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2025-02-22

How to live a meaningful life

How to make your life feel more meaningful | Psyche Guides #philosophy #existentialism #meaning #life

Key points – How to make your life feel more meaningful

  1. A meaningful life is deeply connected. Strong links to friends and family, to a community, to your work or to a transcendent realm can help you feel that your life makes sense and that what you do matters.
  2. Give yourself a meaning-in-life audit. Rate how well connected you feel to sources of meaning in each of the key domains (close relationships, community, work, spirituality) and see where you have room to grow.
  3. Use the audit to refocus on your connections. Strengthening your connections in any one domain can help you build meaning overall – so focus on where your ratings are lower, such as by joining a group that aligns with your values (the community domain), or seeking new, purpose-driven challenges at your job or outside of it (the work domain).
  4. Try existential exercises when you need a boost. Practice self-grounding by writing about an important personal value and what it means to you. Or reflect back nostalgically on personal milestones, important relationships, or challenges overcome to remind yourself of how the past has shaped you.
  5. Pursue self-transcendent experiences. Explore new spiritual practices, novel encounters with nature, or other pathways to enhance your sense that you are connected to something greater than yourself.

LLM Codegen Workflow

My LLM codegen workflow atm | Harper Reed's Blog #llm #coding #assistant

Yet another post about how to use LLMs to generate code. Found this one to be a bit different. Need to try.

2025-02-21

What is your lore

How Deep Is Your Lore? - WSJ

I love an article that goes deep and deconstructs what might otherwise be considered random genz slang.

Lore is valuable online currency these days. A finalist for Oxford Dictionary’s 2024 word of the year (it lost to “brain rot”), this Old English word for knowledge has become slang for dramatic, and often traumatic, details that define a person’s existence. Driven by the impulse to self-mythologize and spin yarns, young people are enshrining even the most minor incidents as essential public knowledge.

“It makes your life sound like something that has these hidden facets that people would really want to know about,” said Dan Walden, 36, a humanities professor at the University of Tulsa. “Instead of just saying, ‘I had depression when I was 16,’ it sounds more mystical to say, ‘That’s my lore.’”

Wound-baring confessionals have long been a surefire way to get likes and views on social media. Influencers use “get ready with me” videos to pair their makeup routines with intimate, sometimes painful personal stories as a way to build connections with viewers. Now, many of those videos include “lore drops”—not only personal stories but gossip and hearsay.

…

“Online, there is a kind of consciousness of your identity, an awareness of how you’re projecting your qualities, and so to that extent, you are playing a role,” Sokolowski said. “And lore conveys character, conveys narrative, conveys deep history, like ancient history.”

Woke

Opinion | How ‘Woke’ Became the ‘Woke Right’ (and Why It Shouldn’t Surprise Anyone) - The New York Times

More interesting stuff about the origins of the word woke

“Woke” has often been reported (including by me, previously) as first appearing in print in 1962, in an article about “Negro” slang published by The Times. But my colleague Emily Berch has recently brought to my attention that in 1940 the Negro United Mine Workers, a West Virginia labor union, issued a statement that included the lines, “We were asleep. But we will stay woke from now on.”

The blues singer Huddie Ledbetter gave us the first “woke” on record — pun intended — on a 1938 recording of his song “Scottsboro Boys,” urging us to “stay woke.” “Staying woke” meant understanding that there are larger forces operating to keep power unequally distributed in our society, disfavoring especially the poor and people of color. Genevieve Larkin, the wisenheimer social climber in the film “Gold Diggers of 1937,” might not have known the term, but she was getting at something similar when she said, “It’s so hard to be good under the capitalistic system!”

Why “woke” rather than “woken”? Black English tends to collapse the past tense and the participle forms of verbs. Textbook English is present tense “sink,” past tense “sank” and participle “sunk.” Black English is just “sink” and “sunk,” a simplification that’s been catching on more broadly for some time.

…

This is how language change happens, and it is happening especially quickly these days in the language we use to talk about culture and politics. The language is morphing to an extent hard to process day to day.

…

Now take this sentence: “The woke right oppose D.E.I. programs, the conception of ‘trans’ as an identity, gender-affirming care for minors, and terms referring to groups such as Latinx and BIPOC.” These unfamiliar uses of “woke,” “D.E.I.” and “trans” and the novel terms “gender-affirming,” “Latinx” and “BIPOC” would not strike someone from even just 15 years ago as Swedish, but would be nearly as incomprehensible. Much of our English vocabulary is in a kind of hypercharge of late, and this is why “woke” has seemed to be such a slippery shape-shifter.

The psychological centre of gravity

The Imperfectionist: Reality is right here

This edition of The Imperfectionist won’t be answering that question conclusively, I’m afraid. But there’s one piece of advice I’m confident applies to basically everyone: as far as you can manage it, you should make sure your psychological centre of gravity is in your real and immediate world – the world of your family and friends and neighborhood, your work and your creative projects, as opposed to the world of presidencies and governments, social forces and global emergencies.

  • [ ] This will make you happier. It will make you more meaningfully productive. And to whatever extent it falls to you to be an active citizen – to be engaged in politics, say, or in otherwise addressing world events – it’ll make you better at that, too. There really is no downside.

…

One very good way to tell that your centre of gravity is out of whack is when it feels like you spend a lot of time inside the minds of far-off strangers. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han points out, the internet – contrary to the dreams of its hippie pioneers – hasn’t created a flourishing, supersized, wonderfully democratic public sphere in which we all get to constructively debate the issues of the day. Instead it erodes the public sphere, by connecting our minds directly to the unedited neediness, rage or fear inside everyone else’s minds, which in turn trigger such reactions in us. And so to follow American politics at the moment isn’t merely to follow the activities of Elon Musk, but to feel overly familiar with his twitchy and emotionally reactive inner life as well. This isn’t healthy. To get along successfully with each other, Han argues, we need a certain psychological distance, some cognitive privacy. There’s some appropriate level of such privacy between me and my wife, for goodness’s sake, so you’d better believe there’s one between me and Musk.

Reasons for drop in software engineering vacancies

Software engineering job openings hit five-year low? - The Pragmatic Engineer

The numbers don’t lie, job listings for devs have plummeted. There’s a few potential reasons why:

and finally

I’m sure that LLMs are a leading cause of the fall in software developer job postings: there’s uncertainty at large companies about whether to hire as fast as previously, given the productivity hype around AI tooling, and businesses are opting to “wait and see” by slowing down recruitment, as a result.

