2025-05-30

The Lost Art of Deep Reading

The Humility of the Page: The Lost Ethics of Deep Reading #reading

This is not just a private loss. It is a civic one. Without the capacity to dwell in difference, to engage with arguments we do not agree with, or to follow a thread longer than 280 characters, we become intellectually and morally brittle. We lose the very qualities that democratic life depends upon: empathy, nuance, deliberation.

Deep reading, particularly of literature, philosophy, and reflective prose, offers not just insight, but rehearsal. It trains us in the moral dispositions that public life requires: attention, imagination, restraint. To give ourselves to a complex text is to practice the patience we need for one another. It is a rehearsal in understanding before judging, listening before reacting. This is not merely a virtue. It is a survival skill for pluralistic, tolerant society.

Beauty is Pain

Beauty is pain: The increasing masochism of self-optimisation | Dazed #beauty #feminism #culture

By now we’re all too familiar with the old adage ‘beauty is pain’. Traced back to at least 1800s France (‘il faut souffrir pour être belle’, or ‘one must suffer to be beautiful’), the phrase has been used for generations to justify the physical suffering many women endure to maintain society’s beauty standards. “If suffering is beauty and beauty is love, she cannot be sure she will be loved if she does not suffer”, as Naomi Wolf wrote in The Beauty Myth back in 1990, unpicking the ways a modern patriarchal society leverages beauty standards as a way to oppress women – even while gender equality grew in the eyes of the law.

We’ve seen this truth play out throughout history, through extreme grooming acts such as wearing corsets and fontanges, hairline plucking and foot binding, disordered eating, and surgeries. But it’s also embedded into the very standards themselves. Today’s trends for thinness – whether via Ozempic or #SkinnyTok – come with the same message as 00s heroin-chic, or the Victorian obsession with the aesthetics of tuberculosis. A malnourished body, a controlled and surveilled body, an addicted or diseased body – i.e. a body in pain – is an intrinsically feminine body, and a beautiful one at that.

Also learned a new term - mewing.

What if modern beauty standards aren’t so much a war between genders, but a symptom of a system that preys on human weaknesses? It was philosopher Michel Foucault’s 1975 essay “Discipline and Punish” that famously illuminated the state of the human body under capitalism. “The new discipline invades the body and seeks to regulate its very forces and operation, the economy and efficiency of its movements… to increase the utility of the body, to augment its forces,” he wrote. Today, the same rings true. In a recent interview on Joshua Citarella’s Doomscroll, Professor Quinn Slobodian explains how we live under neoliberal power that upholds a capitalist economy by prioritising marketability at all costs. To survive in such a climate, it’s necessary that we, as members of this society, consider ourselves as marketable goods too. Ones that are as strong, healthy, beautiful, and optimised as possible.

Under capitalism, the idea that we need to suffer at work to both achieve success and enjoy our lives is one that is driven home constantly, and the same is true for aesthetics; the more committed we are and the more we suffer to achieve them, the more we deserve them. Think of how we might believe that the more a skin treatment stings and burns, the more effective it must be. Labour is a good thing, under this view, and required of all of us to take part in the economy.

AI Browsers

The AI browser wars are about to begin #ai #browser

At this point after fully moving over to Arc, the biggest thing I want in a browser is the concept of Spaces.

Here are the AI browsers mentioned in the article: • Comet (by Perplexity) • Arc (by the Browser Company) • Neon (by Opera) • OpenAI's browser (in development)

The State of IaC

Screaming in the Cloud | The Latest State of IaC with Ido Neeman #iac #terraform

Hypernormalization

Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues. The dissonance is real | Well actually | The Guardian #hypernormalization #institutions

“Hypernormalization” is a heady, $10 word, but it captures the weird, dire atmosphere of the US in 2025.

First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.

The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.

“What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working … and yet the institutions and the people in power just are, like, ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has,” Harfoush says in her video.

Hypernormalization captures this juxtaposition of the dysfunctional and mundane.

Naming an experience can be a form of psychological relief. “The worst thing in the world is to feel that you’re the only one who feels this way and that you are going quietly mad and everyone else is in denial,” says Caroline Hickman, a psychotherapist and instructor at the University of Bath specializing in climate anxiety. “That terrifies people. It traumatizes people.”

People who feel the “wrongness” of current conditions acutely may be experiencing some depression and anxiety, but those feelings can be quite rational – not a symptom of poor mental health, alarmism or a lack of proper perspective, Hickman says.

“People don’t shut down because they don’t feel anything,” says Hickman. “They shut down because they feel too much.” Understanding this overwhelm is an important first step in resisting inaction – it helps us see fear as a trap.

Curtis points out that governments may intentionally keep their citizens in a vulnerable state of dread and confusion as “a brilliant way of managing a highly febrile and anxious society”, he says.

In 2014, Ursula Le Guin accepted the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, saying: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

Harfoush reflects on this quote often. It underscores the fact that “this world we’ve created is ultimately a choice”, she says. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

We have the research, technologies and wisdom to create better, more sustainable systems.

“But meaningful change requires collective awakening and decisive action,” says Harfoush. “And we need to start now.”

Longevity

How ‘longevity’ became the new buzzword in health #ageing

Hawkins says: “Those two things open up an interesting split in the longevity conversation. On the one hand you have this high-tech, science-driven approach where someone is actively throwing quite a lot of money and technology at understanding and optimising their own ageing process; and on the other, with the Blue Zones, it’s a radically back to basics approach to health. A lot of the reasons that we see people living longer in Blue Zones are really foundational things: like having strong community ties and eating relatively unprocessed diets.”

Where once people would brag about being “crazy busy” or pulling an all-nighter at work, now logging eight hours of sleep on your Oura ring score carries more cachet. There’s been such a culture shift that it seems extraordinary now that live fast, die young was ever considered a cool rock’n’roll mantra.

Hawkins says the Future Laboratory report was exploring “this idea that you and your quality of life are ultimately your greatest investment. It’s definitely a status symbol in that way. Perhaps in the future it won’t be so much about the designer hand bag, it’s more what treatments do you have access to, what means do you have to take control over your ageing.”

Anthropic and their focus on Coding AIs

Claude-powered coding tools are poised to transform programming #claude #code #ai #coding

An underrated AI story over the last year has been Anthropic’s success in the market for coding tools.

“We believe coding is extremely important,” said Anthropic engineer Sholto Douglas in an interview last week. “We care a lot about coding. We care a lot about measuring progress on coding. We think it’s the most important leading indicator of model capabilities.”

This focus has paid off. The company’s models have excelled at software engineering since last June’s release of Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Over the last year, a number of Claude-powered coding tools—including Cursor, Windsurf, Bolt.new, and Lovable—have enjoyed explosive growth. In February, Anthropic released a coding assistant called Claude Code that has become popular among programmers.

In media interviews, Anthropic employees have touted the extreme efficiency gains Claude has enabled for its own programmers.

For some reason they never mentioned Amp below.

Anthropic’s success in the coding market has gotten the attention of both OpenAI and Google:

• In early May, OpenAI announced it was acquiring Windsurf, an AI-powered code editing tool that had been powered by Anthropic models.
• The next week, OpenAI announced Codex, a coding agent designed to compete with Anthropic’s Claude Code.
• Last week Google announced its own coding agent called Jules.

The Four Phases of Institutional Collapse in the Age of AI

The Four Phases of Institutional Collapse in the Age of AI

I think it’s happening like this -

This isn’t a linear story arc or a roadmap of change etc, just a rough progression. These phases overlap, feed into each other, contradict themselves. But they help explain what’s going on right now. Why everything feels like it’s… eroding.

---

2025-05-29

The Inverse Catfish Method

What's The Opposite Of Catfishing? #beauty #gender #relationships

Allow me to introduce my signature online dating move: the Inverse Catfish Method.

Back when I was on the apps, I’d upload slightly _un_flattering photos of myself — an up-close, no-makeup selfie; a wide shot in a muumuu the size of a small circus tent — in an effort to meet men who weren’t primarily interested in looks. Bonus: In person, I exceeded all expectations! I’ve found love two, maybe even three times this way (the last one stuck) despite the fact that my skin, like yours, is marked by acne scars, visible pores and a smattering of old chicken pox pits (plus the burgeoning wrinkles of a woman ten years your senior).

If this makes me seem like I have some neurotic need to diminish myself before a man does it first, well… guilty as charged. After reading your question, Not A Catfish, I’d say we have this in common.

AI and Automation

Pluralistic: AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers (27 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow #ai #automation

Honestly the whole piece is worth reading -- it goes into the history of the Luddite movement, AI assisted coding, worker's rights etc

This is what makes investors and bosses slobber so hard for AI – a "productivity" boost that arises from taking away the bargaining power of workers so that they can be made to labor under worse conditions for less money. The efficiency gains of automation aren't just about using fewer workers to achieve the same output – it's about the fact that the workers you fire in this process can be used as a threat against the remaining workers: "Do your job and shut up or I'll fire you and give your job to one of your former colleagues who's now on the breadline."

So there are two stories about automation and labor: in the dominant narrative, workers are afraid of the automation that delivers benefits to all of us, stand in the way of progress, and get steamrollered for their own good, as well as ours. In the other narrative, workers are glad to have boring and dangerous parts of their work automated away and happy to produce more high-quality goods and services, and stand ready to assess and plan the rollout of new tools, and when workers object to automation, it's because they see automation being used to crush them and worsen the outputs they care about, at the expense of the customers they care for.

As has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, the project of automation isn't just about increasing productivity, it's about weakening labor power as a prelude to lowering quality. Take what's happened to the news industry, where mass layoffs are being offset by AI tools.

…consumers and workers are class allies in the automation wars. The point of using automation to weaken labor isn't just cheaper products – it's cheaper, defective products, inflicted on the unsuspecting and defenseless public who are no longer protected by workers' professionalism and pride in their jobs.

Love the description of centaurs vs reverse-centaur

In modern automation/labor theory, this debate is framed in terms of "centaurs" (humans who are assisted by technology) and "reverse-centaurs" (humans who are conscripted to assist technology):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

There are plenty of workers who are excited at the thought of using AI tools to relieve them of some drudgework. To the extent that these workers have power over their bosses and their working conditions, that excitement might well be justified. I hear a lot from programmers who work on their own projects about how nice it is to have a kind of hypertrophied macro system that can generate and tweak little automated tools on the fly so the humans can focus on the real, chewy challenges. Those workers are the centaurs, and it's no wonder that they're excited about improved tooling.

But the reverse-centaur version is a lot darker. The reverse-centaur coder is an assistant to the AI, charged with being a "human in the loop" who reviews the material that the AI produces. This is a pretty terrible job to have.

and an astute observation on the potentially waning power of the tech worker

Tech bosses tormented these workers but pampered their coders. That wasn't out of any sentimental attachment to tech workers. Rather, tech bosses were afraid of tech workers, because tech workers possess a rare set of skills that can be harnessed by tech firms to produce gigantic returns. Tech workers have historically been princes of labor, able to command high salaries and deferential treatment from their bosses (think of the amazing tech "campus" perks), because their scarcity gave them power.

It's easy to predict how tech bosses would treat tech workers if they could get away with it – just look how they treat workers they aren't afraid of. Just like the textile mill owners of the Industrial Revolution, the thing that excites tech bosses about AI is the possibility of cutting off a group of powerful workers at the knees. After all, it took more than a century for strong labor unions to match the power that the pre-Industrial Revolution guilds had. If AI can crush the power of tech workers, it might buy tech bosses a century of free rein to shift value from their workforce to their investors, while also doing away with pesky Tron-pilled workers who believe they have a moral obligation to "fight for the user."

…

When techies describe their experience of AI, it sometimes sounds like they're describing two completely different realities – and that's because they are. For workers with power and control, automation turns them into centaurs, who get to use AI tools to improve their work-lives. For workers whose power is waning, AI is a tool for reverse-centaurism, an electronic whip that pushes them to work at superhuman speeds. And when they fail, these workers become "moral crumple zones," absorbing the blame for the defective products their bosses pushed out in order to goose profits.

As ever, what a technology does pales in comparison to who it does it for and who it does it to.

On the Origin of Wealth

On the Origin of Wealth - by Rob Kurzban - Living Fossils #wealth #beliefs

We reset to the pre-fire days. A traveling guru arrives. Both charismatic and mischievous, he convinces the village that a comet will destroy the world in one week. Panic sets in. No one wants seed corn, let alone shovels anymore—what’s the point of planting if there’s no future? The farmer with the seed corn can’t get anyone to trade with him, making his seed useless. In fact, he stops bothering to protect his corn. Same for the shovel-maker. He can’t even give them away. Some people in the village who happened to have food around can still eat, but many people in the village have nothing left of value to trade. They are poorer. Now, the comet isn’t real. But the value—the wealth—disappears anyway. Even though the stuff is still there.

Now imagine the opposite: the comet is real. Hurtling toward Earth. But this time, no one knows. People go about their lives, bartering, farming, planning next year’s harvest. The value stays intact—right up to the fiery end.

From these hypotheticals, we see that while stuff matters, just as in the cases of power, property rights, and groups, the real hard candy shell of wealth is beliefs. The actual comet doesn’t destroy wealth until it arrives, but beliefs about the fictional comet blew up the economy.

AI Hype

Don’t Believe the AI Hype by Daron Acemoglu - Project Syndicate

First the AI Snake Oil guys and now this.

---

2025-05-28

The Who Cares Era | dansinker.com

In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.

In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.

At a time where the government's uncaring boot is pressing down on all of our necks, the best way to fight back is to care. Care loudly. Tell others. Get going.

As the culture of the Who Cares Era grinds towards the lowest common denominator, support those that are making real things. Listen to something with your full attention. Watch something with your phone in the other room. Read an actual paper magazine or a book.

Be yourself.

Be imperfect.

Be human.

Care.

Personal Software

RedwoodSDK is a React framework for Cloudflare #software #programming #hipster

We believe software can be personal again. Not just technically, but philosophically. Owned. Forkable. Shareable. Local. Beautiful. Built for use, not for scale. Built with love, not venture funding. Built for yourself - and maybe a few others. If this resonates with you, come join us. We're not just building a framework. We're building a future where software is yours again.

Adolescence

What “Adolescence” Gets Wrong About Incels, Crime, and Class #tv #incel

Despite its emotional impact, though, “Adolescence” is fiction widely misinterpreted as fact. The very aspects praised as realistic are, indeed, statistically improbable and misleading.

Shortly after watching the show, I spoke with William Costello, a PhD student at the University of Texas who is among the few researchers seriously studying the incel subculture. His findings complicate the simplistic narrative many viewers seem to believe “Adolescence” affirms.

The creators of “Adolescence” may have intentionally crafted an atypical narrative to highlight how rage and violence can appear unexpectedly. Ironically, some of the series’s admirers miss this nuance, mistaking a fictional tragedy for a representative one.

In doing so, they overlook uncomfortable truths about the causes of most violent crime, which are rooted less in online radicalization than in fractured families and offline peer dynamics.

“Adolescence” is a superb work of art. It should not be mistaken for reality.

The Copilot Delusion

The Copilot Delusion #copilot #ai #software #programming

The thing I hate the most about AI and it's ease of access; the slow, painful death of the hacker soul... Brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By buttons. By bots.

The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs. It’s that it will entice people who never wanted the job to begin with. People who don't care for quality. It'll remove the already tiny barrier to entry that at-least required people to try and comprehend control flow. Vampires with SaaS dreams and Web3 in their LinkedIn bio. Empty husks who see the terminal not as a frontier, but as a shovel for digging up VC money. They’ll drool over their GitHub Copilot like it’s the holy spirit of productivity, pumping out React CRUD like it’s oxygen. They'll fork VS Code yet again, just to sell the same dream to a similarly deluded kid.

There was once magic here. There was once madness.

Kids would stay up all night on IRC with bloodshot eyes, trying to render a cube in OpenGL without segfaulting their future. They cared. They would install Gentoo on a toaster just to see if it’d boot. They knew the smell of burnt voltage regulators and the exact line of assembly where Doom hit 10 FPS on their calculator. These were artists. They wrote code like jazz musicians - full of rage, precision, and divine chaos.

Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard, born to be great, is going to get told to "review this AI-generated patchset" for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin.

Because you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s the cruel joke. We’ll fill this industry with people who think they’re good, because their bot passed CI. They'll float through, confident, while the real ones - the hungry ones - get chewed up by a system that doesn’t value understanding anymore. Just output. Just tokens per second.

And what’s worse, we’ll normalize this mediocrity. Cement it in tooling. Turn it into a best practice. We'll enshrine this current bloated, sluggish, over-abstracted hellscape as the pinnacle of software. The idea that building something lean and wild and precise, or even squeezing every last drop of performance out of a system, will sound like folklore.

If that happens? If the last real programmers are drowned in a sea of button-clicking career-chasers - then I pity the smart outsider kids to come after me.

Defer your thinking to the bot, and we all rot.

