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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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!

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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)

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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?

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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.

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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.

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2025-04-15

Missed a bunch of daily logs because I was locked in. Hopefully I can resume today onwards.

Oliver's Burkeman's Latest Newsletter - No Escape

The Imperfectionist: No escape (from 2022)

I think the general point here, beyond the specific question of how to get writing done, is that we desperately want to be saved. We want to find some person, or some philosophy of life, that will spare us the fear or discomfort or self-doubt or tedium that so often seems to come along for the ride, whenever we try to make progress on things we care about. We hate feeling yoked to reality in such an unpleasant way; we long instead to soar above it, in a realm free from problems. And it’s the mark of a bad self-help book, a dodgy spiritual guru or an incompetent therapist that they’ll be only too happy to encourage the illusion that this might one day be possible.

I don’t think people generally seek out such quick fixes or back-door solutions out of laziness or entitlement. It’s not because they think they shouldn’t have to put in the same effort as everyone else. Rather, most of the time, it’s the opposite: it’s that they feel so inadequate and unqualified for the task ahead of them (of writing, of marriage, parenting – whatever) that they believe they absolutely need a miracle technique, some sort of edge over other people, some secret from a book, if they’re to have half a chance of not screwing everything up. They don’t realise that everyone else is just winging it, too – and that all they need to do is the straightforward thing that’s been staring them in the face all along: to just write for a few hours a week; to sit down for a few minutes and meditate; to be the most loving spouse or parent they’re capable of being on this particular day, and so on.

AI's impact on the job market

The Post-Developer Era • Josh W. Comeau #ai #jobs #software #programming

Josh Comeau with a solid take.

If you’re a job-seeker, you know that there aren’t as many high-quality job listings as there used to be, and the good ones get swamped with applications. It’s very hard to get an interview, let alone an offer.

But I don’t think this is because companies are actually replacing their developers with autonomous AI agents. As I’ve shared, the real-world experiences I’ve read just don’t support that hypothesis. So what gives? Why is it still so brutal out there?

I think there are a few factors:

1. Macro-economic stuff. Interest rates are still relatively high, making it harder for startups to attract the funding they need to grow and hire developers. For several years now, the general economic sentiment has been that we’re on the cusp of a recession.

2. Layoffs. Big tech companies laid off hundreds of thousands of workers over the past couple of years, for a variety of reasons. This means that there are tons of highly-qualified devs out there, looking for work.

3. AI myths. Some companies are still operating under the belief that AI really will make developers obsolete soon, and so they’re not hiring as aggressively as they otherwise would.

That last point is particularly frustrating. Companies are not hiring the developers they need because they’re convinced that AGI? is right around the corner, and when that egg hatches, we won’t need human developers at all anymore. “It’ll be any week now”, they’ve been saying for years. 😅

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2025-04-09

Inquiring Together

Why not inquire together more? - Marginal REVOLUTION #inquiry #questions #discussion #ideas

I find that “inquiring together” works best when you are traveling together, and confronted with new questions.  They can be as mundane as “do you think the two people at that restaurant table are on a first date or not?”  From the point of view of the observers, the inquiry is de novo.  And the joint inquiry will be fun, and may make some progress.  You both have more or less the same starting point.  There isn’t really a better way to proceed, short of asking them.

For most established social science and philosophy questions, however, there is so much preexisting analysis and literature that the “chains of thought” are very long.  The frontier point is not well maintained by a dyadic conversation, because doing so is computationally complex and further the two individuals likely have at least marginally separate agendas.  So the pair end up talking around in circles, rather than progressively.  It would be better if one person wrote a short memo or brief and the other offered comments.  In fact we usethat method frequently, and fairly often it succeeds in keeping the dialogue at the epistemic frontier.

Shopify CEO Memo

This memo of the Shopify CEO mandating AI usage is doing the rounds.

The skeptic in me wonders if something that is obviously useful really needs a top-down mandate. Wouldn't developers automatically adopt it if AI was that transformational? It sounds to me like a bit of a bait and switch where the true agenda is something else - like justifying hiring less and dumping more work on the currently working engineers at Shopify, and using AI as an excuse for keeping up the same level of productivity and output.

On the other hand, this could one of those memos which goes down in technology lore as something that changed computing forever, like the famous Bezos memo: API Mandate: How Jeff Bezos' memo changed software forever | Kong Inc.

AI coding mandates are driving developers to the brink

AI coding mandates are driving developers to the brink - LeadDev

This dropped a day or so after the AI memo above, and is very skeptical about AI Adoption.

