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2026-01-23

Oliver Burkeman on "Unclenching"

The Imperfectionist: The freewriting way of life

Freewriting, as you may know, is the technique whereby you set a timer, open a text file or notebook, then just write whatever comes to mind, even if it looks like absolute garbage. It’s been central to my process of clarifying and expressing ideas for a while now, despite the fact that it challenges every bit of my perfectionistic, control-freakish soul. More recently, though, I’ve started to see it as a microcosm for a whole way of being in the world. Because I think the principles of freewriting contain an entire philosophy for living a meaningful, vibrant, productive life – whether or not you happen to be a writer or use the technique itself.

This is because freewriting is a form of what I’m going to call (perhaps regrettably) unclenching – a psychological “move” that involves relaxing in the midst of anxiety and uncertainty. Surrendering control, but thereby unleashing a vastly greater capacity for action, creativity and aliveness.

In the end, I suppose that this unclenched approach to life works because it reflects how things actually are. We all are freewriting our lives, inevitably, whether we like it or not. Even the most hidebound plan-maker and routine-follower is still choosing, again and again, to keep following those plans and routines, in each new moment that arises. And even the most anxious worrier, forever trying to rule out future uncertainties, remains subject to the fundamental truth that anything could happen at any moment.

Unclenching into life demands that we relax in the midst of the uncertainty and insecurity, because “in the midst of the uncertainty and insecurity” is where we always are. The reward is the aliveness, agency and sense of purchase on life that comes from no longer pretending otherwise.

2026-01-22

Using ChatGPT in relationships

The new relationship dealbreaker: using ChatGPT | Dazed

A sore subject rather than a make-or-break in her relationships, Kaya has also had several heated conversations with someone she’s dating over his “constant” use of AI chatbots. In the future, she predicts she’ll start to distance herself from people who rely on them.

For similar reasons, 30-year-old Ross is already there. “It does put me off people,” the content editor says, explaining that if they went on a date with someone who openly used ChatGPT, they wouldn’t see them again. “When someone has the app, I think less of them.”

Thinking less of somebody just because they have ChatGPT is probably a bit much. But relying on it for articulating your thoughts is a bit messy. I suppose I would be okay with it if it is used to tighten up a piece of informational content. But using ChatGPT to argue with your friend or partner on text is a huge red flag. I would reconsider my relationship with that person if that happens.

2026-01-21

Cafe Recommendations in Tokyo's Sangenjaya district

The Sprudge Guide To Coffee In Tokyo's Sangenjaya District | Sprudge Coffee

I love guides that go beyond focusing just on cities, but instead focus on specific neighborhoods. Bookmarking this one for my next trip to Tokyo.

Just two brief stops on the Tokyo Metro away from the incessant energy of Shibuya sits the district of Sangenjaya—a youth-oriented neighborhood characterized by its station-side maze of winding alleyways crowded with bars and hidden eateries, a thriving community of both local and international students milling in the streets, and a collective of young creatives opening up shop. Fueling this ever-present undercurrent of vitality in Sangenjaya are countless cafes, each seeking a precarious balance between preserving traditions and pioneering innovations.

…

Sangenjaya exists, sandwiched between buzzing neighborhoods like bustling Shibuya and youth-oriented, trend-loving Shimokitazawa, as a laid-back location where the quiet magic happens. More than just the hometown of one of Tokyo’s most lauded roasters, Sangenjaya plays host to a coterie of atmospheric and innovative cafes, all of which provide delightful spots to sip, snack, and soak in the charm of one of Tokyo’s most beloved enclaves.

2026-01-20

Loneliness

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2026-01-19

Your reality is someone else's content

your reality is someone's content - by Adam Aleksic #culture #communication #social-media

I’ve written before about how there are two types of communication: the ritual kind, meant for connecting with other human beings, and the transmission kind, optimizing for distribution of information. Every new technology since the telegraph has continued to prioritize transmission at the expense of ritual. All that matters is how much you can communicate, to how many people—everything is done for views.

But ritual is what gives life meaning. There’s a reason it feels better to talk with a friend on a picnic blanket than watch your friend’s TikToks for the same length of time. Either way, you’re getting the same amount of information about your friend, but only the picnic feels special.

These are only the most obvious examples. I think the viral Sydney Sweeney ad last summer was another example of clip farming, just less on the nose. The real advertisement wasn’t the weird genetics joke, but the subsequent discourse around the advertisement. The purpose of the campaign was to make people uncomfortable enough to talk about it online, and now American Eagle stock is up 100%.

The more we rely on the transmission view of communication, the less incentive there is to treat other people with care. Companies like Cluely can raise millions of dollars by promoting academic dishonesty, and crypto scammers can inflate the value of their shitcoins by popularizing racist memes. If the point is distribution above connection, it’s okay to hurt other people as long as your message gets across.

Friction was the feature

Friction Was the Feature - John Stone's Blog #ai #slop

Today, a candidate armed with an LLM can parse dozens of job postings, lift phrasing from each, and generate a set of keyword-optimized cover letters in no time. They can auto-tailor their resume to each posting. They can submit 30 applications in one sitting.

This is better, right?

Not for anyone, actually. Applications soar; recruiters drown. So we bolt on more automation: applicant tracking systems, resume parsers, AI interview schedulers. We convince ourselves we’ve built a better machine, but we haven’t redesigned the only machine that matters: the system matching the right people to the right work.

…

We automated the production of artifacts but haven’t fixed judgment. The result is a marketplace of immaculate verbiage with very little meaning, of noise without signal.

Everyone looks more “efficient.” Very little about it feels effective.

Recruiting is just one place where friction used to be the feature. When the marginal cost of creating words falls toward zero, any system that uses those words as a proxy for quality begins to fail.

For a long time, we treated certain artifacts as measures of effort or quality. A thoughtful cover letter. A carefully written reference on behalf of a colleague. A multi-page strategy doc. They were hard enough to produce that their existence told you something about the person behind them.

Once AI arrived, those artifacts quietly turned into targets. We told people to personalize outreach, respond to more emails, and write more detailed documents. LLMs optimize for those metrics beautifully. But as they do, the metrics stop tracking the thing we actually care about: competence, sincerity, fit, progress.

This is what I call “Goodhart’s inbox”. We’re surrounded by messages and docs that perfectly satisfy the surface criteria we asked for. But the more we optimize for these outputs, the less focused we are on outcomes: whether anyone is actually understanding each other or moving work forward.