How to be a great thinker

How to be a great thinker #intelligence

Most people are getting dumber. Largely because of the smartphone, we’re in an era of declining attention spans, reading skills, numeracy and verbal reasoning. How to buck the trend? I’ve charted seven intellectual habits of the best thinkers. True, these people exist in a different league from the rest of us. To use an analogy from computing, their high processing power allows them to crunch vast amounts of data from multiple domains. In other words, they have intellectual overcapacity. Still, we can learn from their methods. These can sound obvious, but few people live by them.

1. Read books: Books convey the nuanced complexity of the world.
2. Don’t use screens much: This frees time for books and allows the mind to roam.
3. Do your own work, not the world’s: Focus on personal intellectual freedom rather than maximizing income.
4. Be multidisciplinary: Break down barriers between disciplines to foster innovative thinking.
5. Be an empiricist who values ideas: Prioritize empirical observations and insights.
6. Always assume you might be wrong: Challenge your own assumptions to reach deeper insights.
7. Keep learning from everyone: Embrace lifelong learning and insights from all individuals, regardless of status.

Also loved this story about Isaiah Berlin

In March 1944, Isaiah Berlin returned from Washington to London on a bomber plane. He had to wear an oxygen mask all flight, wasn’t allowed to sleep for fear he would suffocate, and couldn’t read as there was no light. “One was therefore reduced to a most terrible thing,” he recalled, “to having to think — and I had to think for about seven or eight hours in this bomber.” During this long interstitial moment, Berlin decided to become an historian of ideas. He ended up writing the classic essays The Hedgehog and the Fox and Two Concepts of Liberty.

---

2025-05-25

Entry-level tech hiring

Entry-level tech hiring is down 50%. So much for that diploma #tech #software #hiring

Not sure how long this will endure, but it makes for grim reading.

(Also I can't quote from it for some reason)

Silicon Valley Used to Idolize Youth. AI Is Changing That. - Business Insider

This isn't just an economic or technical evolution, it's a cultural one. Where Silicon Valley once idolized youth, today's market prizes proven execution. Risk tolerance has dropped across the startup ecosystem, and with venture capital funding tightening, founders are hesitant to invest in long-term potential over short-term impact.

Interestingly, this has opened the door for more seasoned professionals. While C-suite hiring has also slowed, companies are increasingly turning to "fractional" roles — part-time CTOs, CMOs, and advisors — to access senior talent without inflating their burn rate, according to SignalFire.

Dumb Phones

Is America Headed for an Age of Dumb Phones? - Business Insider #tech #dumb

Matt Thurmond seems like a poster child for tech-forward millennials. He runs an AI-assisted platform for mortgage professionals. He leads a nonprofit that connects longevity researchers, investors, and startups. He was the copresident of a technology conference at Harvard, where he got his MBA.

So it's a little surprising that Thurmond is almost never on his phone.

Count him among the "appstinent" — one of a growing number of Americans, mostly millennials and Zoomers, vowing to live a life free of endless scrolling. "Screen time was just crowding out other things," says Thurmond, who's 41. "That's not where I want to get my entertainment, and it's not really where I want to have any substantive conversation. I prefer to do that kind of stuff in the analog world."

"Appstinence," a play on abstinence, was coined by Gabriela Nguyen, a 24-year-old graduate student at Harvard. Nguyen, who grew up in Silicon Valley and got her first iPod Touch when she was 9, came to view her addiction to phones and social media as the enemy of productivity and living in the moment. She found her calling in encouraging people to wean themselves off their phones. Last year, she started a club called APPstinence at Harvard and launched a website of the same name.

---

2025-05-22

The Era of the Business Idiot

The Era Of The Business Idiot #neoliberalism #manager #workers #shareholder #value

This looong 13000 piece is worth reading in full. But this quote stood out for me

We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work. Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don't experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.

---

2025-05-21

Preferences on Dating Apps

‘Swipe left if you’re under 6ft’: Why are we so obsessed with height? | Dazed #dating #height

Plus, there’s often a gap between people’s self-reported preferences and their actual desires. Or, in other words, there’s a difference between what people say they want on dating apps and what really attracts them in real life. “Dating apps encourage trait-based decisions: users rely on profile details and photos, making choices based on abstract concepts. By contrast, offline attraction is holistic and dynamic, involving nonverbal cues, synchrony, and how someone makes you feel,” Dr Jackson explains.

“In real life, we’re drawn to things like how someone moves, how they listen or make us laugh, their energy, presence, and charisma,” he continues. “These are what we call ‘affective cues’ – these cues play a big role in forming real-world attraction, but they’re almost entirely absent online, where we judge people from a few photos. In person, we also tend to become more forgiving and open once we’ve formed a sense of someone’s warmth, humour, or kindness.” He adds that research shows physical appearance matters less and less over time in ongoing relationships, once deeper emotional bonds have begun to form.

This is one of the myriad issues with online dating: apps inhibit our ability to be curious and imaginative about what we might want. They expect us to possess an unrealistic level of self-knowledge about all of our desires, as if desire is fixed and immutable rather than fluid and ever-changing. But we don’t have to play by apps’ rules – disengaging from rigid ideas about physical ‘types’ and fostering open-mindedness remains our best bet when it comes to finding lasting love.

---

2025-05-19

What is HDR

What is HDR, anyway?

Your modern phone's camera first captures a series of photos at various brightness levels, like we showed a moment ago. From this burst of photos, the app calculates an HDR image, but unlike that commercial software from earlier, it uses complex logic and AI to make the tone mapping choices for you.

Apple and Google called this stuff "HDR" because "HDR Construction Followed By Automatic Tone Mapping" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. But just to be clear, the HDR added to the iPhone in 2010 was not HDR. The final JPEG was an SDR image that tries to replicate what you saw with your eyes. Maybe they should have called it "Fake HDR Mode."

In the age of film negatives, photography was a three step process.

1. Capture a scene on film
2. Develop the film in a lab
3. Transfer the film to paper

It's important to break down these steps because— plot twist— film is actually a high dynamic range medium. You just lose the dynamic range when you transfer your photo from a negative to paper. So in the age before Photoshop, master photographers would "dodge and burn" photos to preserve details during the transfer.

---

2025-05-18

The good times in tech are over | sean goedecke #tech #programming #software #jobs

In the 2010s, interest rates were zero or close to zero2. Investors could thus borrow a lot of money. Much of that money was spent on tech companies in the hope of outsized returns. Tech companies were thus incentivized to (a) hire like crazy, and (b) do a lot of low-risk high-reward things, even if that ends up wasting money. Tech companies definitely did not have to be profitable. In fact, they didn’t even need to make money - they just had to acquire users, or at least hype, to drive up the valuation of the company itself. In that environment, throwing money at their software engineers (in the form of paid trips, in-house chefs, and huge comp packages) was a sensible business decision.

In 2023, this underlying economic situation reversed: interest rates went up to around 5%3. Tech company incentives completely flipped: now it’s suddenly important to be profitable, or at least to make lots of money. That means it’s not wise for most companies to hire like crazy, or to continue throwing near-unlimited amounts of money at their software engineers.

The biggest thing to internalize is that companies now are actually trying to focus. In 2015, there was a lot of appetite to do everything at the same time: building out new product lines, transitioning from a product to a platform, making significant open-source contributions, working on a top-tier developer experience, and so on. In 2025, most of these initiatives have been abruptly defunded in order to put more resources into a handful of bets that the company executives actually care about.

During the 2010s, it was as if companies were their software engineers, and were interested in the same things as their engineers were. A lot of engineers were fooled by this into identifying strongly with their employer. But this was a mirage: in part caused by companies’ desire to attract and retain talent, and in part by there being no real pressure on companies to say no to anything. Now the mirage has vanished. Companies are their executive leadership, and their executive leadership are interested in a much smaller set of things.

If I had to choose, I’d definitely choose to return to the job market of the 2010s, so I can be paid more to work less and have more job security. I’m not an idiot. But the silver lining to actually having to ship is that you’re no longer living in a dream. If you’re realistic about how things work, the job of software engineering becomes much easier to understand:

1. Providing value to the company gets you rewarded
2. Not providing value to the company gets you punished
3. “Value to the company” means furthering the explicit plans of your company’s executives

It’s not much of a mission statement! Certainly nothing on “making the world a better place”. But it has the comforting solidity of the truth. The good thing about the music finally stopping is that you don’t have to worry about when it’s going to stop.

Liquid Content

The Dawn of Liquid Content - by Ryan Khurana

In our world, AI is obliterating the boundaries between forms altogether.

Welcome to the age of Liquid Content—where information flows seamlessly between mediums, transforming its shape while preserving its essence. What was once fixed—text, audio, video—now exists in a state of perpetual potential, ready to materialize in whatever form serves the moment. To understand where Liquid Content will take us, we need only to look at how it has already transformed how we comprehend information.

On TikTok, a video’s format – short, vertical, often overlaid with text – is key to its addictive appeal. A striking example is the prevalence of AI-enabled dynamic transcript overlays (auto-captions and text snippets that appear in sync with speech). By presenting spoken words as on-screen text, TikTok videos manage to grip viewers even with the sound off – something traditional digital media formats failed to do. The result? Higher engagement and retention. In fact, surveys have found that 80% of viewers are more likely to watch an entire video when captions are on, and 37% say captions actually encourage them to turn the sound on out of increased interest.

If TikTok and Spotify show medium shifts in action, AI-powered multimodality represents something far more radical: the complete liberation of content from form. We're not just talking about converting text to speech—we're entering an era where content exists as pure information potential, ready to materialize in whatever medium best serves the moment.

This isn't just flexible content; it's Liquid Content—a paradigm where information flows into the vessel most appropriate for context, user, and purpose.

Breathwork

I was sceptical about breathwork so I did my own research | Psyche Ideas #health #wellness

It all started when I heard about a landmark scientific paper that involved the ‘Ice Man’ Wim Hof training a group of volunteers in a specific breathing technique, and comparing their outcomes with a control group. Earlier, all the volunteers had been injected with a bacterial endotoxin; the results of the breathwork experiment suggested that the Hof group had been able to use controlled breathing to influence their autonomic nervous system, and subsequently their immune response to the toxin.

breathwork techniques

Breathwork is both ancient and contemporary. ‘Breath’ translates as spirit in Latin: spiritus. Derived from practices such as yogic pranayama (prana = life-giving force; ayama = extension or expansion) and Tibetan tummo (‘inner fire’) meditation, it encompasses diverse techniques that regulate breathing patterns to influence physical, mental and emotional states. Techniques range from slow, meditative-like breathing (such as coherent breathing, and nadi shodhana, which is alternate nostril breathing) to faster, high-ventilation styles (such as Hof’s hyperventilation with breath holds, and Stanislav Grof’s holotropic breathwork, which involves engaging in very deep breathing for up to three hours at a time).

Other notable techniques include ujjayi breathing and kapalabhati. Ujjayi or ‘ocean breath’ is a soft, whispering breath that can enhance and complement both focus and steadiness, especially while practising movement/yoga. It involves breathing with a slight constriction in your throat, creating a sound like gentle ocean waves. Kapalabhati or ‘skull shining breath’ is a cleansing, high-ventilation practice that involves pumping the navel to produce forceful exhales, with passive inhales due to recoil of the lungs. It may improve mental clarity.

Unlike many wellness trends that come and go, breathwork – similar to meditation and yoga – is grounded in millennia of human experience. However, breathwork’s claims often outpace rigorous scientific validation, so I completely understand the scepticism. Early in my journey, I too questioned whether controlled breathing could truly influence wellbeing. In fact, it’s part of what motivated me to begin my doctoral research, titled Does Breathwork Work? An Empirical Evaluation of the Hype (2008).

Living without a higher purpose

We can live well, even though we don’t have a higher purpose | Psyche Ideas #purpose #life #self-improvement

In her fiction and theory, Le Guin rejects both nihilism and optimism on the grounds that both defer to a ‘higher purpose’. For her, living without a higher purpose means assuming a few things:

• There is no deity or force in the Universe with a specific plan for our life.
• How society is currently organised is not inevitable; the hierarchies we are born into can be changed.
• We have no specific biological nature that has preprogrammed what it is to be human.
• The people who raised us and the things we’ve been subjected to do not dictate our life’s path.

The Anti-Tech Canon - Books

The Anti-Tech Canon: 30 Books - by Ted Gioia #books #humanities

Back in 2024, I felt an urgent need to challenge the new doctrine of techno-optimism. This ideology told people to shut up and keep scrolling.

Silicon Valley would build utopia for us. We just needed to stare into those tiny screens 24/7, download all the apps, and upload all our private information.

They would do all the rest.

Around that time, some tech leaders started sharing reading lists. These were mostly filled with garbage books—banal pop psychology, sycophantic tech bro bios, and padded ‘big idea’ screeds churned out by Gladwell-ish gladhanders.

I found this alarming. I don’t tell these people what to code. Why were they telling me what to read?

Let me be blunt: You won’t learn about those better books from tech CEOs. Many of them are very smart—I spent 25 years in Silicon Valley and know that from firsthand experience. But right now the tech world needs an infusion of humanistic thinking and a larger cultural perspective.

And that’s not something that Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Tim Cook can deliver.

You need to go outside the tech echo chamber to find this larger wisdom. I’m talking about the real thing—holistic and healing and with the deepest of roots.

There is no app for this.

I have now updated and expanded that reading list. And I’ve also removed it from behind the paywall where it has been hidden from view.

• Shakespeare's final play: A celebration of imagination, harmony, and reconciliation.
• Dr. Frankenstein: The responsibilities of the technocrat and the price of innovation.
• Ruskin's The Nature of Gothic: A critique of organizations from a human standpoint.
• Ruskin's Unto This Last: An ethical perspective on economics.
• Dickens' Hard Times: Compassionate reform in the face of industrialization.
• Thoreau's Walden: A contemplative life in nature.
• Mann's The Magic Mountain: The limitations of the technocrat worldview.
• Ortega's The Dehumanization of Art: The relevance of human elements in art.
• Huxley's Brave New World: The dangers of addiction and distraction.
• Huizinga's Homo Ludens: The importance of playfulness in human life.
• Orwell's 1984: A critique of surveillance and authoritarianism.
• Weil's The Need for Roots: The implications of uprootedness in society.
• Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology: A philosophical critique of technology.
• Arendt's The Human Condition: A playbook for a creative, purposeful life.
• Leavis and Snow's debate: The value of tech versus humanities.
• Herbert's Dune: Themes of power and ecological exploitation.
• Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: Dystopian views on human and machine boundaries.
• Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Insights on technology and society.
• Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: Flourishing in nature without digital interfaces.
• Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The evolution of power and surveillance.
• Gaddis' JR: A postmodernist view on reality and business.
• Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation: The critique of hyperreality.
• Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: The dangers of screen-driven culture.
• Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go: Nurturing empathy in a tech-driven world.
• McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary: The risks of a left-brain dominated worldview.
• Feyerabend's Against Method: A plea for a pluralistic approach to science.
• Han's The Burnout Society: The impact of multitasking on mental health.
• Wulf's The Invention of Nature: The Romantic movement's influence on culture.
• Taylor's Philosopher of the Arts: The importance of arts in realizing a fulfilling life.

Tariff Drama as Kayfabe

WWEconomics: Kayfabe and the Trade War - by kyla scanlon

We’re increasingly watching a simulacrum of politics, a simulation where the real consequences of a trade deal or a policy shift are overshadowed by the perceived drama. Because of this, the true effects of the trade deal, the policy changes, and the corporate maneuvers are obscured by the illusion of political engagement. The focus on tariffs keeps the spotlight on symbolic victories, while deeper, structural issues like worker retraining and investment in future industries remain sidelined.

In professional wrestling, everyone knows the outcomes are predetermined. The championship belts change hands according to storylines written in advance.

The show will continue because the incentives align: politicians get attention, corporations get deals, and algorithms get engagement, whatever. As Barthes pointed out, wrestling is about symbolic conflict - not real violence. The same could be said for the trade war. The real fight is happening behind the scenes, where the deals are made. In the end, both wrestlers leave the ring richer, the audience leaves poorer, and the kayfabe continues.

---

2025-05-17

Tehran's Cafe Culture

Tehran adopts modern café society #tehran #iran #cafe #culture

Cafe culture is the best.

At the heart of the transformation is the rise of trendy new cafés, driven by the demands of a young, educated population that may not have significant wealth but has an undeniable passion for socialising in different spaces and feeling connected to global trends.

In Tehran and other major cities here, café culture has exploded. Although there’s still much ground to cover and quality to improve, this culinary upheaval is as much about reclaiming identity as it is about embracing the rest of the world.

“Everybody is creating cracks in the wall of fanaticism, even those linked to the political system, whether they’re aware of it or not,” said one person in the sector. “Look at how alive the city is at a very difficult time. And this is thanks to these cafés, theatres and art galleries.”

---

2025-05-16

Navigating by aliveness

The Imperfectionist: Navigating by aliveness

from Oliver Burkeman's latest

The concept that sits right at the heart of a sane and meaningful life, I’m increasingly convinced, is something like aliveness. It goes by other names, too, none of which quite nail it – but it’s the one thing that, so long as you navigate by it, you’ll never go too far wrong. Sometimes it feels like a subtle electrical charge behind what’s happening, or a mildly heightened sense of clarity, or sometimes like nothing I can put into words at all. I freely concede it’s a hopelessly unscientific idea. But I’m pretty sure it’s what Joseph Campbell meant when he said that most of us aren’t really seeking the meaning of life, but rather “an experience of being alive… so that we actually feel the rapture” – although personally I don’t think it’s always rapturous, per se – “of being alive.”

feeling better vs feeling better.