2025-02-20

How GenZ sees the world

Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress - by kyla scanlon #genz #economics #demography

Great piece by Kyla Scanlon that is worth reading in full. All the links to other articles she has written related to this topic are worth following as well. This post does a great job of providing a broad persuasive sweep of how GenZ are seeing the world.

Key Takeaways:

  • Gen Z faces a double disruption: AI-driven technological change and institutional instability
  • Three distinct Gen Z cohorts have emerged, each with different relationships to digital reality
  • A version of the barbell strategy is splitting career paths between "safety seekers" and "digital gamblers"
  • Our fiscal reality is quite stark right now, and that is shaping how young people see opportunities

But young people are facing a double disruption - (1) technological creative destruction in the form of AI combined with (some form of) political creative destruction in the form of the Trump administration. When I talk to young people from New York or Louisiana or Tennessee or California or DC or Indiana or Massachusetts about their futures, they're not just worried about finding jobs, they're worried about whether or not the whole concept of a "career" as we know it will exist in five years. So in this piece, I want to talk about:

Paradox of Abundance

Paradox of Abundance: Automation Anxiety Returns

Despite sustained increases in material standards of living, fear of the adverse employment consequences of technological advancement has recurred repeatedly. This represents a paradox of abundance: technological change threatens social welfare not because it intensifies scarcity but because it augments abundance. For most citizens of market economies, the primary income-generating asset they possess is their scarce labor. If rapid technological advances were to effectively substitute cheap and abundant capital for (previously) expensive and willful labor, society would be made wealthier, not poorer, in aggregate, but those who own labor but do not own capital might find it increasingly challenging to make a living. This chapter considers why automation anxiety has suddenly become salient in popular and academic discourse. It offers informed conjectures on the potential implications of these developments for employment and earnings.

Using Willpower to Change Circumstance

Vacation Insights - by Josh Zlatkus - Living Fossils #mentalhealth

The most important insight skulking around the discussion so far is that the environment, context, circumstance, or situation is far more powerful in determining how humans feel, and therefore behave, than willpower, self-control, personality, or resolve.

The role of circumstance helps to explain our optimism on the way home from vacation. As we sit on the tarmac, waiting for a gate to open, our projection of the future benefits from the success of the past week—why can’t we carry this good momentum forward? Our problems seem infinitely manageable. Of course, the strong current of environment also explains why we are pulled back into the same old dynamics. If our failures or feelings were unique or inherent to us—part of our personality or personal history—then presumably they would show up on vacation. When they don’t, they are likely part of our circumstance. Others would respond similarly.

So, unless vacation’s positive momentum results in structural changes to a person’s life, it is likely to fade away. Trust me, I’ve seen this time and time again in my practice. People don’t feel better until they find the right relationship, the right job, the right friends, the right city, and so on. Suffering well is an important skill to have, since nobody ever has everything at once; but when it comes to a difficult job, for example, a client’s energy is typically better spent finding a new one than trying to feel differently about the current one.

Willpower should be used to change circumstances, not responses to circumstances. And it must be applied as far upstream as possible. By “upstream,” I mean close to the source of the problem. For example, let’s say you’re in the grocery store and craving ice-cream. You’re also trying to eat healthier these days. You have two options. The first is not to buy the ice-cream. The second is to buy the ice-cream and rely on your willpower later, once the ice-cream is already in your freezer. Which do you think has more chance of success?

As it turns out, there’s something more upstream still. You could eat before you go to the grocery store, reducing your craving. Borrowing language from the first section, we could say that this “diminishes the likelihood that the hunger system will activate and influence perception.”6

I try to make this point to clients all the time. “Willpower isn’t that powerful compared to circumstances,” I say, “and so when you think about using willpower, use it to change your circumstances.” Some clients, after this little speech, delete Instagram right then and there.

Suffering Well

The Art of Suffering Well - by Josh Zlatkus #mentalhealth #suffering #coping

The author argues that rather than over-medicalizing suffering, we should reclaim traditional ways of coping by focusing on expectation and meaning.

Expectation

Meaning

Viktor Shvets on Govt Spending

Viktor Shvets on what DOGE Is Getting Wrong on US Government Spending - Bloomberg #deficit #economics #finance #government

Risks of an Imbalanced Economy

Addressing Concerns About Government Inefficiency

2025-02-19

Pros and Cons of uv

A year of uv: pros, cons, and should you migrate #python #uv

My conclusion is: if your situation allows it, always try uv first. Then fall back on something else if that doesn’t work out.

we are all androids

the "algorithmic gaze" affects everything you see online #culture #social-media #algorithms

The Wired writer Leo Kim argues that this goes back to the fact that we’re all androids. In the same way that our bodies are part of who we are, so too have our phones become a functional extension of our minds. We feel naked when we go anywhere without them, and to use them is to project our consciousness into the delicate haptic experience of thumb on screen. As such, we feel much closer to our phones than we do our computers or TVs, and enter a kind of “flow state” of media consumption when interacting with them. The rest of the world blurs away as we enter a tender, individualized connection with this unique part of ourselves.

Most of us don’t consider this when we’re in our “flow state” of scrolling. We’re too distracted by dopamine delivery, too captivated by the psychosomatic hypnosis of holding phone in hand. We consume mechanical reproduction of mechanical reproduction, eventually losing touch of what Benjamin labels “aura”—the sublime experience of reality that reminds us to think critically.

Government Debt

The Debt Scolds are Back. For Now. - by Stephanie Kelton #mmt #deficit #economics

So what explains the renewed angst over government debt? Maybe it’s because the world’s richest man keeps tweeting that “America is going bankrupt.” Maybe it has something to do with the fact that House republicans are looking to raise the debt limit by $4 trillion while enacting sweeping tax cuts and beefing up spending on border and other priorities. Even with President Trump posting BALANCED BUDGET! and DOGE flipping over seat cushions to save a billion here and there, deficits are on the republican menu. Maybe journalists are frustrated by the slow news cycle. (LOL It’s definitely not that!) Hey, maybe it’s because the U.S. Treasury Department’s own website uses inapplicable and reckless metaphors to “explain” the national debt!