2026-01-18

Guardian Profile on Adam Tooze

The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age | Economics | The Guardian

I am an unabashed Tooze Boy, so I thoroughly enjoyed reading every bit of this long article.

Anil Dash on a Career in Tech

How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026? - Anil Dash #jobs #software

The first, and most important, thing to know is that it’s not just you. Nearly everyone in tech I have this conversation with feels very isolated about it, and they’re often embarrassed or ashamed to discuss it. They think that everyone else who has a job in tech is happy or comfortable at their current employers, or that the other people looking for work are getting calls back or are being offered interviews in response to their job applications. But I’m here to tell you: it is grim right now. About as bad as I’ve seen. And I’ve been around a long time.

The public narrative is dominated by the loud minority of dudes who are content to appease the egos of their bosses, sucking up to the worse impulses of those in charge. An industry that used to pride itself on publicly reporting security issues and openly disclosing vulnerabilities now circles its wagons to gang up on people who suggest that an AI tool shouldn’t tell children to harm themselves, that perhaps it should be possible to write a law limiting schools from deploying AI platforms that are known to tell kids to end their own lives. People in tech endure their bosses using slurs at work, making jokes about sexual assault, consorting with leaders who have directly planned the murder of journalists, engaging in open bribery in blatant violation of federal law and their own corporate training on corruption, and have to act like it’s normal.

This too shall pass. One of the great gifts of working in technology is that it’s given so many of us the habit of constantly learning, of always being curious and paying attention to the new things worth discovering. That healthy and open-minded spirit is an important part of how to navigate a moment when lots of people are being laid off, or lots of energy and attention are being focused on products and initiatives that don’t have a lot of substance behind them. Eventually, people will want to return to what’s real. The companies that focus on delivering products with meaning, and taking care of employees over time, will be the ones that are able to persist past the current moment. So building habits that enable resiliency at both a personal and professional level is going to be key.

As I’ve been fond of saying for a long time: don’t let your job get in the way of your career.

Laptop Boyfriends

[The Laptop Boyfriends Can’t Stop Watching YouTube in Bed](https://archive.ph/XNB0H#selection-2381.0-2388.0

…YouTube has joined sleep and sex on the short list of activities that occur between the sheets. “The post-coital cigarette is a lost art, so now it’s the post-coital vape and YouTube,” says Weeks. In Gaffney’s relationships, he believes “it was the time and place in which I consumed that was the issue.” He imagines his romantic partners “probably would’ve wanted to do things sexually and that opportunity wasn’t afforded to them because I was watching YouTube.”

Nadia, 30, lives in Paris with her software-engineer husband, who is also 30. She first became aware of his YouTube obsession while watching the Netflix reality-competition series Culinary Class Wars together. Bafflingly, he could identify esoteric gastronomy techniques and recognize chefs from restaurants he’d never even visited. “He just knows so much,” she says. “And I know it’s all from YouTube because he’s not, like, reading cookbooks frequently.” (Nadia asked to go by only her first name for privacy.)

But for every relationship in which YouTube is a bridge between partners, there’s another in which it’s a wedge. For Nadia’s husband, YouTube is a solo activity that exists in addition to shared television time. “Sometimes after a day of socializing, he specifically can’t focus on something on the TV or a 45-minute Netflix show, so he has to watch a 20-minute YouTube show and then another 20-minute YouTube show,” Nadia says. “Once a week, he’s like, ‘No, give me my loafing time with my YouTube alone,’ because apparently watching a movie with me is socializing.”

When pressed to explain why men do this, many I spoke to point to YouTube’s supposed educational value. “ I’m in awe of the magnitude of YouTube, how I can really go down any wormhole and learn anything I want,” says Gaffney.

There is a pervasive sense that time spent on YouTube is more edifying than time spent on, say, TikTok. “He’s somebody that hates the idea of wasting time,” says Watters of his YouTube Shorts–loving partner. The content “is still entertainment, but he can justify it like he’s getting smarter, he’s gaining knowledge. This is valuable.”

I suppose 👆🏽 is one way to justify a YouTube addiction.

2026-01-17

Einstein on being a loner

“I am a typical loner in my daily life... my awareness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has prevented me from feelings of isolation.” — Albert Einstein

This totally made my day. I am very much a loner, but in talking with many folks I have realised that I have very rarely been miserable about it. On the contrary I would say I am pretty happy loner.

Cracked Engineers

Forget Vibe Coders: ‘Cracked Engineers’ Are All the Rage in Tech — The Information

Not exactly the kind of article

In November, a young robotics startup called Gradient began interviewing applicants for an engineering internship at the Palo Alto, Calif.–based company. But after talking to a half-dozen of them, the startup decided to ditch its plan to add interns.

Why exactly? “Not worth our time,” said J.X. Mo, 23, Gradient’s co-founder. While some of the applicants had seemed promising, “none of them would be cracked enough for us to hire them,” he said.

These days, plenty of people within tech are after the same thing Mo is: a “cracked engineer,” a buzzphrase that describes an idealized version of a software engineer capable of thriving in the AI era through scrappiness, workaholism and technical savvy.

/images/CleanShot 2026-01-17 at 12.27.17@2x.png

After looking at this figure, I figure I would put myself more in the category of a 5X engineer with the "willingness to use AI tools" and "capable of thriving in the AI era through scrappiness, workaholism and technical savvy", EXCEPT I am not exactly a workaholic 🙃. Does that make me "semi-cracked" then!?

Before it became a banner for a certain kind of programmer, the term “cracked” originated from videogames, as slang describing an especially adept gamer. Someone with a series of gnarly kills in Call of Duty? They’re totally cracked—that kind of thing.

Within tech, the people most eager to hire a cracked engineer are often startup founders at early-stage companies that haven’t yet accumulated significant venture capital. With limited funds, they need engineers who can operate as the company’s only coder—or perhaps one of a handful at most. And while some engineers specialize in writing code for machine learning or cloud infrastructure, cracked engineers are versatile enough to do it all.

Furthermore, these founders often view cracked engineers as more likely to be undiscovered savants who aren’t after cushy positions at big tech companies, rather than programming veterans. They are typically in their 20s, but they may have accumulated a decade of work experience by the time they reach their mid-20s, startup founders say. Most have little interest in managing other people.

Flat White Under Attack

Is There Really Such A Thing As A Large Flat White? | Sprudge Coffee

My vote is No.