For software developers specifically, there are concerns that AI coding tools are introducing errors into their code, failing at many tasks, and compounding technical debt. But they also feel that misguided mandates are inhibiting the successful adoption of AI tools. While AI coding assistants can be helpful, it’s clear that how leaders approach and support engineering teams makes all the difference.

The HN Discussion around it is pretty insightful as well. From the comments:

I think a lot of confusion and frustration about this is the assumption that all programming is the same thing.

I have seen areas with just tons of boilerplate, straight forward UI stuff, basic test skeletons, etc that I guess could work with AI.

But personally, in 30 years I’ve just never done much of that kind of work. Probably because I find it boring. I go look for hard or novel problems, or data structures and APIs that are causing problems (overgrown and hard to use, buggy, etc). A lot of the time is just figuring out what the authors expected the code to do, and anticipating what we will need for the next few years. I don’t see AI helping much with that.

This pattern is maybe 20% about AI specifically and 80% about low-trust leadership.

LLMs require comparatively little training to use, and in fact training (like how to optimize prompts etc.) is probably a waste of time because the model behavior and interfaces change so frequently.

This puts them in the class of tools where the benefit is obvious once there is actually a real benefit (and not, say, the foreshadowing of some future benefit). This sort of tool doesn't require a mandate to gain adoption.

So, in the subdomains of software development where the LLMs are already useful, developers will naturally pick them up, assuming the business has secured the policy support and funding. In the areas where they aren't useful, businesses should trust developers and not waste their time with mandates.

And I say this as someone who uses LLMs all day every day for Python, Go, Bash, C/C++, pretty much everything. But as an active user I see the limitations constantly and wouldn't mandate their use upon anyone.

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2025-04-08

Dealing with an internet outage where I am at.

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2025-04-06

How Gatsby foretold Trump’s America

How Gatsby foretold Trump’s America #trump #oligarchy

Celebrating its centenary on April 10 2025, The Great Gatsby endures as the defining portrait of Jazz Age extravagance and glamour — a shimmering vision of energy, affluence and possibility. Away from the brightness, however, lies a world where dreams wither beneath corruption and malice.

Observing the deepening faultlines in American society in the early 1920s, F Scott Fitzgerald guessed right: he foresaw tragedy in the country’s impulse towards grandiosity and self-destruction in its reckless dishonesty. While Gatsby doesn’t predict the Trumpian politics of 2025 in any literal sense, it perfectly captures the society that would embrace such politics a century later. The novel’s prescience lies not in foretelling specific events but in diagnosing a culture where power enjoys impunity and cruelty rubs out its traces — a society run by careless people.

Fitzgerald’s verdict on them at the end of Gatsby has become for many a definitive statement on unaccountable elites today: “They were careless people . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Gatsby reaches beyond the moral failures of its characters to expose carelessness as a political force. This includes not only the oligarchy’s immunity from consequence, but also the way extraction was equated with success. The unheeding brutality of so-called world-builders has returned most recently in the dark fantasies of Trumpism, and in Silicon Valley’s fatuous motto, “move fast and break things”.

Women and Work

Women, work and why we’re getting it all wrong #books #workplace #women #feminism

I have tried to articulate my own response to these questions after reading three recent books that explore work in contrasting ways. Patriarchy Inc by Cordelia Fine goes deep into biology and culture to debunk the common (and, in the second Trump era, ascendant) idea that men and women are genetically predisposed to desire different jobs. Charlie Colenutt has produced an oral history of UK workers in their own words, 50 years after Studs Terkel’s US version, Working. And Emily Callaci reanimates the 1970s Wages for Housework movement, a challenge to capitalist assumptions about which labour carries economic worth.

Fine’s book follows her bestselling Testosterone Rex (2017), in which she examines theories that this hormone is what creates inequality between the sexes: in Fine’s analysis, it’s culture, not nature. Patriarchy Inc takes these arguments into the workplace, to demolish the contention that our genetic and hormonal differences mean it’s natural that women and men do different jobs (this would neatly explain why there are so few women in corporate leadership, for example). Fine pithily calls this the “Different But Equal” argument. In her analysis — and it’s one I agree with — we have, rather, been acculturated from birth to expect one type of work or another. Fine calls this “mindshaping”. And it can be reversed.