Crucially, aliveness isn’t the same as happiness. As the Zen teacher Christian Dillo explains in his engrossing book The Path of Aliveness, you can absolutely feel alive in the midst of intense sadness. Aliveness, he writes, “isn’t about feeling better; it’s about feeling better.” When I feel aliveness in my work, it’s not because every task is an unadulterated pleasure; and when I feel it in my close relationships, it’s not because I’ve transcended the capacity to get annoyed by other people – because believe me, I haven’t.

I love how this newsletter managed to squeeze in commentary about large language models

Most obviously, aliveness is what generally feels absent from the written and visual outputs of ChatGPT and its ilk, even when they’re otherwise of high quality. I’m not claiming I couldn’t be fooled into thinking AI writing or art was made by a human (I’m sure I already have been); but that when I realise something’s AI, either because it’s blindingly obvious or when I find out, it no longer feels so alive to me. And that this change in my feelings about it isn’t irrelevant: that it means something.

Meanwhile, aliveness is certainly missing from the future envisioned recently by Mark Zuckerberg, in which the loneliness epidemic will be somehow alleviated by artificial friends – a gang of pals who are always there for you, in every respect, except for the fact that they lack the capacity to know that you even exist.

More subtly, it feels like our own aliveness is what’s at stake when we’re urged to get better at prompting LLMs to provide the most useful responses. Maybe that’s a necessary modern skill; but still, the fact is that we’re being asked to think less like ourselves and more like our tools. It makes you wonder if Wendell Berry had it right when he wrote: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

The Global Matcha Boom

Matcha TikTok Craze Has Japan Facing Tea Shortage, Raising Prices - Bloomberg #matcha #economics

Matcha’s delicate supply chain is partly culpable for the shortage. The powder is made from ground-up shade-grown tea leaves, known as tencha, that are usually harvested once a year. Although tencha production is on the rise, Japan's tea industry as a whole is grappling with an aging population and a lack of successors willing to take over. To meet global demand, the government is considering measures to encourage more farmers to shift production toward tencha away from other forms of green tea.

Also form this podcast transcript: Japan Matcha Shortage: TikTok Craze, Tourism Boom Drive Demand - Bloomberg

Ha: While Japanese have been drinking less green tea over the years – outside of Japan, the appetite for matcha is expanding. Cafes and tea stores as far as Sydney in Australia, have seen sales skyrocket, forcing owners to limit customer purchases because they’re unable to source more of the tea powder from Japan. After the break, why can’t Japanese tea producers just… make more matcha?

Ha: Growing fine quality matcha has a lot to do with the land and the climate. The plant needs to be shaded. The soil needs to drain well, but also retain a decent amount of water. And while matcha is produced in a variety of regions in Japan, there’s one particular place renowned for this highly-prized tea.

Glass: So the most famous region is Uji, which is on the southeast border of Kyoto. And that's where matcha farmers have mastered techniques of growing and harvesting the best matcha, and they've been doing this for centuries.

Ha: So that does sound like a long and arduous process – but certainly not impossible, right? Why can’t supply just keep up with the demand?

Glass: Yeah, so the whole process that I just described, it only happens once a year for the most premium types of matcha, so farmers can't harvest more on demand. The annual supply is usually determined well in advance. And it's obviously a really slow, precise process as well. So the traditional stone mills only grind about 40 grams of matcha per hour. And specialized matcha processing machines are super limited in number. So increasing production speed would definitely compromise the quality of the matcha. And also a lot of these types of produce are pretty much made by family-run businesses in Japan, and obviously Japan has a declining population, it's aging, and there's not enough people to take over those farms in the future, so there's really just a decline in supply for that reason as well.

Levered 401(k)

Mortgage Your 401(k) - Bloomberg #finance #investment

From the latest Money Stuff newsletter by Matt Levine

A levered 401(k) is 👨🏽‍🍳😘

What percentage of her net worth should a 30-year-old professional have in the stock market? I am not going to give you investment advice, and there is a wide range of plausible answers. “Zero, put it all in Bitcoin” is I guess on the list. A popular rule of thumb would say 70% in stocks, with the other 30% in bonds and cash. There is, however, a good theoretical case that the right answer is really 200%, or 500%: Most of a young professional’s economic wealth is the present value of her future employment income, and borrowing money to buy more stocks is a good way to diversify away from that one risky asset. Also many 30-year-old professionals buy houses for considerably more than 200% of their net worth, and putting 200% of their net worth into the stock market could again be useful diversification.

But it is not easy to put 200% of your net worth into the stock market, because where will you get the money? A mortgage on a house is a pretty standard product in the US, but a mortgage on a retirement account is not. Bloomberg’s Suzanne Woolley reports on someone trying to change that:

The Biggest Dating App Faux Pas for Gen Z? Being Cringe

The Biggest Dating App Faux Pas for Gen Z? Being Cringe | WIRED

When it comes to online dating, Giovanni Wolfram, a 25-year-old living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, isn’t all too worried about whether his fellow dating app users will find him attractive. Rather, his biggest fear is that he might come off as “cringey.”

“You can get away with being ugly,” Wolfram says. “But being cringey is just like—that's a character that's imprinted on you.” Since he first joined Hinge at 18, he has worked hard to scrub his profile of sincerity. He’s kept his responses to Hinge’s prompts sarcastic and ironic, sort of as a litmus test. Some people take his snark seriously, but those people don’t get a response from him.

“Intellectually, I’m really all about sincerity and earnestness,” says Wolfram, but he worries about “being perceived as one of those guys who is too earnest and too sincere.”

Sincerity, earnestness, irony-free declarations of contentment—these are all things many young adults edit out of their online personas. Much of what Gen Z considers “cringe” might strike others simply as directness and honesty, but one generation’s authenticity is another’s red flag. Young adults’ tendencies toward lightheartedness and jokes in their online self-presentation may point to the way many of them are dealing with feelings of vulnerability and disillusionment.

Wolfram finds millennials’ sincerity “revolting.” He points to how they respond to dating app prompts in the way they’re intended to be responded to. If the prompt asks the user to share their likes, for example, he often sees millennials “write two paragraphs of lists of everything that they actually like,” he says. “It’s very confusing.”

---

2025-05-15

The Economy A User's Guide No 2

The Economy: A User's Guide | No.2: Human Natures - YouTube

Here's a comprehensive, section-by-section summary of Part 2 of Brett Scott’s podcast series (co-produced with Lanley Chase). This installment examines human nature and its influence on economic ideologies, contrasting the narrow economic conception of humans with a broader, multifaceted perspective. It also introduces key frameworks from economic anthropology.

1. Introduction

• Host: Brett Scott, author of Cloud Money and The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance.
• Series overview: A 7-part exploration of the modern economy and capitalism.
• This episode (Part 2): Focuses on human nature and how narrow views of it shape economic systems.

2. The Debate Around Human Nature

• Philosophers and economists have long debated whether humans are selfish, altruistic, rational, etc.

• Economics' dominant model: Homo economicus — a portrayal of humans as rational, self-interested, optimization-driven agents.

• Critics argue this model is:

  • Inaccurate.
  • Self-fulfilling: people may begin acting selfishly if they’re told that’s “human nature.”
  • Used to justify exploitation.

Quote: “Rather than us trying to disprove homo economicus, it's actually much more effective to... argue that we as human beings are in fact multifaceted.”

3. A Spectrum of Human Natures

Scott introduces a spectrum of human archetypes to challenge the singular focus on homo economicus. These represent different facets of the human experience:

• Homo economicus – Maximizes, optimizes, accumulates.
• Homo adventurous – Seeks adventure and thrill.
• Homo comunus – Desires connection and love.
• Homo cogitans – Reflects, analyzes.
• Homo absurdum – Enjoys playfulness and absurdity.
• Homo reverens – Approaches life with seriousness and awe.
• Homo meditari – Craves emptiness and simplicity.
• Homo ecologicus – Feels connected to nature.
• Homo expressio – Desires creative expression.
• Homo shamanicus – Yearns for mystical, non-rational experiences.
• Homo eroticus – Explores intimacy and relational dynamics.
• Homo fusion – Wants to dissolve into group identity.
• Homo inandi – Seeks dominance and control.
• Homo protectorus – Protects others from harm or domination.
• Homo activusmos – Feels injustice and seeks to right it.

Quote: “We are a whole spectrum of human natures at once... but we're seldom ever taught to think of ourselves like this.”

4. How Ideologies Cherry-Pick Human Traits

Different political and economic ideologies isolate one facet of human nature and treat it as the whole truth:

• Hippie culture → Love-centered human nature → Eco-villages, communes.
• Far-right culture → Domination and fear → Nationalism, protectionism, libertarianism.
• Communism → Cooperative nature → Collective ownership and central planning.

These simplified identities shape corresponding economic visions.

5. Neoliberalism and Homo Economicus

• Neoliberalism (post-1980s) elevates homo economicus through deregulation, free markets, and corporate capitalism.
• Common cultural imagery: Thatcher, Reagan, Wall Street, and the ethos of “greed is good.”
• While economists acknowledge competitive traits, they wrongly treat them as definitive.
• Even cooperation is sometimes re-explained through self-interest.

Quote: “Much like we have five senses... economic life has multiple different logics that coexist.”

6. Economic Anthropology: A Broader Lens

Scott introduces anthropologist David Graeber’s work (Debt: The First 5000 Years) to explain that real economies operate under multiple moral principles simultaneously, not just market exchange.

#The Three Moral Principles in Economies:

1. Everyday Communism

   • Helping others based on need and capacity, without expecting anything in return.
   • Examples: Giving directions, helping someone in distress.

2. Reciprocity

   • Equal relationships balanced through mutual exchange.
   • Examples: Trading goods, friends cooking for each other.

3. Hierarchy

   • Power/status determines who gives and receives, without expectation of reciprocity.
   • Examples: Kings distributing gifts, bosses treating employees to dinner.

These principles often intersect in complex ways.

7. Real-Life Examples of Moral Principles Intersecting

• Narco gangs: Distribute groceries (everyday communism), build loyalty and status (hierarchy), funded by exchange-based drug trade (reciprocity).

• Helping a homeless person with food: Everyday communism.

• Friend makes you dinner: Reciprocity.

• Boss buys team dinner: Hierarchy.

• Airport queue scenarios:

  • If you're not in a rush, you might let a late passenger go ahead → Everyday communism.
  • If you’re equally stressed, their cutting ahead feels unjust → Reciprocity.
  • If a guard tells everyone to let a disabled person pass → Hierarchy + Communism.

Quote: “Capitalist economies foreground reciprocal exchange... but hierarchy and everyday communism abound in the cracks.”

8. Conclusion and Transition

• Modern capitalism is complex and mixes these moral principles.
• Most people struggle to define capitalism clearly because they are immersed in it.
• Economic anthropology helps us understand what came before capitalism and how alternatives once operated.
• Next episode: A look at pre-capitalist systems and how capitalism emerged by displacing them.

Quote: “Much like a fish cannot get enough distance from water to see it clearly... we often can't get enough distance from our system to observe it properly.”

Actionable Takeaways

• Question singular views of human nature in economics and politics.
• Reflect on your own interactions: Are they governed by exchange, generosity, or hierarchy?
• Explore anthropological works (e.g., Graeber’s Debt) to understand diverse economic systems.
• Be cautious of ideologies that simplify humanity to one trait or motive.

Let me know if you'd like a visual reference sheet of the different "homo" archetypes or the three economic moral principles.

The Best Advice I’ve Ever Heard for How to Be Happy

The Best Advice I’ve Ever Heard for How to Be Happy - The New York Times #happiness #self-help

• Start a weird ritual
• Hang out with younger people
• Spread “positive gossip.”
• Do a “mini version” of your favorite vacation activity.
• Cherish the everyday.
• Set up an “emotional first-aid kit.”
• Savor life like an astronaut.
• Listen to Cher.

Database School: Cloudflare Durable Objects

How Durable Objects and D1 Work: A Deep Dive with Cloudflare’s Josh Howard - YouTube #cloudflare #storage #durable

I have been coming across Durable Objects a lot, especially in the context of AI agents. They do seem like great primitives to design a storage abstraction around. It's also great that they integrate with a Typescript API, which makes sense because Typescript (or more precisely Javascript) is a first class citizen in the V8-Isolate system that Durable Objects run inside of. I really wish the abstraction was as clean in other programming languages. Maybe WASM will solve that in the future.

I asked Claude to generate a visualization from the podcast and I thought it did a pretty good job: Durable Objects Visualization

---

2025-05-13

Passport Nation

Citizenship as a Service #passport #citizenship

But there’s something special about Saint Kitts. Its government relies on passport sales as a primary contributor to revenue; in a way, passports are the country’s largest export. Between 2015 and 2022, the Saint Kitts government naturalized some 35,000 citizens through its investment program—meaning in a matter of years, their nation will likely have more economic citizens abroad than it does residents at home. Saint Kitts is a passport island: its prosperity is now intricately linked with the precarious marketplace of global mobility.

The Economy: A User's Guide No. 1

I have decided to watch one of this every day and summarise it here with the help of ChatGPT.

Introduction

• Host: Brett Scott, author of Cloud Money and The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance.
• Series: This is part 1 of a 7-part series exploring the structure of the global economy.
• Goal: To guide listeners from ground-level realities up to global corporate capitalism.

1. Challenging Economic Complexity

• Common belief: The economy is too complex for non-experts.
• Reality: The economic system is messy, human-made, and deeply politicized.
• Most people are conditioned from childhood to enter this system through jobs and money.
• While some thrive, many experience oppression, inequality, and environmental destruction.
• There's a growing sense of meaninglessness due to consumerist culture.
• To change the system, we must first understand and orient ourselves within it.

2. Five Fundamental Anchors of Economic Reality

Scott introduces five “anchors” that help ground our understanding of the economy:

Anchor 1: The Foundation

• We live on Earth, powered by the sun—these are the ultimate sources of economic life.
• Sunlight and air are free, foundational resources; without them, no economy could exist.

Anchor 2: Human Energy Applied to Earth

• Economic value originates from humans using energy to interact with natural resources.
• Applies equally to ancient hunter-gatherers and modern professionals (e.g., software engineers).

Anchor 3: Interdependence, Not Independence

• Humans are born into social networks and shaped by others.
• No one survives or develops entirely alone; society is a mesh of mutual dependence.

Anchor 4: Economy as Interdependent Provisioning

• The economy is the process of people working together to meet needs/desires.
• Forms range from small hunter-gatherer groups to global supply chains.
• Modern capitalism often obscures these interdependencies and inflates perceived needs.

Anchor 5: Economic Life is Embedded in Broader Life

• Economic activity is interconnected with cultural, political, spiritual, and familial life.
• Without non-economic aspects (e.g., love, community), economic activity has no real purpose.
• Mainstream economics often ignores this, presenting the environment and people as external or isolated units.

3. Metaphor: The Economy as a Superorganism

• Just as the body’s cells form a coordinated system, so too do individuals in society.
• No cell can survive alone—same with people in an economy.
• The economy consists of these invisible collaborations among individuals and groups.
• E.g., the production of breakfast cereal involves countless unseen contributors globally.

4. Economic Superorganisms and Power Structures

• Different economic systems (e.g., hunter-gatherers vs. modern market economies) have different structures and power dynamics.
• Removing an individual from these structures (e.g., poverty) is akin to removing a cell from the body—survival becomes difficult.

5. Four Modes of Economic Interdependence

Scott describes four overlapping forms of interdependence:

1. Reproduction

• Creating and nurturing people (e.g., parenting, caregiving).

2. Production

• Collaboratively creating goods/services using physical, mental, and emotional labor.

3. Distribution

• Moving goods/labor through methods like gifting, patronage, trade, or money.

4. Consumption

• Using what others have produced; often overlaps with production.

• Example: A man drawing with a pencil is participating in all four modes:

  • The pencil (production & distribution).
  • His upbringing (reproduction).
  • The drawing process (consumption and production).

• Everyone, even retail workers, operates within these interconnected flows of economic activity.

• Tracing any object (like a pencil) reveals networks involving millions or billions of people—including the listener.

Conclusion

• The economy is a deeply interconnected superorganism, not a collection of isolated individuals.
• Understanding this reality challenges mainstream economic narratives.
• Next episode will explore human nature within this interconnected system.

---

2025-05-12

The Evolution of Psychiatry

The evolution of psychiatry - by Adam Hunt #evo-psych #evolution #psychology #psychiatry

Why do psychiatric conditions exist?

…The framework in question is evolutionary psychiatry, and its principle thinking is simple: if we use evolutionary theory to explain biology, then we should be using evolutionary theory to explain psychiatric disorder. If evolution was given proper attention and integrated into mainstream psychiatry, we would usher in a new era of understanding and treatment of psychiatric conditions.