The flat white is under attack. Or at least according to one Guardian contributor. The aggressor? Milk. More milk. Flat whites apparently now come, confusingly to some, in two sizes—small and large—which some see as a grave offense to the hallowed Antipodean espresso drink.

Except there is one tiny little difference between the flat white and the other drinks listed. What makes the flat white different is that there is no agreed upon definition of the flat white. Even among Australians, who spread it around the world, and New Zealanders, who in actually invented it. We know because we asked thousands and thousands of them all about over a decade ago, when arguing about flat whites still seemed novel. The closest thing to agreement we could find in our survey was that the flatty was “small-ish”. Think of it like a small latte. Further confounding things was the lack of consensus on whether a flit whoite had a double shot of espresso or a single. Ratios here are just as important, if not more, than total drink size, so that’s not ideal.

2026-01-11

The end of the world

From: Laura Manach :bongoCat:: "#Meme #Humour" - Mastodon

Very relatable atm.

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Tsundoku

I knew this term, but I liked how the tweet came together with the pics and everything.

In Japanese, "tsundoku" means collecting books and letting them pile up, not for neglect, but for the joy of knowing they're there, full of untold stories.

RIP Sweetgreens

The Rise and Fall of the Ultimate Millennial Power Lunch #salad #millenial

It seems like just yesterday when I was ordering Sweetgreens on the app several times a week and walking the few blocks in from my apartment (or WeWork) in NYC (where I was living at that tmie) to pick it up from the store. How things have changed!

In the first two months of last year, Sweetgreen’s stock price had declined more than 30 percent. The company had already made significant changes, dropping seed oils, adding “protein plates,” and hiring a bunch of robots in an apparent effort to cater to the early 2020s’ three defining dining trends: the MAHA movement, the protein fixation, and the push to cut costs by eliminating human labor. But not even air-fried potatoes could stop Sweetgreen’s free fall. In August, with operational losses reaching $26.4 million, the chain fired workers, and also the fries. As the year ended, Nathaniel Ru, who co-founded the company in 2007, stepped down from his role. Today, a share of Sweetgreen stock costs less than $8. In late 2024, it was more than $43.

…

Sweetgreen’s early success was not a fluke. As a restaurant, it truly did do something incredible. The company put high-quality organic produce in interesting combinations, incorporating fresh herbs and global ingredients, and going heavy on crunch and citrus. It sourced from small farms that it listed proudly on chalkboards inside each store, appealing squarely to a cohort who knew they really should be shopping at the farmers’ market, even if they usually got their groceries from Instacart, guiltily. And Sweetgreen was an early adopter of online ordering, allowing its customers to waste less time waiting in line. When a Sweetgreen opened in my city, in 2016, replacing a restaurant that had been serving hamburgers for 65 years, I was excited about it the same way I was excited when fiber internet came to my neighborhood: Finally, a better way to live.

The next paragraph makes me feel very seen (not in a good way!)

Sweetgreen was what you ate while listening to, if not the Hamilton soundtrack, then a self-improvement podcast at 1.5 speed, ripping through emails or shopping online before dutifully composting your beautifully designed, biodegradable bowl. It was the perfect fuel for the grinning strivers of the long 2010s, when a better world was possible, and in fact something you could buy. When a dear friend of mine got married, what she wanted to eat more than anything else while being poked and prettied in the hotel suite was Sweetgreen. It was the most reliable, most delicious, least risky meal either of us could think to pick up at an exceptionally frenetic moment. But it also made sense, spiritually, on a day that often requires total command over both one’s appearance and a large number of spreadsheets—a day that is a public declaration of hope for the future, and, in some ways, the first day of your adult life.

I think Sweetgreen didn’t change so much as the world around it did. A $15 salad was never really an investment in one’s health, but it certainly doesn’t feel like that in this economy—and besides, that moment has passed. The optimism of the previous era has given way to something more nihilistic. The people who were once going to guac this week are now quiet quitting and scarfing tallow. The “power” in Millennial power lunch has, largely, been replaced by impotence and apathy. WeWork went bankrupt; Hamilton became cringe; trying so hard to do the right things all the time started to feel pointless and naive. When I told a friend and fellow former Sweetgreen enthusiast about this story, he said, “What’s the point of eating a salad when we’re all going to die?” He was joking, kind of.

Morning Coffee Rave Parties ftw

An aversion to alcohol is making sober raves an increasingly popular party option | CNN

On a Saturday morning in October, Park Jihyun woke up at 5:30 a.m. to go raving in Seoul.

And much about her prep routine was counterintuitive.

Instead of shimmying into a miniskirt, the 29-year-old pulled on a pair of running tights. Instead of slipping her feet into a set of precarious heels, she slipped into running shoes. And in lieu of hailing a cab to the party, she ran from her apartment to the venue in Yongsan-gu, arriving after an hour-long, 5-mile jog, ready to hit the dance floor.

“It’s just random people who meet for the first time. But as we start dancing together, it becomes crazier as time flies,” Park says.

Since launching in May, the Seoul Morning Coffee Club’s Coffee Rave has become a viral success, drawing hundreds of like-minded Seoulites from the comfort of their beds to dance at daybreak.

Attendees, who have paid 20,000 won (about $14) for their ticket, start trickling in at 7 a.m., and line up for their drink of choice, often an iced Americano or a matcha. By 8 a.m., the DJ is pumping out hypnotic bass beats for an enthusiastic crowd of revelers who are jumping in unison in the clear, bright light of day, with nothing but caffeine to fuel their booze-free rave.

2026-01-10

Should you have a library in your loo

Should you have a library in your loo? #library #loo

I swear I had not thought that an entire article could be written on this topic.

The design world, for the most part, is on board. Furniture maker Matthew Burt recently launched the Loo Library, a beautifully compact shelving unit in walnut and stainless steel with semi-circle cutouts in the corners, designed to fit snugly into even the smallest cloakroom. “The idea was to create something with interest and gravitas, while ensuring books could be easily reachable from the loo,” says Burt.

Because it’s not just an issue of title selection (we’ll come to that) — positioning is key in a loo library, too. Books can’t be too close to the pan or too low to the ground, but must be within grasp from a seated position. Unlike the bedside table, in the loo you are privy to both hazards and logistical impediments. The books must be light enough to be easily held, not too precious, but also not too dog eared or well thumbed.

…In Japan, there is a term, mariko aoki, to describe the urge to defecate when entering a bookstore — a phenomenon born, perhaps, from some deeply held or Pavlovian association of reading and the loo.

