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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:
- Circle is not an unregulated bank; it is a tech front-end for US banks and asset managers.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.
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.
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
2025-03-31
Stationary
Inspired by a friend, I invested in some stationary today
- Clairefontaine Triomphe paper
- Kum pencil sharpener
- Tombow Mono mechanical pencil
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.
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.
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.
2025-03-27
Trippy Art
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
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
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
2025-03-26
Amplifier NYT - Up-tempo songs
6 (Up-tempo) New Songs You Should Hear Now - The New York Times #amplifier #nyt #playlist #music
Social Media and Health Awareness
Are you actually as unhealthy as you think? | Dazed
This comes through in the marketing where words like “essential” make taking a supplement like sea moss, a red seaweed being promoted for its “92 essential minerals”, seem vital for full body regeneration. In reality, however, there are actually only 13 consumable minerals necessary for human functions, not 92. If you don’t know at least some of the minerals you’re taking, what they do, or if you’re even deficient in any of them, is gagging down a spoonful before breakfast every morning really the epitome of health? And worse, does not taking it make you think you’re less healthy than you are?
Orthorexia nervosa, a disorder defined by the NIH as an attempt to attain optimum health through attention to diet, was first coined in 1997 by Steven Bratman, MD, American physician and author. Over the last few years, eating-disorder treatment centers have been reporting a rise in cases, with studies finding that higher Instagram use was associated with a greater tendency towards orthorexia nervosa. It can be difficult to notice and easy to hide, especially since obsessively healthy eating is seen as a superior habit, hidden behind moralistic and virtuous adjectives related to “cleanliness”.
The truth is, you’re probably not as unhealthy as social media makes you think. No, you don’t have to choke down a spoonful of sea moss to earn a healthier life, go on a meat-only diet to cure assumed deficiencies, or feed into a $700 handful of pre-breakfast supplements to “balance hormones”. “While it’s great that people are paying attention to their health, the wellness industry tends to exaggerate problems, making people feel like they’re more unwell than they are,” Crum says. “The fundamentals of good health –adequate protein, fibre, hydration, sleep, and stress management – are far more effective than any single supplement.”
Simon Willison on using LLMs to code
Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code #llm #coding
Nothing new here, just a good reference to point to in case anybody asks me.
An elegy to a pencil
an elegy for the pencil - by Adam Aleksic #pencil #writing #tools
Indeed, the experience of writing by hand is increasingly on its way out. Schoolchildren are no longer learning cursive, as computers are integrated ever earlier into the classroom. White-collar jobs are revolving more around screens than printed paper. At a certain point in the future, the pencil is going to feel as obsolete as the stone and chisel. That’s just the way technological change works.
Faulkner, Steinbeck, Atwood, Nabokov, and Morrison have all expressed a preference for pencil and notebook—preferences which surely shaped their ultimate contributions to our collective identity. There’s nothing “childish” about that.
Bubblegum Dystopia
Why do we feel like we can afford more things while being stressed about the cost of living? - YouTube #economics #cost #luxuries
Claude Summary:
The Shift in Value Between Necessities and Luxuries
The core insight is about a fundamental economic shift in the relative cost of necessities versus luxuries over the past several decades:
In the 1970s:
- A TV cost about $500 (10% of a house down payment)
- A house down payment was around $532
- One TV = approximately 10% of a house down payment
Today:
- A TV still costs about $500 (0.5% of a house down payment)
- A house down payment is around $102,000
- One TV = approximately 0.5% of a house down payment
This explains why:
- Older generations view younger people as "financially irresponsible" for buying luxuries - they're applying outdated economic ratios
- People today can simultaneously have many consumer goods while struggling with basic living expenses
- Necessities (housing, healthcare, food) have increased dramatically in price while consumer goods have become relatively cheaper
- This creates a "bubblegum dystopia" where people live with economic uncertainty and housing insecurity while surrounded by affordable entertainment and technology
The shift occurred because:
- Necessities have inelastic demand (people must pay regardless of price increases)
- Companies selling non-necessities had to drive down costs through commodification to compete for the shrinking pool of disposable income
- This results in more affordable luxuries but lower-quality, mass-produced items with "no soul"
More vs Extra
Always do Extra - Ben Northrop #self-improvement
But aren't More and Extra the same thing? No! They sound similar, but they're actually very different. Here's a simple example:
Say for this sprint you're assigned two form screens that take user input and then persist it to the database. Pretty straight-forward. This is your Normal Work - the default expectation of what you need to get done to be in good standing on your project.
Doing More would be completing those two screens and then taking on a third screen that's just like it. Yes, this would help move the project along faster and make your manager happy, and that's great, but in the long-run, More doesn't give you much.
Extra is different than More. Extra is finishing those two screens, but then researching a new library for form validation that might reduce the boilerplate code. Or it's learning ways to protect against common security vulnerabilities from data entry. These little off-ramps from the main highway of Normal Work could be dead-ends and not have any practical value to the project. But they might also be important contributions. And that's the thing with Extra. While the tangible value to the project is uncertain (it could be nothing this time or it could be something), the value to you is real.
Evolutionary Stability: Revolution vs Renovation
https://www.newsblur.com/newsletters/story/8083317:79711f #revolution #renovation #stability
“Renovation is the point of equilibrium between creation and destruction, saving what is valuable and discarding what is outmoded or dysfunctional. It entails a long march through society’s institutions at a pace of change our incremental natures can absorb. Renovation shepherds the new into the old, buffering the damage of dislocation which at first outweighs longer-term benefits … Its aim is transition through evolutionary stability, within societies and in relations among nation-states and global networks.”
In short, evolutionary stability is the better bet for making change than the confident ineptitude of shock and awe tactics that impede it by arousing reactive resistance and rejection before any new approach to governance can take hold.
AI Blindspots
AI Blindspots | AI Blindspots #ai #coding #llms
A good set of pointers by Edward Yang (ezyang)
Blindspots in LLMs I’ve noticed while AI coding. Sonnet family emphasis. Maybe I will eventually suggest Cursor rules for these problems.
Self Study ML
Indian Woman and The Patrilocal Trap
Why is Indian Women's Welfare Devalued? - by Alice Evans
Through my interviews with men and women from across six Indian states, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Morocco and Turkey, I’ve developed the concept of “The Patrilocal Trap”. Historically across Eurasia, sons inherited family assets and cared for elderly parents. Families maintained trusted networks through strategic marriages, socialising daughters to marry, please their in-laws, and stay put. Divorce is heavily stigmatised.
If women are raised for loyalty and unable to credibly threaten exit, they may not necessarily challenge men’s patriarchal entitlements. Instead, she may quietly comply. These films brilliantly capture what quantitative research often misses: the systematic subordination of women's time, preferences, and wellbeing to men’s comfort and convenience.
Violence among hunter gathererers
For the first 290,000 years of our species’ approximately 300,000 year history, everyone was a hunter gatherer. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker argued that hunter gatherers were extremely violent. Better Angels claims that at least 14 percent of prehistoric hunter gatherers died violently. This equates to a violent death rate of at least 420 per 100,000 people per year, using data on typical hunter gatherer mortality rates.
This is a much higher rate of violence than almost anywhere in the modern world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To put it in perspective, global deaths from all types of violence between 2004–21 were around 8 per 100,000 people per year. Even the most violent cities in the world today, in Northern Brazil, South Africa, and on the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border, have murder rates of only around 100 per 100,000 per year.
The implication in Better Angels is that the human mind evolved and developed in a world plagued by constant, endemic violence.
Our 2022 study examined both the ethnographic data – contemporary studies of groups that existed until some modern contact – and archeological data on hunter gatherer violence, much of which comes from data gathered after the publication of Better Angels. We reviewed quantitative estimates of rates of violence in ethnographies, filtering for groups that are most representative of our pre-agricultural ancestors. Our archeological estimates are based on reanalyzing a dataset developed by Gomez et al. (which was released after Better Angels was published and has dozens of extra samples), which attempts to measure rates of violent death by looking for evidence of trauma to skeletal remains. Our study produced estimates for lethal violence around four times lower than Pinker’s figures.
To repeat the key point: Our study produced estimates for lethal violence around four times lower than Pinker’s figures.
Although we think that our study advances the state of knowledge, it must be said that both the archaeological and anthropological (ethnographic) evidence are unusually shaky. The archaeological record for the pre-agricultural period is extremely sparse, and the anthropological evidence is limited and geographically biased.
The defining characteristic that drives high rates of violent death in our species is not our proclivity for lethal violence but rather our capacity for it. Human beings are unusually vulnerable to violence. We have massive heads, thin skin, puny muscles, little to no protective fur; we can’t fly, swim, or burrow away, and we’re not even very good at running away. Our children are even more fragile, particularly as babies, and take ages to mature.
At the same time, our offensive abilities make us the most lethal species on the planet. Violent attacks in a hunter gatherer context are essentially undefendable. We have abilities to collectively organize, plan, and deceive far in advance of any other species. Even lions are afraid of us. Our stone-tipped tools, poisons, and projectile technology appear to have killed off almost all of the planet’s megafauna, like mastodons, giant kangaroos, and saber-tooth tigers.