Once men decide they want to do a job in large numbers, she argues, it becomes high-status. Fine outlines the early history of software programming, when women were considered suited to its demands as “a kind of puzzle-solving — like crosswords”, and held senior roles. In 1957, programmer Elsie Shutt became pregnant and was forced to leave her job at Raytheon Computing in Massachusetts. She carried on freelancing, recruiting other mothers as her workload grew. Shutt’s resulting business, Computations Inc, was rooted in collaboration between “physically dispersed part-time workers, in the days before email and Zoom”. It was very successful.

There’s no definitive answer, Fine says, to explain why women fell away from programming, after peaking in the mid 1980s — 37 per cent of computer science graduates in the US in 1984 were women. Software programming was rebranded as “software engineering” and, as more men rushed in, it became a high-status job. Screening tests became “dubious and gender-based aptitude tests and personality profiles”. Fine’s wider point is that when a significant number of a dominant group take desirable jobs, “social closure” occurs. Men hoard the roles for other men; the same would happen whenever there is a dominant group, because of our inbuilt affinity for others like us: “homophily”. It’s often not conscious, it’s how humans work, left unchecked.

Fine deals in the structures that underpin corporate life. For what happens “on the ground”, I turned to Charlie Colenutt’s Is This Working?. He interviewed 100 people across the UK, and 68 made it into the book, identified only by age and job description. Throughout this long (probably too long) book, the common thread is that it is fate or chance meetings that determine many working lives, rather than planned careers.

Colenutt groups the interviews into sections: “Sales work”, “Bosswork”, “City work” and so on. An online sex worker is with a panel beater, a security guard and a warehouse worker, in “Bodywork”. She’s a student, supplementing an inadequate loan, and finds the work “freeing” — but her account is a glimpse into the invisible, underpaid sectors that service those in well-paid corporate jobs.

The biggest question about work, which Colenutt and Fine approach, focuses on what and who we value. Emily Callaci’s Wages for Housework goes further: it explores a feminist campaign to pay housewives. Why do we tolerate the lack of economic worth assigned to caring? And is a different view possible?

The book is, in part, a chronological account of Wages for Housework in the wider landscape of women’s liberation in the early 1970s, and also contains chapter-long biographies of five key figures in the global movement. I previously knew nothing about this important strand of second-wave feminism and the women behind it, including the American activist and anti-racist organiser Selma James, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, an Italian academic and political radical.

“Wages for Housework,” she writes, “is perhaps best understood as a political perspective, which starts from the premise that capitalism extracts wealth not only from workers, but also from the unpaid work of creating and sustaining workers.” As well as their employee, an employer gets “the labor of the second person who is at home sustaining him”. When the movement emerged in the 1970s, that worker was presumed to be a him.

LLMs from an operator's perspective

LLMs: an operator's view - by James Stanier #llm #operator #manager

In the midst of the current LLM explosion, we as operators find ourselves amongst:

• A blistering pace of improvement in the capabilities of LLMs. New models and products are being released at a rate that is hard to keep up with.
• Immense noise and hype online making all sorts of claims, good and bad, about what the future holds.
• An expectation from our companies to go full-on with "AI", which typically means LLMs, both in developer tooling and in customer-facing products. AI is the new data is the new cloud.
• Echoes in the industry that we are all now overstaffed as a result of productivity gains: that everyone should do more with less, and that AI is the answer to that.

What we'll cover related to LLMs is:

• The (real) rising floor of developer productivity.
• The changing size of organizations.
• The increasing importance of code reviews.
• The changing nature of interviews and identifying talent in short spaces of time.

As an operator, up-skilling your team to use these tools is now essential. Securing the necessary budget to give everyone access to the Pro tiers of ChatGPT, Cursor, or whatever tools represent the best fit for your team is a table stakes activity. And yes, this does mean that your budget will increase, but the productivity gains from an existing team will more than make up for it. Trade the cost of hiring new people for the cost of acquiring tooling.

You should also take the adoption of this tooling seriously. It is not just a case of giving everyone subscriptions and hoping for the best. You need to invest time and effort into training your team on how to use these tools effectively.

ML Inference Optimization Learning Path

One way to find a career in core ML/AI stuff #ai #llm #ml #career #learning

be me june 2024 learn ML model optimizations inference mostly, training a bit optimize SDXL inference post about it find cuda, learn it blogs on kernels for sgemv, softmax, etc. get in-depth knowledge on GPUs fal reaches out offering a role optimize inference of 4 models back to back feel grateful

How to Do Real Work With LLMs

How to Do Real Work With LLMs, Part 1 - by Jon Stokes

LLMs are the next phase of this exact same phenomenon. LLMs enable human language to eat the software that is still eating the world.