2026-01-08

Coffee in California

A California Gesha Makes Its International Auction Debut | Sprudge Coffee #coffee #california #usa

TIL, coffee is grown in California

When you think of coffee production in America, the first place that comes to mind is undoubtedly Hawaii, Kona in particular. But it is not the only state commercially growing coffee. California is home to a few extremely small coffee farms, though few have risen above novelty; even the most avid specialty coffee drinkers are unlikely to have ever tasted any. But that may be changing soon thanks for Frinj Coffee. The Ventura-based farm will be the first continental American producer to take part in an international coffee auction.

2026-01-05

A Metabolic Workspace #productivity

There is a rude but clarifying question here: are you collecting information to use it, or are you collecting information because collecting feels like intellectual work? If it's the latter, you're not building a Second Brain; you're building an anxiety management system that happens to look like productivity.

Ranking Classical Philosophy Books

From: Correcting an Error - by Jared Henderson

It's a 4hr video, so not sure when I am gonna get around to it. But wanted to log it here so that I could point to it next time.

Nostalgia Economy and Analog Awakening #genz #buzzwords #slang

For some random reason I have this GenZ Trends newsletter in my feed reader which has become a bit of a guilty pleasure to read.

In the 2025 recap, I came across this long list of buzzwords. Some of my favorites

Slop life: Acceptance of overstimulating, low-quality consumption as a default mode. (I, II, III)

…

Locking in: Self-optimization as a seasonal ritual. (I, II)

…

Restivals: Festival culture shifts toward livestreaming and at-home experiences rather than physical endurance. (I, II)

…

Floodlighting: A dating term for oversharing trauma early to manufacture intimacy; an emotional jump scare. (I, II)

…

Monkey barring: Dating behavior where someone lines up the next relationship before letting go of the current one, swinging from partner to partner without ever being single. (I, II)

Monk mode: A self-imposed period of extreme discipline and withdrawal framed as productivity-driven, often involving no dating, no socializing, and obsessive self-improvement. (I, II)

…

What To Buy That Improves Quality of Life

What To Buy That Improves Quality of Life #things #buyitforlife

A good list.

2026-01-04

The gap between a Helpful Assistant and a Senior Engineer

The gap between a Helpful Assistant and a Senior Engineer : ezyang's blog

One of the important functions of a senior engineer is to be able to evaluate the context a software project lives in and figure out if we need to do something, even if it isn’t explicitly asked for. This is contrast to a helpful assistant, who is first and foremost obligated to follow the user’s instructions. This leads to a gap between a Helpful Assistant and a Senior Engineer.

Well, imagine a human L7 engineer who has just been hired by a big tech company to head up some big, new, multi-year initiative. Will they say, “Sure, I can help with that!” and start busily coding away? Of course not: they will go out and start reviewing code, reading docs, talking to people, asking questions, shadowing oncalls, doing small starter tasks–they will start by going out and building context. Here, the “helpful assistant” frame for LLMs is limiting: sure, Claude might ask you a few questions to clarify the task upfront, but if your coding agent starts asking you about “relevant partner teams” and “org-wide priorities for this half” you are definitely going to raise an eyebrow.

Thorsten Bell on AI Assisted Coding

Joy & Curiosity #68 - by Thorsten Ball - Register Spill

For more than 15 years I thought that I loved writing code, that I loved typing out code by hand, that I loved the “cadence of typing”, as Gary Bernhardt once called it, when sitting in front of my editor and my fingers click-clacking on my keyboard.

Now, I’m not so sure anymore.

2025 was the year in which I deeply reconsidered my relationship to programming. In previous years I had the occasional “should I become a Lisp guy?”, sure, but not the “do I even like typing out code?” from last year.

What I learned over the course of the year is that typing out code by hand now frustrates me. It frustrates me in the same way that filling out a printed form by hand frustrates me. Writing my name and middle name and last name and my street address and my zip code in capital letters with this stupid pencil when all of this could’ve been done by a computer, god, why do I have to do this, why do you punish me? This is so stupid, so laborious, this shouldn’t exist. I once considered not taking the 50 Euros of reimbursement that Deutsche Bahn offered after a train was delayed for two hours because I would have had to fill out a form by hand.

Amp is now faster and better at writing code than I am and whenever I do have to go in and type some code it feels like I’m pulling out the sewing needle after the sewing machine broke down, like hammering nails by hand after the nail gun’s battery died.

And yet it was fun! It was fun to write code by hand, for many, many years, and when it stopped being fun I was sad. Do I even love programming and building software if the actual writing of code is now a nuisance?

And the sadness went away when I found my answer to that question. Learning new things, making computers do things, making computers do things in new and fascinating and previously thought impossible ways, sharing what I built, sharing excitement, learning from others, understanding more of the world by putting something and myself out there and seeing how it resonates — that, I realized, is what actually makes me get up in the morning, not the typing, and all of that is still there.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: National Book Award by Omar El Akkad: 9780593804148 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books #palestine #gaza

On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.

2026-01-02

Common People

“I wanna live like common people
I wanna do whatever common people do
Wanna sleep with common people
I wanna sleep with common people like you”
Well,​ what else could I do?
I said “I’ll, I’ll see what I can do”

– Pulp, Common People

Found here: The Watching Menace: Crowds, Voyeurism and Photography - Flashbak

Hope is a discipline

Pluralistic: The Post-American Internet (01 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow #ccc #ai #law

Like I said at the start of this talk, I have been doing this work for 24 years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, throwing myself at a door that was double-locked and deadbolted, and now that door is open a crack and goddammit, I am hopeful.

Not optimistic. Fuck optimism! Optimism is the idea that things will get better no matter what we do. I know that what we do matters. Hope is the belief that if we can improve things, even in small ways, we can ascend the gradient toward the world we want, and attain higher vantage points from which new courses of action, invisible to us here at our lower elevation, will be revealed.

Hope is a discipline. It requires that you not give in to despair. So I'm here to tell you: don't despair.

NB: Hope is a discipline is a quote originally attributed to Mariame Kaba. I recently came across it and since then I have been seeing it everywhere. I think it's a pretty powerful statement.

2025-12-31

Raw Denim Tiers

Three Tiers Raw Denim #jeans #clothes

Since September, the only two pieces of bottomwear I have been wearing are a pair of raw denim Nudie jeans, and a pair of Japanese raw denim jeans custom stitched by Monks of Method in Bengaluru. I haven't even washed them yet, getting by with occasional application of a denim refresher.