Romantic Love

Three Interesting Things About Romantic Love #love #anthropology #romance

Naturally, culture matters. So does technology. The manifestations of love vary widely, from arranged cousin marriages to Durex-protected Tinder dates. But the underlying feelings seem to resonate across time and space. And why would they not? Romantic love is a natural emotion for lubricating human pair bonding — a well-respected Darwinian “strategy” amongst most birds and a minority of mammals. I write “strategy” in quotes, as some might mistake it for a cold-hearted calculation: a subconscious chess game to pass on one’s genes. This is nonsense. Love and lust have a Darwinian history but a romantic present. They are feelings which constantly turn against their original purpose, whether in the case of homosexual love — which pits love against reproduction — or in the form of disabling heartache, which devastates not only humans but prairie voles, too.

Love hurts. But that pain transcends cultures — even species.

Manto and Chughtai

Daak Weekly: Manto and Chughtai’s Friendship - by Daak Vaak #urdu #literature #friendship

In a culture obsessed with the passion and drama of romantic love, we often forget to celebrate our friendships, the constant constellations of our lives, witnessing and partaking in our joys and sorrows, even, and especially, the inevitable disappointments of romance. Perhaps even more than our partners, it is our friends who provide us with the emotional and intellectual fulfillment needed to grow into our potential. However, friendships are not without their difficulties; in a relationship that has no social, familial, or legal binding, it must be chosen and nurtured, consciously and intentionally. Yet, friendships are often the first relationships to be set aside amidst life’s clawing demands, in the hopes that they will remain ever fixed when we find the time, energy, or space to come back to them.

A friendship that embodied both these potentials and pitfalls of friendship was the one shared by the doyens of Urdu Literature, Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chughtai.

How we lost the flow

How We Lost the Flow - by Ted Gioia - The Honest Broker

The flow state is important because it’s our most powerful weapon against the intense tech-driven rationalization of our lives.

The dominance of STEM-thinking has left so many of us hollow inside. In a world of intense rationality and digitization, people’s inner lives are gradually destroyed. They are hungry for something deeper, holistic, and more vital than data manipulation can deliver.

Just look at all the metrics on self-harm, suicide, addiction, depression, psychic disorders of every sort. People will tell you that you can’t measure a crisis in the inner life, but that’s not true—there are plenty of numbers and charts that spell it out.

The deepest thinkers of the last century have grasped this—and laid the foundation for flow psychology. I need to give credit to philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1942), seldom read nowadays—but it's no coincidence that his work influenced Proust (the deepest psychological novelist of them all), or that Bergson wrote one of the great philosophical studies of comedy.

These insights are developed further in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and others—all the way up to the leading thinkers of our own time, such as Charles Taylor and Iain McGilchrist.

These rank among the wisest individuals of modern times. But their wisdom is shut out in the cold by a data-driven, profit-driven, device-driven culture.

Even worse, we are now robbed of our flow state—which is now getting hijacked for corporate enrichment.

Scroll-and-swipe apps are now the dictators of the flow state for a billion or so people.

Their role model is narcotics, by the way. That, too, was once a destructive blight only criminals took advantage of. But it has now gone legit with support from the wealthy and powerful.

Scroll-and-swipe only got invented a few years ago, but it is already far bigger than the drug business. By the way, it is also run by a cartel—I call it the dopamine cartel.

Substacker Ken Klippenstein has an even better name. He calls it the Appistocracy. I like that term, and will start using it myself. It aptly describes the forces arrayed against us.

In our age of Appistocracy, everything online is getting turned into a kind of casino. Web interfaces deliberately emulate slot machines. The pacing, the colors, the hypnotic repetitions, and the like.

Trust the experts

Just Trust the Experts - Scott H Young

The rationale for defaulting to believing experts in almost all cases is simple:

  1. An expert is, by definition, a smart person who knows a lot about a topic.
  2. The typical expert has more true opinions than the typical non-expert because they have more knowledge with which to form an opinion.
  3. The most common expert opinion is even more accurate than the typical expert. This is because each expert has a different subset of all available knowledge on a topic, so the average view is a better “best guess” than any individual’s opinion.
  4. The majority expert opinion may be wrong. But contrarian opinions are even more likely to be wrong. The value of this perspective is probabilistic: expert consensus will fail sometimes, but it fails less often than the contrarian alternative. It is therefore a strong default presumption to hold.

You are using Cursor AI incorrectly

You are using Cursor AI incorrectly... #ai #tools #cursor #tips

A one sentence summary is that one should really be using the Cursor rules feature more.

2025-02-18

Export to Prompt

A good thread on resources for exporting an entire repo of code to an LLM Prompt. #llm #prompt #repo #tools

2025-02-17

Finally!

/images/math_academy.png

2025-02-16

Math Academy all day. The end is near. If everything goes according to plan, I will finish the Mathematics for Machine Learning course by Wed 🤞🏽.

2025-02-15

Math Academy!

2025-02-14

Math Academy, and coping with life stuff.

2025-02-13

Chinese Marriages

Why are Chinese Marriages Plummeting? - by Alice Evans #marriage #relationships

China’s marriages have hit rock bottom - only 6.1 million weddings in 2024. This has massive economic consequences - fewer marriages mean mean fewer births, an ageing population, with declining labour productivity, and a rising dependency burden.

Bloomberg blames marital collapse on economic hardship. But my interviews with Chinese young people suggest three further drivers.

  1. Cultural liberalisation means singledom is more permissible, while status is tied to economic success;

  2. Online connectivity enables young women to celebrate independence & equality;

  3. Men and women seem to be retreating into digital worlds.

NYT Amplifier: 10 Songs That Celebrate the Sound of Philadelphia

Can't seem to find a link to the site. #music #playlist #nyt #amplifier

Across all sorts of genres, Philadelphia has a rich musical history and a vibrant musical present. The sound of Philadelphia soul defined the early 1970s (even David Bowie wanted a piece of the action), and its heirs adapted its influence into a neo-soul boom that took off in the late 1990s. Philly has long had a thriving underground music scene, too, as evidenced by its tight-knit indie-rock community and its reputation for eclectic, innovative hip-hop.

