviously, and I am not here to cast moral judgement on these behaviours. But why should someone be stripped of everything for behaving the “wrong” way?

Overtourism in Japan

Overtourism in Japan, and How it Hurts Small Businesses — Ridgeline issue 210 #japan #tourism

A great city is typified by character and the character of great cities is often built on the bedrock of small businesses. Conversely: Chain shops smooth over the character of cities into anodyne nothingness. Think about a city you love — it’s likely because of walkability, greenery, great architecture, and fun local shops and restaurants. Only psychopaths love Manhattan because of Duane Reade. If you’ve ever wondered why overtourism can be a kind of death for parts of a city (the parts that involve: living there, commuting there, creating a life there) it’s because it paradoxically disincentivizes building small businesses.1 Nobody opens a tiny restaurant or café to be popular on a grand, viral scale. Nor do they open them to become rich.2

So why do people open small shops? For any number of reasons, but my favorite is: They have a strong opinion about how some aspect of a business should be run, and they want to double down on it. For example, forty years ago Terui-san, the owner of jazz kissa Kaiunbashi-no-Johnny’s up in Morioka, was like: Hmm, nobody is spinning wa-jyazu (Japanese jazz),3 so I’m only going to rock it. That led to a bunch of cool knock-on connections, not the least of which was a lifelong friendship with the incredible Akiyoshi Toshiko. That singular thing can drive an initial impulse, but small business purpose quickly shifts into: Being a community hub for a core group of regulars. That — community — is probably the biggest asset of small business ownership. And the quickest way to kill community (perhaps the most valuable gift for running a small business) is to go viral in a damaging way.

At risk of oversimplifying: Most “problems” in the world today boil down to scale and abstraction. As scale increases, individuals become more abstract, and humanity and empathy are lost. This happens acutely when the algorithm decides to laser-beam a small shop with a hundred-million views. If you cast a net to that many people, a vast chunk of them will not engage in good faith, let alone take a second to consider the feelings of residents or owners or why the place was built to begin with. Hence: The crush, the selfish crush.

Overtourism brings with it a corollary effect, what I call the “Disneyland flipflop.”8 This happens when visitors fail to see (willfully or not) the place they’re visiting as an actual city with humans living and working and building lives there, but rather as a place flipflopped through the lens of social media into a Disneyland, one to be pillaged commercially, assumed to reset each night for their pleasure, welcoming their transient deluge with open arms. This is most readily evident in, say, the Mario Kart scourge of Tokyo — perhaps one of the most breathtakingly universally-hated tourist activities. I dare you to find a resident who supports these idiots disrupting traffic as the megalopolis attempts to function around them.9

This overtourism is happening mostly because of algorithms collimating the attention of the masses towards very specific activities / places. There’s also a slightly nutty narcissism / selfish component to it, too — fueling that impulse to, at all costs, “get” a photo at a specific spot to share on a specific social media service. (See: Fushimi Inari.) If the algorithm is the gas, cheapness is the spark. Because, damn, is it cheap to travel these days. Combined with the fact that there have never been more “middle class” people in the world, and you get overtourism. In a way, overtourism complications and disruptions are what happens when “humanity wins” and more people have more time and money to go “do things.”

Because! Here’s the heartening bit: More people than ever are traveling, and while, sure, the majority of those travelers are just following trends and lists, there is another group, a small cohort of self-aware travelers who are genuinely, deeply curious about the places they’re visiting, who desire to engage directly without being disruptive, who want to engage fully and “authentically” (that is: visiting people and places that haven’t twisted themselves for the sake of transient visitors (i.e., no renaming things “samurai spice”)). And that “small cohort” (let’s say 15% of global travelers) is larger than the total number of travelers the world saw twenty years ago. Omotesando? Gion? They’re lost, like villages washed away by a tsunami. Much like I don’t understand the heart of a wave, I do not understand the hearts of those who come to Japan to buy a Rimowa suitcase. (Quite frankly, it really freaks me out!) And it is not our job to understand.

…

These kinds of folks buoy the chest, elevate the soul (like witnessing a person stand on an escalator and just stare into the distance, refusing the Siren call of their smartphone). I don’t know if there’s some Platonic or deontic mode of travel, but in my opinion, the most rewarding point of travelling is: to sit with, and spend time with The Other (even if the place / people aren’t all that different). To go off the beaten track a bit, just a bit, to challenge yourself, to find a nook of quietude, and to try to take home some goodness (a feeling, a moment) you might observe off in the wilds of Iwate or Aomori. That little bundle of goodness, filtered through your own cultural ideals — that’s good globalism at work. With an ultimate goal of doing all this without imposing on or overloading the locals. To being an additive part of the economy (financially and culturally), to commingling with regulars without displacing them.

algorithmic performativity

algorithmic performativity - by Adam Aleksic #social-media #algorithms

Chat, we all act differently when we’re being watched. There’s a pressure to avoid embarrassment, to present “authentically,” to put others at ease.

Sociologist Erving Goffman calls this performance—the idea that all public interactions are a kind of theatrical act. You’ll put on a different performance for your college friends and your grandmother; TV broadcasters will put on a different performance when on air and behind the scenes.

In the same way, social media algorithms are uniquely changing how we present ourselves online, since they come with a completely new type of spectator: the algorithm itself.

how social media subjugates us

how social media subjugates us - by Adam Aleksic #social-media #dominance

Throughout this parasocial interaction, we’ve both adopted social roles that come with an imbued set of norms and behaviors. You, the viewer, are in an assigned role of docility. I, the influencer, am in an assigned role of dominance. With each repetition of this dance, we internalize our roles a little bit more. Even though I started out as some random guy yapping on the internet, my role over time is mutually legitimized and I begin to take on greater credibility in your mind.

To be clear, I as an influencer also submit myself to the platform, much like a supplicant to a ruler. I need to replicate “viral-looking” mannerisms and expressions; I need to perform for the algorithm by submitting to its constraints. My studio lighting and “influencer accent” are forms of aesthetic labor validating the platform’s priorities. Then you perceive my message on the toilet and do the same, and we both give more power to the technology mediating our interaction.

what i'm looking for in my marriage

What I'm looking for in my marriage - by Sasha Chapin #marriage #relationships

The complications of measuring things

The Luxury of Fudged Numbers - by Josh Zlatkus #numbers #money #measurement

The drawback to money as a concrete and concentrated form of value is that it crowds out other valuations. At many a cocktail party, wealth is the lowest common denominator of worth. Another downside is that many people are tempted to pursue money well beyond what would represent the best use of their time. Golden handcuffs have imprisoned many in the most productive years of their lives.

Now here’s the thing: even after reading this, you’ll be tempted to filter by height. Why? Because height is a preference, after all, and when accurate information is available, why not use it? The problem is that when something is easy to measure, it tends to crowd out better—but fuzzier—metrics. For example, is weight the best proxy for health? Absolutely not. But it’s easier to capture than VO₂ max. Similarly, is bench press the best determinant of overall strength? No, but it’s more concrete than core strength. So we run with it.

One overlooked consequence of numbers is that they enable the quantification of things that were never meant to be that precise. Without numbers, you can’t specify height. You can’t reduce a person’s value to how much money they make. You can’t compare thoughts, jokes, or creative projects by how much attention they receive. Essentially, much of the harm this essay talks about loses its razor-sharp edge.

Many small-scale societies developed additional ways to blunt the edge of social competition. In Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, James Suzman describes how the Ju/’hoansi assign credit not to the person who shoots the animal, but to the maker of the arrow that brings it down. The purpose of this and related practices is to “cool young men’s hearts”—to temper pride and prevent vanity.

Other examples include the many games of chance that foraging peoples play—often for hours on end. As Sahlins said of the Hazda: “[The] men seem much more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game.” By minimizing the role of skill, these games ensure that every dog has its day. I find something very wise in these old and various ways of softening a loser’s pain, given that most of the time, most people are losing.

Modern metrics give unnatural precision to inherently fuzzy social dynamics. When social life remains loose and informal, and advantages remain imprecise, emotions soften. But the more we quantify, the sharper the comparisons become—and the more those comparisons hurt.

Gaza

Chartbook 400: Murder not crisis - Why Israel's starvation of Gaza is exceptional in a global context. #gaza #palestine #israel #genocide

For many months, it has been beyond reasonable doubt that the Israeli government, the Israeli military, sections of Israeli politics and society as well as their aiders and abetters abroad, have been deliberately starving the population of Gaza with a view to forcing the population either to flee or to face intensifying misery and ultimately an agonizing death. There is clear evidence of deliberate intent going back to 2023. This clearly warrants charges of genocide.