Andrej Karpathy does a 180

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This is from year-end AI newsletter by The Information, and it made me chuckle.

2025-12-30

eSIM annoyance

I switched to eSIM in 2025, and I am full of regret - Ars Technica #phones #mobile

Most people won’t need to move their phone number very often, but the risk that your eSIM goes up in smoke when you do is very real. Compare that to a physical SIM card, which will virtually never fail unless you damage the card. Swapping that tiny bit of plastic takes a few seconds, and it never requires you to sit on hold with your carrier’s support agents or drive to a store. In short, a physical SIM is essentially foolproof, and eSIM is not.

Obviously, the solution is not to remove multifactor authentication—your phone number is, unfortunately, too important to be unguarded. However, carriers’ use of SMS to control account access is self-defeating and virtually guarantees people are going to have bad experiences in the era of eSIM. Enshittification has truly come for SIM cards.

This hits home as somebody who has three numbers I have to maintain across the three different countries I have bases in.

This bit in the end summarizes my feelings about technology enshittification nicely

We gave up the headphone jack. We gave up the microSD card. Is all this worthwhile to boost battery capacity by 8 percent? That’s a tough sell.

Book Recommendations on Learning Philosophies

Pedagogy Recommendations

The readings section here is interesting

Over the years I’ve accumulated a small list of books that I like to recommend:

Each one has the following important charactersitics:

  • Its content is research-based, not just opinion.
  • It is written in an accessible style, suitable for non-experts.
  • It provides actionable advice.
  • It’s fairly small.

Simply implementing a handful of key ideas (that are new to you) from these books will make you a much more effective educator.

In addition, I’ve also found these very useful and thought-provoking, though they are not as immediately actionable:

Books others have recommended:

  • How Learning Works: Eight Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching came recommended by Adam Shostack. I have read the first edition, which had seven principles. I thought it was both full of good research and had a lot of actionable feedback. I found some chapters weaker, and was annoyed by its boosterism for analogy without recognizing its problems. But these are minor issues; if this book appeals to you, go ahead!

and for computer scientists

Specifically for computer scientists, I have some very specific things you should read to gain perspective:

2025-12-27

AI and Programming - Hot Takes by Karpathy and Cherny

Andrej Karpathy broke AI Twitter the day after Christmas by tweeting that “never felt this much behind as a programmer.”

Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code piled on to say - “I feel this way most weeks tbh.” and went on - “The last month was my first month as an engineer that I didn’t open an IDE at all. Opus 4.5 wrote around 200 PRs, every single line. Software engineering is radically changing, and the hardest part even for early adopters and practitioners like us is to continue to re-adjust our expectations. And this is still just the beginning.”

The one redeeming thing about Boris Cherny's tweet was that it kicked off a thread where he gave out a lot of very specific tips in the thread on how the Claude Code team uses Claude Code to write code. Folks might miss it because it branches off the main thread from Karpathy. But there is some absolute gold stuff in there.

I had a bout of insomnia last night (for reasons unrelated to AI taking my job, I will add!) when I came across these tweets. I managed to get off my bed and opened Claude Code to hack on my side project, but mainly it was an excuse to try out some of the tips and techniques mentioned in the thread. I guess the hustle is real! 🙃

2025-12-25

Coffee Omakase

Coffee omakase is Japan’s love letter to caffeine

Italy brought us cappuccinos. Australia introduced the flat white. Cuba created the cafecito, and the Middle East, the qahwa.

Japan is bringing us coffee omakase.

In Japan, there are a number of cafes specializing in coffee omakase. Over the course of three days, I sampled four of them in a highly caffeinated journey through Tokyo and Kyoto. It evoked the dining experience associated with high-end sushi, placing you in the hands of an expert to curate and overwhelm your senses. (Omakase translates to “I’ll leave it up to you.”)

2025-12-22

Comfort Food for the Thinking Class

Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation #media

Wander into any bookstore (I dare you.) 

The non-fiction table will be all but dominated by the usual suspects: Malcolm Gladwell's latest exploration of how some counterintuitive thing is actually the opposite of what you'd expect, a David Brooks meditation on character and virtue, something by Michael Lewis about how one weird guy in an office somewhere figured out a thing that nobody else noticed. And you might find yourself thinking: these are the same books. Spiritually, structurally, thematically identical to the books these same men were writing in 2008. In 2003. In some cases, in 1997.

The Gladwell formula, if you haven't encountered it, goes something like this: take a subject that seems simple, complicate it with research that seems to undermine common sense, then resolve the tension with a tidy insight that flatters the reader's intelligence while confirming something they sort of already believed. The ten thousand hours rule. The tipping point. The power of snap judgments, except actually you should think more carefully, except actually your gut is right. It's intellectual comfort food, and there's nothing inherently wrong with comfort food, but we've been eating the same meal for two decades now and the chef keeps insisting he's serving something new.

This isn't about Malcolm Gladwell specifically, though he'll appear as a recurring character. 

It’s a broader problem.

Our collective intellectual culture seems to have calcified around a cohort of thinkers who achieved prominence roughly ten+ years ago and have been coasting ever since.

But I am uncomfortable with Substack as the default standard-bearer for independent thought.

The platform is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most powerful and connected venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. A16z's partners are as establishment as establishment gets: they sit on the boards of major tech companies, they socialize with senators and moguls and Donald Trump and his clan, they're regularly cited as visionary thinkers in the same airports bookstores where you find the Gladwell and Brooks titles. The idea that a platform funded by these people represents some kind of intellectual insurgency is, at minimum, in tension with the actual power dynamics at play.

I'm not suggesting there's some conspiracy here, that a16z is using Substack to promote certain viewpoints or suppress others. I don't think that's how it works, or at least it’s not how it works yet. The influence is more structural and subtle. Substack's investors want the platform to succeed, and success in the current media environment means attracting the kind of writers who can build large audiences. Large audiences, in the current environment, tend to come from a certain kind of content: culture war commentary, contrarianism that flatters particular demographics, lifestyle content for the professional class, and yes, the occasional original thinker who happens to be accessible enough to go viral.

The result is that Substack's version of independent thought looks suspiciously like the establishment thought it's supposed to be replacing, just with different political valences. Where the old establishment was center-left liberal, the Substack counter-establishment leans toward heterodox centrism that's critical of progressive excesses while being very careful not to threaten the tech industry or the investor class. Bari Weiss, one of Substack's highest-profile writers, is a perfect example. She positions herself as a brave truth-teller taking on the illiberal left, but her actual analysis rarely if ever questions the structural arrangements that benefit people in her social position. She's David Brooks in different packaging: iconoclasm that poses no threat to power, courage that risks nothing.