YouTube music playlist: 10 Songs That Celebrate the Sound of Philadelphia - YouTube Music

USAID

A World Without Aid? - by Oliver Kim - Global Developments #aid #foreign #us #politics

Most of my readers are likely deeply concerned about the wholesale destruction of USAID. They don’t need to be convinced further with statistics—that 19 million lives have been saved by PEPFAR, that 434 of 634 vital soup kitchens in Khartoum will have to shut down, that $500 million of food aid is stuck rotting in warehouses rather than going to the hungry.

Just to lay all my cards on the table, I’m gutted.

Ken Opalo, Lauren Gilbert, Kelsey Piper, among others, have already done an excellent job analyzing the developmental and humanitarian consequences of this rollback. Pushback has begun, as have attempts to mitigate the damage.

Tyler Cowen on Stablecoins

Stablecoins Will Entrench Dollar Dominance for Another Century - Bloomberg #crypto #money #stablecoin #dollar

Some history: The late 19th century brought a unified gold standard to much of the world. The end of World War II brought the Bretton Woods system, which ended in 1971 with a new era of fiat money and floating exchange rates. Crypto was invented in 2008, but the new monetary system that it enables has not become clear until recently.

Stablecoins are programmable crypto assets that promise conversion into some currency, typically US dollars. Currently, they are the fastest-growing sector of crypto. Stablecoin usage is up 84% since August 2023 and is now at a peak of $224 billion. The sympathetic stance of President Donald Trump’s administration toward crypto is likely to help growth further.

It is noteworthy that, measured by market capitalization, perhaps as much as 99% of stablecoins are denominated in dollars. That is a much higher share than is found in standard international trade and finance. This shows that, if monetary institutions were started all over again from scratch — which is part of what crypto is doing — the market would opt largely for dollars.

How Much Protein Do We Actually Need?

How Much Protein Do We Actually Need? - by Chris Gayomali #protein #health #exercise

The tl;dr is that proteinification is the coalescence of two main forces: the mainstreaming of fitness culture and capitalism’s remarkable ability to transform garbage into profit. Whey protein, for example, is a byproduct of cheese. Whey was historically treated as refuse, either dumped in our rivers or used as slop to feed pigs and cattle. And then some smart people realized that whey is actually nutrient-dense and could be refined into a powder and jammed into all sorts of stuff we eat, like protein bars. One cheesemaker’s trash is a fitness bro’s treasure.

The linked article: Big Food Gets Jacked

Production grade frontend app in Go and WebAssembly

We Replaced Our React Frontend with Go and WebAssembly - Dagger #go #wasm #react

Our starting goal was to be able to reuse one codebase for both Dagger Cloud and the TUI. We decided fairly early to make it a Go codebase. Technically, we could have gone the other way and used TypeScript for the TUI. But we're primarily a team of Go engineers, so selecting Go made it easier for others in the team to contribute, to add a feature or drop in for a few hours to help debug an issue. In addition to standardizing on a single language, it gave us flexibility and broke down silos in our team.

Once we decided to run Go code directly in the browser, WebAssembly was the logical next step. But there were still a couple of challenges:

  • The Go + WebAssembly combination is still not as mature as React and other JavaScript frameworks. There are no ready-made component libraries to pull from, the developer tooling isn't as rich, and so on. We knew that we would need to build most of our UI components from scratch.

  • There is a hard 2 GB memory limit for WebAssembly applications in most browsers. We expected this to be a problem when viewing large traces, and we knew we would have to do a lot of optimization to minimize memory usage and keep the UI stable. This wasn't entirely bad though; the silver lining here was that any memory usage improvements made to the WebAssembly UI would also benefit TUI users, since it was now a shared codebase.

Website improvements

Managed to tweak two minor things on the website

2025-02-12

Math Academy and a LOT of chores.

2025-02-11

How do radical ideas go mainstream

How do Radical Ideas Go Mainstream? - by Alice Evans #feminism #radical

Over the 1970s, Americans rapidly became much more supportive of gender equality. Departing from the cult of domesticity, families increasingly came to support equal rights at work and in politics, as well as the transformation of intimate relationships.

What enabled this remarkable shift?

Most Americans encountered feminism indirectly, yet media coverage was overwhelmingly hostile. Mainstream news, like the New York Times, focused on outrageous protests and vilified feminists as rebellious extremists.

Some scholars point to ‘counter-publics’ - ‘feminist consciousness-raising’ in small groups, which problematised sexism and envisioned more egalitarian alternatives. Feminist newsletters and bookstores also gained popularity - at least in San Francisco. But how did radicalism spread beyond small activist circles to influence millions of Americans?

A tremendous new paper by Francesca Polletta, Debra Boka, Caroline Martínez and Mutsumi Ogaki offers an answer which I had previously overlooked, but immediately found compelling. Women’s magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s made feminism relatable. And they reached a massive audience - 50 million plus. A single issue of McCall’s reached one in four American women! Bam.

Podscript Support for Amazon Bedrock and Gemini

Samrat Jha added support for two additional models for Podscript's YouTube captions cleanup subcommand.

Super pumped to see more people being interested in this tool.

Jessica DeFino interview in L’ADN magazine

Care/Expression Vs. Harm/Oppression #beauty #psychology #skincare

L’ADN: Why can seemingly harmless beauty trends be harmful? For instance: glass skin and its derivatives, celebrity brands, Sephora Kids, but feel free to choose your favorites…

JD: There are psychological, physical, and environmental consequences to nearly every beauty trend, on the individual and collective levels. To use glass skin as an example: On the psychological level, this is literal self-objectification. On the physical level, the excessive product use required to create that glassy effect can damage the skin barrier, disrupt the skin microbiome, and cause inflammation. On an environmental level, we’re continuously producing and consuming products — products often produced with fossil fuels and petrochemicals — in order to meet a definitionally unmeetable goal, which exacerbates the industry’s devastating impact on global warming.

In Praise of Ponzis

In Praise of Ponzis #crypto #product #marketing

Today, there is an abundance of many things, if not everything. And most traditional gatekeepers have lost their old powers (even those that are doing well financially like, say, The New York Times, have a far smaller share of global mindshare than they used to).

Today, the main gatekeepers are the crowd and the algorithms that gauge and guide the crowd's attention. These algorithms create a world in which the biggest winners are bigger than ever. Success breeds success, creating path dependencies that make it hard for runners-up to catch up. In a growing number of industries, rewards are power-law distributed. This means the crowd is more important than ever and that launching a successful product is both harder and more lucrative than ever.