Psychiatric therapies have never been atheoretical – psychiatrists have always justified their treatments with some school of thought: Freudian psychodynamic theories placed blame on early childhood and subconscious urges; behaviorism justified the application of pain to try and train people out of wrongthink; and more recently, chemical imbalance theories were used to advertise pharmaceuticals, despite the narrative of simple dopamine and serotonin dysfunctions having been long dismissed in academic circles. Recent advances in genetics and neuroscience have provided more evidence and complexity, but no promising new theories. Psychiatry today can be considered a discipline in crisis, surviving only because psychological and pharmaceutical treatments are effective for some people, some of the time, and so we still need them. The way is open for a new paradigm in psychiatric theorizing.

Darwin’s prophecy manifested itself in psychology around 100 years after his writing. Now, evolutionary psychology has become a common reference point for public discussion and academic research. Evolutionary psychiatry is a late follower, arising in the last years of the twentieth century alongside evolutionary medicine, its foundational work owing to Randolph Nesse, George Williams, John Price, and others.

This unique theoretical strength has been followed up by work in evolutionary medicine and psychiatry identifying six reasons why conditions we define as disorder or disease (of body or mind) persist in evolved creatures:

1. Constraints on biological design, because evolution can only make alterations within a certain range.
2. Pathogens evolve, so we cannot evolve perfect immunity against them.
3. Design trade-offs and byproducts make perfection impossible.
4. Evolved defenses against disease and danger often induce harmful symptoms.
5. Selection is for reproductive success, not health, so we can evolve in ways which are debilitating if they allow us to reproduce more successfully.
6. Mismatch between evolved systems and modern environments lead to novel, harmful, reactions.

Of these six reasons, it’s important to note that the last four are the modern result of functioning rather than dysfunctioning processes. The idea that natural selection would only encourage perfect health is mistaken. It’s entirely possible for evolution to lead our bodies and minds into states which we now diagnose and treat as disorders or diseases.

For instance, some are mismatched psychological systems which are exposed to over-stimulation in the modern environment, becoming the biggest causes of abuse, ruination and early death in developed countries. Alcoholism and drug abuse manipulate natural chemical pathways which exist for evolutionarily advantageous reasons; obesity by overeating is caused by natural desires for sweet and fatty foods; and gambling addiction is likely linked to a history of continuously searching for scarce high-calorie food and other risky but rewarding endeavors.

This bit on autism is really insightful.

Investigating the most severely disabled autistic individuals you almost always discover damaging genetic mutations or early life trauma, such as foetal alcohol syndrome. These are clear cases of biological dysfunction. On the other hand, the less severely disabled individuals (who would once have been called Asperger’s or “high-functioning”) show none of those biological signs of dysfunction, instead showing evidence we expect from functional adaptations: the associated genes are common and complex, brain differences are subtle, the characteristics appear early in life when they are guaranteed to affect reproduction, and the prevalence is high enough that at least one person per Dunbar-sized hunter-gatherer social group of one hundred and fifty would show the same traits – in which case, every one of our ancestors would have known an autistic person. These biological signs are those we expect to see from adaptations, not dysfunction. The question we are led to ask is what autism’s function could have been.

Psychologically, autistics often show unusual abilities in intelligence, memory, and perception, especially in their areas of special interest or obsession. An anthropologist once stumbled upon a reindeer herder in Siberia who camped alone, ate alone and chose to keep away from the rest of their small nomadic group, but who could list the names, medical history, parentage and more of a group of 2,600 reindeer. Researchers have identified this as a possible case of an autistic mind playing a crucial role in a group’s survival. Technologies which played crucial roles in human civilization’s birth such as oil lamps, multi-component tools, star maps, grinding stones and fire hearths have also all been suggested as the sorts of things which autistic people gravitate towards. Social oddities could be forgiven when your mind is spectacularly useful, so this ability profile explains why these cases of autism evolved. Autistic minds sacrificed social nuance as trade-offs in becoming the object and system specialists amongst our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Those same individuals can excel in technological and scientific endeavors in the modern world.

“the alteration of stigma”

Theoretical clarity does not necessarily make for treatment improvements, but one way in which explanations from evolutionary psychiatry could instantly improve lives, essentially free of financial cost, is through the alteration of stigma. The causal explanation of a disorder affects its stigmatization. People believing chemical imbalance theories of depression feel more hopeless when diagnosed as depressed; people believing in genetic and neurological causes of psychosis are more stigmatizing of psychotic individuals than people who believe psychosis results from stress. In turn, an evolutionary explanation of a disorder inevitably changes that disorder’s perception. The full effects of this shift in perception are yet to be seen, and will of course depend on the condition and specific explanation. Psychopathy, for example, may not be destigmatized by an explanation as a cheating strategy which is game theoretically optimal for some portion of a group.

René Girard's influence on the US far right

How a little-known French literary critic became a bellwether for the US right #girard #memetic

on memetic desire

Girard is best known for his theory of “mimetic desire”, the idea that humans don’t desire things in and of themselves, but out of a wish to imitate and compete with others. On the back of this insight, the writer built a distinctive anthropology, borrowing from and contest-ing the theories of Nietzsche and Freud. He also came up with a set of ideas about scapegoating that have been taken up by rightwing readers in recent years in their critiques of so-called cancel culture. While Girard described himself as a centrist, his ideas are now celebrated by a movement that, while not unilaterally rightwing, incubated the policies of the Trump administration.

The idea is set out in Girard’s first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (published in French in 1961), which describes how Don Quixote, Madame Bovary and characters from Stendhal, Proust and Dostoyevsky come to desire things because others already want them. “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind,” he wrote. The fact that desires are borrowed means they are necessarily competitive. If you desire your neighbour’s husband, you have to contend with your neighbour in order to get what you want — or what you think you want. Mimetic desire leads to fruitless competition, unhappiness and even violence.

on Girard's role in the shift from structuralism to post-modernism, thanks to Derrida

Girard’s early work was informed by “structuralism” — the study of language and society as a closed system of interrelated signs, which was then dominant in French universities. But he was present at the birth of a new movement. In 1966, Johns Hopkins hosted a conference devoted to structuralism with the unprepossessing title, “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man”, that didn’t hint at the controversy it would cause. Girard and his colleagues invited a group of pre-eminent French thinkers, including the philosopher Michel Foucault, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to attend. It was the last speaker to be invited who proved the most disruptive. After Lévi-Strauss and Foucault dropped out, Girard extended an invitation to a young Algerian-born philosopher, still little known in France: Jacques Derrida. In the final paper of the conference, Derrida attacked the basic assumptions of structuralism. This was the point of departure for his philosophical method, deconstruction, which sought to undo binary distinctions — raw/cooked, light/dark, sane/insane etc — in order to reveal the social forces that upheld them. Some conservatives today consider Derrida’s thought (or “postmodernism”, as they usually call it) to be the source of modern society’s ills. Girard later joked that, by inviting Derrida, he and his fellow conference organisers had let the plague into America.

on scapegoat theory

As post-structuralism spread through American universities, Girard pursued the implications of mimetic desire. His second book, Violence and the Sacred, published in 1972 and perhaps the most influential of all his work, describes how human societies enter into periods of crisis in which competition becomes unbearable. The solution, Girard claimed, is a violent act of scapegoating. The scapegoat has certain recurrent features: they are a foreigner, someone with a disability or a person in a position of authority. Such acts are then commemorated in the founding myths of cultures, myths in which the scapegoat becomes deified.

on Vance being influenced by scapegoat theory

Reading the French thinker prompted Vance to reconsider his faith, but it was the scapegoat mechanism that really struck a chord. “It captured so well the psychology of my generation, especially its most privileged inhabitants,” Vance writes. “Mired in the swamp of social media, we identified a scapegoat and digitally pounced. We were keyboard warriors, unloading on people via Facebook and Twitter, blind to our own problems.”

The truth is more complicated. In his 1999 book, I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard describes how globalisation had led to “the rise of victim power”. He praised this development, referring to international aid and universal healthcare as expressions of a genuine concern for the most vulnerable. But it could be taken too far. “This concern sometimes is so exaggerated and in a fashion so subject to caricature that it arouses laughter, but we should guard against seeing it as only one thing.”

What would Girard say about the politics of today, America’s new immigration policies or the escalating trade war between the US and China? I asked his friend and biographer, Cynthia Haven. “I think he would enjoin us to turn to powers even higher than Trump, even more powerful than Xi Jinping. When he urged us to desist from escalation, he meant it for peace. When he beseeched us to forgive one another, his position was absolute.”

Many of Girard’s new interpreters seem strangely indifferent to this injunction, ignoring the scapegoats of today’s world, unless they are the victims of leftwing cancel culture — a phenomenon that has largely disappeared since Musk’s purchase of Twitter. In September 2024, Vance made the false claim that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbours’ pets. He later claimed that such stories were necessary so that “the media pays attention to the suffering of the American people”. In an article shortly afterwards for Politico, journalist Ian Ward claimed Vance had used Girard as his scapegoating playbook. More likely, the anti-political thinker had been abandoned altogether, sacrificed at the very moment he’d been deified.

---

2025-05-11

The Cult of Doing Business

The Cult of Doing Business | Commonwealth Magazine #business #entrepreneurship #cult

One of the strangest features of American work culture is the constant pressure to treat one’s job as something more than a job: a calling, a means of expressing oneself, a vehicle for personal growth. This pressure comes from bosses, of course, who would rather foster intrinsic motivation than pay higher wages. But it also comes from popular psychology. As every self-help reader knows, the most successful careerists leverage their own unique personalities to achieve results and add value. They work for themselves. They love what they do. They are radiant with a higher purpose. In a word, they are “entrepreneurial.”

In his new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, historian Erik Baker calls this self-help ideology “the rot festering at the core” of our national obsession with work. A comprehensive and sharply written intellectual history, the book traces the origins of several reputedly twenty-first-century maladies to an earlier age. Gig work, as it turns out, didn’t begin with Uber but with Avon direct-sales reps. The wacky metaphysics of today’s tech billionaires have their analogues in the “mind-cures” of nineteenth-century spiritualists. And the celebration of “charismatic” executives has its origins in German social science, with disturbingly fascist undertones. Baker also demonstrates how a fetish for entrepreneurs shaped both modernization theory during the Cold War and now-discredited market-based solutions to global poverty, especially microfinance. But the “marriage of positive psychology and the entrepreneurial ethic” is the book’s primary target. It’s a rotten worldview because it “enjoins us to work more intensely than we need to,” and more importantly, it “leaves us feeling devoid of purpose when we don’t have work.”

In the fifties, Norman Vincent Peale, a preacher, New Thought evangelist, and eventual officiant of Donald Trump’s first wedding, produced one of the most popular self-help books of all time, The Power of Positive Thinking. “The more you lose yourself in something bigger than yourself,” Peale writes, “the more energy you will have.” Strangely, for Peale, that “something bigger” didn’t include unions or the social infrastructure built by Roosevelt’s New Deal, which he fumed against at every turn. The book has never been out of print, and Baker is good at explaining why. For people afraid of falling behind in the wake of the Great Depression (or, in our own time, the Great Recession) the entrepreneurial ethic that arose from New Thought literature “functioned as a sort of insurance policy—not just a failsafe strategy in case of unemployment, but a preemptive ward against redundancy and obsolescence.”

Just as Dale Carnegie was right to say that people love to hear the sound of their own name, it is probably true that “autoletic” workers (those who discover intrinsic motivation and achieve “flow”) will feel more satisfied at work. But Baker is calling attention to the fact that these ideas become popular among managers for ignoble reasons: they make it cheaper and easier to burden employees with the task of preserving their own well-being. “Autoletic” workers are more easily exploited, as are those who treat their jobs as extension of themselves. The basic career advice one gets from positive psychology is that throwing yourself into your work is the best way to achieve success and personal fulfillment. And since Americans, as Baker suggests, “prize psychological health as highly as a religious duty,” to fail to be entrepreneurial is a kind of mortal sin.

The Christian language of “duty” and “calling” comes from Max Weber, the German sociologist who studied the problem of how to encourage Arbeitsfreude, or “joy in work.” Weber’s 1904 visit to the United States helped convince him of his famous thesis that the main driver of worker motivation was the Protestant ethic. His colleague Joseph Schumpeter, building upon the supposed link between economic and personal growth, celebrated the entrepreneur as the innovative, heroic force behind “creative destruction”—the kind of leader who inspires joy, meaning, and purpose. The problem, Baker argues, as he combs through the legacy of German social science, is that for some, the only purpose of life is to win at any cost. “The entrepreneur became a Nietzschean conqueror,” he writes, “setting the world ablaze with his energy and virility.” This holds true even when proponents of “creative destruction” adopt a sunnier idiom in Northern California. Baker describes Steve Jobs, who encouraged “an almost cult-like esprit de corps” in his Macintosh unit, as “the most ruthless entrepreneur to emerge from the counterculture.” In Silicon Valley, charismatic leadership of the kind that aroused the Austrian economists was given a friendly, New Age twist. Baker’s genealogy helps explain why American startup culture is so deeply weird.

But it’s not weird, of course, to seek work that is meaningful and satisfying. Hence the universal appeal of the entrepreneurial ethic: it offers the founder, the franchisee, the gig worker, and the influencer the same promise of freedom, and it offers those with W-2s a reason to clock in every day. Employees, no matter what their job, crave recognition, autonomy, and a personal connection to work, which is why they often contribute more than they’re paid for. Baker’s point is that celebrating workers’ “proactivity” disguises an essentially exploitative relationship. That’s especially true when the ethic becomes a management philosophy, as it did during the consulting boom of the seventies and eighties, when “value creation” and “innovation” served as important alibis for cost-cutting and deregulation. “The ultimate function of the entrepreneurial ethic,” he writes, “is to reconcile workers to precarity.” It also creates the illusion that the tech billionaire and the gig worker (who receives no benefits and cannot join a union) are aligned against the wet blanket of government regulation.

There is nothing wrong with finding spiritual value in one’s career—provided that value doesn’t exist to be exploited by a billionaire. And of course it’s fine to love what you do. But it’s even better to treat love itself as the most important work.

LegoGPT

New Lego-building AI creates models that actually stand up in real life - Ars Technica

Lovely heartwarming article about a bunch of CMU researchers training an LLM-style model for Lego bricks.

On Thursday, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University unveiled LegoGPT, an AI model that creates physically stable Lego structures from text prompts. The new system not only designs Lego models that match text descriptions (prompts) but also ensures they can be built brick by brick in the real world, either by hand or with robotic assistance.

To build LegoGPT, the Carnegie Mellon team repurposed the technology behind large language models (LLMs), similar to the kind that run ChatGPT, for "next-brick prediction" instead of next-word prediction. To do so, the team fine-tuned LLaMA-3.2-1B-Instruct, an instruction-following language model from Meta.

The team then augmented the brick-predicting model with a separate software tool that can verify physical stability using mathematical models that simulate gravity and structural forces.

To train the model, the team assembled a new dataset called "StableText2Lego," which contained over 47,000 stable Lego structures paired with descriptive captions generated by a separate AI model, OpenAI's GPT-4o. Each structure underwent physics analysis to ensure it could be built in the real world.

The Rise of Normanticisation

Basic as the new punk: The rise of normanticisation | Dazed

Good to know that the style I prefer has an actual name. Having said that this is quite a nuanced article.

The recent embrace of ‘being basic’ isn’t simply a recession indicator, it’s part of a bigger shift away from extreme personalisation towards a more normie ideal

 Then, last year, there was a shift: people started making fun of the ‘micro-trend final bosses’ who took personal style inspiration from the internet. Somewhat ironically, in seeking hyper-individuality through a revolving door of micro trends, we lost true personal style along the way. The antithesis of this, it seems, is to look, dress and act so “basic” that it’s clear you’re not trying to differentiate yourself at all. Now, being a “normie” is becoming romanticised – or normanticised, rather.|

Panzoni says the rise of normanticisation signals a readjustment. “It’s a response to the overconceptualization of style,” she says. “Right now, we’re seeing a widespread elevation of essentials: denim, button-ups, blazers, suits, uniforms and a broader surge of interest in minimalist fashion that has been growing during the past couple of years.” This is hardly surprising, considering that fashion often becomes an early barometer of shifting consumer priorities during periods of economic uncertainty, but Panzoni believes something deeper is at play. She calls the quiet retreat to basics and basic dressing in fashion the “dark forest theory of fashion”. This means: “Dressing in consciously ‘basic’ ways’ (like essentials) laced with subtle cues of insider knowledge, as a strategy for safeguarding personal subjectivities from the overexposure and aesthetic extraction that’s become so common online.” In other words, the growing yearning to be “basic” can't simply be boiled down to being a “recession indicator”.

Learn from the skeptics

These lessons in scepticism could make the world a better place | Psyche Ideas #skepticism #philosophy

We live in a paradoxical time: despite the proliferation of critical thinking courses in schools and universities, our public discourse has never been more dominated by inflexible certainties, tribal allegiances to dubious ‘facts’, and a profound aversion to questioning our own beliefs. In an age where certainty is currency, doubt has become a radical act.

Our social media ecosystems reward conviction, not contemplation. Politicians trumpet certainties rather than explore complexities. Even our educational institutions often teach critical thinking as a weapon to dismantle others’ arguments rather than a tool for examining our own. The skill we most desperately need is the very one we’ve neglected to cultivate: the ability to hold our own certainties in suspension.