Those who style themselves “defenders of Israel” will be quick to insist that, in fact, there is a feeding operation in Gaza. But, as the famine historian and aid expert Alex de Waal demonstrates in powerful piece in the Guardian, “Israel’s food points are not just death traps – they’re an alibi … The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation system is like standing at the edge of a big pond and feeding the (starving) fish by throwing breadcrumbs. Who gets to eat its rations?” Air drops of food, are simply more of the same.

Ethnic cleansing by means of starvation is the actual policy.

Death by starvation in Gaza is not the collateral, unintended consequence of an obscure, anonymous, amorphous crisis. It is the results of deliberate policy on the part of the Israeli government, bent on using the resources of a highly sophisticated state to render Palestinian life in Gaza impossible.

GenZ

Why everyone hates Gen Z workers - by Ellen Scott #genz #workplace

far back as the fourth century BC there’s evidence of Aristotle criticising the generation below him for the way they approach hard graft: “They are high-minded, for they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of necessity”. In the first century BC, “the beardless youth” are described as not knowing how to manage their money. There’s no hard evidence of younger-generation-bashing in the years of children working in factories, but I’d confidently bet it happened, especially when young people dared to ask for better working conditions. In 1894, the Rooks County Record in Stockton, Kansas, published a reader’s letter that accused ‘nobody wants to work these hard times’.

In 1990, Gen X were referred to as the slacker generation, with Time magazine stating that workers born between 1965 and 1980 “would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder” and have attention spans “as short as one zap of a TV dial”. In 2017, it was millennials who were called “spoilt, full of themselves [and] averse to hard work”. Now it’s Gen Z’s turn in the firing line.

But why does this happen? Why do we keep viewing the generation below us as bad at work? Why did everyone hate Gen X, then millennials, and why do we now hate Gen Z?

Why does everyone hate Gen Z workers? Because we’ve all been told to. Because an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality, with Gen Z workers as ‘them’ is far better for bosses than one in which it’s all workers versus those at the top. It’s better that we keep squabbling at each other like crabs in a big bucket, rather than us pausing and questioning the very structure of the bucket, or deciding to group together and attack the crab fisherman. And if that squabbling can be monetised, even greater news!

I urge you, the next time you’re lured in by Gen Z sniping, pause and consider what’s going on behind the take you’re being served up by your algorithm. Are Gen Z workers really lazy, entitled, or rude? Or is your own outrage being manufactured and weaponised against you? Who’s benefitting when we see work/life boundaries and those who ask for them negatively? And who’s losing out? Spoiler: It’s not just Gen Z.

Ageing accelerates at 50

Ageing accelerates around age 50 ― some organs faster than others #ageing

It is a warning that middle-aged people have long offered the young: ageing is not a smooth process. Now, an exhaustive analysis of how proteins change over time in different organs backs up that idea, finding that people experience an inflection point at around 50 years old, after which ageing seems to accelerate.

2025-07-23

When curiosity doesn’t fit the world we’ve built

When curiosity doesn’t fit the world we’ve built #adhd #curiosity

However, three interconnected forces might be conspiring to push hypercuriosity toward its maladaptive expressions:

1) Social media is designed to trigger but never satisfy our information-seeking drives. Algorithms exploit our curiosity gaps (the space between what we know and want to know) and deliver just enough novelty to keep us scrolling. For hypercurious minds, this creates an endless loop of stimulation.

2) Nonlinear exploration is discouraged in educational institutions. Traditional education rewards sustained attention to predetermined tasks. The result is that many hypercurious kids feel miserable suppressing their natural curiosity rather than learn how to leverage it.

3) Most modern workplaces measure value based on efficient output. In high productivity + low creativity work environments, hypercurious employees might burn out and/or leave to become self-employed (which might be why there is an association between ADHD and entrepreneurship).

So how do we fix this? I believe solving this requires three fundamental shifts:

1. Rewilding education. We need to redesign learning environments to support hypercuriosity. This means welcoming neurodivergent thinking, embracing experimental learning, and encouraging nonlinear paths.

2. Reclaiming attention. The attention economy hijacks hypercuriosity. We must treat attention as a precious resource worth protecting both individually and culturally by resisting algorithmic distraction and setting boundaries around our focus.

3. Reimagining technology. Digital tools should support hypercuriosity, not exploit it. We need interfaces (including AI) that help us ask better questions, discover new information, connect ideas, and integrate knowledge.

2025-07-16

Google Finds a Crack in Amazon’s Cloud Dominance

Google Finds a Crack in Amazon’s Cloud Dominance — The Information #gcp #google #aws #amazon #ai #startups

AWS generates more than twice as much revenue as Google Cloud and has long dominated the market for selling cloud services to startups. But the Dia episode and other examples show how Google has become competitive in attracting AI startups to its cloud, thanks to Gemini and other capabilities AWS doesn’t have.

AWS’ struggle to develop a strong AI model of its own has fueled a perception that it is trailing Google in developing cutting-edge AI.

That’s a big turnaround after Google’s earlier struggles with previous versions of Gemini and startups’ widespread complaints about the difficulty of setting up Google Cloud accounts for AI computing.

Google Cloud has even landed business from two high-profile AI startups its own AI teams compete with: Safe Superintelligence Inc., led by former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever; and Thinking Machines Lab, helmed by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati. (AWS may have wanted Murati’s business, too: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy met with her in San Francisco earlier this year.)

Google Cloud also recently won business from an even fiercer rival, OpenAI, which has been a major customer of Microsoft cloud servers but has been branching out to other providers.

Aruna Roy on Jane Austen

Social activist Aruna Roy on Jane Austen’s enduring appeal  - The Hindu

As we mark the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, I am reminded of British-American poet W.H. Auden’s remark about her in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’.

…It makes me most uncomfortable to see

An English spinster of the middle-class

Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’,

Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety

The economic basis of society…

Raising Children

Learning to Parent in Community – SAPIENS #parenting #caregiving #culture #anthropology

Bebuna, a woman in her 60s, sits in front of her hut breastfeeding her granddaughter. I had never seen an older woman nursing and—even as an evolutionary anthropologist—didn’t realize it was biologically possible.

“Are you producing milk?” I asked.

Bebuna squeezed her breast, and white droplets appeared.

It turns out that lactating people can produce milk indefinitely, as long as they continue breastfeeding baby after baby. Bebuna has been doing just that for decades, as a midwife and caregiver to many children in her community.

Bebuna is a member of the BaYaka, a collective name for several forest-living forager groups west of the Congo River. [1] Her community lives in the northern Republic of Congo and speaks the Mbendjele language. In 2013, I began visiting Mbendjele BaYaka camps to research how people learn from others in a hunter-gatherer society.

There are countless ways to raise children, shaped by cultural traditions or, in more individualistic societies, by personal choices among various parenting philosophies. All approaches bring benefits and challenges. But community-oriented cultures like the BaYaka get at least one thing right: Parenting should not be learned in isolation or all at once—it is a lifelong process embedded in daily life long before one has a child and long after.

Unlike me, the BaYaka learn to parent before they become parents.

Among both babies under 1.5 years and children aged 1.5–4, around 40 percent of their close care, including holding and physical contact, was provided by “allomothers”—caregivers other than the biological mother. On average, each child had 14 people within arm’s reach throughout the day.

Mothers responded to just under half of all crying bouts. Allomothers soothed the rest—over 40 percent on their own, the remainder alongside the mother. Soothing often meant drumming on the child’s back or yodeling to gently calm the child.

And who were these allomothers? Mostly, other children. These young helpers were more involved, collectively, than fathers or grandmothers.

Parenting is never perfect. Cultures raise children differently, shaping adults valued by their own standards. But, based on my experiences, one truth emerges: Learning to care for others should start long before having a baby.

Two years into parenthood, I have more questions than answers. Growing up in Turkey, studying across Europe and Canada, and working in the U.K., I had never held a newborn until I had Eren. I spent my childhood and early adulthood learning subjects like math, physics, and literature—what my societies valued most. My first months of motherhood were emotionally overwhelming because of the steep learning curve I had to scale.

I wish, like the BaYaka, my parenting lessons had followed a gentler slope, stretched across my lifespan. The same could be said about other essential life skills like growing food, caring for our elders, and dealing with death.

For those of us living in individualistic societies, what happened that people stopped caring to learn life’s basics? Take a note from the BaYaka and other community-oriented cultures: Bring these lessons back into learning journeys.

What’s Happening to Reading?