"Harder" might not be the right word. Let me rephrase: Launching a successful product is riskier than ever and more dependent on random forces than ever. In the past, a producer could rely on their own manufacturing capacity and on relationships with powerful gatekeepers to guarantee a product's success. It did not always work, but it often worked.

Today, producers can launch products more easily. But so can their competitors. And ultimate success depends on the behavior of large groups of people. These people cannot be coaxed or threatened. But they can be bribed.

Jujutsu Version Control System

Jujutsu VCS Introduction and Patterns | Kuba Martin #jujutsu #version #control #git #tools

Looks like this is the new hotness and best of all, it's based on Git. Hoping to play around more later.

2025-02-10

How to Achieve Immortality

How to Achieve Immortality - by Ted Gioia #transhumanism #immortality #lifespan #extension #ageing

But there are some similarities between ancient heroes doing great deeds, and today’s Silicon Valley transhumanist. They both want to be like the gods (only their methods are different). Also, they are both admired leaders in their respective societies.

That’s the part that troubles me most. If the dude slurping up stem sells in a bunker was just another crazy person, I wouldn’t worry about it. But, unfortunately, these unhinged narcissists include some of the most powerful people on the planet.

We should all be concerned about that.

…

This is what art does. Even at secondhand.

If you’ve crossed paths with a great artist, some of that immortality might even rub off on you.

That’s a different way of surviving—and one that no tech bro can match by getting injections of teenager blood or gulping down 100 nutritional supplements per day.

It’s useful to remind ourselves of this genuine immortality of art and of the great deeds praised by the ancients—especially in an age that worships tech and marginalizes all other pursuits.

And it’s especially wise to do this, given how tech actually focuses so much on the ephemeral nowadays—all that scrolling and swiping ‘content’ that only lasts a few days, or less.

What these platforms deliver is the exact opposite of immortality. The empires of TikTok and Instagram and hundreds of other apps are built on the flimsiest of foundations—a few seconds of streaming data.

So it’s ironic that the people who promote this vapidity are seeking immortality for themselves. I doubt they will find it. But they do have good reason to fear transience and oblivion—because that’s what they’ve staked their whole careers on.

Economics as politics and philosophy

Economics as politics and philosophy rather than some independent science – William Mitchell – Modern Monetary Theory #economics

So economists know they are lying to the public about fiscal matters because if the truth about the capacity of government and the reality of all the charades about debt issuance, central bank independence, and the rest of it was understood, then we would make greater demands on government.

Just like religion that attempts to control us through fear of a terrible afterlife, economics as practised by the mainstream is a control mechanism to ensure the powerful retain their position in the pecking order and their wealth and privilege.

…

Economics as a discipline has morphed into becoming a support mechanism to ensure private profit continues to be accumulated by the few while the rest of us increasingly struggle with various challenges that such a bias has created – deterioration in the quality and availability of housing, environmental degradation, diminishing employment quality, diminishing quality and availability of health care, increased corporatisation of education, etc

And the conduct of central banks in this era is one significant aspect of this bias.

Under the pretense of ‘fighting inflation’, they manipulate interest rates to the benefit of private bank shareholders, financial wealth holders and oversee the massive redistribution of income away from low-income mortgage holders towards high-wealth asset owners.

They demand that unemployment has to rise to the reach the unobservable NAIRU, which evades accurate statistical estimation – which is so inexact that the concept is devoid of practical use as a policy guide, quite apart from its vacuous theoretical status.

They then threaten governments with even more punishing interest rate hikes, if they don’t cut fiscal outlay to ensure the unemployment rises, and, meanwhile, they regularly make political statements about the dangers of deficits etc, then tell everyone that they are independent of the political process.

How Venture Capital Works

As a startup founder, you really need to understand how venture capital works | TechCrunch #vc #venture #capital

Bookmarking it here because I thought it was a nice overview of the basics of how VC works - with terms like corporate VC funds, LPs

Grand Strategy

Killing A Bad Strategy Before It Kills you #books #review #strategy

Rob Henderson reviews On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis.

This one stood out to me.

6. Leaders Must Appear Certain, Even When They Aren’t

  • Decision-making often happens without complete information.
  • Goethe: “For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him, he must regard himself as greater than he is.”
  • Self-belief, even when slightly exaggerated, can boost effectiveness in leadership, relationships, and career success.

2025-02-09

The Psychology of Severance

The Psychology of Severance | Psychology Today #severance #tv #psychology

This disconnection is particularly evident in Mark S., the protagonist, whose "outie" has chosen to undergo the severance procedure to escape the grief of losing his wife. Yet his "innie" is trapped in a cycle of meaningless labor, unable to understand why he exists only within Lumon’s walls. His "innie" never sleeps, never rests, and the minute he leaves work, his next conscious experience is that of arriving at the office again for a new 8-hour work cycle. This mirrors what we see in some trauma survivors, who may unconsciously or consciously repress or dissociate from painful memories as a defense mechanism. The severance procedure is, in effect, an extreme version of psychological compartmentalization—a way to avoid emotional pain by physically splitting off access to distressing memories.

Tokyo Drift

Tokyo drift: what happens when a city stops being the future? | Japan | The Guardian

Still, mass tourism is as demoralising and demeaning here as anywhere. Tourists disrupt the rhythm of the city, agents of minor turmoil set loose in familiar spaces. There may be no way to describe these transgressions without sounding like a crank – I know it is not maliciousness on their part – but I have lived in Japan long enough that the surprise of encountering a broad, looming American, with their transparent expressions and flashy Lycra pants, stuns me out of the daze into which the city has lulled me. I am rankled by offences invisible to outsiders. While part of me sympathises with the family of sightseers blundering their way on to a crowded Yamanote Line train with their suitcases, or the young women filming TikToks in the aisles of a Ministop, my Tokyo training means I know infringement of its unwritten rules when I see it. This is a city that expects people to suffer in peculiar ways. You would need to live here to know that using a bicycle bell is anathema when you can simply squeeze the brakes by way of warning. There is no way to explain that the cement curbs around the overgrown green spaces carved out of the pavement at many intersections are not for sitting. I couldn’t say for sure why the rumble of the plastic wheels of rolling suitcases is more frightening than jackhammers.