When we think about how violent psychologically typical people are, it is important to remember that an outsize proportion of violence is committed by psychologically atypical people.
This has parallels with modern society. In Sweden, 1 percent of the population commits 63 percent of all violent crime. Comparably high-quality data does not exist for every Western country, but the tidbits we have suggest that this pattern is normal. It has also been established that sociopathy is highly heritable and has a strong genetic component. However, there is a long-standing debate as to whether it should best be understood as a mental disorder or an evolutionary adaptation. If our interpretation of the dynamics of hunter gatherer violence is correct, it lends support to the idea that sociopathy is an adaptation.
In a modern context, sociopathy can be interpreted as a high-risk, high-return behavioral strategy, with sociopaths overrepresented both in high status professions and people with large numbers of sexual partners but also in incarceration, drug abuse, accidental death and other undesirable outcomes. In a prehistoric hunter gatherer context, a similar dynamic may have been at play, with some sociopaths benefitting by acquiring multiple wives or achieving some degree of group dominance (as Gau did), while others suffered social rejection and early death (like Twi).
The idea that some people are simply bullies by nature might be difficult to accept in cultures with deep commitments to liberal values and personal freedoms, but we shouldn’t shy away from the deep implications it has for our society. If it is true, it suggests that we should heed the example set by our prehistoric ancestors and deal with them by working collectively to restrain them rather than blaming society for their existence and attempting to treat them as if they were the same as everyone else.
This has obvious implications in the area of crime and incarceration, but also in other areas like education where protecting people from bullies could be prioritized.
The most important implications are for political institutions. The wars, genocides, and democides of the twentieth century are a warning of what happens when the worst people get their hands on the instruments of power in modern states.
Evolution of violence from hunter gatherer societies to agricultural societies
Nevertheless, the elevated rates of violence among agriculturalists can only partially be attributed to the influence of sociopathic leaders. The fact is that the invention of agriculture fundamentally changed the dynamics and incentives for violence in our species.
We hypothesize that agriculturalists were more warlike than nomadic hunter gatherers for three main reasons:
- They stored food, had more possessions, and lived at high population densities. This made it easier to monopolize resources through the use of force and harder to avoid conflict by running away. It also means that the rewards of attacking other groups of agriculturalists are larger. Moreover these denser, sedentary populations exhibit greater disparities in size and technology, creating power imbalances that incentivize violence by reducing the risks for powerful attackers and making total annihilation of opposing groups viable.
- Their hierarchical and inegalitarian social organization made it easier to organize collective violence and coordinate on violations of non-violent norms. Leaders could coerce group violence for selfish reasons. Women had lower social status and so were less able to curb the more aggressive tendencies of men. For the same reason, it was much easier for individual men to monopolize women and slaves as part of the spoils of war.
- Small-scale farmers tend to be more self-sufficient and less inter-connected with other groups than hunter gatherers, who typically exhibit more fluid group affiliations and widespread trading networks. This means that small-scale farmers are less incentivized to cooperate with other groups and also lack the family and cultural ties that would stop them from fighting if it were in their interests.
These factors made the incentives for conflict much greater and made it much harder to overcome the Hobbesian Trap, even though agriculturalists were descended from hunter gatherers who, for hundreds of thousands of years, faced strong evolutionary pressures against violence.
2025-03-25
Assembled my Nuphy Air60 V2 keyboard with a custom keycap set. I really like the fact that I can just place it over my laptop keyboard and it just works without any disruption.
Final result
Build a Team that Ships
Build a Team that Ships #software #best-practises
I started my first company 15 years go, and I still can’t manage. I suspect that very few people can. With AngelList, we want a team of self-managing people who ship code.
Here’s what we do:
- Keep the team small. All doers, no talkers. Absolutely no middle managers. All BD via APIs.
- Outsource everything that isn’t core. Resist the urge to pick up that last dollar. Founders do Customer Service.
- People choose what to work on. Better they ship what they want than not ship what you want.
- No tasks longer than one week. You have to ship something into live production every week – worst case, two weeks. If you just joined, ship something.
- Peer-management. Promise what you’ll do in the coming week on internal Yammer. Deliver – or publicly break your promise – next week.
- One person per project. Get help from others, but you and you alone are accountable.
If they can’t ship, release them. Our environment is wrong for them. They should go find someplace where they can thrive. There’s someplace for everyone.
Economic Policy of the Trump Administration
The Parallel Economy and the New Rules of American Power
We have a few forces at work - (1) bot-driven information warfare has distorted our perception of economic reality and (2) seemingly deliberate policy volatility creates conditions for an economic downturn (3) and a Trump 'parallel economy' is positioned is emerging to capitalize on the resulting confusion - perhaps, reducing Trump’s market concerns. Understanding all of this requires unpacking four interconnected phenomena:
Bots: Automated (and hijacked) information flows have created an environment where most people don't know what's factually true anymore
Recession: The administration appears to be intentionally engineering economic volatility as a "necessary detox” as I wrote about last week, with JP Morgan placing recession odds this year rising to 40% and Goldman Sachs to 20%.
Parallel Economy: The parallel economy built by Donald Trump Jr. is a reason why President Trump might not care too much about the market selloff.1
Fried Brains: We have ‘temporal dysphoria’. There is a profound mismatch between the pace of information cycles and the ability of humans to adapt to the change in said pace.
We're living in a reality shaped by automated outrage machines, while facing an economic downturn engineered through deliberate trade policy chaos. As this volatility harms everyday Americans, the Trump family could be positioning itself to profit from a parallel economy. Meanwhile, social media has so thoroughly warped our perception of time that we can no longer process events in a coherent timeline - there’s even a chart for it!
2025-03-24
Back from travels. Settling in.
The Economist on Longevity Research
Dreams of improving the human race are no longer science fiction #longevity #anti-aging
The lack of data is no accident. Medical research has, to a very large extent, focused on treating debilitating afflictions, rather than on improving the capabilities of people who are already healthy. Regulators have developed systems to test whether drugs prevent or alleviate known ailments, but these are typically not well suited to assess whether a treatment has a positive effect on those who are already well. Since such enhancements might be considered less urgent, it is anyway less clear how risks and rewards should be balanced. What is more, naturally occurring substances cannot be patented, so there is little incentive for pharmaceutical firms to pour money into research on their effects.
Charles Brenner, a biochemist at the City of Hope, an American medical-research centre, has suggested that Mr Johnson’s “polypharmacy” is likely to be harmful and dismissed his claimed immortality as “delusional”. Without proper clinical trials of his various treatments, it is impossible to judge with any certainty. That is why the world of enhancement is excited about a study called TAME, which is the first clinical trial that targets ageing specifically to be approved by America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
2025-03-23
Career Advice in 2025
Career advice in 2025. | Irrational Exuberance #career #software #jobs
Very relatable for me atm.
If you pull all those things together, you’re essentially in a market where profit and pace are fixed, and you have to figure out how you personally want to optimize between people, prestige and learning. Whereas a few years ago, I think these variables were much more decoupled, that is not what I hear from folks today, even if their jobs were quite cozy a few years ago.
Going a bit further, I know folks who are good at their jobs, and have been struggling to find something meaningful for six-plus months. I know folks who are exceptionally strong candidates, who can find reasonably good jobs, but even they are finding that the sorts of jobs they want simply don’t exist right now. I know folks who are strong candidates but with some oddities in their profile, maybe too many short stints, who are now being filtered out because hiring managers need some way to filter through the higher volume of candidates.
I can’t give advice on what you should do, but if you’re finding this job market difficult, it’s certainly not personal. My sense is that’s basically the experience that everyone is having when searching for new roles right now. If you are in a role today that’s frustrating you, my advice is to try harder than usual to find a way to make it a rewarding experience, even if it’s not perfect. I also wouldn’t personally try to sit this cycle out unless you’re comfortable with a small risk that reentry is quite difficult: I think it’s more likely that the ecosystem is meaningfully different in five years than that it’s largely unchanged.
Scribbling with Pencils
Issue 113: The Reading Life of... Michael Rance #blackwing #pencils #scribbling #reading
There is nothing perhaps more beautiful to me in one's reading life than marginalia. I love going through a friend's copy of a book and attempting to decipher their scribbles. Same goes for reading the book notes from a person one is dating: 'why did they underline this passage? Were they thinking of me?'. I am a prolific proponent of writing in one's books. Note-taking directly on the page transforms a white, almost-cold object into a well-worn and colorful extension of thought.
The only thing that I write my notes with are pencils. I am annoyingly specific about what pencils I must be working with: the Palomino Blackwings, ideally the black model, and they must be sharpened. The blackwings are perfect. They create a crisp, dark line, and they float across the page. They are a modern reproduction of the pencils that John Steinbeck (among others) wrote with. I like knowing that I am holding a similar instrument as the one that Steinbeck held as he furiously wrote The Grapes of Wrath. I am romantic and foolish sometimes!
I have a fairly intricate note-taking process. In my books I underline passages that are of some interest to me, and in the margin nearest the spine I will jot down asterisks to note how essential the passage is for my brain.