What’s Happening to Reading? | The New Yorker #reading #ai

What will happen to reading culture as reading becomes automated? Suppose we’re headed toward a future in which text is seen as fluid, fungible, refractable, abstractable. In this future, people will often read by asking for a text to be made shorter and more to-the-point, or to be changed into something different, like a podcast or multi-text report. It will be easy to get the gist of a piece of writing, to feel as if you know it, and so any decision to encounter the text itself will involve a positive acceptance of work. Some writers will respond by trying to beguile human readers through force of personality; others will simply assume that they’re “writing for the A.I.s.” Perhaps new stylistic approaches will aim to repel automated reading, establishing zones of reading for humans only. The people who actually read “originals” will be rare, and they’ll have insights others lack, and enjoy experiences others forgo—but the era in which being “well-read” is a proxy for being educated or intelligent will largely be over. It will be difficult to separate the deep readers from the superficial ones; perhaps, if A.I.-assisted reading proves useful enough, those terms won’t necessarily apply. Text may get treated like a transitional medium, a temporary resting place for ideas. A piece of writing, which today is often seen as an end point, a culmination, a finished unit of effort, may, for better and worse, be experienced as a stepping stone to something else.

2025-07-15

Coffee and aging

Coffee May Promote Longer, Healthier Living - Bloomberg #caffeine #anti-aging

If you're like me, you climb out of bed each morning feeling like a zombie -- until you slug back that first cup of coffee.

Turns out that morning jolt may benefit more than just energy levels. It could help slow down the aging process of the body's cells, potentially helping to fend off ailments including cancer and neurodegeneration.

Caffeine flips a biological switch in our bodies called AMPK, which monitors our cells' energy levels and, when they're low, tells them to slow down their growth processes and instead focus on repairing damage, according to a paper recently published in the journal Microbial Cell.

In doing so, caffeine inhibits the cellular growth regulator TOR, explains Babis Rallis, the paper’s senior author and a reader in genetics, genomics and fundamental cell biology at Queen Mary University of London. TOR is highly active when we're embryos and fast-growing kids, helping us develop into adults. Once we're older, it will contribute to our body’s ability to, say, renew skin, grow hair and heal wounds.

TOR, however, is "pro-aging." When it's too active, it's implicated in problems including metabolic disorders, neurodegeneration, inflammation and cancer, according to Rallis. 

By studying caffeine's effect on cell growth, Rallis is hoping to get a better handle on some of the factors that promote longevity, a field known as biogerontology. That could inform future research into how we can trigger these virtuous cellular effects through diet, lifestyle and new medicines to achieve healthy aging, he said in an interview.

"We're not saying that you have to take hundreds of pills, like we have seen in the news by certain billionaires," he said. "We mostly try to uncover biological mechanisms and understand how you can then change your habits."

2025-07-13

What I could have learnt from René Girard #mimetic #culture

René Girard might have found metaphorical use for this. The French theorist’s great idea was that religion and culture grow out of what he called mimetic rivalry. Human beings, uniquely, choose the objects of their desire largely on the basis of what other people desire. “There is nothing, or next to nothing, in human behaviour that is not learned, and all learning is based on imitation,” he writes. But while mimesis helps us learn, it also leads to escalating competition, and ultimately violence. Religion evolved as a means for containing rivalry by projecting communal violence on to an arbitrarily chosen sacrificial victim, the scapegoat.

As always happens when an intellectual becomes popular, distortions have followed. The main problem, though, is not misinterpretation. It’s omission. What is often left out of discussions of Girard is the most challenging part of his theory, about how we break the cycle. Here he turns to one of the firmest messages of the gospels: the injunction to love our enemies. Girard knew, as we all know, that renunciation and mercy are almost impossibly hard, and quite alien to human culture. Yet he argues that it is the moments when the mimetic crisis has reached a hysterical crescendo, when “the vanity and stupidity of violence have never been more obvious”, that it is possible to see our enemies in a new way. Might we not be living in such a moment right now?

Extraction vs Creation

From Dollar Dominance to the Slop Machine - by kyla scanlon #economics

The US has become an extraction economy.

  • We extract value from our existing position through dollar dominance, military supremacy, and technological leadership and now are choosing to tear down the foundations that created that position in the first place.
  • We extract attention through spectacle without creating the trust that makes spectacle meaningful.
  • We extract wealth from our own institutions without replenishing the capacity that generated that wealth.
  • The UFC image captures this well - it takes the symbolic power of American institutions and converts it into entertainment value, with no consideration for what that conversion costs us in terms of credibility or coherence.

China, meanwhile, has become a creation economy1.

  • They're building electrical generation capacity, training engineers, developing industrial policy that spans decades.
  • They're creating an “electrostate” with an economy driven by the technologies that will determine 21st-century competitive advantage.

Immigration Policy of the Danish left

Denmark’s left defied the consensus on migration. Has it worked? #denmark #immigration

These are uncomfortable facts, so much so that to point them out is to invite the disgust of European polite society. Whether in France, Germany, Italy or Sweden, parties of the hard right have surged as they—and often only they, alas—persuaded voters that they grasped the costs of mass migration. But the National Rally of Marine Le Pen in France and Giorgia Meloni’s post-fascist Brothers of Italy have an unexpected ally: Denmark’s Social Democrats, led by the prime minister, Mette Frederiksen. The very same party that helped shape the Scandinavian kingdom’s cradle-to-grave welfare system has for the past decade copy-pasted the ideas of populists at the other end of the political spectrum. Denmark is a generally well-run place, its social and economic policies often held up for other Europeans to emulate. Will harsh migration rhetoric be the next “Danish model” to go continental?

The Danish left’s case for toughness is that migration’s costs fall overwhelmingly on the poor. Yes, having Turks, Poles or Syrians settle outside Copenhagen is great for the well-off, who need nannies and plumbers, and for businesses seeking cheap labour. But what about lower-class Danes in distant suburbs whose children must study alongside new arrivals who don’t speak the language, or whose cultures’ religious and gender norms seem backward in Denmark? Adding too many newcomers, the argument goes—especially those with “different values”, code for Muslims—challenges the cohesion that underpins the welfare state.

The upshot of the left’s hardline turn on migration has been to neutralise the hard right. Once all but extinct, it is still only fifth in the polls these days, far from its scores in the rest of Europe. For good reason, some might argue: why should voters plump for xenophobes when centrists will deliver much the same policies without the stigma? Either way, that has allowed Ms Frederiksen to deliver lots of progressive policies, such as earlier retirement for blue-collar workers, as well as unflinching support for Ukraine. The 47-year-old is one of few social-democratic leaders left in office in Europe, and is expected to continue past elections next year.

2025-07-12

AI Therapy

AI therapy bots fuel delusions and give dangerous advice, Stanford study finds - Ars Technica #ai #therapy

Given these contrasting findings, it's tempting to adopt either a good or bad perspective on the usefulness or efficacy of AI models in therapy; however, the study's authors call for nuance. Co-author Nick Haber, an assistant professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Education, emphasized caution about making blanket assumptions. "This isn't simply 'LLMs for therapy is bad,' but it's asking us to think critically about the role of LLMs in therapy," Haber told the Stanford Report, which publicizes the university's research. "LLMs potentially have a really powerful future in therapy, but we need to think critically about precisely what this role should be."

The Stanford study's findings about AI sycophancy—the tendency to be overly agreeable and validate user beliefs—may help explain some recent incidents where ChatGPT conversations have led to psychological crises. As Ars Technica reported in April, ChatGPT users often complain about the AI model's relentlessly positive tone and tendency to validate everything they say. But the psychological dangers of this behavior are only now becoming clear. The New York Times, Futurism, and 404 Media reported cases of users developing delusions after ChatGPT validated conspiracy theories, including one man who was told he should increase his ketamine intake to "escape" a simulation.

In another case reported by the NYT, a man with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia became convinced that an AI entity named "Juliet" had been killed by OpenAI. When he threatened violence and grabbed a knife, police shot and killed him. Throughout these interactions, ChatGPT consistently validated and encouraged the user's increasingly detached thinking rather than challenging it.

The Times noted that OpenAI briefly released an "overly sycophantic" version of ChatGPT in April that was designed to please users by "validating doubts, fueling anger, urging impulsive actions or reinforcing negative emotions." Although the company said it rolled back that particular update in April, reports of similar incidents have continued to occur.

Stablecoins and 100% reserve requirements

What does one hundred percent reserves for stablecoins mean? - Marginal REVOLUTION #crypto #stablecoin #reserves

The statute’s policy goal is to keep a payment‑stablecoin issuer from morphing into a fractional‑reserve bank or a trading house while still giving it enough freedom to:

  • hold the specified reserve assets and manage their maturities;
  • use overnight Treasuries repo markets for cash management (explicitly allowed);
  • provide custody of customers’ coins or private keys.

Everything else—consumer lending, merchant acquiring, market‑making, proprietary trading, staking, you name it—would require prior approval and would be subject to additional capital/liquidity rules.

Why Your Brain Gets High on Uncertainty #neuroscience #brain #uncertainity

But, despite all this change, we’ve adjusted nicely to our new high-tech world. Why? Because we thrive on a challenge. We thrive on the uncertainty that comes with learning new things.