What if doubt isn’t weakness but wisdom? What if the most intellectually courageous stance isn’t to plant your flag in the ground of conviction, but to embrace the productive discomfort of uncertainty? The ancient Greco-Romans, facing their own societal upheavals, developed sophisticated approaches to scepticism that might serve us better than our modern pretences to critical discourse.

The article concludes by summarizing the four sceptical lessons: Socrates teaches humility about knowledge; Protagoras reminds us of cultural perspectives and limits; Cicero encourages evidence-based provisional beliefs; and Pyrrho shows that suspending judgment leads to peace of mind.

The artefacts of work vs actual work

Dan Dean: "The management class is used to experiencing the …" - Indieweb.Social

Loved the distinction between the concept of artifacts of work and actual work, and how LLMs exacerbate the gap between the two. #llm #software #work #management

The client is not on a journey

Ad Aged: A Journey. #naricissm #journey

 In the newsletter, Bruni quotes an Australian reader, Michael Hogan, who writes, “It feels like every damn thing I do is labeled a journey. I don’t buy a drill. I’m on a home improvement journey. I don’t see my doctor. I’m on a wellness journey. I don’t deposit money into my bank account. I’m on a wealth journey. Make it stop.” 

Bruni comments on this linguistic-tic this way:

"Maybe it’s a byproduct of the era’s narcissism, a companion to all the selfies and Instagram stories and a social media landscape in which people are always positioning themselves in the foreground, where they pose just so. It’s semantic self-aggrandizement, turning an errand into an adventure, a routine into a religion...And so humdrum activities become heroic acts."

If you use words for a living, and almost everyone does, don't use words you're used to seeing. Don't just repeat things. Don't play into the dominant complacency. Which is a obfuscator's way of saying don't be boring. 

Don't be a "story-teller." Don't promise "robust," or "agile," or "nimble." Don't look like everyone else. As Orwell told us in "Politics and the English Lanuage," "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."

Software Engineering and Entropy

The Curse of Knowing How, or; Fixing Everything | Blog #programming #entropy #sisyphus

Now that I’ve learned to notice, my perception of software has changed in its entirety.

Every piece of software becomes a TODO list.
Every system becomes a scaffolding for a better one.
Every inconvenience becomes an indictment of inaction.

So relatable

I’ve lost count of how many projects I have started that began with some variation of “Yeah, I could build this but better.”

• A static site generator because the existing ones had too many opinions.
• A note-taking tool because I didn’t like the way others structured metadata.
• A CLI task runner because Make is cryptic and Taskfile is YAML hell.
• A personal wiki engine in Rust, then in Go, then in Nim, then back to Markdown.
• A homelab dashboard because I don’t like webslop.

The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction

The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction #friction #digital #economy #infrastructure

Friction has become a defining feature across the economy, with huge consequences for everything from education to infrastructure. And it's created three distinct worlds that operate by entirely different rules:

• The digital world has almost no friction.
• The physical world is full of it.
• And in certain curated spaces - like the West Village, or your AI companion -friction has been turned into something you can pay to remove.

Tanner Greer has a beautiful breakdown of American loneliness, drawing from Tocqueville and Wang Huning. “The American,” he writes, “was an individual first, nothing second.” The result is a culture of deep, systemic isolation. Not just emotional, but economic. Americans work alone, consume alone, get rewarded alone. Even our policies, as Tocqueville feared, are structured around that loneliness.

“When you analyze many government policies [in America] it is not difficult to see that their fundamental motivation [is in fact] the complex and persistent role played by widespread loneliness.”

Loneliness isn’t just personal. It’s institutional. It’s fiscal. It’s a bit engineered. It’s purposeful.

This is the economic story: friction has become a class experience. Wealth has always helped smooth over bumps - but when the physical world is such a mess and the digital world is so easy, it’s simple to curate the digital into the physical if you have money.

…

It’s the same logic that powers Erewhon, or Soho House, or influencer-run startups. You’re not paying for the thing. You’re paying for the removal of difficulty. The filtered lighting. The social cachet. The sense that this world still makes sense!

---

2025-05-07

Alternate Coffee Varieties

The resilient coffee discovery that could save our morning brew #coffee #stenophylla

While one solution is to shift production geographically as the climate changes, people like Davis, head of coffee research at Kew, and longtime collaborator Jeremy Haggar of the University of Greenwich, think a more sustainable answer is to diversify into climate-resilient choices among the 131 coffee species identified so far.

The two most exciting new species on the block, Davis told me, are excelsa and stenophylla. Excelsa has a deeper root system, allowing access to water in drought conditions, and is also resistant to heat, pests and disease. The first coffee from a Ugandan excelsa project that he has been involved in will come to the UK market this year (he reports the smooth taste to be comparable to a speciality arabica).

Stenophylla is at a more experimental stage. In 2018, Davis and Haggar managed to track down the plant in Sierra Leone with the help of Daniel Sarmu, a coffee specialist in the country. Together with the coffee company Sucafina, the NGO Welthungerhilfe and the co-operation of local communities, the trio have planted wild varieties in trial plots across Sierra Leone with a view to reviving it as a coffee crop (its prospects withered in the mid-20th century as local farmers turned to robusta). The first harvest is expected this year.

Podcast Bros and Brain Rot

Podcast Bros and Brain Rot - Nathan Cofnas’s Newsletter #brainrot #podcasts #social-media

People who don’t trust “experts” now look to podcasters and other alt-media figures—many of whom (including Rogan and Brand) are comedians—to decide what to believe about everything from WWII to vaccines to Ukraine to tariffs. The result has been a proliferation of ignorance with disastrous consequences for our culture and public policy.

Uneducated podcast bros have not found a magic shortcut to knowledge. Even on Covid, they have not outperformed actual experts. However, it’s true that many so-called experts are fake and/or corrupt. Blind obedience to credentialed authority (associated with the left) or trust in a “marketplace of ideas” that rewards brain-rotting infotainment (associated with the right) are both failed strategies.

Matt Levine on Memecoins

OpenAI Will Get A Bit More Normal - Bloomberg #memecoin #crypto

The point of a memecoin is that for 15 minutes everyone in crypto coordinates to (1) pay attention to some person and (2) turn that attention into money by buying a token. And then they move on. I don’t know why this is a fun game for anyone to play, but apparently it is. In this game, somebody is going to make money by buying the token at the beginning of the 15 minutes, and somebody else is going to lose money by buying it at the end of the 15 minutes. There is not a different thing that can happen; the memecoin is not going to build enduring value and steady cash flows. It is going to go up while people are briefly paying attention, and then it is going to go down when they stop. Perhaps you can get people to pay attention more than once, but that is just repeating the same process; it’s not building enduring value.

Oh now obviously if people buy the coin before its public announcement, they will do even better than the people who buy it right after the public announcement. And one can guess that those people are insiders who are connected with the promoters of the memecoin. But of course those are the people who will make money! It’s their meme! You are paying money to buy a token representing “I paid attention to Melania Trump today.” Who should get that money, if not Melania Trump or whoever set up the coin for her?

The enshittification of tech jobs

Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow #tech #jobs #enshittification

Cory Doctorow is a really gifted writer. Love the concept of Vocational Awe in the paragraph

Tech workers are a weird choice for "princes of labor," but for decades they've enjoyed unparalleled labor power, expressed in high wages, lavish stock grants, and whimsical campuses with free laundry and dry-cleaning, gourmet cafeterias, and kombucha on tap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhUtdgVZ7MY

All of this, despite the fact that tech union density is so low it can barely be charted. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. When you're getting five new recruiter emails every day, you don't need a shop steward to tell your boss to go fuck themselves at the morning scrum. You can do it yourself, secure in the knowledge that there's a company across the road who'll give you a better job by lunchtime.

Tech bosses sucked up to their workers because tech workers are insanely productive. Even with sky-high salaries, every hour a tech worker puts in on the job translates into massive profits. Which created a conundrum for tech bosses: if tech workers produce incalculable value for the company every time they touch their keyboards, and if there aren't enough tech workers to go around, how do you get whichever tech workers you can hire to put in as many hours as possible?

The answer is a tactic that Fobazi Ettarh called "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

"Vocational awe" describes the feeling that your work matters so much that you should accept all manner of tradeoffs and calamities to get the job done. Ettarh uses the term to describe the pathology of librarians, teachers, nurses and other underpaid, easily exploited workers in "caring professions." Tech workers are weird candidates for vocational awe, given how well-paid they are, but never let it be said that tech bosses don't know how to innovate – they successfully transposed an exploitation tactic from the most precarious professionals to the least precarious.

As farcical as all the engineer-pampering tech bosses got up to for the first couple decades of this century was, it certainly paid off. Tech workers stayed at the office for every hour that god sent, skipping their parents' funerals and their kids' graduations to ship on time. Snark all you like about empty platitudes like "organize the world's information and make it useful" or "bring the world closer together," but you can't argue with results: workers who could – and did – bargain for anything from their bosses…except a 40-hour work-week.

But for tech bosses, this vocational awe wheeze had a fatal flaw: if you convince your workforce that they are monk-warriors engaged in the holy labor of bringing forth a new, better technological age, they aren't going to be very happy when you order them to enshittify the products they ruined their lives to ship. "I fight for the user" has been lurking in the hindbrains of so many tech workers since the Tron years, somehow nestling comfortably alongside of the idea that "I don't need a union, I'm a temporarily embarrassed founder."

About the narrative of AI vs reality of AI

Bindley spoke to David Markley, an Amazon veteran turned executive coach, who attributed the worsening conditions (for example, managers being given 30 direct reports) to the "narrative" of AI. Not, you'll note, the actual reality of AI, but rather, the story that AI lets you "collapse the organization," slash headcount and salaries, and pauperize the (former) princes of labor.

The point of AI isn't to make workers more productive, it's to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses. Another of Bindley's sources went through eight rounds of interviews with a company, received an offer, countered with a request for 12% more than the offer, and had the job withdrawn, because "the company didn’t want to move ahead anymore based on the way the compensation conversation had gone."

Arvind Narayanan on Avoiding Risks with Generative AI

https://x.com/random_walker/status/1919359709062033850 #ai #risks

When we use generative AI for work, there are two ever-present risks: hallucinations/confabulations and deskilling. For each of my AI use cases, I try to make sure I know how I'm avoiding those risks. Specifically:

• AI is helpful despite being error-prone if it is faster to verify the output than it is to do the work yourself. For example, if you're using it to find a product that matches a given set of specifications, verification may be a lot faster than search.

• There are many uses where errors don't matter, like using it to enhance creativity by suggesting or critiquing ideas.

• At a meta level, if you use AI without a plan and simply turn to AI tools when you feel like it, then you're unlikely to be able to think through risks and mitigations. It is better to identify concrete ways to integrate AI into your workflows, with known benefits and risks, that you can employ repeatedly.

• Turning to deskilling, in some cases the worries are overblown. We should distinguish between essential skills and incidental skills for each job. Incidental skills are those that it's okay to delegate to automation as long as people understand the underlying principles. For example, back in the day when programming languages and compilers were developed, there were worries about people losing the ability to directly write machine code, but that proved unfounded.

• On the other hand, if a junior developer relies too much on vibe coding and hence can't program at all by themselves, in any language, and doesn't understand the principles of programming, that definitely feels like a problem.

• Deskilling is usually discussed in the context of junior workers but I think it's a problem at any career stage. Even setting aside AI, there are many senior people who stop learning and have an ossified set of skills.

• Deskilling is a much more insidious problem than errors, because it happens gradually over years, so you may never notice.

• I think the way to address it is structural, and not even AI-specific. If you're always scrambling to meet a deadline, there will be too much temptation to take shortcuts (including, but not limited to, overuse of AI), and your skills will atrophy.

• My own strategy is to set aside about one day a week, sometimes more, for activities that are more about learning and growth than about productivity. This comes at a huge short-term cost but I think it is necessary in the long run.

• Depending on the job and task, there are other potential risks from AI. Having a plan to address errors and deskilling is necessary, but not sufficient, to ensure a beneficial approach to AI.

The Solution Problem

A great series of essays which in a long-winded but very thoughtful and insightful way tries to explain why the mental health landscape is pretty bad nowadays.

• The Solution Problem (Part 1/3) - by Josh Zlatkus
• The Solution Problem (Part 2/3) - by Josh Zlatkus
• The Solution Problem (Part 3/3) - by Josh Zlatkus

In Part I, I reviewed three answers to the question: “Why are diagnoses of mental illness on the rise?” These answers were: because of progress, because of evolutionary mismatch, and because of the solution problem. I threw my weight behind the final two and promised to bust the first like a piñata.

Next, I divided problems into three types—unknown, tolerable, and regular—as part of my argument that in order to judge a solution, we need to ask what kind of problem it solves, whether it improves experience, and what it costs. The milder the problem, and the less its solution enhances quality of life, the harder it becomes to justify the solution’s costs.

The fifth cost of solutions, which I am most interested in, is the tendency of solutions to create problems. A.k.a. the solution problem. We already saw an example above. When my neighbor has a heated steering wheel, my hands feel colder. Indeed, the very existence of a solution “escalates” the problem from unknown or tolerable to regular—because all of a sudden, something can be done. The opposite is true, too. If you want to make something more tolerable, ensure that everyone has to deal with it. That nothing can be done.

In part 3:

By the way, I am sure that my many criticisms of the mental health field have given some readers the impression that I dislike my job. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the only person who loves their job more than I do is my friend, who is also a therapist but sees more clients.

The simplest way I can put it is this: I love my job because it lets me build meaningful relationships with my clients. In fact, I often find myself wishing the rest of my life matched the intimacy of a good therapy session. And when my clients improve, it's typically because of the relationship. (Turns out—newsflash!—a deep social bond is pretty healing for a deeply social species.) But the rest? The DSM diagnoses, the medications, the ever-multiplying therapeutic orientations, the canon of mental health theorists from Freud and Jung to Beck and Satir, the saturation of mental health thinking into every corner of life—most of that is nonsense, and I can’t be asked to support it.

---

2025-05-06

Ava on Friendships

always on your side - by Ava - bookbear express #friendship #love

Some beautiful thoughts on friendship by Ava. Really needed this today.

At the party the topic came up: can men and women be friends? P said that she didn’t think they could, that male/female friendships could never be as unboundaried as her friendship was with me. Which is probably true: we went to Japan for a week and shared the same hotel room, which is not something I can imagine doing with any male friend. But everyone else in the conversation pointed out that the presence of boundaries didn’t mean a friendship wasn’t real.

Some of my best friends are guys, and at this point I’ve known them for about 10 years. I have matching tattoos with a couple, C and B. At this point they feel like family, as in: I couldn’t imagine us breaking up for any reason. We drift, and we go through different seasons, but the relationship has proven so extremely durable. In friendships you don’t often explicitly talk about values, but we have the same values. The same orientation towards work and love. And also a thousand subtler things. We understand each other’s dreams, big and small, and we can really talk. I think that’s what it comes down to: I can really talk to my friends, and I can talk to them through everything.

Friendship brings out the best in me, and sometimes I fear that romantic relationships bring out the worst. As a friend, I’m steady, warm, receptive. As a partner, I’m only sometimes that. At my most difficult, I fear that I couldn’t possibly be lovable. But that’s too simplistic of a narrative, so let me try again.

Here we go: over the years I’ve sometimes called my friends, crying, anxious, and let them be my anchor to reality. The unconditional acceptance they model to me is how I would like to show up in every moment of my life, in each important relationship. In reality, there are plenty of times I don’t show up like that, when I crack under stress, when I am not patient and kind. It’s easier to be generous to your friends, because you have some level of remove from them—they are usually not pressed up against you in your worst moments, privy to your most destructive tendencies. But friends are still our first and sometimes best model of someone who chooses to be always on your side.

We don’t have many good theories about friendship, or a lot of scripts. It’s so different from dating, which is so scripted it can feel stifling, where so much of the possibility space is prescribed or proscribed. The guy should pay on the date. The girl shouldn’t make the first move. You should respond to a text in this amount of time. Since I started matchmaking, a ton of people have told me: I prefer to get to know someone as a friend first. Dating apps feel so unnatural and stilted. I think this is because everything feels more organic when there’s not a script. When I’m not playing a role, when I can be just who I am and you love me anyway, everything feels more real.

At a holiday party last year, a guy told me that he believed friendship should be easy. He was close to his family, and he had a partner he loved very much. Those were the relationships in his life that he had the capacity to be challenged by. He wanted his friendships to be light, loose, simple.

For many people, friendship’s appeal lies in its relative lack of complications. No taxes or laundry, no sex, no fighting. People are allowed to walk away and no one gets mad. You get to choose how much you opt in. When contrasted with romantic relationships, which at their worst can resemble a merry-go-round in Hell, they seem all upside.

---

2025-05-05

AI and the Humanities

Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? | The New Yorker #ai #humanities

But factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities. The real project was always us: the work of understanding, and not the accumulation of facts. Not “knowledge,” in the sense of yet another sandwich of true statements about the world. That stuff is great—and where science and engineering are concerned it’s pretty much the whole point. But no amount of peer-reviewed scholarship, no data set, can resolve the central questions that confront every human being: How to live? What to do? How to face death?