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2025-04-05

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman - Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

This is my second time reading the book. Actually, it is the first because the first time I listened to it as an audio book. I am also reading this book right now as I slowly embark on a reset of long held belief and patterns of behavior around productivity and achievement.

These excerpts from the chapter titled Cosmic Insignifance Therapy really hit home.

The hazard in any such discussion of “what matters most” in life, though, is that it tends to give rise to a kind of paralyzing grandiosity. It starts to feel as though it’s your duty to find something truly consequential to do with your time—to quit your office job to become an aid worker or start a space flight company—or else, if you’re in no position to make such a grand gesture, to conclude that a deeply meaningful life isn’t an option for you. On the level of politics and social change, it becomes tempting to conclude that only the most revolutionary, world-transforming causes are worth fighting for—that it would be meaningless to spend your time, say, caring for an elderly relative with dementia or volunteering at the local community garden while the problems of global warming and income inequality remain unsolved. Among New Age types, this same grandiosity takes the form of the belief that each of us has some cosmically significant Life Purpose, which the universe is longing for us to uncover and then to fulfill.

Which is why it’s useful to begin this last stage of our journey with a blunt but unexpectedly liberating truth: that what you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much—and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.

It’s natural to find such thoughts terrifying. To contemplate “the massive indifference of the universe,” writes Richard Holloway, the former bishop of Edinburgh, can feel “as disorienting as being lost in a dense wood, or as frightening as falling overboard into the sea with no-one to know we have gone.” But there’s another angle from which it’s oddly consoling. You might think of it as “cosmic insignificance therapy”: When things all seem too much, what better solace than a reminder that they are, provided you’re willing to zoom out a bit, indistinguishable from nothing at all? The anxieties that clutter the average life—relationship troubles, status rivalries, money worries—shrink instantly down to irrelevance. So do pandemics and presidencies, for that matter: the cosmos carries on regardless, calm and imperturbable. Or to quote the title of a book I once reviewed: The Universe Doesn’t Give a Flying Fuck About You. To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realize we were carrying in the first place.

The evolutionary angle here is interesting

These self-centered judgments are part of what psychologists call the “egocentricity bias,” and they make good sense from an evolutionary standpoint. If you had a more realistic sense of your own sheer irrelevance, considered on the timescale of the universe, you’d probably be less motivated to struggle to survive, and thereby to propagate your genes.

Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely—and often enough, marvelously—really is.

Goya Journal - MTR in Bengaluru and Iftar in Lucknow

The latest edition of the Goya Journal newsletter landed in my inbox and a couple of article caught my eye - one about Lucknow, a city I grew up in and about MTR in Bengaluru.

• From Sehri to Iftaar in the Streets of Lucknow — GOYA
• The Story of Bengaluru's Iconic MTR, the Original Udupi Hotel — GOYA

Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Started reading this book on a whim because I saw Oliver Burkeman recommended it. I didn't expect much, and it turned out to be not that different from a typical book in the self-help genre. But skimming it does yield some nice gems, like this quote from Ron Finley

When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them I breathe - I'm a professional breather. We create those false transitions, we make it all look like it's separate, just like we separate a garden, from a state, from a country, and ourselves from nature.

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2025-04-04

Stop expecting your partner to fulfil all your needs | Dazed #dating #relationships #expectations

But what if we’ve now swung to the other extreme? Many of us now expect our partners to be everything: our best friends, sexual playmates, therapists, running buddies, cheerleaders, and more. We don’t accept any traits that jar with our own or a single conflicting value – and it’s likely this is making dating harder for us all.

But by approaching dating as nothing more than a tick-box exercise, we drive away possible moments of intimacy and connection. Contrasts in personalities, temperaments, and interests provide the push-and-pull needed to allow relationships to thrive. This doesn’t mean settling for someone who treats you poorly or forcing yourself to persevere with dating someone who doesn’t excite you. But if you like wild Friday nights and your partner prefers Netflix marathons, go party with your friends. If you love Sunday morning hikes and they don’t, go solo or find a buddy. A partner doesn’t have to be your everything.

I’ve been single for a while (aside from a minor situationship detour), and when people ask if I miss dating, I can honestly say I don’t. I get everything I need from my friends, sisters, mum, dogs, and – ahem – vibrational support. But most importantly, I’ve learned to rely on myself. If I want to see a play or catch a comedy show, I go solo. I can still grab lunch at that cute café I’ve been eyeing or curl up somewhere with a coffee and a good book. I stopped expecting one person to be my whole world, romantic or otherwise.