But why would our brains evolve to thrive on uncertainty? Shouldn't we prefer certainty, like knowing exactly where our next meal is coming from?

As I mentioned earlier, uncertainty was critical for our survival. Think about our ancestors who conquered new lands. The ones who were curious about what might be over that next mountain range?

So what can we do with this knowledge? Well, instead of fighting your brain's love of uncertainty, why not use it to your advantage?

  • Want to learn something new? Frame it as a mystery to be solved.
  • Need to exercise more? Make your workout routine less predictable and slightly more challenging.
  • Trying to stay motivated at work? Gamify projects with elements of discovery and reward.

Like anything pleasurable, too much of a good thing can ruin it. Like too much candy for a nickel. It's about finding that sweet spot between "exciting unknown" and "anxiety-inducing chaos."

Meditation and Boredom

Find meditation really boring? You’re not the only one | Psyche Ideas #meditation #boring

In fact, what my colleagues and I call ‘spiritual boredom’ has a long tradition. Christian history contains numerous depictions of boredom: paintings of yawning congregants, people sleeping during sermons, and so on. In the Middle Ages, this phenomenon was recognised as a spiritual malaise called acedia (from Latin), characterised by listlessness and melancholy. Christians referred to it as the ‘demon of noontide’ – a concept described by St Thomas Aquinas as the ‘sorrow of the world’ and the ‘enemy of spiritual joy’.

Beyond these examples from Christian history, reports of boredom can be found in almost every spiritual practice. For instance, in Buddhist contexts, there are accounts of boredom during Asanha Bucha Day sermons. Similarly, some reports relating to mindfulness meditation describe experiences of ‘void’ – an emotional state combining boredom and psychological entropy.

Having said all that, I don’t believe boredom is just an obstacle – it could also be informative. From an evolutionary perspective, boredom exists to signal misalignment. It’s your brain’s way of saying: ‘This doesn’t suit you – change something.’ If you ever find yourself bored while meditating, praying or listening to a sermon, it might be helpful to ask yourself: ‘Am I over- or underchallenged?’ and ‘Does this practice (still) hold personal meaning for me?’

Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY

Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale | Hacker News #postgres #pubsub #queues

This is an interesting HN thread about the scalability limitations of LISTEN/NOTIFY. The blog post is worth reading. What caught my attention was this thread which had some interesting discussion

This is roughly the “transactional outbox” pattern—and an elegant use of it, since the only service invoked during the “publish” RPC is also the database, reducing distributed reliability concerns.

…of course, you need dedup/support for duplicate messages on the notify stream if you do this, but that’s table stakes in a lot of messaging scenarios anyway.

Yeah, but pub/sub systems already need to be robust to missed messages. And, sending the notify after the transaction succeeds usually accomplishes everything you really care about (no false positives).

Boosterism

Boosterism - by Rob Kurzban - Living Fossils #evo-psych #heirarchy #power

Boosting seems to have to do with cases in which an individual2 does something—I’m going to call it the Thing, with a capital letter—that that individual is either not allowed to do, by convention or rule, or is stereotypically not good at—according to the current cultural norms, or both.

…

Boosterism seems to be the feeling you get when someone does someThing stunning and brave that fits the scheme above.

Why?

Scholars such as Chris Boehm—see, for instance, his book Hierarchy in the Forest—have suggested that humans have a propensity to try to flatten hierarchies. As we have seen in posts about power, when there is one individual—or a group of a few individuals—who everyone else always backs, these few powerful people can do practically whatever they want, advancing their (fitness) interests at the expense of others’. Boehm suggests that humans naturally want to limit the power of the powerful. Certainly there is cross-cultural evidence of this preference, especially in the so-called collectivist cultures associated with Asia.

This resonates with boosterism, if imperfectly. The story about the marathon can be seen as part of eroding the power of men in society, reducing the extent to which it is an identity-focused regime, as I’ve called it. Generally, boosterism feels anti-hierarchy. So maybe boosterism is a leveling system, designed to support underdogs to prevent domination by the few, or the one. It’s probably often fitness-good to support the erosion of power of people or groups who can impose their will on you. Leveling is good for those who aren’t part of the elite.

As some researchers put it, “[a]lthough people prefer to associate with winners, there is also a strong desire to support the lovable loser or underdog.” It feels good to stand up and say, yes, I too support people doing that Thing.

But if everyone else has the same belief, well, that’s neither particularly stunning nor especially brave. When the battle is long over, and the moral arc has fully arced, boosterism changes. It still feels good—but it’s no longer subversive. It’s orthodoxy in the costume of rebellion. And like all such performances, it risks slipping into the theater of the absurd: applause lines for acts no longer forbidden, cheers for victories already won.

2025-07-11

Why I don't want a boyfriend

Why I don't want a boyfriend - by Sky Fusco - Unsupervised #boyfriend #relationships

I’ve been dating men for twenty years. I’ve merged lives with brooding musicians, flamboyant jocks, hard-working farmers, single dads, tortured professors, treehouse builders, and award-winning chefs. I tried to love these men for who they were, and not for what they did, but it was impossible. Their actions towards love were clouded by ego, coercion, control, dominance, manipulation, self-loathing, reactivity, weaponized incompetence, and cowardice. With one exception, I don’t remember any of them taking the time to sit still, self-reflect, or even jot some thoughts down in a journal.

Currently, I see multiple generations of men who haven’t done any inner work, and generations of women who have done all of it. Men can barely look at themselves, and women are taught to look too much. This disparity is sad for everyone involved, but because of it, I rarely feel the benefits of the “love” men try to offer me, especially when compared to the nourishment and deep intimacy provided by my friendships with everyone else.

It turns out that love starts with the self, and it requires courage, attention, and devotion. Deeply loving someone, and being loved by them in return, requires radically loving ourselves. In my experience, most men don’t even like themselves. It’s no wonder I don’t really feel their love.

Ok this made me chuckle

An exception to my boredom is when I’m romancing academics—men who read profusely and have knowledge to share—or men who are phenomenally skilled and obsessed with their work. I learn so much from them, but both of these archetypes ultimately make difficult partners, namely because they’re workaholics. They are, however, good temporary lovers, and can turn into the best peers.

These days, I cherish my friendships with men who aren’t trying to court or possess me—mentors, dads, friendly neighbors, helpers, or the partners of my friends. They almost see me; there’s no fantasy for them to project onto me, blocking their view. And if there is, I don’t have to know about it.

2025-07-10S

Rigidity in Islamic Societies

State Power & Punishment - by Alice Evans #islam #religion #power

Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have a brilliant new paper, published in the Journal of Economic Literature, proposing a dynamic interaction between culture and institutions. They suggest that a society’s values legitimise particular economic and political institutions, which then shape emergent configurations of culture. In their theory, each cultural set has a set of ‘attributes’ (which can be abstract or specific). These sets can be ‘free-standing’ or ‘entangled’

Contrasting cultural evolution across world regions, they suggest that Islam has some ‘highly specified’ attributes, which are also ‘entangled’. Sharia reigns supreme, since it is the word of God, revealed by Mohammad. Given this fundamental set of attributes, reinterpretation or critique becomes illegitimate. Instead, Muslims usually gravitate to scriptural literalism, and the religion thus becomes relatively ‘hard-wired’, less open to contestation or institutional reform. Rulers then cement their authority by invoking and entrenching Islamic values.

Alice Evans critically engages with Acemoglu and Robinson’s theory on the dynamic interaction between culture and institutions, focusing on Islamic societies. She argues that state power, prestige, and punishment are key engines sustaining cultural norms, especially through religiously sanctioned enforcement mechanisms like the office of hisba.

Key Takeaways

• Islamic cultural rigidity is not "hard-wired" but enforced through state power and punishment. • The office of hisba historically policed morality, legitimizing rulers and controlling social behavior. • Power, prestige, and punishment together shape cultural evolution and institutional legitimacy.

“Positive” Masculinity

The problem with ‘positive masculinity’ | Dazed #masculinity #gender #patriarchy

Masculinity is always in crisis, and the crisis is always new. In 1100, chronicler Oderic Vitalis railed against pointy shoes, for initiating young men into lives of effeminacy and sexual deviance. In the 1930s, George Orwell blamed the suburbs and middle-class morality. Today, it’s violent misogynist Andrew Tate and his legion of off-brand masculinity influencers.

TIL about the term "toxic masculinity"

‘Toxic masculinity’ was not a concept born of feminism. The phrase was coined, at least in print, by Shepherd Bliss, a member of the mythopoetic men’s movement – a mostly 1980s and 90s phenomenon that tried to explain why men felt like shit.