Sometimes I will underline specific words, and write letters in the margin that correspond to what I want to do with the words.
'R' means that i want to read the thing in question. '
'r' means that I want to do further research.
'def' means that I need to define the word, if I don't have it in my vocabulary.
'mem.' means that I want to memorize the passage.
'ST' means that I want to actively study the passage. I use this when I am smitten by something about the prose style, or the construction of the narrative, and want to learn from it to use in my own writing practice.
Outside of the margins I will write brief notes, questions, reflections. Same goes for the top of the page. If the book is especially important or for a project that I am doing, I will go through after finishing the book and place multi-colored stickers so that they hang from the outside of the book. Below is an example from Halldór Laxness’ Independent People, which I read for a newsletter piece that I wrote (shameless plug, sorry!).
Game of Life
What Can We Learn about Engineering and Innovation from Half a Century of the Game of Life Cellular Automaton?—Stephen Wolfram Writings #engineering #innovation #conway
I recently wrote a CSS grid based Game of Life animation, that served as a background for a webpage. Had a lot of fun writing it. When I showed the webpage to a bunch of my dev friends, everyone was impressed with the animation, but I was a bit surprised how few of them were able to recognize the original inspiration from Conway's Game of Life. Next time, I will send this article to them.
Toxic Preconditions
The Imperfectionist: Toxic preconditions #burkeman
From Oliver Burkeman's latest newsletter
A more wide-reaching form of toxic precondition is what Anne-Laure Le Cunff, in her brilliant just-published book Tiny Experiments, calls “the tyranny of purpose” – the oppressive idea that the activities with which we fill our days must be leading up to something, to some final and finished state of having arrived at our destination in life, if they’re to be worth doing in the first place. Her book is a practical guide to living experimentally and with curiosity in the deepest sense of those terms – ie., not just as a cleverer way of putting your five-year vision into action, but because living experimentally and with curiosity is an inherently fulfilling way to live. Imagine the projects you could launch, the hobbies you could explore, the ways you could conduct your social life or parenting, and much else besides, if you needed no reassurance that the new way of doing things was every going to become a permanent feature of your life! Wouldn’t you suddenly feel much, much freer to act?
Which brings us, I think, to the fundamental toxic precondition lurking behind every other toxic precondition: the strong desire we have for some kind of guarantee – before we embark on a new activity, or even just allow ourselves to relax into life – that it’ll all unfold safely and securely, that we’ll retain the feeling of being in control. That’s what you’re surrendering, in a small way, when you go ahead and write a few hundred words of your novel, with no certainty they’ll be any good. Or when you move forward with the day’s projects despite not having carried out your morning routine to the letter. It’s also what you’re surrendering when you decide to cut yourself a bit more slack in life – because who knows what chaos might unfold if you stopped yelling internally at yourself to work harder or do better, if you stopped watching yourself like a hawk for signs of backsliding? In other words: we don’t erect toxic preconditions simply because we’re irrational, self-defeating idiots. We do it because we want to feel secure, and to avoid the risk of experiencing emotions we’re unsure we’d be able to handle.
You never had control; all you had was anxiety. And when you let go of that, even a little bit, what you’re left with is one of the most powerful reasons imaginable for taking any action that feels as though it might make life more meaningful or vibrant, which is that frankly, at the end of the day, you might as well.
Musk Discovers Magic Money Printers
Elon Musk Discovers the "Magic" of Modern Money #mmt #money
In which Elon Musk discovers MMT
These “magic money computers”, as Musk calls them, “can just make money out of thin air.” Daddy DOGE seemed genuinely gobsmacked. “It just issues payments.” “They just send money out of nothing.”
I guess Elon missed the MEMO from various central bankers—Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Jerome Powell, Neel Kashkari, Mario Draghi—all of whom have acknowledged that this is how modern money works. I guess he also missed thousands of articles, books, chapters, working papers, etc. that MMT scholars (alone or in collaboration with others) have written or recorded over many decades.
The point is, there’s no “bombshell” in what Musk told Senator Cruz.
Stephanie Kelton then follows this up with a whirlwind history of "money-printing" which makes for fascinating reading
No one who read Warren Mosler’s Soft Currency Economics almost thirty years ago would be the least bit surprised to learn that present-day governments “spend money out of nothing.” And if you’ve read Randy Wray’s Understanding Modern Money, Michael Hudson’s Temples of Enterprise, or David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, then you know that governments have created “money out of nothing” from the very beginning.
You might even say that the ancient Mesopotamians invented blockchain technology some 4,000 years ago. Instead of a network of computers, these ancient societies used clay tablets to securely record transactions that were transparent, immutable, and resistant to tampering. You find the same kind of early blockchain technology throughout the Middle Ages, when English kings issued hazelwood tally sticks as a form of tamper-resistant currency with its own embedded record-keeping technology.
In fact, Mesopotamian clay tablets were so ubiquitous that scientists are still discovering them today. Just last week, The Guardian ran this terrific article about an impeccable new discovery.
…
Money was invented for the purpose of moving real resources into the public domain. From the very beginning, it was conjured into existence to build armies, temples, palaces, navigable waterways, granaries, roadways, bridges and more. Whether they used “imprints on Mesopotamian clay tablets, notches on sticks, writing in chalk on slate or, later, fountain pen on parchment paper, stamped and milled coins, inked paper notes, [or] today’s electronic entries store on computer hard drives,” powerful collectives have issued payments out of nothing to maintain the functioning of their societies and further their broader ambitions.
The DOGE “bombshell” is tantamount to a team of archeologists declaring, "I found 14 magic money tablets that send money out of nothing." Nothing new under the sun.
2025-03-16
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman - Chapter 4
If skillful time management is best understood as a matter of learning to procrastinate well, by facing the truth about your finitude and making your choices accordingly, then the other kind of procrastination—the bad kind, which prevents us from making progress on the work that matters to us—is usually the result of trying to avoid that truth. The good procrastinator accepts the fact that she can’t get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect. By contrast, the bad procrastinator finds himself paralyzed precisely because he can’t bear the thought of confronting his limitations. For him, procrastination is a strategy of emotional avoidance—a way of trying not to feel the psychological distress that comes with acknowledging that he’s a finite human being.
2025-03-14
Four Thousand Weeks
In today's dose of Oliver Burkeman
Though I’d been largely unaware of it, my productivity obsession had been serving a hidden emotional agenda. For one thing, it helped me combat the sense of precariousness inherent to the modern world of work: if I could meet every editor’s every demand, while launching various side projects of my own, maybe one day I’d finally feel secure in my career and my finances. But it also held at bay certain scary questions about what I was doing with my life, and whether major changes might not be needed. If I could get enough work done, my subconscious had apparently concluded, I wouldn’t need to ask if it was all that healthy to be deriving so much of my sense of self-worth from work in the first place. And as long as I was always just on the cusp of mastering my time, I could avoid the thought that what life was really demanding from me might involve surrendering the craving for mastery and diving into the unknown instead.
The universal truth behind my specific issues is that most of us invest a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves. We don’t want to feel the anxiety that might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right path, or what ideas about ourselves it could be time to give up. We don’t want to risk getting hurt in relationships or failing professionally; we don’t want to accept that we might never succeed in pleasing our parents or in changing certain things we don’t like about ourselves—and we certainly don’t want to get sick and die. The details differ from person to person, but the kernel is the same. We recoil from the notion that this is it—that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at. Instead, we mentally fight against the way things are—so that, in the words of the psychotherapist Bruce Tift, “we don’t have to consciously participate in what it’s like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality.” This struggle against the distressing constraints of reality is what some old-school psychoanalysts call “neurosis,” and it takes countless forms, from workaholism and commitment-phobia to codependency and chronic shyness.
None of us can single-handedly overthrow a society dedicated to limitless productivity, distraction, and speed. But right here, right now, you can stop buying into the delusion that any of that is ever going to bring satisfaction. You can face the facts. You can turn on the shower, brace yourself for some invigoratingly icy water, and step in.
2025-03-13
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman - Chapter One
There was no anxious pressure to “get everything done,” either, because a farmer’s work is infinite: there will always be another milking and another harvest, forever, so there’s no sense in racing toward some hypothetical moment of completion. Historians call this way of living “task orientation,” because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline, the approach that has become second nature for us today.
2025-03-12
Four Thousand Weeks - Introduction
Read the introduction of Oliver Burkeman's previous book on the plane. #productivity
The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.
Moreover, the busyness of the better-off is contagious, because one extremely effective way to make more money, for those at the top of the tree, is to cut costs and make efficiency improvements in their companies and industries. That means greater insecurity for those lower down, who are then obliged to work harder just to get by.
Four Thousand Weeks is yet another book about making the best use of time. But it is written in the belief that time management as we know it has failed miserably, and that we need to stop pretending otherwise.
2025-03-11
Prep for travel.
2025-03-10
Tallahassee Ghazal
Tallahassee Ghazal – SAPIENS #ghazal #urdu #arabic #poetry
Using an ancient Arabic poetic form, a poet-archaeologist from Florida cycles through feelings of entrapment growing up queer in the U.S. South. But in the end, they celebrate love for this place—and that “most of us are breathing.”