The answers to those questions aren’t out there in the world, waiting to be discovered. They aren’t resolved by “knowledge production.” They are the work of being, not knowing—and knowing alone is utterly unequal to the task.

For the past seventy years or so, the university humanities have largely lost sight of this core truth. Seduced by the rising prestige of the sciences—on campus and in the culture—humanists reshaped their work to mimic scientific inquiry. We have produced abundant knowledge about texts and artifacts, but in doing so mostly abandoned the deeper questions of being which give such work its meaning.

Now everything must change. That kind of knowledge production has, in effect, been automated. As a result, the “scientistic” humanities—the production of fact-based knowledge about humanistic things—are rapidly being absorbed by the very sciences that created the A.I. systems now doing the work. We’ll go to them for the “answers.”

But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions—and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever.

The 80-hour myth

The 80-Hour Myth (Why We're Addicted To Being Busy) - Dan Koe #productivity #hustle #culture

The usual productivity spiel but I thought this section was interesting

Work Like A Lion, Not A Cow

There are two approaches to work.

First, is like a cow who grazes the fields:

• Consistent long hours every day
• Steady and predictable output
• Trading time for money in a linear fashion
• Showing up regularly regardless of energy
• Often leads to burnout and diminishing returns

Second, is like a lion, which we share a similar psychological wiring in that we are hunters (at least when it comes to work).

Our brain craves the novelty and dopamine that comes along with discovering resources (like ideas) that aid in our survival:

• Intense bursts of focused, high-energy work
• Long periods of rest and recovery between hunts
• Work according to energy and creativity cycles
• Prioritize impact over number of hours logged
• Aim for leverage where results aren’t tied to time

A lion, by today’s perception, is a massive procrastinator, and people discourage that. They make you feel guilty for taking your time. They tell you that you lack discipline and you should take things more seriously.

If you’re bad at texting people back, or you tend to put your work (or homework) off until the last second, it’s not a character flaw, it’s how many people are wired.

If that sounds like you, what you need to understand is that intensity is better than duration, rest is the most productive form of work, and results matter more than hours.

But there are a few moving pieces here.

First, is leveraging your unique strengths that give you an asymmetric advantage.

Second, is choosing to pursue work that allows you to put lifestyle first.

That way, you can work according to your energy cycles and make a conscious choice as to what you should be working on. Some creatives worked late into the night while others preferred the morning.

If someone tells you what to work on, you can’t really change that, and your first priority must be to leave that work.

The Seven-Year Rule

The Seven-Year Rule - MacSparky

Years ago, I encountered a fascinating concept in a book by the Dalai Lama: every seven years, human beings transform into entirely new versions of themselves. This idea stems from the biological principle that our bodies replace virtually all their cells over a seven-year cycle. The person you are today doesn’t share a single cell with the version of you from seven years ago. (This is, of course, a generalization as some cells regenerate much faster and others a little slower.)

There’s something profoundly liberating about this constant state of transformation. We often become fixated on our past: mistakes we’ve made, opportunities we’ve missed, harms inflicted upon us (and by us), or wounds we’ve suffered. But what if we truly internalized that the person who experienced those things no longer exists in a physical sense?

I recently spoke with a friend who was still dwelling on something that happened thirty years ago. “Why do you care?” I asked him. “That was four versions of you ago. That person doesn’t exist anymore. Move on.”

This perspective applies equally to our future selves. The version of you that will exist seven years from now hasn’t formed yet. So why not focus your energy and attention on the present moment?

As you read these words, you are uniquely yourself, different from who you were a moment ago and who you’ll become in the next. By embracing this present version of yourself, you release yourself from the bonds of history while simultaneously doing the greatest possible favor to your future self.

We exist in a perpetual state of transformation: cellular, psychological, and spiritual. When we recognize and honor this constant evolution, we free ourselves to live more fully in the eternal now. Adopt the Seven-Year Rule. You’ll be doing yourself a favor.

Minimalift program by Matt D'Avella

I cut my training by 70% (and got better results) - YouTube #fitness #workout #lifting

ChatGPT Summary: ChatGPT - Minimalist Strength Training Overview

There is too much workout/lifting content out there. But this one caught my eye because of its minimalist approach. Some materials available for sale include options to do workouts at home using just barbells and bodyweight exercises.

This is mainly to motivate myself to resume my workouts.

Recipes from a Tech Bro

Recipes #recipes #food

I stumbled upon these recipes accidentally when I visited the site to check out another technical blog post. I found the recipes to be simple and to the point.

Experts and Elites Play Fundamentally Different Games

Experts and Elites Play Fundamentally Different Games #status #hierarchy #experts #elites #power

Experts are people who know things. They’re judged by other experts—people who speak the same language, use the same methods, and know the same details. You can spot experts by their credentials, their technical precision, or just the way they argue. They care about being right. They’re evaluated on whether their work holds up—whether it can be tested, measured, replicated, or defended under scrutiny. They debate each other, go deep into the weeds, and let the details decide who’s correct.

Elites are different. They’re not judged on technical knowledge but on being impressive across a broader range: wealth, looks, taste, social fluency, connections, charisma, and cultural feel. Elite institutions tend to screen for such qualities, which is why educational pedigree is also often important. This is why you can major in anything at Harvard and still get an elite job. No need for narrow expertise in, say, engineering or mathematics.

There is some interesting exploration of the idea of the expert-elite spectrum.

---

2025-05-04

Field Guide to AI Assisted Communication

You Sent the Message. But Did You Write It? #ai #communication #slang

Last week, I got a message from someone I’ve known for ten years. It was articulate, thoughtful…and definitely not written by him.

It’s one example of what has increasingly unsettled me about the way people interact - myself included - as we all participate in this vast, unprecedented, AI-enhanced communication experiment.

That’s when it dawned on me: we don’t have a vocabulary for this.

We’re surrounded by AI-shaped communication—but we’re still talking about it like everything is normal.

So I started writing down the weirdness. And it turned into a glossary.

Here are ten terms offered to help name, diagnose, and spark reflection on the strange new ways we communicate in the age of AI:

The terms listed are:

1. Chatjacking
2. Prasting
3. Prompt ponging
4. AI’m a Writer Now (aka Sudden Scribe Syndrome)
5. Promptosis
6. Subpromptual
7. GPTMI
8. Chatcident
9. GPTune
10. Syntherity

Why are big companies so slow

Why are big tech companies so slow? | sean goedecke

Big tech companies spend a lot of time and money building things that a single, motivated engineer could build in a weekend. This fact puzzles a lot of people who don’t work in big tech. Often those people share theories about why this is true:

1. Big tech engineers are incompetent and unproductive, and big tech routinely wastes billions of dollars in salary on bad hires
2. Big tech companies use processes, like Agile, that are so inherently inefficient as to slow down work by 100x for no good reason
3. Big tech engineers are lazy and are stealing time from their employers
4. Big tech companies are dominated by coordination problems that sap much of the value of each extra engineer
5. Big tech operates at web scale, so comparing weekend features to big tech features is like comparing a diecast toy car to a Ferrari

Why are big tech companies slow? Because they’ve packed in as many features as possible in order to make more money, and the interaction of existing features adds an unimaginable amount of cognitive load. Some hackers are revolted by this, because they love simple tools that do one thing well. That’s a fair reaction. But don’t let your revulsion fool you into thinking that big tech companies are full of stupid people.

Capturing value at the margin is really difficult to do well. That’s why big tech pays big tech salaries for it!

---

2025-05-03

Jujutsu Version Control

zerowidth positive lookahead | What I've learned from jj

I have taken baby steps with jujutsu so far. This seems like a good article

I recently started using the Jujutsu version control system, and it’s changed how I think about working with code. As someone who’s been using git for nearly two decades, it’s refreshing to gain new perspectives on my daily work and get a sense of what might be possible in the future.

Working with git has been great, especially in contrast to what came before. But despite years of development, it still has sharp edges and presents a steep learning curve. Jujutsu doesn’t fix that, exactly, but it sands off some rough edges and makes some different decisions that result in a much safer and far more flexible workflow.

Psychedelics and Indigenous Communities

The ancient psychedelics myth: ‘People tell tourists the stories they think are interesting for them’ | Drugs | The Guardian #psychedelics #history

This article upends notions I had held about psychedelics that were informed by the usual sources mentioned in the article (like Pollan). It's good to read a good critique informed by sources.

Based on this and other evidence, Brabec de Mori argues that ayahuasca diffused through the Peruvian Amazon in the past 300 years. It is likely older among Tukanoan peoples further north, who, he suspects, transmitted the practice to populations missionised early in the lowlands. Yet in the regions most frequented by tourists, it seems to be a relative novelty. Brabec de Mori isn’t the first to make the argument – the anthropologist Peter Gow proposed something similar in 1994 – but he, more than anyone else, has found the anthropological data to support it.

Brabec de Mori’s findings represent one of many cracks in the stories we tell about the history of psychedelics. As these substances become the mainstream, so do narratives about their role in human societies, narratives that often bind them to shamanism. Just look at the media coverage. In 2020, a journalist for the Washington Post wrote that consciousness-altering substances “have been used by Indigenous cultures for physical and psychological healing for thousands of years”. Michael Pollan endorsed a similar narrative throughout his bestselling 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind, writing that “elements of shamanism might have a role to play in psychedelic therapy – as indeed it has probably done for several thousand years”.

These quotes all subscribe to what I call the global archaic psychedelic shamanism (Gaps) hypothesis. It consists of three claims. First, that psychedelics have long been widespread. Second, that use of psychedelics goes back to the ancient past. Third, that psychedelics have long been used by shamans for therapeutic healing.

Like so many of the stories we tell about human history, the Gaps hypothesis is rooted in glimmers of truth. Yet much of what passes as psychedelic history has been distorted by a seductive mixture of flimsy archaeological evidence, outdated anthropological approaches and economically expedient ideology. “It’s a romantic image that Indigenous people have been using everything they do for thousands of years,” Brabec de Mori said. “If we change the picture, it’s kind of unromantic, and it seems that people like romanticism.”

For Erika Dyck, who has studied the history of attitudes about psychedelics, stories about traditional psychedelic use are rooted in financial and ideological goals. “A lot of the enthusiasm for investing in psychedelic drugs,” she said, stems from an expectation that they will bring “a paradigm shift in the way we think about mental disorders.” Our stories reflect that goal. We portray shamans around the world as psychotherapists and psychopharmacologists. We imagine how we want to use psychedelics and then project those imaginings on to cultures we know little about.

---

2025-05-02

10 books that are dating red flags

10 books that are dating red flags | Dazed #dating #books

I first thought the title was a bit unserious, but the actual article turned out to be very insightful and funny.

On A Clockwork Orange

It’s a thought-provoking read and probably one of my favourite books, but if the person you’re dating thinks Alex is some kind of aspirational antihero, it’s safe to say you should probably run a mile.

On American Psycho

So if a man you’re dating loves American Psycho, just try to make sure this is due to its trenchant critique of consumer-capitalism, and not because he thinks Patrick Bateman is a based alpha giga-chad.

TIL, there is such a thing as "dude-bro" books:

I’ve always been perplexed by the idea that there are large numbers of obnoxious literary bros out there, bragging about having read Infinite Jest and terrorising the people around them with Jack Kerouac quotes. I have met a handful of men like that in my life, but they don’t exist as a meaningful constituency – most men simply don’t read fiction, if they read at all. If I met someone who loved Pynchon, DeLillo, Bolaño or any other author from the “dude bro” canon, I’d be more inclined to think of them as interesting than as pretentious.

On All About Love by Bell Hooks

I actually don’t think All About Love is inherently a red flag book. But it can be alarming to many when certain people (men) have this book in their possession. When I think about All About Love, I think of that picture a guy took of himself on a beach reading it, and everyone commented that he was only on page one and was already taking pictures of himself 😭. All About Love has become associated with a kind of performance for men. It often sits on the corner of their desks collecting dust, but it’s there so that any potential romantic partner they bring home will be impressed by their supposed desire to engage with hooks’ work and better themselves. Beyond that, I know people have a lot of problems with All About Love, especially because hooks writes that love and abuse cannot coexist. When I first read the book at 17, that particular line triggered one of the worst mental breakdowns I’ve had to date. Now that I’m 25, I understand that what people write in books isn’t always fact and that they can be wrong.

On Crime and Punishment

If you’re seeing someone who is reading a book by Fyodor Dostoevsky, good news! They have a brain cell. The bad news, however, is that that brain cell is deficient in serotonin; this person likely takes themselves quite seriously, has a morose outlook on life, and struggles with chronic depression (at least, if they didn’t when they started it, they will have developed it by the time they’ve finished it).

What Goes Around Comes Around... And Around...

What Goes Around Comes Around... And Around... | ACM SIGMOD Record #databases #sql #relational

The PDF can also be found here: whatgoesaround-sigmodrec2024.pdf

This is a great survey of all the interesting things that have happened in databases w.r.t to data modeling and query languages, which concludes that ultimately every converges to Relational Modeling and SQL.

In this paper, we analyze the last 20 years of data model and query language activity in databases. We structure our commentary into the following areas:

1. MapReduce Systems
2. Key-value Stores
3. Document Databases
4. Column Family / Wide-Column
5. Text Search Engines
6. Array Databases
7. Vector Databases
8. Graph Databases

We contend that most systems that deviated from SQL or the RM have not dominated the DBMS landscape and often only serve niche markets. Many systems that started out rejecting the RM with much fanfare (think NoSQL) now expose a SQL-like interface for RM databases. Such systems are now on a path to convergence with RDBMSs. Meanwhile, SQL incorporated the best query language ideas to expand its support for modern applications and remain relevant.

Although there has not been much change in RM fundamentals, there were dramatic changes in RM system implementations. The second part of this paper discusses advancements in DBMS architectures that address modern applications and hardware: 9. Columnar Systems 10. Cloud Databases 11. Data Lakes / Lakehouses 12. NewSQL Systems 13. Hardware Accelerators 14. Blockchain Databases

Some of these are profound changes to DBMS implementations, while others are merely trends based on faulty premises.

Karpathy vibe-coding a production grade web-app

Vibe coding MenuGen | karpathy #llm #coding #software #programming #vibe-coding

TLDR. Vibe coding menugen was exhilarating and fun escapade as a local demo, but a bit of a painful slog as a deployed, real app. Building a modern app is a bit like assembling IKEA future. There are all these services, docs, API keys, configurations, dev/prod deployments, team and security features, rate limits, pricing tiers... Meanwhile the LLMs have slightly outdated knowledge of everything, they make subtle but critical design mistakes when you watch them closely, and sometimes they hallucinate or gaslight you about solutions. But the most interesting part to me was that I didn't even spend all that much work in the code editor itself. I spent most of it in the browser, moving between tabs and settings and configuring and gluing a monster. All of this work and state is not even accessible or manipulatable by an LLM - how are we supposed to be automating society by 2027 like this?

---

2025-05-01

Adolescence TV show

The problem with Adolescence | Dazed #tv #misogyny #gender #manosphere

Finally ended up watching this show. Now catching with all the internet think pieces on it!

It’s true that those of us on social media – that’s 98 per cent of us Gen Zers – are entirely at the mercy of algorithms. Major platforms like TikTok remain maddeningly opaque about exactly how their algorithms work, but it’s not difficult to spot patterns in what they choose to recommend. Speaking to the BBC in 2024, Andrew Kaung, a former analyst at TikTok, algorithms are designed to fuel engagement by showing you content which you’re inclined to spend longer watching. Often, this sort of thumb-stopping content is extremist in nature; independent research and reporting has consistently found that social media algorithms amplify misogynistic and inflammatory content.

But while it is impossible for parents to ensure their children are forever shielded from the likes of Andrew Tate, there’s no reason why this problem can’t be tackled at the root. If parents and teachers are powerless to adequately monitor the kind of content children are consuming online, why can’t social media companies do something? Why can’t misogynistic content be removed from platforms before it has a chance to poison impressionable young minds? It’s a question worth asking, but one Adolescence fails to pose. Instead the show meekly throws its hands up in defeat. “You can’t keep an eye on them all the time, love. We just can’t,” Eddie says.

Typing Practise

Studio: How To Type Fast #typing #practice

Found in this video: Learning to Type FAST in 5 Days - 150+ wpm Guide from MKBHD Team - YouTube

Typing Practice 2

If you’re from the video welcome! The following is the exact instructions I gave our team to follow for 1 work week which is why you’ll see instructions to record scores for each day. Enjoy!

For the next 5 work days dedicate 20 minutes a day to doing these practice exercises.

• 10 minutes before lunch, 10 minutes after lunch.
• You can break these 10 minutes up, but please make sure you’re doing at least 20 minutes a day.
• During all of these tests you should be trying your hardest to never look at your keyboard. Try to focus on not looking during regular work day typing as well.
• Focus on accuracy over speed at all times, even when you’re taking tests at the end of each day.
• Use the same keyboard for all of this practice.