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2025-04-03

Matt Levine on Stablecoins

Stablecoins Are Growing Up - Bloomberg #stablecoin #money #finance #crypto

I have always thought of stablecoins as basically unregulated non-interest-paying crypto banks. The idea of a stablecoin is that there is a company, the stablecoin issuer, and you send the company dollars, and it gives you back tokens (“stablecoins”). Each token is supposed to be worth a dollar, and if you hand the issuer back a token it will hand you back a dollar.1 But mostly you hold onto the stablecoins and the issuer holds onto your dollars. You both arguably benefit from this:

• You can use the tokens like dollars on in crypto applications, where actual dollars are hard to use: The stablecoins live natively on various crypto blockchains, can be sent over the blockchain, can be used in smart contracts, etc., in ways that don’t really work with dollars held in bank accounts.
• The issuer has the dollars, which it can invest in super-safe short-dated US Treasury bills, or anything else, to make money. It doesn’t pay you any interest; any profit it makes from its investing is the issuer’s to keep.

But yesterday Circle Internet Group Inc., the big US-based issuer of the USDC stablecoin, filed publicly for an initial public offering. It has previously filed confidentially, but its prospectus is available now. It is an interesting read, and it has caused me to update my model of stablecoins in two respects:

1. Circle is not an unregulated bank; it is a tech front-end for US banks and asset managers.2
2. I am not as sure as I once was about “non-interest-paying.”

AI Ambivalence

Great articulation of how it is like to use AI for software development.

Imagine you’re a Studio Ghibli artist. You’ve spent years perfecting your craft, you love the feeling of the brush/pencil in your hand, and your life’s joy is to make beautiful artwork to share with the world. And then someone tells you gen-AI can just spit out My Neighbor Totoro for you. Would you feel grateful? Would you rush to drop your art supplies and jump head-first into the role of AI babysitter?

This is how I feel using gen-AI: like a babysitter. It spits out reams of code, I read through it and try to spot the bugs, and then we repeat. Although of course, as Cory Doctorow points out, the temptation is to not even try to spot the bugs, and instead just let your eyes glaze over and let the machine do the thinking for you – the full dream of vibe coding.

I do believe that this is the end state of this kind of development: “giving into the vibes,” not even trying to use your feeble primate brain to understand the code that the AI is barfing out, and instead to let other barf-generating “agents” evaluate its output for you. I’ll accept that maybe, maybe, if you have the right orchestra of agents that you’re conducting, then maybe you can cut down on the bugs, hallucinations, and repetitive boilerplate that gen-AI seems prone to. But whatever you’re doing at that point, it’s not software development, at least not the kind that I’ve known for the past ~20 years.

The entire conclusion section is worth reading as well. Here is the last couple of paragraphs

So there’s my overwhelming feeling at the end of this post: ambivalence. I feel besieged and horrified by what gen-AI has wrought on my industry, but I can no longer keep my ears plugged while the tsunami roars outside. Maybe, like a lot of other middle-aged professionals suddenly finding their careers upended at the peak of their creative power, I will have to adapt or face replacement. Or maybe my best bet is to continue to zig while others are zagging, and to try to keep my coding skills sharp while everyone else is “vibe coding” a monstrosity that I will have to debug when it crashes in production someday.

I honestly don’t know, and I find that terrifying. But there is some comfort in the fact that I don’t think anyone else knows what’s going to happen either.

Hamish Mckenzie on Chaos Media

From the temple to the garden - by Hamish McKenzie #media #chaos

Today, we live in the age of chaos media.

Traditional media’s rigid order has been replaced by mayhem. Conflict supersedes consideration. Speed overwhelms verification. This system is, in many senses, a marvel, with massive democratization potential. Anyone can have a voice, and your idea, if the winds blow just right, can reach billions of people in an instant. One of its great virtues is that it demands that everyone—even the powers that be—speak to each other directly, and others can talk back. Now the savviest politicians sit down for long interviews in nontraditional formats and show their thinking.

Hamish (as the founder of Substack) has a vested interest in the shift away from traditional media. So understandably, this piece is a bit tepid when it comes to outlining a clear alternative. He just seems to just gloss over the corrosive effects of chaos media.