Indian coffee shops

India’s coffee shops are leveraging craft pastries - Coffee Intelligence #india #cafe

It's a bit nostalgic to read about Indian coffee shops where I spent a significant portion of my time before moving to Berlin.

India’s coffee market is forecast to double by 2030, with revenues from coffee shops rising at nearly twice the pace of their American counterparts – a sign of both growing affluence and an evolving urban palate. If coffee is the reason customers walk in, pastries are now the reason they stay and spend.

In wealthy economies, cafés once relied on their core product, anything ranging from a great cappuccino to an ethical supply chain or even a knack for latte art. Like in other emerging coffee markets – China for example – India skipped that era. As specialty – or at least premium – coffee leapfrogged from novelty to mainstream in major cities and even in small north Indian towns and cities, standing out required more than fresh-roasted beans and a V60 bar.

Chains like Blue Tokai helped build consumer literacy. But once a critical mass of urban Indians knew what a flat white was, the category became crowded and price-sensitive. Recent rising coffee prices also meant the premium and specialty coffee segment ran the risk of becoming too inaccessible. If everyone could serve decent coffee, differentiation had to come from elsewhere.

Enter the pastry revolution.

In a country that has leapt from instant coffee to specialty culture in a single generational stride, it is perhaps fitting that its cafés are no longer just places to drink coffee – but third spaces built to impress, taste and post.

It makes me a bit sad reading this, because it implies a cafe that exclusively focuses on providing top class coffee is not gonna make it in India. This also explains why it is extremely rare to find Indian coffee shops that serve international coffees, i.e. coffee brewed from beans across the world.

Performative Reading

The Curious Notoriety of “Performative Reading” | The New Yorker

Such an absolutist vision of individualism, however, undermines the systemic conditions that inform our relationship with the world, and ourselves. If we are to believe that the purpose of our lives is to unearth and express an authentic version of our true natures, we risk ignoring the myriad associations and forces that determine how we conceive of these premises in the first place. The philosopher Michel Foucault questioned this abiding belief that self-expression leads to liberation, advocating instead for an end to “all these forms of individuality, of subjectivity, of consciousness, of the ego, on which we have built and from which we have tried to build and to constitute knowledge.” Foucault argued that such idealism distracts the individual from grappling with, and critiquing, the power structures that lay claim to their actual freedoms—health care, reproductive rights, education, gender identity, and economic equality among them—which remain under the direction of a “biopower,” a term Foucault used to denote state and social institutions that organize and control a population.

In this view, the performative-reading phenomenon appears less like a newfangled way of calling people pretentious and more like an odious reflection of society’s increasing deprioritization of the written word. Reading a book is antithetical to scrolling; online platforms cannot replicate the slow, patient, and complex experience of reading a weighty novel. This is especially revealing because social media can replicate other art-consuming experiences for users: one could exclusively listen to music, look at visual art, or watch film clips via TikTok or Instagram and reasonably (if not depressingly) claim to have a relationship with these mediums—authentic relationships, fostered with the help of an app. The only way that an internet mind can understand a person reading a certain kind of book in public is through the prism of how it would appear on a feed: as a grotesquely performative posture, a false and self-flattering manipulation, or a desperate attempt to attract a romantic partner.

“Reading requires sitting alone, by yourself, in a quiet room,” he said in a 2003 interview. “I have friends, intelligent friends, who don’t like to read because they get—it’s not just bored. There’s an almost dread that comes up.” If our screens are adept at anything, it’s allaying this dread, convincing us to scroll until the loneliness goes away. Perhaps the performative reader is doing just that—performing, wielding a book for a perpetual, undying audience. Or maybe they’re leaning into the dread that Wallace spoke of, hoping to discover who they really are once the curtains close.

2025-12-18

The performative male

When did everything (and everyone) become so ‘performative’? | Dazed

This article is about "performativity" in general, but imo the best parts of it are a slick breakdown of the performative male.

The word “performative” has been thrown around in 2025, mostly to describe the “performative male”. The archetype of a performative male is a tote-bag-carrying, matcha-drinking, All About Love-reading man who curates his behaviours to attract women, using more “feminine” interests to lure them into a false sense of security. Appearing to look “not like other guys” while simultaneously acting exactly like other guys is an unfortunately common occurrence in heterosexual dating. Online, the idea of performative men took on a life of its own – there are performative male final boss starter packs, videos of men “performatively” reading and even performative male lookalike contests.

…

To understand how everything and everyone became “performative”, let us first track the emergence of the performative man. Dr Rauchberg says the performative male trend was a splintering of last year’s celebrity look-alike contests. Most of these look-alike contests centred around male celebrities, like Timothee Chalamet. As these contests grew in popularity and were replicated, they sparked a larger conversation around how masculinity is enacted. She calls performative men the “Gen Z hipsters”, sipping matcha lattes and reading dog-eared feminist paperbacks instead of falling into the violent confines of the manosphere. “When the only media representations you see either fault you (men are bad!) or push you into warped misogyny, the performative male is an ironic, playful response that pushes back at weaponised misogyny in media,” she says.

Thin and Thick Desires

Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life

The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package.

Social media gives you the feeling of social connection without the obligations of actual friendship.

Pornography gives you sexual satisfaction without the vulnerability of partnership.

Productivity apps give you the feeling of accomplishment without anything being accomplished.

In each case, the thin version is easier to deliver at scale, easier to monetize, and easier to make addictive.

The result is a diet of pure sensation.

And none of it seems to be making anyone happier.

The thick life doesn't scale.

That's the whole point.

So: bake bread.

The yeast doesn't care about your schedule.

The dough will rise when it rises, indifferent to your optimization.

You'll spend an afternoon doing something that cannot be made faster, producing something that you could have bought for four dollars, and in the process you'll recover some capacity for patience that the attention economy has been methodically stripping away.

Write a letter, by hand, on paper.

Send it through the mail.

The letter will take days to arrive and you won't be able to unsend it or edit it or track whether it was opened.

You're creating a communication that exists outside the logic of engagement metrics, a small artifact that refuses to be optimized.

Code a tool for exactly one person.

Solve your friend's specific problem with their specific workflow.