Can we really solve patriarchal violence with good patriarchs, who deserve their authority and always get things right? Envisioning a way out of oppressive masculinity is obviously better than defending it, but the positive masculinity movement hasn’t done much envisioning. ‘Healthy masculinity’ means both everything and nothing at the same time. Plus, some of its advocates are startlingly conservative: a recent BetterHelp ad features a man with a soothing voice being asked what ‘healthy masculinity looks like in 2025’, and telling the listener “maybe the tropes of provide and protect still hold,” clarifying that “maybe it’s less about muscles right now and maybe it’s about protecting your partner’s spirit or protecting their emotional safety.” Some are pushing back against traditional gender roles in more meaningful ways, but the language of ‘healthy masculinity’ leaves their endgame a great big mystery box. Do they want the borders of masculinity to be less policed, or do they just want to slightly expand the territory of what is acceptable for men? And where, if at all, do women fit into this?

Notes from an experienced software dev

All high value work is deep work, and all motivation is based on belief. #software #programming

Advice about software engineering that is worth repeating in full

Senior SWE, 12 YoE. The discourse around software development is incredibly chaotic and anxiety-inducing. I deal with the same emotions as everyone, but I manage to keep going despite having worked in a very poorly run company for a long time on a severely neglected product amidst product cancellation, brand cancellation, mass layoffs (one of which affected me), mismanagement, offshoring, you name it. I have managed to stay actively learning new tech, engaged on challenging problems, and having positive interactions with my coworkers consistently, even when one or more parties are being difficult to work with (which we all can be guilty of, myself included).

Here, I am to about share what keeps me grounded within all the noise.

This post itself is not a statement of fact, but a belief. But it keeps me going through all the noise and bullshit.

Also, a caveat: The claims I am making aren't the only claims to be made, and there are other important things to know. For example: It is true that all high value work is deep work, but it's not true that all deep work is high value work. A rectangle isn't necessarily a square.

All high value work is deep work, and all motivation is based on belief.

High value work is differentiated work. It's your moat. Not everyone has the grit, the attitude, the determination, and the ability to focus on challenging problems involving abstract concepts, especially when there is no immediate gratification, and when there is significant adversity in the environment. This is true of the population at large. But even within engineering/development, there are levels to this. Most people refuse to read. Most people refuse to do research. Most people panic when they see big log messages or stack traces. Most people give up when their code won't compile after googling for 20 minutes, if they even try googling at all. If you're the opposite of that kind of person, you will always be valuable in development.

All motivation is based on belief. Use this fact to be a leader, and use this fact to motivate yourself. All hard workers work hard because they believe they will benefit from it.

For some people, it is enough benefit to simply get in a flow state and enjoy solving a problem. But there is something deeper. Ask yourself what it is for you. Some examples:

  • ego boost (I am so smart wow)

  • prestige/praise (he/she is so smart wow)

  • distraction/addictive pattern (my marriage/family/health/social life sucks so bad, I need to forget for a while)

  • raw gratitude (or is it cope energy?) (I am grateful I get this fat paycheck to sit inside in comfortable temperatures and ergonomics, safely on a computer with no risk of injury or death, no one berating me constantly, no dealing with unreasonable patrons/patients/customers/schoolkids etc, just to solve challenging problems and be in a flow state, and if I could earn this money in a band or as a gamer I would but I can't so I'm just grateful for this opportunity so I can focus on myself and my family and my hobbies outside of work and build a nest egg for my family)

  • social (I love the people I work with, I genuinely have fun at the office with these cool people and I would still hang out with these people even if I weren't being paid)

Find out what motivates you, understand it, contextualize it, and ACCEPT it. Once you do that, you can have the space to figure out the same for others and help them along. I recommend taking the gratitude route. Gratitude can apply pretty broadly. It is actually a major life lesson in happiness.

Also, yes, corporate America is toxic. But you choose to work there. Every day you choose to work there, you should 100% double down on acceptance, or 100% double down on trying to find another job. Anything in between is total misery. Don't live life in resistance to what is. Accept what you can't control and work hard on what you can control. Either go to a startup and accept the risks, become politically active and solve the problem that way, or accept that you want the money badly enough and that the greedy, lying toxic charlatans running corporate America are the ones most able to give you the fat paycheck you signed up for.

Find what it is that motivates you in this field, and use that motivation to power some deep work so that you have some staying power in this field. It all starts in your own mind.

I know this devolved into a ramble. Just my two cents, hope it helps.

2025-07-08

The Perils of ‘The Perils of Design Thinking’

The Perils of ‘Design Thinking’ - The Atlantic #design #politics #culture

The concept of design, as the French philosopher Bruno Latour observed in a 2008 lecture, has had an “extraordinary career.” No longer is design about making objects more beautiful and useful; instead, he suggested, “design is one of the terms that has replaced the word ‘revolution’!” That might be the problem. “Our contemporary idea of design,” Gram writes, is often used to convince ourselves “that positive social change could be achieved without politics and government action; that problem solving could be both generative and profitable.” But most ambitious changes on the societal level require political consensus, and what’s profitable for some may not be beneficial for all. Design may be a distraction from the real work.

In Praise of “Normal” Engineers

In Praise of “Normal” Engineers – charity.wtf #engineering #normal #productivity

I really liked the part How do you turn normal engineers into 10x engineering teams?

  1. Shrink the interval between when you write the code and when the code goes live.
  2. Make it easy and fast to roll back or recover from mistakes.
  3. Make it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing.
  4. Invest in instrumentation and observability.
  5. Devote engineering cycles to internal tooling and enablement.
  6. Build an inclusive culture.
  7. Diverse teams are resilient teams.
  8. Assemble engineering teams from a range of levels.

Decentering work

Is it finally time to decentre work?  | Dazed #work #hustle #capitalism

“The journey of emerging into adult responsible contexts [the working world] involves at some point the need to do some sort of deprogramming and unlearning as the fantasy of your working life becomes deconstructed by reality,” 25-year-old Olivia tells Dazed. Olivia graduated with her MA in 2023 and started working at her university shortly after, but she recently quit her job. Her last job made her acutely conscious of the structural violence of late-stage capitalism, and shaped her plans for the type of job she’d like to do next. “[It is important to look at] how you are being valued at a place where you swap your time, skills, mind and body for money,” she says. “And I use those words with a lot of intention.”

Framing work in the way that Olivia has is beneficial to understanding the oppressive nature of work under late-stage capitalism because you are exchanging your limited time on earth and your health, which can be seriously jeopardised by doing a desk job, for money. And this is, of course, not by choice. Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek argue in their book After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time, that “we are coerced into work on pain of homelessness, starvation and destitution.” In other words, we work because we have no other choice. This isn’t to say that work isn’t fulfilling and deeply enjoyable for some. It can provide a sense of purpose and optimism, especially when you’re doing something you love and feel passionate about. But the amount of time we’re expected to expend on our jobs (and lack of choice) can significantly sour that devotion.

I would argue that young graduates’ dissatisfaction with work is potentially connected to the fact that their priorities differ from those of past generations. As older people were marrying young and able to buy their homes and have children on their salaries, they were able to acquire symbols of the “good life”, as theorist Sara Ahmed describes it, even if it didn’t really make them happy. Gen Z (and millennials) struggle to receive the economic benefits that previous generations achieved through work, which potentially makes them less resilient to its brutality. It’s also important to note that the markers of the “good life” have changed in the social media age, where we are confronted 24/7 by influencers who are always on holiday, live in big homes and wear enviable clothing. They could not afford their lifestyle through a traditional nine-to-five job, and it makes one question the point of having one when you could just become a content creator.

As we’ve already established, under capitalism, everyone needs to work; and detailing the ways work under this system is coercive and detrimental to one’s health doesn’t change that fact, if anything, it’s just depressing. The intention of this article is not to depress anyone, but rather to prompt an examination of our feelings about work, as it often defines so much of our self-worth, creating fears about how others see and value us. You are not a failure if you can not find work in our incredibly fucked-up job market. You are more than the work you do and what you produce, and the same energy that goes into your working life should be expended on your personal life. Of course, our personal lives do not provide us with income, but they do equally (if not more so) provide us with the tools we need to stay alive: our friends, family and our communities (if we invest in them).

2025-07-06

AI, ML and Deep Learning

PyTorch in One Hour: From Tensors to Training Neural Networks on Multiple GPUs #ai #ml #deeplearning #tensors

I was working my way through this article when I came across a nice, simple definition of the different categories - AI, ML and Deep Learning

AI is fundamentally about creating computer systems capable of performing tasks that usually require human intelligence. These tasks include understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, and making decisions. (Despite significant progress, AI is still far from achieving this level of general intelligence.)

Machine learning represents a subfield of AI (as illustrated in Figure 2) that focuses on developing and improving learning algorithms. The key idea behind machine learning is to enable computers to learn from data and make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed to perform the task. This involves developing algorithms that can identify patterns and learn from historical data and improve their performance over time with more data and feedback.