Part of: Poets Resist, Refuse, and Find a Way Through – SAPIENS
Karl Marx in America - Andrew Hartman
Marxism for Americans: Andrew Hartman - Future Hindsight (podcast) | Listen Notes #marx #america #marxism
Andrew Hartman has an upcomingi book: Karl Marx in America
Some notes from the transcript:
I note here that this episode is coming out the day before the 177th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto's publication.
On Marxism and Marx's ideas:
So I've written a book about how Karl Marx's ideas have, I guess, played out throughout American history. And so Marx himself is a very important figure there as a person, but more importantly, sort of as somebody who created a body of work, a body of ideas that have persisted up until this day and in people's minds as being relevant. Marxism has a long and torturous history that is both complex and oftentimes changes depending on the time and context. But for my purposes, to be a Marxist simply means that you have a particular way of understanding capitalism, that is that the most important feature of capitalism is the relationship between those who own things, like what Marx called the means of production. But this would be like the factories or the land or the media. And then everyone else, for the most part, who has to work for them, or as Marx would have put it, has to sell their labor in order to survive. So famously using the language of the Communist Manifesto, this is the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. And Marx, in his time when capitalism of this sort was relatively new and had not gone global, theorized that that aspect of our human relations, that is there would be two classes of people, those who owned and those who worked for those who owned. He theorized that eventually everybody would come to be a member of one of those two classes, or almost everybody. And I think that is to a large extent become true. And that is one of the reasons why Marxism has continued to be relevant to lots of people, even after the failure and fall of most of the states that organized around Marxism, most particularly the Soviet Union. And I think that's why people are still reading and talking about Karl Marx. In fact, there's been like a recent influx of people reading Marx and talking about Marx again, perhaps more so than we've seen since the 1960s or even the 1930s. So to me that Marxism is just a particular way of understanding capitalism.
Relevance of Marx Today:
Yeah, so like Marx was fallible, he was human. He made mistakes as well as a person, to me, is less interesting than the fact that he made mistakes as a thinker. But his basic conception of capitalism and what it did to humans and also to some extent of what it did to climate or the environment, was essentially true. And that's why people continue to read Marx, for example, Howard Zinn, the left wing historian who was most famous for writing a people's history of the United States that continues to be read all across the world, and that conservatives continue to lament that fact. He wrote a play in the 1990s called Marx and Soho. And that's exactly what Howard Zinn tried to imagine is if Marx were alive at that point in the 1990s, what would he think? And essentially, Marx's theories in this play by Howard Zinn had panned out to a remarkable degree in terms of thinking about the globalization of capital accumulation that had wrecked so many lives and had sort of spread misery across the planet, while some people got rich beyond their wildest dreams. One of Marx's basic theories of capitalism is that it's at one level very wonderful in the terms of, like the things it can do in terms of technological development. It creates the capacity for humans to live without having to labor as much as humans in the past have had to because of the sort of, like, technological advancements, but also even more so, the advancements. Advancements in terms of, like, organizing ourselves into large units, like, what we would call corporations. So I think he would look around and say, look at all this wonderful stuff. But hardly anybody can share in the wonders. And also because of how unequal things are, because a few men control most of the wealth in the world, most people are more alienated than ever. I think he would say, yeah, this is what I expected. But I. I don't think he would have expected it would have taken so long for humans to get their act together, to sort of create something new. And, of course, that's one of the things that Critics across the 20th and 21st century of Marx and Marxism have pointed to, like, what next? Marx predicted that capitalism would fall, that capitalists were creating their own gravediggers. And yet, here we are. Perhaps things are worse than ever in terms of inequality, in terms of exploitation, in terms of our destruction of the very thing we need to survive, that is the planet and all of its resources.
The aspect of freedom in Marx's works
But I think since the fall of the Soviet Union and in particular in the last 10 or 20 years, people are much more interested in sort of freedom aspect of Marxist theory. So if you think about it in these terms, in capitalism, most people don't have a lot of free time because so much of our time is spent working. And while we're at work, most people, like you, could never describe the conditions of work. You kind of laid it out nicely when you're talking about sweatshops in Bangladesh or sweatshops in Amazon warehouses right here in the United States. Most people, while they're at work, they don't experience freedom. Like, there's nothing freeing or liberating about that experience. And they have to spend so many hours of their life under those conditions. Conditions in which a boss, a manager, or the system, in some sense, has almost totalitarian control over them, over their bodies. And yes, you could always say, well, they could just quit. That's not always true everywhere, but maybe in the U.S. yes, if you work at Amazon, you could just quit, but you have to pay the rent. You have to feed your kids. Like, that's part of Marx's whole theory and premise of capitalism is that most of us have to sell our labor in order to survive. And that's not a condition that creates freedom for most people.
On Marx's theory of change
So there's kind of like two layers to how Marx thought about the shift from capitalism to socialism or communism. These were terms that were often used interchangeably in the 19th century for Marx. So, like, if you think about capitalism growing into ever larger institutions and entities, factories, workers would be thrown together in ways that they would come to recognize the similarities of their shared conditions, and that would help them organize against their system of oppression. This is what Marx described in the Communist Manifesto as capitalists digging their own graves. And so he truly believed that the way in which capitalism was developing in terms of, like, the socialization of production, in other words, like things coming together in the producer side, would lead to the socialization of human relations once the humans involved, especially the workers, recognized their conditions. At various points, this happened to a small degree. And I think you could say, like, the labor movement over the course of the last two centuries is a product of this kind of understanding of capitalism and what happens to workers in it. The other side of Marx's theory is he thought a lot about the sort of inevitable crises of capitalism. And so just in his life, he saw several extremely damaging economic crises of capitalism. 1830s, 1850s. And then he didn't live long enough to see, of course, the 1890s, which was one of the worst. He saw one in the 1870s, but then there was another even worse one in the 1890s, each getting worse and worse. And then there's the 1930s. And many Marxist historians would say that the two world wars of the 20th century were the inevitable sort of byproduct of these. These crises of capitalism, that's a debate for another time. So he thought that if workers were organized, if they had that sort of solidarity, they could take advantage of these crises. And as each crisis got worse and worse, the working class would be well positioned to transition, to have a revolution, a socialist revolution. Obviously, it hasn't happened and obvious, or at least not yet, but it's really hard to anticipate that happening right now as we sit in 2025. And so that aspect of Marx and Marxism, I don't think is as relevant as perhaps it once was. Although I I do think that when the working class, through the labor movement organizes, that's one of the most important things that people can do to make their lives and the lives of others better. It's the most important sort of counter force to oligarchy. But the reason why I think Marx is still relevant goes back to his theory of labor exploitation and freedom. Like how he thought thought about capitalism and conceptualized the way it made us unfree, the way it alienated us is still so highly relevant. Maybe it's up to us to imagine how to create something different.
On Capitalism and Democracy:
But I have been wondering for a while, are capitalism and democracy compatible or incompatible? And I have to say that I've asked this question several times on the podcast, and none of the guests so far have yet to give me a straight answer on whether capitalism and democracy really should hang together or maybe not. Speaker B: Well, I'm so happy that I can break that string. I don't think they're compatible at all. I think they're completely incompatible. But again, I would think of democracy as on a spectrum in much the same way like Marx would think of freedom in relation to labor on a spectrum. This is a very Marxist take on democracy, I think, as well. There have been moments in American history, and the United States is historically probably the most capitalistic nation in world history. And also we like to think one of the sort of, like, originators of political democracy, although that's a more contested history. But at every step, democracy, if we define it as rule by the people, and by the people we mean everybody, at every step, it's been highly constrained. Now, that's true of democracy almost everywhere throughout history, but in particular in the US it's been highly constrained, in large part because of capitalism. And I think that's more true now than ever. And so if we only think of democracy as electing people to lead us or represent us every two to four years or whatever it is, I guess capitalism, democracy can work fine. Although even by that very limited definition of democracy, I think things aren't going so well. We have to sort of expand our imagination when it comes to democracy. We have to think about being free to rule ourselves in all aspects of our lives. And there are so many aspects of our lives where we're not free to rule ourselves. And when you really think about it, the thing standing in the way of that freedom in so many aspects is capitalism or one of its byproducts. If you have a billion dollars, you have so much more power, not only over the political system, but over your own life.
…
but just think about the billions of people across the planet who are completely constrained by the fact that they just don't have enough wealth, money, resources to actually have autonomy over their life, to actually rule themselves, govern themselves, and thus they are controlled by other people. In the US we, I guess, get to choose our. Choose the people who control us, but we have a very narrow set of parameters around which we choose the people who control us. And it seems to get narrower every four years.
On what we can do:
We all feel paralyzed. And so, you know, a lot of us will look locally, sort of tend to our own gardens, which is great. But I guess that's not really going to change the conditions either. One thing that I advise people to do is find ways to connect with other people that will change their and other people's sort of understanding or political consciousness. Form a reading group. And everyone reads something that is very challenging either at an intellectual or a political level. I just think I like that a lot. So, like, one of the things that's really interesting in my book is I've have learned throughout U.S. history, since Marx became a thing in the U.S. people have formed reading groups and they read marks together. And we're not just Talking about sort of grad students, as you might imagine, we're talking about, like, working class people really struggling through difficult texts to try to understand their world. I feel like we need more of that. And to me, that could be a really sort of radical act in today's world of. Of social media and our diminishing attention spans. Spend some time with something difficult like reading a philosophical text like Capital or it doesn't have to be Marx. There's so many other great things. And do it with other people. Talk about it.