NOTES:

• Try to do all of these activities at least once unless they seem too hard.
• I’d suggest starting with an easy activity first and then moving onto the harder ones.
• At the end of each day, go to Monkeytype and take 5x 15 second tests. Record your best score each day.

First

Keybr - This test needs to be finished before starting any other activities.

• Read all the instructions before you start.
• Create an account to keep track of progress.
• Unlock all letters as green before moving on
• If it takes you the full 5 days to complete this that’s fine

After Keybr is completed and all letters are green, here’s a list of different ways to practice during your time slots. I’ve grouped them in different tiers of difficulty.

Easy:

1. Go to Monkeytype and choose the “words” category on top.

2. You’ll have 50 words to type with no time limit

3. Focus on finishing each test with no errors

4. Before you start another test, select “Practice Words”, select “Words” for missed words and “On” for slow words and click “Start” and take the new focused test.

5. Open “Zen” mode in Monkeytype

6. Here you wont have words, but you just type what comes to mind.

7. Type in here what you need to accomplish for the day or just some things on your mind.

8. We practice a lot of typing while reading words on a screen, but in the real world you’ll be typing something in your head.

9. Press “Shift - Enter” to finish Zen mode.

10. Go to Monkeytype and select “Custom” then “Change”

11. In the custom box put your full name.

12. Our names are something we type all the time

13. Set it to 30 seconds and practice typing your name.

14. Continue Practice Mode in Keybr

Medium:

15. Go to Monkeytype and select “Quote”

16. This will add capitalization and punctuation to your tests

17. Play TypeRacer

18. Racing game where you race against other people with similar typing speeds

19. This also includes punctuation

20. Play Z Type

21. Asteroids based typing game.

22. No punctuation or capitalization

23. Go to Monkeytype and select times over 1-2 minutes

24. Allow yourself to type for longer amounts of time vs a short test.

25. Focus on accuracy

Hard:

26. Go to Monkeytype and select either “time” or “words”

27. Go to Settings and “Funbox”

28. Select “Read Ahead Easy”

29. This will remove the next word as you type forcing you to read ahead while typing.

30. If this is too easy, move to “Read Ahead” or “Read Ahead Hard”

31. Go to TypeLit.io

32. This website lets you choose a book and type the chapters.

33. Lots of punctuation and general formatting you must follow

34. Type a page at a time

35. Go to Monkeytype, in funbox settings click “Wikipedia”

36. This will give you prompts that are based on Wikipedia articles

37. Lots of punctuation again, but in the familiar Monkeytype layout

• Try to do all of these activities at least once unless they seem too hard.
• I’d suggest starting with an easy activity first and then moving onto the harder ones.
• At the end of each day, go to Monkeytype and take 5 15 second tests. Record your scores if you want to keep track!

Case for Living Online

Tyler Cowen: The Case for Living Online - by Tyler Cowen #online #culture

Why do I spend so much of my time with email, group chats, and also writing for larger audiences such as Free Press readers? I ask myself that earnestly, and I have arrived at a pretty good answer. I believe that by spending time online I will meet and befriend a collection of individuals around the world, who are pretty much exactly the people I want to be in touch with. And then I will be in touch with them regularly.

I call them “the perfect people for me.”

I recognize that many of these communications are online, and thus they are “thinner” than many more local, face-to-face relationships. Yet I do end up meeting most of these people, and with great pleasure. That, in turn, enhances the quality of the online communications. And frankly, if forced to choose, I would rather have thinner relationships with “the perfect people for me” than regular bear hugs and beer guzzlings with “people who are in the 87th percentile for me.”

The internet, in other words, has invented a new means of human connection, characterized by “the perfect people for me.” For me, it’s people who are into analytical thinking and tech and AI and music and economics, and much more. For others? It can be Survivor obsessives or vegans or knitters or Survivor obsessives who are vegan and love to knit. The point is that there is a niche for all 8 billion of us. And now we know where to find each other.

And it turns out we value that very, very highly. So highly that we are willing to obsess over our little devices known as smartphones.

The renaissance of personal software

The 70% problem: Hard truths about AI-assisted coding #ai #programming

I believe we're going to see a renaissance of personal software development. As the market gets flooded with AI-generated MVPs, the products that will stand out are those built by developers who:

• Take pride in their craft

• Care about the little details

• Focus on the full user experience

• Build for the edge cases

• Create truly self-serve experiences

The irony? AI tools might actually enable this renaissance. By handling the routine coding tasks, they free up developers to focus on what matters most - creating software that truly serves and delights users.

How to live like an Epicurean — 9 key habits

How to live like an Epicurean — 9 key habits #epicurean #philosophy

If you’re looking for a way to live a more fulfilling or simpler life, living like an Epicurean might be the answer. Epicureanism is a philosophy that emphasises the importance of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain to live a fulfilling life. However, this idea of pleasure was not limited to physical pleasure alone but also included intellectual pleasures such as knowledge and wisdom. It teaches that the greatest good is pleasure and the absence of pain.

1. Focus on Inner Happiness: Seek joy from within rather than external possessions.
2. Practice Self-Control: Master your emotions to achieve tranquility.
3. Prioritize Meaningful Relationships: Cultivate genuine friendships for support and happiness.
4. Embrace the Present Moment: Live fully in the now and enjoy simple pleasures.
5. Seek Healthy Pleasures: Find joy in virtuous living rather than excess.
6. Cultivate a Mindfulness Practice: Engage in meditation or reflection for greater self-awareness.
7. Accept What You Cannot Control: Let go of the need to control everything around you.
8. Challenge Adversity: View challenges as opportunities for growth and resilience.
9. Live Moderately: Avoid excess and focus on balanced choices that promote well-being.

Avoiding Skill Atrophy in the Age of AI

Avoiding Skill Atrophy in the Age of AI - by Addy Osmani #ai #software #programming

Here are the key points from the section "Using AI as a collaborator, not a crutch":

• Mindful Engagement - Treat AI as a collaborator rather than an infallible tool. Engage actively with its outputs.
• Practice AI Hygiene - Always verify AI suggestions. Test and understand AI-generated code instead of accepting it blindly.
• No AI for Fundamentals - Reserve time for manual coding to strengthen foundational skills. Consider implementing "No-AI Days."
• Attempt Problems Independently - Try solving issues on your own before consulting AI. This enhances problem-solving skills.
• Augment Code Review with AI - Use AI to assist in code reviews but maintain human oversight to catch potential errors.
• Active Learning - Follow up on AI solutions to deepen understanding. Engage with AI by asking questions about its outputs.
• Track AI Assistance - Keep a record of frequent AI queries to identify knowledge gaps and areas for improvement.
• Pair Programming with AI - Collaborate with AI in a pair programming style to maintain control over the coding process.
• Long-term Skill Preservation - Ensure that reliance on AI does not lead to skill atrophy. Maintain curiosity and understanding of coding fundamentals.

These practices aim to leverage AI's advantages while preserving essential coding skills and critical thinking abilities.

"AI-first" is the new Return To Office

"AI-first" is the new Return To Office - Anil Dash

Big tech CEOs and VCs really love performing for each other. We know they hang out in group chats like high schoolers, preening and sending each other texts, each trying to make sure they're all wearing the latest fashions, whether it's a gold chain or a MAGA hat or just repeating a phrase that they heard from another founder. A key way of showing that they're part of this cohort is to make sure they're having a tantrum and acting out against their workers fairly regularly.

The return to office fad was a big part of this effort, often largely motivated by reacting to the show of worker power in the racial justice activism efforts of 2020. Similarly, being AI-first shows that a company is participating in the AI trend in the "right" way, by imposing it on workers, rather than trusting workers to judge what tools are useful for them to do their jobs.

There's an orthodoxy in tech tycoon circles that's increasingly referred to, ironically, as "tech optimism". I say "ironically", because there's nothing optimistic about it. The culture is one of deep insecurity, reacting defensively, or even lashing out aggressively, when faced with any critical conversation about new technology. That tendency is paired with a desperate and facile cheerleading of startups, ignoring the often equally interesting technologies stories that come from academia, or from mature industries, or from noncommercial and open source communities that don't get tons of media coverage, but quietly push forward innovating without the fame and fortune. By contrast, those of us who actually are optimistic about technology (usually because we either create it, or are in communities with those who do) are just happily moving forward, not worrying when people point out the bugs that we all ought to be fixing together.

Reimagining Democracy

Reimagining Democracy - Schneier on Security #democracy #politics

Bruce Schneier writes with a lot of clarity. The whole article is worth reading.

Indeed, the very idea of representative government was a hack to get around technological limitations. Voting is easier now. Does it still make sense for all of us living in the same place to organize every few years and choose one of us to go to a single big room far away and make laws in our name? Representative districts are organized around geography because that was the only way that made sense two hundred-plus years ago. But we do not need to do it that way anymore. We could organize representation by age: one representative for the thirty-year-olds, another for the forty-year-olds, and so on. We could organize representation randomly: by birthday, perhaps. We can organize in any way we want. American citizens currently elect people to federal posts for terms ranging from two to six years. Would ten years be better for some posts? Would ten days be better for others? There are lots of possibilities. Maybe we can make more use of direct democracy by way of plebiscites. Certainly we do not want all of us, individually, to vote on every amendment to every bill, but what is the optimal balance between votes made in our name and ballot initiatives that we all vote on?

Manas Saloi on his favorite thinkers

This tweet by Manas Saloi intrigued me a little bit so I went on a bit of a rabbit hole to locate all the resources he is referencing:

• The Internet of Beefs
• How many businesses-in-a-box are there?
• College as an incubator of Girardian terror | Dan Wang
• Game of Thrones: A Girardian Reading | Dan Wang
• Election Day 2020: René Girard, Part 2 – Alex Danco's Newsletter
• The Founding Murder and the Final Boss – Alex Danco's Newsletter
• Secrets about People: A Short and Dangerous Introduction to René Girard – Alex Danco's Newsletter
• The Mike Speiser Incubation Playbook - kwokchain
• Making Uncommon Knowledge Common - kwokchain
• 11. Eugene Wei - Amusing Each Other to Death - Jackson Dahl

Welcome to the Era of Experience

“Welcome to the Era of Experience” by David Silver and Richard Sutton

In key domains such as mathematics, coding, and science, the knowledge extracted from human data is rapidly approaching a limit. The majority of high-quality data sources - those that can actually improve a strong agent’s performance - have either already been, or soon will be consumed. The pace of progress driven solely by supervised learning from human data is demonstrably slowing, signaling the need for a new approach. Furthermore, valuable new insights, such as new theorems, technologies or scientific breakthroughs, lie beyond the current boundaries of human understanding and cannot be captured by existing human data.

To progress significantly further, a new source of data is required. This data must be generated in a way that continually improves as the agent becomes stronger; any static procedure for synthetically generating data will quickly become outstripped. This can be achieved by allowing agents to learn continually from their own experience, i.e., data that is generated by the agent interacting with its environment. AI is at the cusp of a new period in which experience will become the dominant medium of improvement and ultimately dwarf the scale of human data used in today’s systems.

An experiential agent can continue to learn throughout a lifetime. In the era of human data, language-based AI has largely focused on short interaction episodes: e.g., a user asks a question and (perhaps after a few thinking steps or tool-use actions) the agent responds. Typically, little or no information carries over from one episode to the next, precluding any adaptation over time. Furthermore, the agent aims exclusively for outcomes within the current episode, such as directly answering a user's question. In contrast, humans (and other animals) exist in an ongoing stream of actions and observations that continues for many years. Information is carried across the entire stream, and their behaviour adapts from past experiences to self-correct and improve. Furthermore, goals may be specified in terms of actions and observations that stretch far into the future of the stream. For example, humans may select actions to achieve long-term goals like improving their health, learning a language, or achieving a scientific breakthrough.

The era of human data offered an appealing solution. Massive corpuses of human data contain examples of natural language for a huge diversity of tasks. Agents trained on this data achieved a wide range of competencies compared to the more narrow successes of the era of simulation. Consequently, the methodology of experiential RL was largely discarded in favour of more general-purpose agents, resulting in a widespread transition to human-centric AI. However, something was lost in this transition: an agent's ability to self-discover its own knowledge.

---

2025-04-27

The End of Deep Reading

Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us #reading #distractions

I recall that experience today somewhat wistfully, in an unrecognisable age where so little of what we read asks anything of us. The idea of lingering with a text that doesn’t yield immediate meaning feels increasingly alien today. In a world shaped by feeds and fragments, where comprehension is measured in clicks and content must gratify instantly or be discarded, a book like Faulkner’s feels almost impossible.

I read to my 6 year old and 4 year old daughters every night and I worry what kind of reading life they will have. I know it will be fundamentally different to mine but what I fear they’ll miss is not literature’s beauty but its resistance. The way it trains the mind to slow down, to reflect, to tolerate ambiguity. To reside in the discomfort of the interstitial and be ok with it. The way it sharpens perception by refusing to simplify. The world they are entering is freighted with superficiality and false certainty with its Blinkist-ification and summaries of summaries and algorithmic banalities. As Baudrillard put it, copies of copies of which we have now lost the original.

---

2025-04-26

Coffee Varieties beyond Arabica and Robusta

That’s why Davis is so interested in rediscovering lost coffee species. It’s not that any single species will provide a magical solution to the many challenges facing global coffee production—not even a mythical heat-and-drought-resistant coffee plant like stenophylla. But certain rare species could be used both to partly replace crops in areas that are becoming too hot for them and to crossbreed new, sturdier strains. To make this happen, though, scientists will need genetic resources from which to choose the best traits—and not only those that make them unusually resilient, but also those that impart a great taste, too. That last part is crucial. No species, however resilient, can become the coffee of the future if people don’t find it delicious.

Manufacturing Viability in US

Why It’s Impossible for Most Small Businesses to Manufacture in the US | WIRED #tarrifs #us #china #manufacturing

This is a great article with a lot of research and interviews on the ground with vendors and suppliers that makes the case that tariffs are unlikely to stimulate manufacturing in the US because there are so many other factors at play here.

Cost is undeniably an important reason why businesses choose to source from China. But experts say it’s incorrect to assume that lower prices mean lower quality, and the reason manufacturing in China is cheaper than other regions doesn’t always have to do with how much workers are paid. In fact, lower wages have become a less important aspect of China’s manufacturing strength as the country has moved up the value chain, says Eli Friedman, an associate professor studying China’s labor force at Cornell University.

“You definitely can’t say because wages in Chinese factories are only 25 percent of what American counterparts are working for, that the quality is going to be 25 percent of the American product,” Friedman says. “That’s much too simplistic a way to think about this.”

Cultural norms like working long hours and intentionally spending decades in the same industry often means that workers in China have become more skilled and specialized in certain areas. China is also a world leader in the production of industrial tools, which means factories can easily adjust machinery to fit the ever-changing needs of their customers. As a result, Chinese factories are often more responsive to customization demands from clients and more capable of precisely orchestrating their design intentions.

Kim Vaccarella, the founder and CEO of a handbag company called Bogg, makes products out of EVA, a rubber-like petroleum byproduct also used for flipflops and yoga mats. Vaccarella says it’s possible to make EVA products in Vietnam, but when she researched sourcing from there, she found that a lot of the factories were Chinese-owned and employed Chinese engineers. “China has mastered EVA. They’ve been doing shoes in EVA for 20-plus years, so it was really our first choice,” Vaccarella says.

If Bogg tried to move its manufacturing to the US, Vaccarella says she believes she would also need to hire Chinese talent to help ensure the production lines were set up correctly. But she worries that would be difficult, especially given the Trump administration’s current policies to reduce immigration. “With everything going on with our borders, is it going to be hard to get the visas for the Chinese counterparts to come in and be able to help us build this business?” she asks.

I am Martin Parr

Watched this movie finally and totally loved it!

One notable thing about the movie was that it did not discuss camera gear at any point in the film. There is a discussion of Parr moving from black-and-white film to color film. You can also see him holding a Canon DSLR in many of the frames. But at no point in the film did the film talk about the cameras that Parr uses. I thought that was very refreshing.

---

2025-04-25

Be a disappointment

The Imperfectionist: Be a disappointment #burkeman #disappointment

From Oliver Burkeman's latest:

The older I get, the more convinced I become that it’s a critical life-skill – at least if you’re roughly the sort of person I am – to get better at disappointing other people.

I don’t just mean you should go easier on yourself when you catch yourself feeling bad for falling short of others’ expectations (although you should do that, too). I mean that it’s worth deliberately and consciously practicing disappointing others, letting the associated feelings sink into your bones, and generally spending time hanging out in the space of ‘being a disappointment’.

You’re especially likely to benefit if you belong to the category of people psychologists call “insecure overachievers”. (At book festivals and other events, it’s always fun to see people’s eyes widen in recognition when I use that phrase.) That is to say you’re the sort who works hard, gets stuff done, and impresses others with your achievements – but that to some degree, for whatever combination of reasons to do with upbringing, culture or DNA, you do it all because you feel that otherwise you won’t quite have earned your right to exist on the planet.

Accomplishments that ought to be a source of delight – good grades, promotions, professional success – can feel ironically oppressive to insecure overachievers, because once you’ve met a standard like that, it becomes the new minimum standard you’ve got to meet, next time, in order to carry on feeling adequate.