Build something that will never scale, never be monetized, never attract users.

The entire economy of software assumes that code should serve millions to justify its existence.

Making something for an audience of one is a beautiful heresy.

None of this will reverse the great thinning.

But I've started to suspect that the thick life might be worth pursuing anyway, on its own terms, without needing to become a movement.

2025-12-15

M.F. Husain Museum in Qatar

India’s best-known artist gets his own museum—in Qatar

Although he died 14 years ago, aged 95, M.F. Husain is India’s best-known modern artist. He recently became its most expensive, too: earlier this year one of his works sold at auction for $13.8m, a new record for an Indian painter. The opening of Lawh wa Qalam (The Canvas and the Pen) in Qatar adds one more item to Husain’s list of achievements, for it is the first museum outside India dedicated to a single Indian artist.

Why is the museum in Doha and not, say, Pandharpur, the town of Husain’s birth? The artist, who was Muslim, fell foul of Hindu nationalists, who claimed to be offended by his frequent depiction of Hindu goddesses in the nude. By the mid-2000s the harassment had become intolerable: death threats, vandalism of his artwork, an attack on his home by Hindu militants and an estimated 900 legal cases registered against him. He left India in 2006 and never returned, living between Dubai, Doha and London. “It is a sad day for India,” the editor of the Hindu, a newspaper, wrote at the time.

Mubi Podcast with creator of Jiro Dreams of Sushi

JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI... and David Gelb changes how people eat it

David Gelb changed how the world looked at food documentaries. I watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi not too long after it first came out. Over the years, I have also followed the numerous food documentaries (including Gelb's Chef's Table and it's various spinoffs and knockoffs) define an entire genre of documentary film-making.

This podcast was a nostalgic trip down memory lane and had some interesting insights on how the whole phenomenon began.

2025-12-12

Gyms in airports

The first study quoted in this post had 12 participants. They were all in their 20s.

Enough said! 🤷🏽‍♂️

#gym #airport

2025-12-11

Berluti Knot

Recently switched to this knot from the Parisian knot, and I am super happy with it 😊!

2025-12-10

MCP donated to Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF under the Linux Foundation

Donating the Model Context Protocol and establishing the Agentic AI Foundation \ Anthropic

The comments on the HN Post are brutal, and I suspect accurate.

Anthropic wants to ditch MCP and not be on the hook for it in the future -- but lots of enterprises haven't realized its a dumb, vibe coded standard that is missing so much. They need to hand the hot potato off to someone else.

MCP is overly complicated. I'd rather use something like https://utcp.io/

This sounds more like anthropic giving up on mcp than it does a good faith donation to open source.

Anthropic will move onto bigger projects and other teams/companies will be stuck with sunk cost fallacy to try and get mcp to work for them.

Good luck to everyone.

tbf I do believe MCP has its uses. It just hasnt lived up to its hype yet and it's complicated to implement in a remote scenario. Moreover, for local MCPs using stdio, you might as well use regular tool calls instead

The Best Philosophy Lectures

The Best Philosophy Lectures on YouTube

Great to see Ellie Anderson on there. She is one of my favorite philosophy YouTubers.

On Brainrot

On Brainrot #europe #twitter #misinformation

The conservative commentator Erick-Woods Erickson observed on his Substack this week that Twitter has now convinced large swaths of the American right that Europe has been completely overrun by Muslims, that the United Kingdom is on the verge of becoming an Islamic nation, and that Sweden has fallen.

But reality tells an entirely different story. Muslims make up less than eight percent of Sweden's population. Non-natives account for less than thirteen percent of Germany. There are problems, certainly, real ones that deserve serious attention, but the online discourse had inflated them into an existential civilizational collapse that simply isn't happening at the imagined (and much tweeted about) scale.

Erickson's broader point is about what - precisely - has happened to our discourse and our decision-making. The Trump administration, he argues, has been captured by people whose entire education, whose entire worldview, whose entire paradigm of reality itself has been gleaned from Twitter.

Erickson and I would likely disagree on 90% of the issues that come up on his podcast. But I think he's 100% on the money when it comes to this - our current epistemic disaster. He is quite accurately describing a phenomenon that has metastasized across the entire information ecosystem, across all political orientations, across geographic boundaries and cultural contexts.

We've entered the era of "brainrot" - though the term itself feels almost too glib // flippant for the scale of our cognitive and cultural crash out. Somewhere in the last decade and a half, something fundamental broke in how human beings process information, form beliefs, and engage with reality. We became a global fragmentation of doom scrolling, context-lacking, uncurious, blindly accepting, regurgitating masses.

2025-12-04

The 2025 archetype gift guide

Dazed has a very interesting set of gift guides - broken down by archetypes. Here are my personal favorites

2025-12-02

The Cost of Living

I was sitting in a Copenhagen cafe (Original Coffee Istegade to be exact) and they had a stack of Kinfolk magazines. I wanted to stay off any screens so I just started reading all the back issues one by one and stayed for the entire day.

This article especially caught my attention: The Cost of Living - Kinfolk

It's paywalled online and not availble in full. But here is a lovely quote from it.

The essential problem is much the same now as it was then: What we think we want, and what actually makes us happy are, in the end, not the same things. Thoreau’s solution is surprisingly practical and has the tone of an economics lecture rather than the pulpit. “The cost of a thing,” he writes, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” 

When we devote ourselves to our jobs and push ourselves to acquire the outward signs of success, we often vastly under-estimate the amount of “life-cost” we will pay to attain our goals. Once awoken to this cost, Thoreau saw it everywhere: the effort made to dress elegantly, curry favor among neighbors and business associates, the fear of insolvency. At one point he notes that most of his neighbors would rather appear in public with a broken leg than with patched trousers (“distressed” garments had yet to come into fashion).

"life-cost" is such an amazing concept.

The Philosophical Stance Against Having Children

The Growing Anti-Natalist Movement in Japan – SAPIENS

Many critics paint anti-natalism as a movement rejecting generational continuity and its followers as selfish, short-sighted, and nihilistic. Critiques of childlessness in general have only grown in tandem with rising pronatalist policies across the globe. Current U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, in a 2019 speech at a The American Conservative gala, implied the childless are “sociopaths” unmoored from the well-being of their “communities,” “families,” and “country.” Others have described them as “hedonists” chasing a life of pleasure. Philosopher Ben Ware compared anti-natalism to the folly of techno-utopianism for believing that it has found the solution to worldly suffering.