ChatGPT Summary of full podcast transcript: ChatGPT - Marxism in America Today
Mysore Food Guide
Mysore Food Guide #mysore #food
A set of places from a local.
Evolution of Spotify in the Indian Market
Diljit Dosanjh Breaks the Bollywood Mold and Shakes Up India’s Music Scene - Bloomberg #music #business #spotify #indian
People’s tastes have also evolved. According to Spotify, domestic fans streamed almost 70% international music on the platform when the company debuted in India in 2019, compared with 70% local music now. Punjabi tunes in particular are topping the charts, not just in India but among a global audience, according to Spotify. Dosanjh is partly responsible for that.
While Indian music is still mainly consumed by Indians and the diaspora, that is starting to change.
The arrival of Spotify and other streaming platforms in India, the second-largest English speaking nation in the world, has played a crucial role in helping India raise the quality of its entertainment output. With diverse musical offerings from India, the number of countries that have songs from the country on top of their streaming lists is growing, said Ashish Pherwani, leader for the Media & Entertainment sector at EY in India.
“There’s more acceptance of Indian music that’s happening right now,” Pherwani said. “It’s just the tip of the iceberg. Honestly, there’s so much more that can happen around Indian content. It’s been a largely diaspora-oriented industry five years back, but that’s changing now.”
Andor
Every Star Wars Project Fails to Get This Basic Thing Right — Except One #andor #starwars
From the beginning of the franchise, Star Wars has been about struggling against tyranny and evil. From the Rebel Alliance fighting the Empire to the Resistance facing off against the First Order and the Jedi dueling with the Sith, the galaxy far, far away has always revolved around the forces of peace and democracy challenging those of authoritarianism. Ironically, with all the depictions of dictators and tyrants, Star Wars has consistently struggled to depict life under authoritarianism realistically. Only the show Andor has broken this trend by giving fans a believable look at how a dictatorship operates.
Andor won praise for its darker tone, more nuanced characters, and complex story. A great deal of this complexity and nuance was directly the result of its focus on portraying the realities of authoritarianism. Through depictions of average people and making Imperial officers more important characters, Andor gave fans a fascinating and scary look at life in the Empire.
From the very first episode of Season 1, fans get a look at how terrible life can be for regular people under imperial rule. Viewers see soldiers bullying people and get a sense of the fear and paranoia pervasive throughout society. When Andor kills two officers and goes on the run, he faces constant suspicion, as many people are constantly afraid that spies and informers will get them sent to prison or worse. This is a more accurate depiction of life under a tyrant.
Andor also gave fans a deeper look at the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB) and the terror it strikes into dissidents. Similar to the Soviet KGB or the East German Stasi, the ISB operates as a secret police force for the Empire, seeking out any potential opposition or rebellion through espionage, coercion, and fear. Further, in depicting and characterizing individual members of the ISB, like Dedra Meero and Blevin, fans finally get some insight into why a person would choose to serve the Empire and fight the rebellion. This reminds viewers that authoritarian regimes are run by real people who choose to oppose democracy, not mind-controlled clones or nameless soldiers.
Andor proved to be a remarkable show by giving fans an exciting adventure story, full of action and twists, while also exploring the darker elements of the Star Wars universe. It also managed to do something that George Lucas has arguably tried to do since the first movie released in 1977. Andor depicted a story of freedom struggling against tyranny that included nuance and a realistic depiction of how dictatorships and rebels actually operate.
2025-03-09
Is Posh Moisturizer Worth It
Is posh moisturiser worth the money? #skincare #moisturizer
All the skincare tips I need.
The three types of moisturiser can help. Humectants, such as hyaluronic acid and glycerin, pull moisture from inside the body onto the surface of the skin. Occlusives, such as petroleum jelly and shea butter, block water from evaporating from the skin. Emollients, such as ceramide, smooth the skin by filling in gaps between skin cells. A review published in January in Experimental Dermatology found that ceramide made skin look and feel smoother and also reduced inflammation of the skin.
If the goal is soft, well-hydrated skin, experts say that cheaper products work just as well as the boutique options. “You don’t need to break the bank,” says Nour Kibbi, a clinical associate professor of dermatology at Stanford University. Where splurging may pay off, says Abigail Waldman, a dermatologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts, is on products that reduce the signs of ageing. As people age, skin-cell production slows and the skin thins. Older people also produce less collagen, which keeps the skin plump. This combination leads to wrinkles.
Retinol and other retinoids, a class of products chemically derived from vitamin A, reduce the appearance of wrinkles by increasing cell and collagen production. A study published in JAMA Dermatology in 2007 tested the effectiveness of retinol by comparing the arms of 36 elderly people who, three times a week, had had lotion with retinol put on one arm and lotion without retinol on the other. After six months, the researchers found that the arms with retinol had fewer fine wrinkles. Nearly 20 years later, experts still recommend retinol as a way to reduce the signs of ageing.
2025-03-08
Chill day. Watched some shows. Did some travel planning.
2025-03-07
The Lead-Pipe Theory of the Internet
Came across this great quote from the book The Socratic Method by Ward Farnsworth : Amazon.com: The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook (Audible Audio Edition): Ward Farnsworth, John Lescault, Blackstone Publishing: Books #books #socrates
The book will also offer some ideas about how Socratic teachings relate to our current cultural and political difficulties. Let us backtrack a moment. The ancient Romans built elaborate networks of pipes to deliver water where they wanted it to go. The networks were a marvel. But many of the pipes were made of lead, and the water carried the lead along with it. One school of thought regards this as part of the reason for the decline and fall of Rome: lead poisoning gradually took its toll, impairing the thought and judgment of many Romans, especially at the top. The theory is much disputed; perhaps it contains no truth. But as a metaphor it is irresistible. We have built networks for the delivery of information-the internet, and especially social media. These networks, too, are a marvel. But they also carry a kind of poison with them. The mind fed from those sources learns to subsist happily on quick reactions, easy certainties, one-liners, and rage. It craves confirmation and resents contradiction. Attention spans collapse; imbecility propagates, then seems normal, then is celebrated. The capacity for rational discourse between people who disagree gradually rots. I have a good deal more confidence in the lead-pipe theory of the internet, and its effect on our culture, than in the lead-pipe theory of the fall of Rome.
Against Self-Improvement
The Marginalian – Marginalia on our search for meaning. #self-help #self-improvement
Loved this quote from the book On Getting Better
We can’t imagine our lives without the wish to improve them, without the progress myths that inform so much of what we do, and of what we want (we don’t tend to think of ourselves as wanting to be what we are already). Whether we call it ambition, or aspiration, or just desire, what we want and what we want to be is always our primary preoccupation, but it is always set in the future, as though what could be — our better life, our better selves — lures us on. As though it is the better future that makes our lives worth living; as though it is hope that we most want.
On Vibe Coding
Will the future of software development run on vibes? - Ars Technica #ai #coding
As Karpathy humorously acknowledged in his original post, the approach is for the ultimate lazy programmer experience: "I ask for the dumbest things, like 'decrease the padding on the sidebar by half,' because I'm too lazy to find it myself. I 'Accept All' always; I don't read the diffs anymore."
At its core, the technique transforms anyone with basic communication skills into a new type of natural language programmer—at least for simple projects. With AI models currently being held back by the amount of code an AI model can digest at once (context size), there tends to be an upper limit to how complex a vibe-coded software project can get before the human at the wheel becomes a high-level project manager, manually assembling slices of AI-generated code into a larger architecture. But as technical limits expand with each generation of AI models, those limits may one day disappear.
But there are limits to how far Willison will go. "Vibe coding your way to a production codebase is clearly risky. Most of the work we do as software engineers involves evolving existing systems, where the quality and understandability of the underlying code is crucial."
At some point, understanding at least some of the code is important because AI-generated code may include bugs, misunderstandings, and confabulations—for example, instances where the AI model generates references to nonexistent functions or libraries.
Even so, the risk-reward calculation for vibe coding becomes far more complex in professional settings. While a solo developer might accept the trade-offs of vibe coding for personal projects, enterprise environments typically require code maintainability and reliability standards that vibe-coded solutions may struggle to meet. When code doesn't work as expected, debugging requires understanding what the code is actually doing—precisely the knowledge that vibe coding tends to sidestep.
Linus Torvalds on Being a Visionary
Linus Torvalds is not a visionary - YouTube #linus #vision
This quote resonates so much, esp when I see all the folks on X walking around in an AI driven haze. It feels okay to not be a part of that crowd and still feel validated.
I am not a visionary. I'm an engineer. I'm happy with the people who are wandering around looking at the stars but I am looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole before I fall in.
2025-03-06
The Joy of React
The Joy of React #react #course
Speedran sections of this course because I got this sudden urge to learn React a bit more in depth.