The chaos of our current media moment cannot last, but no one knows exactly what the new landscape will look like when it stabilizes. That’s precisely why your choices today matter so much. Every subscription, every share, every minute of your attention is a vote for the culture you want to see flourish. You can choose to invest in a system that values deep relationships over the flimsy validation that chaos media offers. You can reclaim your attention from the doomscroll feeds and pour it like water onto the seedlings of a better future. These actions aren’t just about getting better content or contributing to a healthier media economy—they cultivate a richer, more thoughtful culture capable of addressing the complex challenges of our time. It’s a culture worth subscribing to.

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2025-04-02

Means of Production vs Means of Connecting

The Algorithmic Holiday - by Brett Scott #capitalism #gig #economy

The Gig Economy platforms, by contrast, run a lean version of this. A company like Uber knows that it doesn’t actually need to own tens of thousands of cars - the Means of Production - provided that it owns an information and management architecture that stands between those productive assets and society: Uber owns the Means of Connecting, rather than the Means of Production, which means they can still be a gatekeeper between workers and consumers, while outsourcing finance costs to the individual workers.

Choosing Next.js

Build Times - You should know this before choosing Next.js #nextjs #next #javascript

A breakdown of how Next.js seems to be tied to Vercel in many ways, who don't seem to care about being good open source stewards.

• Lack of adapters
• No official serverless support
• Vercel-Specific, Undocumented Code Paths
• Poor Security Incident Handling
• Lack of transparency in governance

Beauty and Relationships

Does beauty make people good partners? | Dazed #beauty #relationship #love #feminism

So much of romantic relationships is about pressing yourself into a shape you do not recognise, as Faye so accurately puts it. We are told that women are meant to be hyper-feminine and that the right man will put you in your “feminine energy”, as divine feminine con-influencers incessantly express online. But this isn’t a natural state of being as we are so often told, but a naturalised one. We act this way because we are told to and because it gets the best reception from both our desired partners and from the public.

Nobody knows what Leclerc and Mleux’s relationship is like, and yet they assume it’s good because she is beautiful and feminine and adheres to her gender correctly. Conversely, so does he – Leclerc is seen as being good-looking and is immersed in the hyper-masculine and perilous world of motor racing. We praise certain relationships and those within them for their ability to keep up with appearances.

This is not surprising. As beauty critic, Jessica DeFino wrote in her newsletter last year, as a society, we tend to have the moral code of Disney cartoons. We superficially believe that beauty is good; thus, a beautiful couple must have a healthy relationship (look at the contrast with how people talk about and aspire to Dua Lipa and Callum Turner’s relationship). When we see people we perceive as “ugly” (ie who sit outside narrow European beauty standards), we are quick to assume the worst. That their relationship must be bad, that something must be wrong, that they are not really in love. This is exactly why people feel the need to change and transform themselves beyond recognition. It seems contrary to what we ask of people when we are looking for love in the first place. We ask that people genuinely love us for who we are, but the world repeatedly proves that we will only be rewarded for looking a certain way, for not being or looking like ourselves.

In her book Right Wing Women, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin writes that “the tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognise that they are committing suicide.” Dworkin was making a specific reference here to right-wing women who make accommodations to male domination for their own survival. But when I read that quote, I immediately thought about beauty and relationships and the ways we transform ourselves entirely for love and survival. But we deserve to do way more in this life than just survive.

We “survive” by adhering to our gender roles, with their own built-in violence that often result in tragedy. We “survive” by adhering to beauty standards, where people go under the knife and sometimes do not wake up or have lifelong complications due to surgeries. We “survive” by changing ourselves, making ourselves smaller and more easily digestible, to the point where we look in the mirror and can no longer recognise who is staring back at us. It may seem like survival, but as Dworkin would put it, it is a type of death.

Not all people feel forced to look a certain type of way in their relationships; but many of us can relate to feeling pressured within these dynamics to keep up with appearances. Love and the pursuit of it (albeit challenging) are supposed to be fun, exhilarating, and life-affirming, but rarely ever feel that way. So, what really makes a good partner? Maybe once we deprioritise the importance of physical appearance from our lives (and gender), we will genuinely know the answer to that question.

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2025-04-01

Travel day. Digital nomadding for at least a month.

Mumbai Recs

A lovely friend sent along some very hyperlocal food recs for Mumbai #food

Chembur - my most fav vadapav in front of post office opens 4 or 5pm

Matunga - Classic pav bhaji or DPs Pav bhaji if you’re interested to try South Indian: Ramashray or madras cafe, there’s a soya chaap wala near madras cafe that’s also v good. Gupta pani puri near the matunga station. Too many Guptas check for the right one haha

Sion : gurukripa samosa. Very famous supplies to most theatres and schools in Mumbai

Dadar : Ashok Vada pav, sandwich also might be good in most places Bombay veg toast here.