Machine learning has been integral in the evolution of AI, powering many of the advancements we see today, including LLMs. Machine learning is also behind technologies like recommendation systems used by online retailers and streaming services, email spam filtering, voice recognition in virtual assistants, and even self-driving cars. The introduction and advancement of machine learning have significantly enhanced AI’s capabilities, enabling it to move beyond strict rule-based systems and adapt to new inputs or changing environments.

Deep learning is a subcategory of machine learning that focuses on the training and application of deep neural networks. These deep neural networks were originally inspired by how the human brain works, particularly the interconnection between many neurons. The “deep” in deep learning refers to the multiple hidden layers of artificial neurons or nodes that allow them to model complex, nonlinear relationships in the data.

Unlike traditional machine learning techniques that excel at simple pattern recognition, deep learning is particularly good at handling unstructured data like images, audio, or text, so deep learning is particularly well suited for LLMs.

/images/ai_ml_deepl.png

Oliver Burkeman on Insecure Overachievers

The Imperfectionist: Acting because you don't have to

The spiritual teacher Michael Singer says somewhere that the basic stance most of us take toward the world is that we try to use life to make ourselves feel OK. And this is certainly true of the type psychologists label ‘insecure overachievers’, who often accomplish plenty of impressive things, but who do so, deep down, because we don’t believe we’d have earned the right to feel good about ourselves, or to relax into life, if we didn’t.

It’s a soul-crushing way to live, not least because it turns each success into a new source of oppression, since now that’s the minimum standard you feel obliged to meet next time…

Most productivity advice, I think, caters to people mired in this mindset. It promises ways to help you take so much action, so efficiently, that you might one day get to feel good about yourself at last. Which isn’t going to work – because the real problem isn’t that you haven’t yet done enough things, or got good enough at doing them. The real problem is the fact that for whatever combination of reasons in your childhood, culture or genes, your sense of self-worth and psychological safety got tethered to your productivity or accomplishments in the first place.

This is a really good take on ambition, and continuing to be ambitious without being constantly in insecure-overachiever mode

One of the most important consequences of all this, for me, has been the realisation that when you begin to outgrow action-from-insecurity, you don’t have to give up on being ambitious. On the contrary: you get to be much more effectively and enjoyably ambitious, if that’s the way you’re inclined.

I’ve long been allergic to the notion, prevalent in self-help circles, that if you truly managed to liberate yourself from your issues, you’d ideally spend your days just sort of passively floating around, smiling at everyone, maybe attending the occasional yoga retreat, but not much more. “The more I heal, the less ambitious I become” is a phrase I’ve encountered multiple times online in recent months. And yes, sure, if your ambition was only ever a function of anxiety, becoming less ambitious would be an excellent development. Then again, the desire to create remarkable outcomes in your creative work, relationships or community – or even just in your bank balance – might just be an authentic part of who you are, once the clouds of insecurity begin to clear.

So you don’t need to choose between peace of mind and the thrill of pursuing ambitious goals. You just need to understand those goals less as vehicles to get you to a future place of sanity and good feeling, and more as things that unfold from an existing place of sanity and good feeling. (Besides, I’ve got to believe that ambition pursued in this spirit is far likelier to make a positive difference in the world.)

How do we boost birthrates

How do we Boost Birth Rates? - by Alice Evans #fertility #demography #children

Six factors need to be addressed

  1. Women procreate if they expect rewards such as personal fulfillment or social approval.
  2. People are more likely to have kids if it’s fun relative to other alternatives.
  3. Economic and housing incentives from governments must outcompete other alluring alternatives.
  4. Community plays a role by creating social expectations and shared activities among families.
  5. Films and cultural portrayals could make parenting seem more desirable.
  6. The rise of singles and solitude makes it harder to raise children alone and affects dating prospects.

2025-06-28

Peter Steinberger - Building Apps with AI

Slot Machines for Programmers: How Peter Builds Apps 20x Faster with AI | Peter Steinberger #ai #programming Peter built vibetunnel with two other people: GitHub - amantus-ai/vibetunnel: Turn any browser into your terminal & command your agents on the go.

The process was heavily AI assisted and the post above goes into his thoughts around using AI. It's more credible when folks who have actually built something useful that's in the wild and works well talk about AI assited coding.

The Art of the Mega-Prompt

Here’s where things get spicy. While the internet is flooded with “10 AMAZING PROMPTING TRICKS THAT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND” listicles, Peter has a refreshingly blunt take:

This is the greatest bullshit. There are so many people out there that try to explain you… All those long websites about prompting… That’s all bullshit.

Instead, Peter’s secret sauce is beautifully simple: explain what you want from multiple angles, like you’re talking to someone slightly unfamiliar with your product. No structure needed. Just ramble.

Sometimes my prompt is this long where it’s a lot of rambling. Oh yeah. The padding… looks like shit. It needs to be like this and this and this.

He uses WisprFlow. “Heck, they should give me affiliate links by now because I converted so many people.”

Crucial insight:

They’re non-predictable. It’s like nature. So if you don’t like the outcome, just try it again.

Agents have “temperature.” Don’t like the result? Just re-execute without changing the prompt. Like slot machines: press enter, get something new.

Peter’s approach leverages something most don’t realize: we like redundancy. Explain the same thing three ways, we don’t get annoyed. We get clarity.

The Real Skill: Clear Thinking

When Peter starts something fresh, he has a bulletproof SDD workflow using Google AI Studio: brain dump ideas into a 500-line Software Design Document, iterate with “Take this SDD apart” prompts for 3-5 rounds until the spec is bulletproof, then simply tell Claude Code: “Build spec.md” and let it run for a few hours.

Going "no-contact" with family and friends

Why So Many People Are Going “No Contact” with Their Parents | The New Yorker #family #culture

The field of family estrangement is still in its infancy. The tome-like “Handbook of Family Therapy,” a mainstay among psychologists, does not contain an in-depth entry on estrangement. “The cliché ‘hiding in plain sight’ is really appropriate here,” the family sociologist Karl Pillemer, who teaches at Cornell, told me. Kristina Scharp, a director of the Family Communication and Relationships Lab, at Rutgers University and Michigan State, defines estrangement as an “intentional distancing” between at least two family members “because of a negative relationship—or the perception of one.” Sometimes it comes from an accumulation of grievances. Other times, it’s because of one fight—for example, after a parent rejects an L.G.B.T.Q. child when they come out. According to a survey conducted by Pillemer in 2019, twenty-seven per cent of Americans are currently estranged from a relative. If you haven’t experienced it yourself, you probably know someone who has.

2025-06-25

Top of Hacker News

Fun with uv and PEP 723 | Hacker News

An article I wrote for my new tech blog made it to the top of Hacker News.

/images/hacker_news.png

Annotating Books

Marginalia mania: how ‘annotating’ books went from big no-no to BookTok’s next trend | Books | The Guardian #books #annotate

Looks like annotating books is in. I recently started doing this because I realised that it increased retention.

There are two kinds of readers: those who would choose death before dog-ears, keeping their beloved volumes as pristine as possible, and those whose books bear the marks of a life well read, corners folded in on favourite pages and with snarky or swoony commentary scrawled in the margins. The two rarely combine in one person, and they definitely don’t lend each other books. But a new generation of readers are finding a way to combine both approaches: reviving the art and romance of marginalia, by transforming their books and reading experiences into #aesthetic artifacts.

It is what her fellow scholar Jessica Pressman calls “bookishness”: a post-digital behaviour that has developed among passionate readers. But that is not to say it is purely performative: annotating a novel can allow us to retrace our first journey with a book, as well as revisit our state of mind at the time. I think of the last book that made me cry, Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss – what would my marginalia have looked like when I read it back in 2021, sobbing through the final pages at the reflections of my own struggles with mental illness? What would I see now in the notes I’d made then?

Annotation has also become a way of connecting: some BookTokkers lavishly annotate a copy of their friend’s favourite book as a gift, stacking the margins with observations and jokes; Marcela is excitedly planning to do this for her best friend. A dear friend of mine inherited the habit from his late mother and he now treasures the precious “scribblings” in the margins of her history and poetry books. Some people specifically seek out books annotated by other readers in secondhand shops – a spark of connection with the past – or even by their authors;

I’m like McAlister, who says that while she annotates her academic reading, well, like an academic, she’s usually too immersed in books to annotate for fun.A

Learnings from 2 years of using AI tools

Learnings from two years of using AI tools for software engineering #ai #software #programming

Working with Generative AI is fertile ground for several cognitive biases that can undermine judgment. I find this a fascinating part of GenAI: how manipulative this technology is.