I have to build another static site, and instead of doing it in Go like this one, I wanna do it in React. I feel like there will be less of a cognitive dissonance between the frontend tech and the the tech used to build the static site if I just do it all in Typescript. Let's see how the experiment turns out.
2025-03-05
Writing Styles of Famous Tech People
On Writing #1 - by Zvi Mowshowitz #writing #styles
Great post breaking down how famous tech folks write, and their peculiar style.
2025-03-04
The Return of Romanticism
We Really Are Entering a New Age of Romanticism #culture
An article from Ted Gioia which gave me a lot of hope.
In the old days, movie villains were mobsters or crime syndicates. Nowadays they are tech innovators. This kind of shift in the popular imagination does not happen by chance.
Now let’s revisit the (even older) history.
Back in the 1700s, ruthless algorithms had a different name. They called them Rationalism—and the whole Western world was under the sway of the Age of Reason. But like today’s algorithms, the new systems of the Rationalists attempted to replace human wisdom and experience with intrusive and inflexible operating rules.
It didn’t work.
“This rationalistic philosophy, which had been expected to solve all the problems, had failed to rescue society from either despotism and poverty,” explains Edmund Wilson in his masterful study To the Finland Station.
“The mechanical inventions of which it had been expected that they would vastly improve the lot of humanity were obviously making many people miserable,” he continues.
(By the way, it’s no coincidence that recent tech overreach has been accompanied by a New Rationalism, championed by crypto swindler Sam Bankman-Fried and his many fellow travelers. But that subject deserves a whole article of its own….Now let’s return to history.)
The Rationalists of the 1700s (and today) put their faith in three things—and they all backfired.
(1) The most obvious failure was the attempt to impose rational rules on the political system. This led to the French Revolution, which soon collapsed in terrible bloodshed, and resulted in the dictatorship of Napoleon.
Millions of people died because the dominant algorithms didn’t work.
(2) The second obsession of the Rationalists in the 1700s was the total systematization of all knowledge. (Does that sound familiar?)
They didn’t have ChatGPT back then. But they did the best they could with the immense efforts of the French Encyclopedists and German taxonomists.
Everything got classified, codified, quantified, named, and placed on a chart. Foucault later mocked this as an “archeology of human sciences.”
Everything was forced into the system—even (or especially) humans.
That’s because this way of understanding the world failed to grasp anything that evolved or grew or changed or lived. Like the tech-gone-wild ethos of the current day, the messy human element was removed from the Rationalist systems.
(3) But the Rationalists of the 1700s made one more mistake—and it reminds us again of our current situation. They let a brutal technocracy destroy people’s lives—driven by dreams of profit maximization, and ignoring the human cost.
It wasn’t called Silicon Valley back then. The name given to the technocracy in the 1700s was the Industrial Revolution.
We don’t fully grasp the horrors of the factory sweat shops today—because the Romanticists worked on fixing the problems of industrialism in the 1820s and 1830s. This new generation of artists, humanists, and compassionate critics of the technocracy passed laws against child labor, unsafe working conditions, abusive hours, and other exploitative practices.
In other words, the Romanticists replaced the algorithm with humanist values. Rationalism on its own would never do that.
Canva Design Essentials
Graphic Design Essentials #canva #design
Decided to watch this video series from Canva's Design School collection on a whim. Finally took the time to properly go through the color theory stuff which is well explained.
Freelancing as Software Engineer
Came across a couple of articles this week that contained some good tips on how to get freelancing gigs. #freelancer #jobs #software
Nerd Reich
The Nerd Reich #silicon #valley #politics #fascism
Have to admit this is a great name for a newsletter by Gil Duran that critiques the politics of Silicon Valley. He has been at it for a long time now, long before current political developments post the presidential elections.
He came on the Angry Planet podcast and did a scathing takedown of the current administration and its policies: Welcome to the Nerd Reich - Angry Planet (podcast) | Listen Notes
Some excerpts from the podcast transcript.
About Curtis Yarvin
So we're gonna get real granular with some of the stuff at the top, and explain some of the personalities. Who is Curtis Yarvin? Speaker 4: Curtis Yarvin is a software programmer mostly based in San Francisco who in the early two thousands started writing under the name Mintius Moldbug, a series of essays largely focused on the need to replace democracy with dictatorship. Back then, he's sort of an anonymous troll, not using his real name. People who'd known him a long time say he's always been like that and people probably didn't take him too seriously. But he caught the ear of some important people eventually. Most notable, Peter Thiel, who, by, you know, a few years later was investing along with Andreessen Horowitz in Curtis Charbon's software idea for something called Urbit to create this decentralized peer to peer computer network, you know, on libertarian vision. And he was became known for his ideas as Peter Thiel's house philosopher. And he's continued to write these things in, in subsequent years and laying out more aggressively and in more detail how one might go about replacing a democratic government with a sort of corporate tech dictatorship.
About pseudo-intellectualism in Silicon Valley:
The critique seems to be that democracy doesn't work and it's bad and it hasn't solved all the problems and it just creates more problems. But no no the the other part to understand about these guys is that they're not intellectuals. They are pseudo intellectuals. They pretend to be smart. They pretend to understand things like history.
Look, I'm not a historian. Right? Studied a lot of politics, but I'm not a political scientist. These guys act like they're all a bit altogether, political science, historian. But when you look at what they're actually doing, and I'm working on a piece actually that categorizes their argument style because they all have it in common.
They take something in history, completely misinterpret or warp it, cherry pick whatever facts they want, all to fit their thesis and try to say that everything in history proves that what I'm saying is right. Now a critical thinker and an intellectual is also aware of the contradicting information and you have to make your presumptions and your predictions based on a more nuanced version of things. For instance, I think that most tyrannies have a history of collapsing and being overthrown. And I think that'll happen with whatever these guys are trying to do. However, in history, we see that sometimes tyranny can last a few decades or longer.
So the question is, will this last a long time? Ten, twenty years, the rest of our productive lives? Or can we overthrow it, overturn it in a couple of years in the next election or whatever. Right? So, you know, but they cherry pick the information and pretend they know what they're talking about.
On the Silicon Valley ideology
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. That's true. Anyway, but, it the Silicon Valley ethos, I mean what? Yeah. I mean, if I create a video game, am I gonna become a total asshole?
Speaker 2: Mhmm. Yes. Okay.
Speaker 4: There are a few who don't seem to be like that, but I do think that it gives rise to this sort of, idea of supremacy. That you are of a superior intelligence because you understand technology and because you have managed to make a lot, a lot of money. And it's something I observed while I was working in politics was it seemed to me that if you have power, then you want money. If you have money, then you want power. If you want both, then you kinda wanna live forever and be God, and that's where you start to have a problem.
And so I think we're at the part where the the people with money have realized that they have power, they're using it. And And we're also starting to see that their ideology their ideology get really, really weird, and they're starting to talk a lot more about God and living forever and getting off the planet and being bigger than being human. And so I think that theory that I kind of thought up a long time ago that crossed my mind came is is coming to fruition because we do see this weird interesting turn, you know, there's this there's this bundle of ideologies that, a couple of researchers, Timnit Gebru and Emil Torres put together called tescreal, t e s c r e a l. Transhumanism, exotropianism, singularitarianism, rationalism, cosmism, effective altruism, and longtermism. I can't believe I remembered all of them off the top of my head.
But it's this I these ideas that have bubbled up out of Silicon Valley that essentially amount to an ideology of tech supremacy. We are smarter than everyone. We are richer than everyone, and a desired destiny to rule the world. And you see this coming out in terms of this sort of abundance agenda, which basically amounts to, let tech people do whatever they want without regulation and they'll save us. Right?
Podcast summary by ChatGPT here: ChatGPT - Silicon Valley Authoritarianism Rise
2025-03-03
Erotic Writing
Erotic writing is becoming more explicit #erotica #books #literature
But eroticism is changing. Open “Onyx Storm”, the latest romantasy book (a genre that blends romance and fantasy) by Rebecca Yarros, and things are rather clearer. Hardy perennials are out. Words like “hard” are in—as too are words including “cock”, “fuck” and “straddle”. And people are buying it. Sales of erotica are booming: thanks to pre-orders, “Onyx Storm” had already been on Amazon’s bestseller list for 19 weeks by the time it was published in January. After release, it shifted almost 3m copies in a week. It sold faster than any novel in America in the past 20 years.
There is now a vast variety of erotica available, including cosy erotica (knitwear is torn off), Austen erotica (Mr Darcy has assets even more impressive than £10,000 a year) and fairy erotica. There is even erotica featuring—readers may wish to brace themselves—physicists. These titles contain such explicit lines as, “Your dissertation on liquid crystals’ static distortions in biaxial nematics was brilliant, Elsie.”
What has driven this is new digital formats, such as audiobooks. (Ms Yarros and Ms Maas dominate those charts, too.) The e-book has been especially consequential. It is discreet—no one can see what you are reading on a tablet. And it lets authors self-publish cheaply, as Ms James did in 2011 with “Fifty Shades of Grey”, a story of sadomasochism. It was later republished by Vintage, but romance lovers retained the habit of reading books digitally.