The guest worker in Japan, though necessary to keep operations running, is stretched thin between demand and bureaucracy, especially considering the quasi-legal subterfuge required to ship them in. While the recently assassinated former prime minister Shinzo Abe expanded the quota for moderately skilled immigrants in a series of reforms translated as “comprehensive measures for acceptance and coexistence of foreign nationals”, many still arrive on student visas. Brokers and language schools arrange minimal coursework and permission to work a 28-hour week on the side, though much longer shifts are typical. Legal measures to end death from overwork could be more difficult to enforce among student workers, who are preyed on by language schools and staffing agencies. The truly unlucky souls wind up as part of the technical intern training programme, a scheme to bring in unskilled labour under the guise of vocational training that domestic and foreign investigations have found is rife with human trafficking, fraud and vicious abuse that culminates in death, disfigurement and psychological trauma. When guest workers abscond from the legal programmes – in 2023 alone, more than 9,000 interns disappeared from the books – they become even more vulnerable, surviving on under-the-table jobs.

Writing Good AI Prompts for Code Generation

Prompt patterns for LLMs that help you design better software | Chuniversiteit

Developers typically use LLMs via prompts, natural language instructions that can be used to generate code(side note:This means that prompting can technically be seen as a form of programming.) and other types of artefacts. Prompt patterns are reusable prompt designs that codify best practices, and can be used to consistently achieve good results. This week’s paper introduces 13 such prompt patterns.

The 13 prompt patterns that are presented in this paper can be grouped into four categories: requirements elicitation, system design and simulation, code quality, and refactoring. All prompt patterns were tested with ChatGPT, but will likely also work with other LLMs.

2025-02-08

Tapestry

Tapestry • Your favorite blogs, social media, and more in a unified and chronological timeline

Tapestry combines posts from your favorite social media services like Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr and others with RSS feeds, podcasts, YouTube channels and more. All of your content presented in chronological order, with no algorithm deciding what you should or shouldn't see.

Marriage Material Shortage

America’s ‘Marriage Material’ Shortage - The Atlantic #marriage #relationships

Adults have a way of projecting their anxieties and realities onto their children. In the case of romance, the fixation on young people masks a deeper—and, to me, far more mysterious—phenomenon: What is happening to adult relationships?

American adults are significantly less likely to be married or to live with a partner than they used to be. The national marriage rate is hovering near its all-time low, while the share of women under 65 who aren’t living with a partner has grown steadily since the 1980s. The past decade seems to be the only period since at least the 1970s when women under 35 were more likely to live with their parents than with a spouse.

People’s lives are diverse, and so are their wants and desires and circumstances. It’s hard, and perhaps impossible, to identify a tiny number of factors that explain hundreds of millions of people’s decisions to couple up, split apart, or remain single. But according to Lyman Stone, a researcher at the Institute for Family Studies, the most important reason marriage and coupling are declining in the U.S. is actually quite straightforward: Many young men are falling behind economically.

How I use AI

How I Use AI: Early 2025 | Ben Congdon #ai #tools

some thoughts on friendship

some thoughts on friendship - by Ava - bookbear express

  1. Asymmetric friendships are common. There’s a limit to how asymmetric ongoing romantic relationships can be, because at the end of the day in most marriages you still have to like them enough to live under the same roof. But friendships can be quite asymmetric! Last year a close friend and I were discussing how difficult it can be when one person wants to be supersupersuper close and the other person wants to be… kind of close. That’s not a terrible amount of asymmetry, but it can still feel crushing in the way all unreciprocated love does. Sometimes we really want to be close with someone, and they’re just not available, or not interested. It’s okay to admit that that hurts, even when it’s purely platonic.

Cairo's Female Skaters

Watch: Up close with Cairo’s female skaters | Dazed

Loved watching this (extremely) short film

The film follows a group of young, female skateboarders, drifters and motorbike riders, aged between 13 and 22, as they careen around the Egyptian capital. The girls are resilient in the face of a traditional, religious and patriarchal society which seeks to prevent them from pursuing their passions; the film follows the group as they overcome the barriers facing them, finding freedom and community in the process.

High Agency is Tech's Latest Buzzword

Why everyone in Silicon Valley wants to be 'high agency' #buzzword #culture

I love following the evolution of language, and Business Insider just published a great piece on a new phrase that has taken over Silicon Valley. People in tech used to call themselves "self-starters," then the term "disruptor" came into vogue. Now, everyone is claiming that they’re "high agency."

From Business Insider:

Over the past year, high agency has become the aspirational character trait of Silicon Valley. Early last year, the analytics site Brandwatch found there was a 500% jump in mentions of the phrase across X, Reddit, and other social media sites.

Not one but two podcasts titled "High Agency" have launched, one dedicated to AI, the other to entrepreneurship. On LinkedIn, a wide range of sectors, from solar to crypto, are suddenly seeking “high-agency” applicants. And on Substack, tech-culture essayists are schooling readers on how to ratchet up their “high-agency” qualities, which are said to be possessed by tech elites and top athletes.

"High agency" was coined in 2016, when Eric Weinstein, then the managing director of Peter Thiel's investment firm, referenced it during an appearance on a podcast hosted by the self-help guru Tim Ferriss. In Weinstein's formulation, a high-agency approach to the world is "constantly looking for what is possible, in a kind of MacGyverish sort of a way."

It's a trait mostly assigned to people who start their own companies, seize opportunities that others miss, and never take "no" for an answer. High-agency people are rich, successful, or on their way to being both. They're action-oriented and find opportunities where others see roadblocks.

As the article explains, Americans love phrases and terms that are meant to inspire future hard-working business leaders. Words like grit, type A, and even girlboss all connote an intense drive. The phrase “high agency” grates me a bit though. It sounds hyper-individualistic and implies a sort of pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps type mentality. The reality of life in America is that it doesn’t matter how “high agency” you are, you could end up in medical debt and lose your house, or become permanently disabled overnight from catching a virus someone gave to you on the bus to work.

Silicon Valley billionaires like Marc Andreessen talk about “high agency” people as if they’re some superior class and the traits they carry are innate, which reads a bit weird to me considering how fond those people are of eugenics. That said, the phrase does seem to be getting mainstreamed enough already that it won’t carry those connotations for very long. It is already being fully adopted into the hustle-bro lexicon. You can read the full story on Business Insider.