Here are just a few examples of potential cognitive biases:

Automation bias represents our tendency to favor suggestions from automated systems while ignoring contradictory information, even when that information is correct. Once you've experienced success with AI-generated code, it's natural to start over-trusting the system. The confident tone and polished output can make us less likely to question its recommendations, even when experience suggests a different approach.

The framing effect reinforces the impact of the positive, confident phrasing of LLM responses. For instance, if an AI suggests that a particular approach is "best practice," we are more likely to take that at face value and adopt it, without considering context-specific factors.

The anchoring effect can kick in when AI presents a solution before we thought about it. After viewing AI's suggestions, we can find it harder to think creatively about alternative solutions. The AI's approach becomes our mental starting point, potentially limiting our exploration of better alternatives. On the flip side, AI can also help us mitigate anchoring bias, for example when assisting with modernising a pre-existing solution we're already anchored to.

And finally, there is also a version of sunk cost fallacy at work when coding with AI. Investing less human labour into writing code, should make it easier to discard code that’s not working. However, I've caught myself becoming over-attached to large pieces of AI-generated code which I’d rather try to fix instead of revert. Perceived time savings create a psychological investment that can make one reluctant to abandon AI-generated solutions, even when they're sub-optimal.

Th Amplifier: 8 rising pop girls you should hear now

The Amplifier: 8 rising pop girls you should hear now #amplifier #music #playlist

YouTube Music Playlist: The Amplifier: 8 Rising Pop Girls You Should Hear Now

AI Killed My Job

AI Killed My Job: Tech workers - by Brian Merchant #ai #jobs #software #programming

These are some harrowing accounts of engineers from some of the top technology companies in the world, giving their take on what AI is doing to software engineering jobs.

I have been a software engineer at Google for several years. With the recent introduction of generative AI-based coding assistance tools, we are already seeing a decline in open source code quality 1 (defined as "code churn" - how often a piece of code is written only to be deleted or fixed within a short time). I am also starting to see a downward trend of (a) new engineers' readiness in doing the work, (b) engineers' willingness to learn new things, and (c) engineers' effort to put in serious thoughts in their work.

Specifically, I have recently observed first hand some of my colleagues at the start of their career heavily relying on AI-based coding assistance tools. Their "code writing" consists of iteratively and alternatingly hitting the Tab key (to accept AI-generated code) and watching for warning underlines 2 indicating there could be an error (which have been typically based on static analysis, but recently increasingly including AI-generated warnings). These young engineers - squandering their opportunities to learn how things actually work - would briefly glance at the AI-generated code and/or explanation messages and continue producing more code when "it looks okay."

This job market is absolutely punishing. I had a .gov job for the .com crash, a publicly funded .edu job for the 2008 crash, and a safe place inside a Dropbox division making money hand over fist during the COVID crash (Dropbox Sign more than doubled document throughput over 2020). This is my first tech winter on the bench, and I'm getting zero traction. 37 job apps in the months I've been looking, 4 got me talking to a human (2 of which were referrals), all bounced me after either the recruiter or technical screens. Never made it to a virtual onsite.

This has to do with me being at the Staff Engineer level, and getting there through non-traditional means. The impact is when I go through the traditional screens for a high level engineer I flame out, because that wasn't my job. The little feedback I've gotten from my hunt is a mix of 'over-qualified for this position' and 'failed the technical screen.' Attempting to branch out to other positions like Product Manager, or Technical Writer have failed due to lack of resume support and everyone hiring Senior titles.

Last year, a new hire came in to lead another department. Genuinely believe she is a product of the "LinkedIn hustler / thought-leadership / bullshit titles" culture. Super performative.

Recently and during a cross-functional meeting with a lot of people present, she casually referred to a ChatGPT model she was fine-tuning as our "Chief Marketing Officer"—in front of my manager. She claimed it was outperforming us. It wasn’t—it was producing garbage. But the real harm was watching someone who’d given decades to his field get humiliated, not by a machine, but by a colleague weaponizing it.

Today, in the name of “AI efficiency,” a lot of people saw the exit door and my CMO got PIPd.5 The irony here is two-fold: one, it does not seem that the people who left were victims of a turn to "vibe coding" and I suspect that the "AI efficiency" was used as an excuse to make us seem innovative even during this crisis. Two, this is a company whose product desperately needs real human care.

All my life, I’ve wanted to be an artist. Any kind of artist. I still daydream of a future where I spend my time frolicking in my own creativity while my own work brings me uninterrupted prosperity.

Yet this has not come to pass, and despite graduate level art degrees, the only income I can find is the result of a second-class coding job for a wildly capitalist company. It’s forty hours a week of the dullest work imaginable, but it means I have time to indulge in wishful thinking and occasionally, a new guitar.

2025-06-23

Emotions vs Feelings

This is a good short YouTube video on distinguishing between feelings and emotions, and hence arriving at a more biological grounding for dealing with them. #feelings #emotions

I generated a summary of the transcript.

Theme Wise Breakdown

Misconceptions About Emotions

Lisa Feldman Barrett opens by addressing common myths: that emotions are hardwired and universal, and that emotions are simply reactive impulses of an "animalistic" brain potentially overridden by rationality. These myths characterize emotions as something that happens to you, causing uncontrollable reactions, or as a sign of morality or mental illness.

Redefining Emotions

Barrett explains that emotions are actually brain-generated constructions. They arise because the brain continuously regulates the body’s internal states (such as glucose or oxygen levels) and uses past knowledge to predict and interpret these bodily signals in relation to the external world. This process produces the experiences we recognize as emotions.

Difference Between Feelings and Emotions

She clarifies that feelings—such as pleasantness, unpleasantness, calm, or activation—are features of emotions but are not equivalent to emotions themselves. Emotions are more complex episodes where the brain is effectively telling a story about bodily states influenced by past experience.

Importance of This Understanding

Barrett discusses how this perspective transforms the way we understand mental health conditions like depression, emphasizing that symptoms may arise from the brain’s metabolic regulation efforts rather than a straightforward pathology. This view invites a broader, more biologically grounded approach to treatment.

Implications for Personal Change

Since emotions are constructed using past experiences to make predictions, individuals are not prisoners of their past but architects of their emotional experience. Psychotherapy can reframe past experiences, and actively cultivating new experiences can alter brain predictions and future emotional responses. This empowers people to take control over their emotional lives by changing their present actions and experiences.

Responsibility and Control Over Emotional Life

Barrett notes that while early experiences shape the brain’s predictive models often without our control, adulthood brings the ability to choose and change experiences. These choices can reinforce or alter the brain’s emotional predictions, offering tools for healing and transformation despite life’s inherent unfairness.

Learning Electronics

Electronic Nights I - Getting Started ? #electronics

Stumbled on this great guide to getting started with electronics which also traces the personal journey of the author from not being able to install a 9V battery or jumpstarting a car to building a electronic gadget.

James Baldwin quote

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

I read this quote in a tweet today and realised that now more than ever in my past, I have truly internalized the message in the quote.

2025-06-22

Gender Equality in Scandinavia

Why is Scandinavia the Most Gender Equal Place in the World? #gender #inequality #equality #scandinavia

Europe and North America escaped this trap through a fortunate confluence of factors: Christianity sanctified the nuclear family, the Protestant Reformation elevated marital bonds, the Enlightenment championed free expression of dissent, while robust states enforced laws and provided core services. Technological advances, media connectivity, and economic growth then proved transformative: women gained control over their fertility, pursued careers, built diverse friendships, demonstrated equal competence in socially valued domains, and mobilised for reform.

Yet Scandinavia had two unique latent assets which would prove transformative in the 20th century. Scandinavians never idealised female seclusion and there was a nascent culture of associations. Neither entailed gender equality, but rather they provided the latent assets for egalitarian ideological persuasion and capture of state power.

Scandinavian Christianity retained remarkable permissiveness. Ibn Fadlan, travelling from Baghdad in 922, was shocked to see Scandinavian merchants having sex with enslaved women in public view. In 1432, a Venetian captain shipwrecked on Norway’s Lofoten archipelago noted locals bathed naked together, unashamed.

A hundred years later, Andrew Boorde observed Icelandic priests keeping “concubynes”. 17th century travellers noted, with surprise, that bathhouses were sometimes nude and gender-mixed.

In northern Sweden and Finland, where agricultural productivity was low and class divisions were minimal, unmarried men and women might spend nights together without parental approval (‘nattfrieri’ - night courting). In 1799, Malthus noted that Swedish country girls often had “sweethearts for a considerable time before they marry” - frequently accelerated by pregnancy. Even in the late 19th century, 16% of first births to University of Iceland’s Theology Faculty were illegitimate.

What explains this permissiveness?