Authorial autonomy online means it is “impossible to police” what goes into books, says Hal Gladfelder of the University of Manchester. The ubiquity of internet pornography means that even to try to do so would feel “ridiculous”.
In one sense this new generation of erotic prose is more realistic than what came before. Floral analogies are out; proper body parts are in. But in another sense, it is not remotely realistic. Everyone is gorgeous; names like “Xaden” and “Aetos” dominate; most characters have remarkable powers, if not superpowers.
Crypto Bailout By Trump
Issue 78 – President on brink of bailout for bitcoin #crypto
From Molly White's latest newsletter.
And although many still describe bitcoin as “digital gold”, believing that it should serve as a hedge against economic turmoil in similar ways as some people view actual gold, bitcoin and other crypto assets are once again demonstrating that they are among some of the first assets to decline among broader economic uncertainty. With looming tariffs by the Trump administration against Canada, Mexico, and China, concerns from the Federal Reserve about those and other policies’ impacts on inflation, and continuing wobbles in the labor market, people are selling off risky assets like crypto in hopes of better weathering the economic storm on the horizon. The comparatively new bitcoin ETFs set new records for the highest single-day outflows on February 25, with investors withdrawing more than $1 billion in total from the eleven ETFs.3
Seeming to respond to the panicked pleas from the cryptocurrency industry, Trump rescued bitcoin from its below-$80,000 slide in a Sunday Truth Social post reiterating his plans for a “U.S. Crypto Reserve”, which he added would contain “XRP [Ripple], SOL [Solana], and ADA [Cardano]”. Further panic from bitcoin maximalists likely prompted his quick addendum two hours later that “And, obviously, BTC and ETH, as other valuable Cryptocurrencies, will be the heart of the Reserve. I also love Bitcoin and Ethereum!” Nice save.4
Why I don’t feel threatened as a software engineer
Why I don’t feel threatened as a software engineer #llm #software #programming
My perspective on this as a developer who’s been using these systems on a daily basis for a couple of years now is that I find that they enhance my value. I am so much more competent and capable as a developer because I’ve got these tools assisting me. I can write code in dozens of new programming languages that I never learned before.
But I still get to benefit from my 20 years of experience.
Take somebody off the street who’s never written any code before and ask them to build an iPhone app with ChatGPT. They are going to run into so many pitfalls, because programming isn’t just about can you write code—it’s about thinking through the problems, understanding what’s possible and what’s not, understanding how to QA, what good code is, having good taste.
There’s so much depth to what we do as software engineers.
I’ve said before that generative AI probably gives me like two to five times productivity boost on the part of my job that involves typing code into a laptop. But that’s only 10 percent of what I do. As a software engineer, most of my time isn’t actually spent with the typing of the code. It’s all of those other activities.
The AI systems help with those other activities, too. They can help me think through architectural decisions and research library options and so on. But I still have to have that agency to understand what I’m doing.
So as a software engineer, I don’t feel threatened. My most optimistic view of this is that the cost of developing software goes down because an engineer like myself can be more ambitious, can take on more things. As a result, demand for software goes up—because if you’re a company that previously would never have dreamed of building a custom CRM for your industry because it would have taken 20 engineers a year before you got any results... If it now takes four engineers three months to get results, maybe you’re in the market for software engineers now that you weren’t before.
Are we all severed
Are we all severed? | Dazed #severance #tv #culture #work
This article started with Severance but went to many places
Severance is often described as a dystopian work of science fiction, but there are stark similarities between the show’s world and our own. While it’s not possible to literally bifurcate your consciousness – yet – how many of us contain parts of our identities just to get through the day? How many of us have gone to work while depressed, brokenhearted or grieving? On a macro level: how many of us have gone to work knowing that wars, famines, and genocides are happening? Arguably, under late capitalism – which prioritises work over all else – we’re all kind of severed.
It’s partly a psychological survival strategy; compartmentalisation is a very common trauma response. Our brains can only handle so much. But it’s fair to say we feel considerable pressure to compartmentalise in the first place because society isn’t structured in a way which allows people to look at trauma head-on. Why is it that Mark must return to work three weeks after Gemma’s death_,_ when a steady return to normal functioning after a bereavement can typically take two or more years? The need for him to be productive and keep working is so urgent, so imperative, that he allows his employer to stick a microchip in his brain. But Severance does not condone severance: Lumon uses the innies’ ignorance to exploit them in a number of innovatively cruel and evil ways. Instead, it emphatically skewers the ridiculousness of modern life, where productivity (and appearing sane) always takes precedence over personal pain.
NoteGPT
NoteGPT - AI Summarizer and Generator for Enhanced Learning #tools #ai
Useful suite of tools to perform a lot of AI assisted tasks like transcription, summary generation etc.
Men and Close Friendships
Too many men lack close friendships. What’s holding them back? | Psyche Ideas #friendship #masculinity #culture
High-quality, close friendships involve intimacy, the fragile closeness born of risking ourselves and being met with acceptance and belonging. This kind of closeness can evade men in environments that operate on norms of indifference or active hostility towards expressing what is happening in their inner worlds.
Alao, 33, a Nigerian gay man, put it more bluntly: ‘Straight men have a lot to learn from us.’ For him, the casual tenderness and care often seen in same-gender male relationships shouldn’t be confined to the queer community. Trans men echoed this perspective, drawing from their unique vantage point of navigating masculinity while remembering their previous girlhoods or womanhoods. ‘As a man with a girlhood, I’m confident in expressing vulnerable needs,’ said Liam, 28, a graduate student in New Jersey. He added that friendships with cisgender men often feel like ‘a step down in intimacy’. These relationships could be richer, he believes, if cisgender men risked sharing their own ‘vulnerable needs’, and also learned how to meet that need in others.
We have, as a society, always demanded bravery from men. But so many are still lost when it comes to the bravery that close relationships demand.
Reading - Switching from Paper to Screens
What does switching from paper to screens mean for how we read? | Psyche Ideas #reading #screen
Reading is so commonplace that it’s hard to appreciate how much of a challenge it poses to the human brain. As you read this sentence, you’re using the visual forms of words to access their meanings and pronunciations from memory, and then using this information, and the neural systems that evolved for spoken language, to construct larger units of meaning: phrases, sentences and extended discourse. Reading is a relatively recent cultural invention; our brain did not evolve to read. Only after years of education and practice do people learn to coordinate the brain systems needed to support skilled reading. This process is inherently difficult, as evidenced by the fact that a significant proportion of people struggle to attain reading proficiency despite having normal intelligence and opportunities for education.
One of these findings is the screen inferiority effect. As its name suggests, this effect refers to demonstrations that – with all else being equal – a text that is read on a digital screen will be less well understood than the same text if it is read on paper. If you’re reading this article online, for example, your understanding of its content may (at least to some degree) be compromised. After reading the article, you might be able to accurately answer questions about its gist, but not necessarily be able to report the details as well as if you had read it on paper. The effect has been documented across different languages and writing systems, indicating that it is robust.
Some studies, however, have provided evidence that the size of this effect is influenced by a number of variables. One of these variables is the nature of the text: the comprehension of narrative texts (in which readers become immersed in a story) seems to be less affected by how the text is displayed, compared with the comprehension of expository texts. So, if you’re engaged in an interesting novel, as opposed to studying a textbook, your grasp of the text will likely be less influenced by whether it’s on a screen or in print form. Another important variable is the amount of time available to read, with the screen inferiority effect being larger when readers are under pressure to read rapidly. If you have to read something very quickly, you’d probably be better off reading it in print. There is some evidence that reading skill is an important variable, too, with the screen inferiority effect being more pronounced for less skilled readers.
2025-03-02
Stablecoins
Stablecoins: the real crypto craze #crypto #stablecoin #finance
stablecoins are increasingly used for real-world purposes, too. Migrants send remittances with them, replacing a correspondent-banking system beset by high fees and delays. The Turkish trader says that shopkeepers in the Grand Bazaar pay suppliers with the coins as they are the fastest option. In countries where inflation erodes savings and dollars are scarce, they are catching on as a store of value. A survey of stablecoin-holders in Turkey and four other emerging markets by Castle Island Ventures, which invests in crypto startups, and Visa, a payments giant, finds that nearly half use them for this purpose.
Oversight is not all bad for stablecoins, facilitating interest from mainstream finance. Stripe, a payments firm, has bought Bridge, a stablecoin-infrastructure startup. Visa has built a platform to help lenders issue coins; BBVA, Spain’s second-largest bank, will be among the first to use it, perhaps for money transfers. Stablecoins have shown their value in the backrooms of the Grand Bazaar. Their next task is to do so in the regulators’ offices and boardrooms of Washington and Wall Street.
Being Independent
Pure Independence · Collab Fund #self-help #self-improvement #independence
Great piece by Morgan Housel
I have seen many people achieve some level of financial independence only to be sucked into a new kind of dependence: the culture of their tribe. Financial freedom is achieved, but it’s replaced with sycophancy to a new boss, or a blind adherence to tribal views you might disagree with deep down.
It’s a unique form of poverty: rather than needing to work for money, you are indebted to needing to think a certain way.