Git - template for commit messages

Conventional Commits | Mike Perham #git #template #commit #tools

git supports a template for commit messages and any lines that start with # are ignored. I added this as ~/.gitmessage:

# type(subsystem): short description
### Types
# feat: A new feature
# fix: A bug fix
# docs: Documentation only changes
# build: Changes that affect the build system or external dependencies
# ci: Changes to our CI configuration files and scripts
# perf: A code change that improves performance
# refactor: A code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature
# style: Changes that do not affect the meaning of the code
# test: Adding missing tests or correcting existing tests

and then adjusted ~/.gitconfig like this:

[commit]
  template = ~/.gitmessage

What to read

everything i read in january 2025 - by Celine Nguyen

When people ask me, ‘What kinds of books do you read?’ I never know what to say. I suspect I’m not alone in this. Obviously, people tend to prefer certain books, films, songs—but I don’t know how many people will say that they just read sci-fi, only watch noirs, prefer hyperpop above all else.1 The best descriptions end up feeling very specific and very vague: Books about fatally flawed people who keep on going. Films about crushing on someone in a decadent setting. Music that feels pure and shot through with light.

My philosophy on reading can be summed up as: Don’t discriminate, but be discerning. I’d hate to dismiss a book for the wrong reasons—but I do want to feel opinionated about what I’m reading.

Suspectibility to Misinformation

Educated but easily fooled? Who falls for misinformation and why #misinformation

Political identity also played a key role. The meta-analysis confirmed previous research showing that individuals who identify as Republicans are more likely to fall for misinformation than those who identify as Democrats. Republicans were less accurate at assessing the veracity of news and tended to label more headlines as true, whereas Democrats were more skeptical. Individuals with higher analytical thinking skills—that is, who are better at logically evaluating information, identifying patterns, and systematically solving problems—performed better overall and were more skeptical (tending to classify news as false). People were more likely to believe that news that aligned with their political identity was true and to disregard news that was not aligned with their political identity—a phenomenon known as partisan bias. However, a counterintuitive finding was that individuals with higher analytical thinking were actually more susceptible to partisan bias. This tendency is known as motivated reflection, which is a cognitive process where individuals' analytical reasoning works against them to protect their pre-existing beliefs, values, or partisan affiliations. The strongest effect in the meta-analysis was the influence of familiarity. When participants reported having already seen a news headline, they were more likely to believe it was true. This finding underscores the danger of repeated exposure to misinformation, particularly on social media.

“The results highlight the urgent need to integrate media literacy and critical thinking skills into school curricula from an early age. Younger adults, despite being considered 'digital natives,' were less able to distinguish between true and false news,” Ralf Kurvers continues. More effective and age-appropriate media literacy programs tailored to this group are therefore crucial. Furthermore, given the strong effects of familiarity and political bias, interventions for helping people identify and share less misinformation must consider how information is presented and shared, especially on social media, where these effects are amplified. For example, effective interventions might emphasize commonalities and promote dialogue across political boundaries.

Why build your own vector DB? To process 25,000 images per second - Stack Overflow #vector #database #image #search

The transcript was a great read.

 So we leverage a model that was published by OpenAI in 2021 called CLIP– C. L. I. P– Contrastive Language Image Pre-training, and this model was trained on images and their captions as I mentioned. OpenAI never released the weights, but there are open source versions of this model trained by the open source community and we picked one of those called OpenClip. And the model is only capable of understanding images, and that's why on the camera and the devices we actually detect using motions and using YOLO models which understand multiple frames. It detects the people, takes a crop of that, actually a high quality version of that subject, either person or vehicle, and then sends it back and we only index those images.

They built their custom vector DB because they wanted a database that was optimized for a write-intensive workload.

As you mentioned, vector database itself, we could also leverage some third party vector database in cloud like Pinecone. We first, in fact, started looking into, again, because of privacy, we decided not to send the data, but we started looking at open source. So we looked into Qdrant and Weaviate, which are some of the rising vector databases that are out there that especially the LLM users use. Very soon, we realized that we actually built a POC with both of them, but very soon we realized that our use case is very different because most of these vector databases are mostly read intensive. So you ingest your documents, let's say for RAG purposes initially, and then you read a lot of them. You just send the vector and try to search. Our use case is a bit different because of the scale of all these images coming in so it's a lot more write intensive.

we are destroying software

We are destroying software | Hacker News

We are destroying software with Leetcode interviews, resume-driven development, frequent job-hopping, growth investment scams, metrics gaming, promotion-seeking, sprint theatre, bullshitting at every level of the org chart, and industry indifference.

2025-02-07

Cerebras and DeepSeek

I learned about Cerebras from the latest Oxide and Friends podcast. #ai #hardware #inference #deepseek

At the moment they have a chatbot interface that one can try for a while before the token limit is reached. I just did and it is wicked fast! The entire response from DeepSeek was there in moments as I looked away from the screen for a split second.

2025-02-06

Pure Lithium

Why we're bad at charging #battery #charging #energy

A Boston-based startup called Pure Lithium recently announced a breakthrough with its lithium metal batteries. While the lithium-ion batteries in your phone start to degrade significantly after a few hundred cycles of charging and discharging, these lithium metal batteries, which use pure lithium rather than a lithium compound, can last over 2,000 cycles without significant damage degradation, an ongoing test shows. Plus, the lithium metal batteries can store twice as much energy and weigh half as much as conventional lithium-ion batteries. Pure Lithium cofounder and CEO Emilie Bodoin calls this combination of features “the holy grail of energy storage.”

Meco - an app for consolidating newsletters

For those folks who don't want to fiddle with Gmail filters and RSS feed readers to redirect their newsletters to unified view, this app might be a good alternative: Meco: The #1 newsletter aggregator | Declutter your inbox #newsletter #aggregator

httptap

GitHub - monasticacademy/httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program #go #networking #tools

When you run httptap -- <command>, httptap runs <command> in an isolated network namespace, injecting a certificate authority created on-the-fly in order to decrypt HTTPS traffic.

Written in Go, runs only on Linux.