Low population density, minimal urbanisation, and sparse monasteries and bishoprics likely weakened the Church’s ideological control. Richard F. Tomasson argues, “The older permissive pattern persisted in those areas where the influence of Christian conceptions of marriage was weakest”. This openness enabled high female labor force participation, but that’s only one part of Scandinavia’s feminist secret…

and there is part 2 as well: Why is Scandinavia the Most Gender Equal Place in the World?

They laid out four fundamental demands:

  1. All adults should have opportunity for independent development
  2. All adults should be economically independent of relatives
  3. Society should be neutral toward different domestic arrangements
  4. Children's development should be independent of parents' economic circumstances

The Diderot Effect

The Diderot Effect is a social phenomenon where obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption, leading to acquiring more new things that complement or match the original item. This effect is named after the French philosopher Denis Diderot, who described how receiving a new robe made him want to replace his old belongings to match the new one, resulting in a cascade of purchases.

In essence, the Diderot Effect explains how one new purchase can lead to a chain reaction of additional spending to maintain a consistent lifestyle or aesthetic. #consumption #spiral

2025-06-21

2025-06-19

Home-Centric vs City-Centric

Found this in a documentary about Tokyo public toilets and it resonated for me in a very different context - spending time in cafes (one of my favorite activities)

/images/city-centric.png

2025-06-18

Authenticity is a mirage

Gen Z and gen Alpha brought a raw, messy aesthetic to social media. Why does it feel as inauthentic as ever? | Eugene Healey | The Guardian #authenticity

Authenticity is the great mirage of the modern age. Its promise – to live unmediated, in full accordance with our values and beliefs – feels like the ideal we’re always reaching for before it vanishes beyond the horizon. And ironically, the more we try to prove we’re authentic online, the more we seem to accelerate its disappearance.

As Generations Z and Alpha joined social media, they responded to the cultural demand for perfection with chaos – raw, unfiltered, deliberately messy content. The curated feed of flatlays gave way to the sloppy photo dump; the finstas; the bedrotting. Finally, our real lives represented on screen. Finally, something real.

Except that this quickly became another role to be performed, a generation-defining content genre that has itself become subject to more and more extreme performances – filming oneself bawling into the camera, extreme overshares, breakdowns in public. Vulnerability-as-aesthetic, where what began as a rejection of perfection has become its own form of perfectionism – the flawless execution of being flawed.

To understand why authenticity is impossible, first we need to understand what social media has done to us. It’s turned personal identity into performance art – and in doing so, has transformed us all into brands (I should know, I’m a brand consultant).

The internet has fundamentally altered the conditions under which genuine self-expression can exist. The solution isn’t to perform authenticity harder, but to recognise and jealously guard the remaining places where real authenticity might still be possible: in unrecorded conversations, in private moments, in closed networks that haven’t yet been colonised by the attention economy.

2025-06-17

Adults TV Show

What can we learn from TV shows about friendship? | Dazed #tv #adults #friendship

In the last episode of FX’s new comedy series Adults, which follows a group of friends in their twenties, Paul Baker (Jack Innanen) gets a letter from the US government notifying him that his visa is expiring and that he must leave the US and go back to Canada. His friends, Samir (Malik Elassal), Billie (Lucy Freyer), Anton (Owen Thiele) and his girlfriend Issa (Amita Rao), who he lives with, are devastated. To ensure he can stay in the country, Issa asks him to marry her, to which he gratefully, but also begrudgingly, agrees. 

While the journey to get there is incredibly convoluted, they eventually arrive at the courthouse to wed. However, before they’re about to get married, Issa gets cold feet, telling Billie that marrying Paul is different from when she jokingly married her ex-friend Zack-Carlos because her marriage to Paul would be real. To Paul’s surprise, Billie walks down the aisle in Issa’s place, telling Paul that Issa isn’t ready to marry him but that they do not want to lose him and that she will marry him instead. This results in the entire friendship group arguing as they all volunteer to marry their Canadian friend. To end the bickering, Issa rejoins the group at the altar, apologising and professing to Paul: “We all love you. We just want you to stay. So, literally, any of us would marry you. Paul Baker, you choose. What do you want?”

Manifest Cheating

Can you really ‘manifest cheating’ in a relationship? | Dazed #dating #cheating #manifest

At the end of our five-year relationship, my ex suggested that it was my concerns around his loyalty that caused him to cheat in our relationship. In other words, I thought his infidelity into existence (or manifested it). It’s a concept I initially rolled my eyes at, then forgot about entirely, until recently, when The Wizard Liz revealed online that she’d been cheated on while pregnant by YouTuber Landon Nickerson. As a lifestyle influencer and manifestation coach, The Wizard Liz, whose real name is Lize Dzjabrailova, being cheated on has since set the internet into a spin – even the women who dedicate their lives to embodying “divine femininity” aren’t spared from the deeply painful but unfortunately common experience of infidelity. So, what does the spiritually-charged message that you can “manifest cheating” in your relationship do for how we think about modern relationships? 

As more young people move away from traditional religions and, in turn, seek answers in alternative spirituality, it should come as little surprise that New Age practices like manifestation have found their way into dating culture. According to Todd Baratz, a certified sex therapist and relationship expert, concepts like twin flames, divine feminine and masculine energy and practices like astrology are now deeply shaping how many young people understand relationships. “These frameworks offer fresh, new and beneficial language, comfort, and a sense of control in uncertain emotional terrain, but they also can turn love into a performance or a projection,” he says. “Instead of building relational skills – like communication, conflict repair, or emotional availability – people are using spiritual frameworks to bypass hard conversations or justify toxic dynamics.”

How Societies Morph With the Seasons

What Foragers Teach Us about Seasons and Social Change

As an evolutionary anthropologist working with the BaYaka, I initially presumed people simply adjusted because of the seasonal availability of different foods. But their changes extended way beyond sustenance into the realms of politics, economics, rituals, and relationships.

These shifts starkly contrast with my own homes in the U.K. and Spain, countries seemingly locked into fixed sociopolitical and economic orders. BaYaka flexibility made me rethink my assumptions about what is “natural” for human societies, including gender roles, hierarchies, and social group sizes.

And the more expansively I looked, I realized BaYaka flexibility isn’t the anomaly: The rigidity of industrialized, capitalist societies is. Across history and geography, societies have restructured their sociopolitical and economic lives in response to seasonal shifts—and perhaps not solely due to fluctuating resources. People may also do so because they recognize the dangers of stagnation.

As I see it, regular restructuring keeps communities adaptable and resilient. Solving today’s greatest challenges—inequality, authoritarianism, the climate crisis—may require embracing this flexibility as part of the fabric of our societies.

And the BaYaka aren’t unique in their cyclical shifts. The 20th-century French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss documented seasonal transformations among the Nambikwara, an Indigenous Amazonian group whose territory today lies in central Brazil. For five months each year, according to Lévi-Strauss, they inhabited large villages, tending small gardens for food. When the dry season began, they dispersed into smaller, mobile foraging groups. These shifts also ushered a reversal of political authority. During the dry season, leaders became authoritative decision-makers, resolving conflicts directly. When the rains returned, the same leaders no longer held coercive power. They could only attempt to influence through tactics like gentle persuasion or caring for the sick.

Similarly, at the turn of the 20th century, anthropologist Franz Boas observed that inequality peaked during the winter among the Kwakiutl, or Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, a First Nations people along the Pacific Coast of what is now Canada. Boas wrote about Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw winter villages with strict hierarchies and grand ceremonial events. In summer, these rigid structures dissolved as communities broke into smaller, more flexible groups. And rather than people doing this subconsciously solely to adapt to the weather, they were so aware of the political nature of their practices that individuals even changed names when they adopted new social positions for winter ceremonies.

Meanwhile, in my home countries and many others today, institutions seem immutable, changing only during revolutions, coups, or wars.

These cases flip the usual narrative. Instead of assuming that hierarchy is the prize of complexity, these sites suggest not all monumental architecture required a ruling class. For much of human history, societies didn’t follow a single political trajectory—they shifted between different modes of organization, much like the BaYaka do today.

Recognizing humanity’s long tradition of social fluidity puts the present into perspective: The “Western world” is not the culmination of a 10,000-year-long march but an anomaly in a 300,000-year-long history of Homo sapiens’ cultural adaptability.

2025-06-16

ytt-mcp - MCP Server to fetch YouTube Transcripts

I built an MCP server today!! - GitHub - deepakjois/ytt-mcp: MCP server to get YouTube transcripts #youtube #mcp #transcription

I love how seamlessly I can integrate this with Raycast (see demo video in README page on Github).

The bonus was I really got deep into how uv and Python packaging works.

URL Shortening System - Excalidraw Diagram

I really loved this dense Excalidraw diagram. Adding it here because I wanna come back to it for inspiration

/images/url_shortening_excalidraw.png

Found it in this tweet