Near marine drive : panini at Raju sandwich in front of KC college and K rustoms icecream is famous for the nostalgia value. I like the walnut crunch flavour there tho hahah

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2025-03-31

Stationary

Inspired by a friend, I invested in some stationary today

• Clairefontaine Triomphe paper
• Kum pencil sharpener
• Tombow Mono mechanical pencil

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2025-03-30

Vibe Coding Manifesto

Vibe Coding Manifesto #ai #coding #vibe

💜Flow over friction – Ride the wave, don't fight it.

💜Iteration over perfection – Perfection is obsolete if you can always reroll.

💜Augmentation over automation – AI is a collaborator, not a replacement.

💜Product thinking over code crafting – What matters is what you build, not how you write it.

💜Rerolling over debugging – If fixing takes too long, regenerate.

💜Human taste over technical constraints – The best tech serves great taste, not the other way around.

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2025-03-29

Lucifer

Watched this Malayalam movie called Lucifer which was released a few years ago. It was actually to build some context because a sequel to this movie just released and I have been convinced under mild duress to go watch it.

I haven't watched a lot of Malayalam movies. Lucifer is made in a specific style that uses common tropes in Indian cinema - outsized male protagonist, unrealistic action sequences, bombastic dialogues, lavish sets. It is designed to appeal to a mass market audience and may not appeal to a more nuanced cinema lover. But having said that, I have watched many Bollywood Hindi movies in that genre which are terribly made, and compared to those I thought this movie was very tastefully made. Prithviraj Sukumaran is a genius filmmaker, and Mohanlal as the lead puts the Shahrukhs and Salmans of Bollywood to shame.

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2025-03-28

AI and the software industry

How will AI affect the software industry? | Alex Hyett #ai #coding #software #programming

AI is definitely going to cause more people to create software in the same way that Instagram caused more people to take photos. However, not everyone taking photos is a photographer, and not everyone creating software is a software developer.

Anyone can take a photo with their phone, but a photographer understands things like lighting and composition (can you tell I'm not a photographer!) to capture a memory or tell a story that not everyone is capable of.

The same is true for software development. Yes, AI is capable of writing code, but unless you are capable of fully understanding the requirements and the code that it has written, it won't be as good as what a professional developer could do.

Doomerism

The Imperfectionist: Three ideas for turbulent times

From Oliver Burkeman's latest

But “if we can recognise that change and uncertainty are basic principles,” as the futurist and environmentalist Hazel Henderson put it, “we can greet the future… with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.” You can take a crisis very seriously indeed without fooling yourself that you know the worst outcome is certain. In fact, I’d say that to assume the worst is to fail to take it seriously. All of which is worth bearing in mind before you next let some alarmist commentator’s efforts at emotional self-management, masquerading as objective analysis, completely derail your day.

As Eliason notes, this isn’t merely a matter of a mistaken mindset; powerful cultural and economic forces have shaped things this way. Work and physical exercise used to overlap far more than they do, and the shift to work-from-home has eliminated much socialising with colleagues. Plus it’s much easier for corporations to sell “exercise”– in the form of gym memberships, stationary bikes and so forth – than somehow to turn “a physically active social life spent largely outdoors” into a marketable product. Still, most of us probably do have some individual scope to “de-atomise” our lives, finding multiple forms of benefit in the same activity, so that we’re no longer trying to cram things like parenting, exercise and household chores into separate stretches of our all-too-finite time.

Also found this amazing piece from the newsletter: De-Atomization is the Secret to Happiness #exercise #atomization

Things that go wrong with disk IO

Things that go wrong with disk IO | notes.eatonphil.com #disk #io

This is a great article. I encountered the different ways that disk IO can go wrong for the first time when I worked on Badger, a key value database in Go. At that time I remember being puzzled by the number of things to deal with when trying to recover from a disk crash.

There are a few interesting scenarios to keep in mind when writing applications (not just databases!) that read and write files, particularly in transactional contexts where you actually care about the integrity of the data and when you are editing data in place (versus copy-on-write for example).

We'll go into a few scenarios where the following can happen:

• Data you write never actually makes it to disk
• Data you write get sent to the wrong location on disk
• Data you read is read from the wrong location on disk
• Data gets corrupted on disk

And how real-world data systems think about these scenarios. (They don't always think of them at all!)