These critiques are unfair and either wholly inaccurate or overly simplified. Anti-natalists have a wide range of motivations, often related to the broader social, political, and economic circumstances that shape their understandings of reproductive choice, parenthood, and the future. Anti-natalist movements around the globe do not always agree with one another or share the same concerns.

2025-11-30

Career Minimalism

Career Minimalism: The Gen-Z Trend Rewriting Work-Life Balance | The Everygirl

“Career minimalism” is a growing workplace phenomenon that many Gen Z professionals are embracing in favor of sustainability, characterized by stable day jobs that offer healthy boundaries and a sense of stability, rather than a nonstop hustle.

Those who practice “career minimalism” don’t center their identities around their work, meaning they pursue passions, hobbies, and other interests outside of their day job for a more well-rounded identity. Essentially, their careers are a minor part of their lives and who they are, so they have more time and space to pursue other things that matter to them.

Some Gen Zers are leaning into another recent trend, “conscious unbossing”—the intentional decision to reject traditional leadership roles. While jobs in middle management may have previously been necessary stepping stones for forward career trajectories, Gen Z workers have had a front-row seat in witnessing their parents and their own direct managers burn out. Additionally, they’re considering whether they have the desire and skills to step into a management role, while weighing these factors against the level of anticipated stress.

These observations and shifts are leading to a collective feeling that what lies beyond working yourself to the bone (more money, more pressure) isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. For many, the rewards aren’t worth the chase, and practicing “career minimalism” helps them set these boundaries.

2025-11-29

Train Dreams

This was a visually stunning movie, with occasional thought-provoking dialogue from its wide cast of interesting character.

Some interesting dialogue (from the transcript):

Ain’t there any place in this world a man can get some peace?

[narrator] Those were the only words Grainier ever heard the man say. They remained with him always.

The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.

This valley is special. Used to all be under a glacier, you know? Three thousand feet of ice. When it broke, it just flooded the whole region. Carved out all these valleys. That’s where all those lakes come from. Can you imagine if you were back here then? This big block of ice, thousands of feet tall, and just the cracks and the freezing-cold water. It must have felt like the world was coming to an end. [Robert] Hmm. That’s where all those myths come from, you know? All those flood stories. All those different religions all over the world. It’s just the same story, different slants. Hey, I didn’t mean to be disrespectful to anything you believe or anything like that. I just, you know… No, no, no. I just find it fascinating. Can’t help it when I’m in a place like this. It’s just… [tender music playing] The world’s an old place. Yeah. Probably nothing it hasn’t seen by now.

Yeah. I lost my husband too, a little over a year ago. It took him a long time. And when it was over, it was like there was a… a hole in the world. I had more questions than answers, like no human had ever died before. [scoffs] When you go through something like that, nothing you do is crazy. You just go through what you go through.

In the forest, every least thing’s important. It’s all threaded together, so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins if you really look at it. The little insects you can’t even see, they play a role as vital as the river. [exhales sharply] The dead tree is as important as the living one. There must be something for us to learn from that. What if you got nothing left to give? Hmm? What then? Mmm… The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit. [Robert chuckles] [breathing shakily] [voice breaking] Yeah. Yeah. Is that what I am? A hermit? Well, I mean, I believe we both are, in our own ways. Just waiting to see what we’ve been left here for.

"no shoes" startups

I feel like I should put this as one of the criteria for companies I would love to work for, Might even turn out to be a good filter otherwise 🤷🏽‍♂️

2025-11-28

Breaking the long hiatus brought about by work travel, illness etc.

Oliver Burkeman on Interestingness

The Imperfectionist: Interest is everything

Perhaps the reason the idea of an “interesting” life feels like a cop-out – compared to, say, a wildly successful or influential or joyful one – is that it lacks any sense of domination or conquest. We want to feel as though we were handed the challenge of a human lifetime and that we nailed it, that we grappled with the problem and solved it. Whereas to follow the lead of interestingness is to accept that life isn’t a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had. And that engaging with it as fully as possible, connecting to the aliveness, is its ultimate point.

…“There’s a specific exhaustion,” observes the artist Dipa Halder, “that comes from constantly shape-shifting to fit what you think people want. I call it type 2 burnout. You’re not overworked, you’re just working against your own grain.”…

This is a very insightful point about AI

And by the way: I don’t think it’s a coincidence that interestingness is the very thing I feel falling away whenever I discover, or begin to suspect, that something I’m reading or watching was generated by artificial intelligence. It might continue to be impressive, or informative, but the flame that kept me fascinated sputters and dies. Which speaks to my point about the pursuit of your interests sparking the interest of others: once I realize the person who created the work wasn’t sufficiently interested to engage with it every step of the way, I can’t summon interest in the result, either. (And the AI certainly wasn’t interested in what it was producing; if there’s one human quality definitively lacking in an LLM, it’s the capacity to be interested in anything at all.)

2025-11-17

Summary of Four Thousand Weeks

Four Thousand Weeks #burkeman #books

Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks is one of the most influential books I have read in the last few months. This is a good summary that will hopefully encourage more folks to read the book.

2025-11-14

Corporate Nihilism

What will bring ambition back from the dead? - Two by Two by The Ken #workplace

“Nothing about work fazes me anymore. Absolutely nothing,” said a senior executive at a consumer-tech company who’s in his early forties. His financial comfort means: “Anything can happen and I don’t bat an eyelid. And I can’t remember ever feeling this way.” 

He didn’t say that to me, though.  

That quote is from Arundhati Ramanathan’s workplace vibe-shift story from just over two weeks ago, “Indian tech companies are spawning an ‘ambitionless’ generation.”

Arundhati called the prevailing mood “corporate nihilism.”

LinkedIn Meme

/images/linkedinmeme.png

Manifesting this in life.

Found via: Beast Land and Christiancore - After School by Casey Lewis

2025-11-13

Harsh realities of getting older

8 harsh realities about getting older that no one warns you about until it’s too late | Scandinavia Standard #aging #wisdom

This is the heaviest reality of all — and the most motivating.

There comes a point where you recognize that life is not a rehearsal. The choices you’ve made are real. The seasons you’ve lived through won’t return. The opportunities you missed don’t come back around.

But this realization isn’t meant to be depressing. It’s clarifying.

It pushes you to stop waiting for “later.” It forces you to stop living on autopilot. It encourages you to make decisions you’ve been avoiding.

Because once you accept that there’s no reset button, you start living more intentionally.