I once heard a good litmus test: If I can predict your views on one topic by hearing your views about another, unrelated topic, you are not thinking independently. Example: If your views on immigration allow someone to accurately predict your views on abortion and gun control, there’s a good chance you’re not thinking independently.
Grid and Flexbox Visual Cheatsheets
Nice visual cheatsheets. #grid #flexbox #css #cheatsheet #tools
Personal Renewal by John Gardener
PBS - JOHN GARDNER - EDUCATION AND EXCELLENCE #self-help #self-improvement #ambition
We've all seen men and women, even ones in fortunate circumstances with responsible positions who seem to run out of steam in midcareer.
One must be compassionate in assessing the reasons. Perhaps life just presented them with tougher problems than they could solve. It happens. Perhaps something inflicted a major wound on their confidence or their self-esteem. Perhaps they were pulled down by the hidden resentments and grievances that grow in adult life, sometimes so luxuriantly that, like tangled vines, they immobilize the victim. You've known such people -- feeling secretly defeated, maybe somewhat sour and cynical, or perhaps just vaguely dispirited. Or maybe they just ran so hard for so long that somewhere along the line they forgot what it was they were running for.
"Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account."
I'm not talking about anything as narrow as ambition. After all, ambition eventually wears out and probably should. But you can keep your zest until the day you die. If I may offer you a simple maxim, "Be interesting," Everyone wants to be interesting -- but the vitalizing thing is to be interested. Keep a sense of curiosity. Discover new things. Care. Risk failure. Reach out.
I've watched a lot of mid-career people, and Yogi Berra says you can observe a lot just by watching. I've concluded that most people enjoy learning and growing. And many are dearly troubled by the self-assessments of mid-career.
Such self-assessments are no great problem at your age. You're young and moving up. The drama of your own rise is enough. But when you reach middle age, when your energies aren't what they used to be, then you'll begin to wonder what it all added up to; you'll begin to look for the figure in the carpet of your life. I have some simple advice for you when you begin that process. Don't be too hard on yourself. Look ahead. Someone said that "Life is the art of drawing without an eraser." And above all don't imagine that the story is over. Life has a lot of chapters.
The more I see of human lives, the more I believe the business of growing up is much longer drawn out than we pretend. If we achieve it in our 30's, even our 40s, we're doing well. To those of you who are parents of teenagers, I can only say "Sorry about that."
2025-03-01
What to Pack in a Bug-Out Bag | The Art of Manliness #survival #prepper #outdoors
2025-02-28
Karpathy on using LLMs
The only useful thing I did today was watching this Karpathy video in full, apart from watching the latest episode of Severance.
2025-02-27
Podscript UI overhaul
UI overhaul · deepakjois/podscript@ef94c87 · GitHub #podscript #react #shadcn
Overhauled the Podscript web UI with close to 1000 lines of AI assisted React code that uses shadcn components.
I used Cursor heavily because my React foo is kinda rusty. However, I did get it to explain every line of code to me as a learning exercise. Along the way, I was able to prompt the AI to improve some of the code it generated, so I am gonna say it was a very collaborative endeavor.
Roti
Community-Based Research Explores Roti’s Global Histories – SAPIENS #roti #food #history #culture
Kale roti, for example, is a regional delicacy from Bangladesh that contains black gram beans (mashkalai) and other flours, and is eaten with mashed dishes made of chili, eggplant, tomato, or spiced beef. Using ingredients such as melted butter and cake flour changes the flatbread’s texture into the soft and spongy South African butter roti. In South Asia, Kenya, and Uganda, the flatbread goes by “chapati,” from the Urdu-Hindi root word “chapat” (slap), referring to the slapping technique used to flatten dough balls into thin, round discs before cooked on a tawa, or hot griddle. In Guyana, the name “clap roti” similarly points to a clapping technique for fashioning a flaky, tender roti—perfect for picking up steaming hot goat curry. In the Indian province of Gujarat, there is an extra-thin roti called a rotli. In Malaysia, the word “roti” can refer to many types of leavened and unleavened breads, including the famous roti canai, enjoyed as a circular, crunchy, flaky bread. And in various places, people have created versions to accommodate dietary restrictions and preferences, including vegan roti.
Slop
The New Aesthetics of Slop - by Ted Gioia #ai #slop
We have come a long way from the days of Impressionism and Naturalism and all the rest. Those were serious movements. They happened because of dedicated artists committed to their craft.
Slop is the opposite.
It’s the perfect aesthetic theory for 12 year olds with no artistic sensitivty—but possessing a crude sense of humor and lots of pop culture detritus in their heads.
Tech companies embrace this—and even brag about the sloppiness of their Slop. Each generation of AI aspires to new levels of whackness.
AI does not possess a self. It lacks personhood. It has no experience of subjectivity. So any art it creates will inevitably feel empty and hollow.
The Slop Manifesto is pretty cool!
How to code with Claude Sonnet 3.7
Some tips to code with Claude Code from somebody who works at Anthropic. #code #claude #ai #tools
Catherine Olsson: Claude Code is very useful, but it can still get confused.
A few quick tips from my experience coding with it at Anthropic 👉
Work from a clean commit so it's easy to reset all the changes. Often I want to back up and explain it from scratch a different way.
Sometimes I work on two devboxes at the same time: one for me, one for Claude Code. We’re both trying ideas in parallel. E.g. Claude proposes a brilliant idea but stumbles on the implementation. Then I take the idea over to my devbox to write it myself.
My most common confusion with Claude is when tests and code don't match, which one to change? Ideal to state clearly whether I'm writing novel tests for existing code I'm reasonably sure has the intended behavior, or writing novel code against tests that define the behavior.
If we're working on something tricky and it keeps making the same mistakes, I keep track of what they were in a little notes file. Then when I clear the context or re-prompt, I can easily remind it not to make those mistakes.
I can accidentally "climb up where I can't get down". E.g. I was working on code in Rust, which I do not know. The first few PRs went great! Then Claude was getting too confused. Oh no. We're stuck. IME this is fine, just get ready to slowww dowwwn to get properly oriented.
When reviewing Claude-assisted PRs, look out for weirder misunderstandings than the human driver would make! We're all a little junior with this technology. There's more places where goofy misunderstandings and odd choices can leak in.
Beliefs about Groups
Property Rights Part II: Groups Are All In Your Head #groups #psychology
Consider the case of the Hutu and Tutsi. Before colonial powers arrived in Rwanda and Burundi, the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi was tied to roles: Tutsi were cattle herders, and Hutu were primarily farmers. These roles were malleable. A Hutu who gained wealth, for example, could become a Tutsi, and a Tutsi who fell into poverty might be seen as a Hutu. It wasn’t penguin-like. No genetic barrier separated the two; rather, it was a set of beliefs tied to social and economic status that people shared about who belonged where.
Then colonial powers showed up, bringing their own beliefs about human groups. The Belgians, looking for a tidy way to rule, assigned group membership based on external traits—height, nose shape, and skin tone—and issued identity cards that fixed people as either Hutu or Tutsi. What had been fluid became rigid, and what had been a matter of local belief became a matter of colonial administration. Suddenly, group membership wasn’t just in people’s heads; it was on ID cards. But here’s the key: the colonial project worked the way it did because it created new beliefs. Hutu and Tutsi became fixed categories, not because DNA had changed but because the social world had.
This artificial rigidity had horrible consequences, which echo to this day. Once people’s beliefs about group membership hardened, so too did the lines of power and conflict. By the mid-20th century, these categories fueled violent struggles that culminated in the Rwandan Genocide. Even in the aftermath of such horror, the reality remained: the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi is still a matter of belief. Just as in the case of property rights—and moral rules as well—if no one believed the distinction mattered, it would vanish tomorrow. There is no penguin-like essential quality separating the two groups. Hutus and Tutsi are Hutus and Tutsis because someone interprets them as being such.
The Bull Case for Generative AI
Key Takeaways OpenAI Is Not A Real Company - Better Offline (podcast) | Listen Notes #openai
Ed Zitron makes a great case for how generative AI maybe more hype than we imagine it to be.
✅ Generative AI is not a profitable industry – it is entirely propped up by venture capital and cloud subsidies.
✅ OpenAI loses billions every year – even on its paid customers.
✅ The user numbers are misleading – low conversion rates suggest weak market demand.
✅ OpenAI’s product strategy is failing – new offerings are expensive, unreliable, and unprofitable.
✅ Future prospects look bleak – if venture capital dries up, OpenAI and the broader generative AI space could collapse.
Full transcript and summary here: OpenAI is Not a Real Company - Transcript Summary
Reality
2025-02-26
Resend
Send emails with Node.js · Resend #email #api
Resend is the email API for developers.
This may be the simplest and most intuitive API for email sending I have come across so far. I was able to setup my custom domain with it and start sending emails in less than 15 mins. They also have Go and Node SDKs, among others.
2025-02-25
Spent most of the day diving into React and Tailwind.
Agency vs Intelligence
Words of wisdom from Karpathy sensei.
Cursor Rules
I talked to the AI today and told it stuff it doesn't know yet 🤷🏽♂️