Containers from scratch in shell

great talk. it has double audio till about 3:20 but that gets fixed after that. this is a great resource to understand container basics by building one from first principles.

Criticisms of the Ghiblification Meme

This is a great articulation of the problematic nature of the latest Ghiblification trend. I don't care so much about other critiques along the lines of copyright infringement so much, but this hits home.

Curious vs Humble

#curious #humble

Doing Things You Love

How I Choose What to Work On - Tynan.com #life #goals

Despite being a lifelong entrepreneur and being relatively successful at it, I don’t write a lot about it because I routinely make decisions that trade money for other things (freedom, autonomy, quality of life, stubborn insistence on what I want a product to be, etc). I suspect that most people who want entrepreneurial advice are more interested in making money than the things I prioritize.

I don’t really even know if I’d suggest my method for other people, since it’s pretty tailored to me and my preferences, but I’m happy to share it in case it gives anyone anything to think about.

If there were a core principle of my method, it would be that life is amazing and my goal is to maximize experiencing life. You need a certain amount of money to do that, and increasing amounts of money make even more things possible, but often these come at the cost of increased stress, reduced time with loved ones, or doing work that doesn’t matter to you.

With that in mind, I will only ever work on things I want to work on. I would rather be poor than make a lot of money doing something I hate, and I think my history of actions (readable on the 15+ years of blog posts I’ve written) prove that. If I were giving advice I’d probably encourage someone to choose the most profitable thing out of all of the things they want to do, but that’s not necessarily advice I’d follow.

If you do something you love, you will become good at it much faster than something you don’t love, and when you are good at something you will have some opportunity to commercialize it.

on money

Part of the reason I’ve been able to do this is because I’ve always designed my life such that it can benefit from having money (pinball arcade rooms and all that…) but is also compatible with having no money.

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2025-03-27

Trippy Art

Comets, Orbits, and the Mystery We Are: The Enchanted Celestial Mechanics of Australian Artist Shane Drinkwater – The Marginalian #art #trippy

Trippy art partly inspired by Tibetan Buddhist art.

Nature vs Nurture

"Is it nature or is it nurture?" is a damn good question #nature #nurture

Case for not watching Streaming TV shows

The Case Against Streaming TV Shows - by Trungphan2 #tv #streaming

Anyway, let me firm up my case against watching new TV streaming shows with a few additional thoughts:

• How streaming changed TV economics and incentives
• Matt Stone on how streaming distorts the art of TV
• Quentin Tarantino on why TV isn’t memorable

Awesome read.

Non Monogamy

Countering the Monogamy-Superiority Myth: A Meta-Analysis of the Differences in Relationship Satisfaction and Sexual Satisfaction as a Function of Relationship Orientation

Found this paper in this Dazed article: Non-monogamous relationships are ‘just as happy’ as monogamous ones | Dazed

I LOLed at this paragraph in the article:

The flipside is that the research doesn’t find any consistent benefits to opting out of monogamy either: perhaps surprisingly, people in non-monogamous relationships do not experience “significantly” higher levels of sexual satisfaction. Could this revelation dampen the envy and resentment which some monogamous people clearly feel towards people they assume to be having more sex than them? Could it be the beginning of a detente between two warring factions, who clearly have more in common than they realise? Maybe all relationships trend towards sibling-like companionship punctured by perfunctory bouts of missionary, regardless of how many partners you happen to have. Maybe the non-monogamous aren’t all sex-crazed libertines who live in communes and spend their time having drug-fuelled orgies and making their own kimchi, but human beings with ordinary desires and disappointments, just like you and me.

Complements in Tech

What are Complements?

Complementarity matters a lot in tech. One of the drivers of growth at the sector level is that many products complement one another at the product level: if there are smarter phones, there will be more apps; if there are more apps, there will be even smarter phones. This was also a driver of the more recent runup in AI: R&D budgets for designing chips and capex budgets for building them only make sense in light of demand from companies building AI models, and that demand is reasonable because there are so many more consumer use cases.

Conway's Game of Life

Conway’s Game of Life is an example of emergence and self-organisation.

When we surround ourselves with abundant, diverse ideas, complex ideas emerge. These ideas are unique and do not resemble the ideas from which they emerged. Even if the initial set of ideas seem simple and disconnected, spontaneous order can emerge, leading to brilliant ideas.

Emergence and self-organisation are all around us. In the sciences, society, art and in nature.

from: How to live an intellectually rich life - by Utsav Mamoria

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