Karpathy on AI assisted non-"vibe-coding"

How Y2K Shaped Modern Misogyny

How Y2K pop culture shaped modern misogyny | Dazed #feminism #y2k #pop-culture #culture

There were certain words that kept coming up over and over and over again during my research, and ‘empowering’ was one of them. Almost inevitably, whenever it came up, it was being used in a defensive sense, after someone had been critiqued for something. The first Wonderbra ad with Eva Herzigova in 1994 was on billboards everywhere; it was very old-school bombshell, like the death knell for third-wave feminism. But the defence of it was that it was ‘empowering’. She made a lot of money, so maybe it was empowering [laughs]. Then there was a movie poster [for 2007 film Hostel 2] where a woman was being tortured and confined. It was quite dark, and when there were complaints, one of the producers claimed that they were ‘empowering’, because in the end, she fights back.

Marketers love nothing more than a good buzzword, right? When they find a word that they can imbue with a certain kind of progressive meaning, that is always a word that you should be suspicious of. Even the word ‘feminism’ is something that is so loaded at this point. But feminism does have a very clear meaning: women should have equal rights to men, and have equal protection under the law.

Sophie Gilbert: A lot of people think of this book as cultural criticism – that’s what I thought it would be, when I was pitching it – but to me, now, it is much more of a history book. And the point of history is not to rehash the stories that people already know; it is to look for the hidden stories that weren’t told at the time.

History is so often presented through a male frame. These are the stories that weren’t told or weren’t put together at the time, because people don’t really care about women that much, and also people don’t take seriously cultural products that are deemed to be ‘trash’, whether reality TV or gossip magazines or different kinds of media that women enjoy. But at the same time, they have such a massive influence. What I really wanted to do was to look at these, critically and historically, and see what they told me.

---

2025-04-24

Be Easy To Work With

Tags: #work #soft-skills

How to teach yourself about AI

How to teach yourself about AI - by Mike White #ai #learning #books

One of the most important abilities you need for a successful career is knowing how to update your skills. As I tell my kids, this isn’t just important advice for scientists, who work in a profession that is supposed to generate new knowledge and new technology, and thus is always changing. The New York Times recently covered the “Gen X career meltdown”, describing the challenges of media professionals who entered journalism, advertising, film, etc. in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. The media business looks nothing like it did 20-30 years ago.

…

In that spirit, I want to encourage everyone learn more about AI, including scientists whose training and work may be mostly non-computational. Especially if you’re still early in your career, you have time to build your skills and bring deep learning into your work. To be clear, if you’re serious about doing computational biology, you’ll need to do more than just read some books; you’ll need to spend some time training with real computational biologists. But it is possible to, in the words of Harvard computational biologist Sean Eddy, “ go where a question takes you, not where your training left you.”

…

For the antedsciplinary scientists (and non-scientists) out there, here are my recommendations for books to learn AI. They range from gentle and popular introductions to fantastic textbooks that rigorously cover the math. (Eddy’s piece, by the way, helped tip the scales in favor of my decision to come to Washington University in St. Louis, where Eddy was at the time. I wanted to be around people who thought like that.)

What Happens When Everything Becomes a Meme

What Happens When Everything Becomes a Meme? #meme #commons

In economics, the tragedy of the commons is what happens when a shared resource - like farmland, fisheries, or clean air - is exploited so extensively that it eventually collapses. Today, we're experiencing a modern variation of this tragedy, not just in physical resources, but in our essential societal infrastructure:

• The social commons: trust, relationships, community.
• The cognitive commons: curiosity, education, critical thought.
• The economic commons: stable markets, shared prosperity, institutional trust.
• The informational commons: language, reality, basic consensus.

Unlike traditional commons, which collapse through actual physical depletion, these invisible resources are slowly dismantled through systemic incentives that reward isolation, compliance, instability, and division.

on the social commons

And honestly, a society built on transactional interactions and shallow connections is inherently fragile. People who can't trust each other in daily life don't suddenly trust each other at the ballot box. People who can't commit to friendships or partners might have trouble committing to democratic institutions or civic engagement. I am being sweeping in my assertions, but think of the foundation - a society without stable relationships can't sustain stable democracies.

Without genuine community ties, citizens disengage. Civic participation declines, and as Guy Debord warned us - politics devolves into spectacle rather than substance.

on the cognitive commons

Anne Helen Petersen has a nice essay on that here, writing “the logic we’ve internalized is pernicious and persistent: if you’re spending time doing something, and there’s a potential to make money off that thing, leaving that money on the table is fiscally irresponsible.” The obsessive, monetized pursuit of hobbies isn't mere escapism but a reaction to general pressures: education-driven burnout, economic precarity, and performative living. It's a way for people to assert identity and agency within structural limitations. Optimization, efficiency, monetization. Repeat!

Without curiosity or critical thinking, we become vulnerable to manipulation, susceptible to polarizing narratives, and ultimately lose the ability to make independent judgments, which is really important for democratic citizenship.

on the economic commons

We burned our economic commons, not because it makes sense, but because our political leaders have confused economic policy with personal vendettas. The market for chaos is booming, and trust is evaporating.

on the informational commons

The informational commons - language, reality, and basic consensus - is collapsing because we've monetized division. Social media platforms aren't built for clarity or understanding; they're optimized for engagement, outrage, and polarization. Algorithms don't reward nuance; they reward certainty, controversy, and emotional triggers.

What replaces consensus reality? Loyalty realities. Tribal realities. Personalized realities!! We no longer debate ideas or solutions - we debate whose facts count, whose feelings matter, whose truth wins. Truth itself becomes a loyalty test, not a shared ground. And without a shared informational commons, cooperation becomes impossible. We don’t solve problems, we fight over who gets to define them! Language is weaponized and reality is fractured.

and finally

Each of these commons has been chipped away, monetized, and exploited. Social trust turned into transactional loneliness. Curiosity replaced by compliance and cognitive outsourcing. Stable economic governance overtaken by chaotic spectacle. Shared reality splintered into competing tribes and personalized truths.

The societal infrastructure isn't gone forever. Unlike a depleted fishery or farmland, these intangible resources can regenerate if we choose connection over transaction, critical thought over compliance, substance over spectacle, and shared reality over isolated tribes, etc. But, you know, for now… bitcoin?

Millenial Hobby Energy

What is Millennial Hobby Energy? - by Anne Helen Petersen #hobby #hustle #culture

Many bourgeois or upwardly aspirational millennials have a hobby story similar to mine. Maybe they had a period in their teens or early 20s where they did something just because they liked it. But most people came to understand activities as “achievements” early on: if you’re doing something that’s not directly related to grades, then it should be extremely legible as a line on your college resume.

If you did what we called an extra-curricular, it was less because it was fun, or because you wanted to, but because “it looked good,” or communicated something “interesting” or “well-rounded” about your personality. And when you instrumentalize leisure in this way, you lose touch with your understanding of what leisure even is. Did you like basketball? Did you like playing the piano? Or did you do it because it — or something like it — was what you did?

Within this framework, there was very little room for activities that resisted narrativization in a college essay. Hobbies that didn’t produce something, or help someone, establish you as superlative, or in some way highlight your entrepreneurial spirit weren’t really hobbies at all. They were fucking around: invisible, if not altogether shameful. Listening to music = not a hobby. Scrapbooking = not a hobby. Zine making could be a hobby, but only if you distributed it to every high school in your metro area and formed a movement around it, etc. etc. (On this subject, I always refer people to Malcolm Harris’s Kids These Days, which outlines how millennials came to understand themselves as a product to be ameliorated).

---

2025-04-23

Banking and Crypto

Crypto Might Get Some Banks - Bloomberg #crypto #stablecoin

But narrow banking pops up elsewhere. One important modern form is stablecoins. A stablecoin is a crypto form of banking: You deposit dollars with a stablecoin issuer, it gives you back tokens entitling you to get your dollars back, and meanwhile it does whatever it wants with the dollars. In the unregulated early days of crypto, “whatever it wants” could be quite spicy indeed, but these days stablecoins are a big business and there is something of a norm of parking the deposits in very safe short-term dollar-denominated assets, ideally Treasury bills or reverse repos or a BlackRock money market fund. If you launched a new stablecoin today and said “we will take your dollars and use them to make loans to emerging crypto entrepreneurs,” you’d have a hard time competing with the big incumbent stablecoins that say “we will take your dollars and use them to buy Treasury bills.” (Especially if, like most stablecoins, you didn’t pay interest.)

The Future is Augmentation

Why LLM-Powered Programming is More Mech Suit Than Artificial Human #llm #coding #software #programming

There is a view in many circles that LLMs will replace programmers. I am hesitant to say that this will never happen, becuase a lot of things with LLMs have surprised me recently, and I expect more surprises to come. For now, however, I don’t see LLMs effectively replacing programmers; but they are transforming how we work. Like Ripley in her Power Loader, we’re learning to operate powerful new tools that extend our capabilities far beyond what we could achieve alone.

This transformation will change what we value in developers. Raw coding ability becomes less important; architectural thinking, pattern recognition, and technical judgment become more crucial. The ability to effectively direct and collaborate with AI tools emerges as a vital skill in itself.

The developers who thrive in this new environment won’t be those who fear or resist AI tools, but those who master them—who understand both their extraordinary potential and their very real limitations. They’ll recognise that the goal isn’t to remove humans from the equation but to enhance what humans can accomplish.

In my view, that’s something to embrace, not fear. The mech suit awaits, and with it comes the potential to build software at scales and speeds previously unimaginable—but only for those skilled enough to operate the machines in ways that don’t harm themselves or those around them.

---

2025-04-21

AI Phobia

AI Phobia Is Just Fear That ‘Easier’ Equals ‘Cheating’ #ai #phobia #skepticism

Why do these businesses care so much? I suspect they aren’t really worried about AI—they're clinging to an old belief that if work isn't visibly difficult to produce, it must be less valuable. When we dig beneath the surface of "no-AI" policies and detection tools, we find an age-old assumption that worth must be measured in struggle. This mindset shows up again and again, from “hustle culture” and the “rise and grind’ mindset that defined the 2010s to recent return-to-office mandates that prioritize presence over performance. In a culture that values butts in seats and availability on Slack, it becomes easy to mistake friction for effort and effort for worth.

Oddly enough, the very thing we’re resisting—the ease of AI—might be what sets us free. AI isn’t the first tool to challenge how we think about work, but it may be the most direct. By shifting the locus of effort, AI forces us to confront our dysfunctional relationship with work. It holds up a mirror to our culture’s deeply rooted belief that struggle equals value—and in that reflection lies a rare opportunity: to reimagine work in terms of outcomes, not optics; human flourishing, not performance theater.

Anne Helen Petersen once memorably described this as "LARPing your job"—performing a theatrical version of productivity. Workers engage in elaborate displays of "being at work": staying visible on Slack, responding to emails at all hours, and maintaining a digital presence that signals industriousness. The tools have evolved—from software that monitors keyboard activity to AI that analyzes facial expressions in video calls—but the underlying philosophy remains pure Taylorism.

The irony is that these measurements often have little correlation with value creation. Knowledge work rarely follows linear patterns. Our most valuable contributions often come from reflection, seemingly "unproductive" conversations, exploration of dead ends, and invisible mental processing.

A Survey of Reinforcement Learning

The State of Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning #llm #rlhf #rl #reinforcement

This piece is by Sebastian Raschka of Build a Large Language Model fame.

Slowly making my way through this. Found it via a tweet and this is a lot of signal for the relatively short length of the article. Really enjoying it!

---

2025-04-20

Review Code and LLMs

Alex Bird: "I have found that reviewing code is harder than w…" - Mastodon Canada #llm #code #reviews

I have found that reviewing code is harder than writing code. Increasingly, I am trying to write code that is easier to review -- that when someone looks at it, it is easier for them to tell if it does what it ought.

One of my objections to widespread LLM use for code generation is that we replace the easier task of code writing with the harder task of code reviewing.

(I include ensemble/mob programming here as a type of code review -- continuous code review)

---

2025-04-18

Plastics

Plastics are greener than they seem

Although the drawbacks of the world’s reliance on plastics are all too apparent, the benefits they provide, in the form of reducing waste and cost, are all too easily overlooked. Plastics have made possible a bewildering range of new materials that can replicate the properties of existing ones, and can do things they cannot, while being lighter, more durable, and cheaper and easier to manufacture. These materials have become vital in everything from building to carmaking to consumer electronics.

Take food as an example. Plastic packaging prevents perishable foodstuffs from spoiling, making possible global trade in meat, fish, fruit and vegetables. It enables essentials like rice, cooking oil and powdered milk to be stored and distributed safely and cheaply. A one-litre plastic bottle weighs 5% as much as a glass one; plastic packaging thus reduces shipping costs and emissions.

Plastics have also eased the world’s reliance on older materials, and on the living beings from which many of them came. There are perhaps 10m pianos in the world. If all their white keys were made of ivory, how many elephants would remain?

---

2025-04-17

Intelligence in Birds and Mammals

Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals | Quanta Magazine

Intentionally Make Close Friends

Post 43: Intentionally Making Close Friends — Neel Nanda #friendships

Good experiment with some interesting ideas.

---

2025-04-16

Situationships

Bad Romance #situationships #love #dating

A friend of mine is in a situationship where neither of them talks about their dating lives, so she doesn’t know if he’s seeing other people, and he doesn’t know if she is. Instead, she’s piecing together context clues to figure out his status. This is an untenable situation, and I was surprised she was okay with it. But I think the arrangement satisfies some of her needs while keeping alive the hope of real commitment. Sometimes, uncertainty is preferable when seeking clarity could mean learning that what you want is impossible. It’s like the Prisoner’s Dilemma: staying in a mutually tolerable situation feels safer than risking “losing it all” by asking for the truth.

AI as a normal technology

AI as Normal Technology #ai

We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity.

Autonomy and Connection

The Age of The Social Paradox - Rob Henderson's Newsletter #books #review

A fascinating new book, “The Social Paradox: Autonomy, Connection, and Why We Need Both to Find Happiness” by William von Hippel, a social psychologist, offers some insight. Drawing from decades of research in social and evolutionary psychology, von Hippel argues that human beings are pulled by two needs: autonomy (our desire to control our own life) and connection (our need to belong). For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, connection took precedence because small, close-knit communities depended on collaboration and mutual trust. Personal freedom in such societies was constrained by interdependent reliance on kin and friends.

Over time, however, modern lifestyles have elevated autonomy at the expense of connection, leaving many people struggling to balance these twin drives.

Von Hippel argues that the pursuit of autonomy often comes with a trade-off: If we want both independence and companionship, we may feel the need to influence or control others to align with our preferences. We want to live on our own terms, but we also don’t want to be alone — so we might try to guide others toward our way of thinking or doing things. As he puts it, “Only when others conform to your preferences can you meet all your autonomy needs while maintaining your connections.” But this approach is rarely sustainable. Relationships built on control rather than mutual understanding create tension and, ultimately, a hollow sense of connection.

VERT - online file converter

VERT.sh

File converters have always disappointed us. They're ugly, riddled with ads, and most importantly; slow. We decided to solve this problem once and for all by making an alternative that solves all those problems, and more.

All non-video files are converted completely on-device; this means that there's no delay between sending and receiving the files from a server, and we never get to snoop on the files you convert.

Video files get uploaded to our lightning-fast RTX 4000 Ada server. Your videos stay on there for an hour, or after they're converted (in the case of the input which you upload) or downloaded (in the case of the output which is to be downloaded), whichever comes first.

Their code is open source as well: GitHub - VERT-sh/VERT: The next-generation file converter. Open source, fully local* and free forever.

The rise of end times fascism

The rise of end times fascism | Far right (US) | The Guardian

Inspired by a warped reading of the political philosopher Albert Hirschman, figures including Goff, Thiel and the investor and writer Balaji Srinivasan have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.

The Map is Not The Territory - Social Media Edition

cutting through the image - by Adam Aleksic #map #territory #social-media

However, as I’ve previously written, social media platforms want us to think that their map is the territory, because that helps their business model. The more we confuse their “content” with reality, the more we identify with it. Over time, you might really find yourself pursuing regular basket-weaving instead of underwater basket-weaving, simply because that’s what’s available to connect with—but that makes you easier to target as a consumer, since you’re now aligning your identity with the kind of broad metadata the algorithm is able to work with.

Once you identify with the algorithmic version of reality, the manufactured values of the platform become synonymous with your actual values. Content is presented as if it’s “good”—after all, it’s targeted for you, and has lots of “likes” from other people—but these metrics are made up. They reflect the platform priority of engagement optimization, rather than actually being intrinsically “good” or targeted to you.

We might prefer to compartmentalize our “algorithmic selves” from our “real selves” like we’re characters on Severance, but the truth is that they’re both constantly influencing each other. You get basket-weaving videos because you have a latent urge to pursue underwater basket-weaving, and then you ultimately take regular basket-weaving classes because you identified with the spectacular presentation of reality.

Our memes and language are similarly always evolving online and offline, with both mediums constantly influencing each other. The territory affects the map we draw, and then that map affects how we interact with the territory. This is inevitable—it’s just useful to remember which is which.

---