Httptap only runs on linux at present. It makes use of linux-specific system calls -- in particular network namespaces -- that will unfortunately make it very difficult to port to other operating systems. If you know how httptap could be ported to other operating systems then please get in touch!

Monastic Academy

I was reading the README of the httptap and I came across this: #buddhism #ai

Httptap is part of an experiment in developing technology in the context of Buddhist monasticism. It was developed at the Monastic Academy in Vermont in the US. We believe that a monastic schedule, and the practice of the Buddhist spiritual path more generally, provide ideal conditions for technological development. The way we have set things up is that we live and practice together on a bit over a hundred acres of land. In the mornings and evenings we chant and meditate together, and for about one week out of every month we run and participate in a meditation retreat. The rest of the time we work together on everything from caring for the land, maintaining the buildings, cooking, cleaning, planning, fundraising, and for the past few years developing software together. This project is a demonstration of what is possible on the software side, but of course to see the full product of our work you should come visit us.

If you're interested, we run an AI fellowship program, which is a funded month-to-month program where you live on the land, participate in the schedule, and do your own work during the day. We also have a 3-month monastic training program, which can lead into our long-term residential training.

For the past few years we have been recording a lecture series called Buddhism for AI. It's about our efforts to design a religion (yes, a religion) based on Buddhism for consumption directly by AI systems. We actually feel this is very important work given the world situation.

Finally, our head teacher Soryu Forall published a book a few years back called Buddhism For All. We're working on a sequel at the moment.

I should join an AI commune and just work on side projects and meditate all day! This photo is just lovely.

/images/monastic.png

the way a sovereign currency "works"

This is the clearest explanation of how a sovereign currency works using the framework of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). You don't even have to endorse MMT, just pay attention to the beginning of the lecture where Wray quotes from the St Louis Fed and prominent economists on why they continue to perpetuate the false claim that the US government can "run out of money". #mmt #money #sovereign #debt #deficit

Recently, there's a paper from the St. Louis Fed. Let me read this and then translate it. The St. Louis Fed, if you don't know, is a bastion of monetarism. This is Milton Friedman type economics. What I'm telling you is accepted from right to left: "As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose debt is denominated in dollars, the U.S. government can never become insolvent, i.e., unable to pay its bills. In this sense, the government is not dependent on credit markets to remain operational. Moreover, there will always be a market for U.S. government debt at home because the U.S. government has the only means of creating risk-free dollar-denominated assets."

Let me translate: the government can never run out of dollars, it can never be forced to default, it can never be forced to miss a payment. It is never subject to the whims of bond vigilantes. That's what the St. Louis Fed tells us, and you can find virtually identical quotes from Bernanke, from Greenspan, and really from almost all economists. When President Obama tells you we're running out of money, that the piggy bank is empty, that is just not true, and all economists know that it's not true.

The question is, why do they lie to you? There's a nice little video blog in which he interviews Paul Samuelson. I won't read this long thing; you can see the PowerPoint later. He says there's an element of truth in the superstition that the budget must be balanced at all times. But then later on, he talks about over longer periods of time. He likens it to an old-fashioned religion used to scare people so that they will behave in a particular way. He says, "We have taken away a belief in the intrinsic necessity of balancing the budget, if not every year, then over a short period of time." If Prime Minister Gladstone came back to life, he would say, "Uh-oh, what have you done?" And James Buchanan argues in those terms. I see merit in that view. He likens it to a superstition, an old-time religion. We have to do this because we have a fear that our elected representatives will spend without limit, and so we make up this lie that the federal government is like a U.S. household. You hear this all the time in debates about the budget, that the U.S. government is like a household. That is not true. Unless you have a printing press in your basement and you're printing up dollars, you are nothing like the federal government. The federal government creates money as it spends.

MAGA Obsession for the 1950s family

Brooding: Trad or Not, We’re All Nostalgic for a Fake Past #marriage #family #relationships

Conservatives are years deep into a period of raging nostalgia for a fake past, the historical details of which most people have a sketchy grasp on at best. They’re not nostalgic for the ’50s as it actually was — a time of government largesse, with huge spending on education and housing — but the ’50s as it exists in the imaginations of many white Americans: as the peak of “normal” white American culture. This is where our ideas about what a “typical American family” looks like tend to originate. The very concepts of the nuclear family, of “family” as a consumer category, of the roles that each member of a family are understood to play (“girl dad,” anyone?): All of this flows from mass media of the 1950s. Even though family life today bears little resemblance to that time, the aesthetic aura of the 1950s family has had diabolical staying power in our popular culture, a recent example being, of course, the whole “trad” thing.

and suddenly in the middle of the article, there is some actually insightful marriage advice!

But all this effort and expectation that we put into our family relationships is a double-edged sword, according to Coontz. Couples spend so much time together, trying to fulfill their obligations correctly, that they are losing the social connections they need to stay sane.

“Date nights are the worst marriage advice that I’ve ever heard of,” she said. The tyranny of one-on-one time, according to Coontz, is bad for everyone.

“We have to understand that it’s a win-win situation if we cultivate our single friends and our single lives and our single skills,” she continued. “It brings new life to our marriage, but it also protects us in two ways. It protects us against asking too much from our marriage, and if we leave our marriage, we already have social networks, so we don’t have to start all over.”

But the convenience structures of everyday life, from streaming to DoorDash, conspire to keep us more isolated from our communities than we could be, and more enmeshed in family structures that continue to resemble the historical anomaly of the 1950s nuclear family.

The Attention Singularity

Trumpcoin and TikTok - by kyla scanlon - Kyla’s Newsletter #attention #power

This is the birth of the Attention Singularity, where power, narrative, and wealth merge into one self-reinforcing system.

Think of the Attention Singularity like a black hole, but instead of gravity, it's attention that becomes so powerful it warps reality itself. We're watching the birth of a system where attention directly creates wealth (like $60B from Trumpcoin in 36 hours), wealth instantly enables power (potential TikTok acquisition), power captures more attention (platform control), and each cycle gets faster and stronger than the last.

Traditional limits like physical constraints, geographic boundaries, or institutional checks stop mattering because digital attention moves instantly and globally, while narrative overpowers physical reality. Once this feedback loop starts, it's self-reinforcing: attention creates wealth, wealth enables power, power shapes perceived reality, and reality drives more attention.

I am being sweepingly dramatic in these statements, but they are important to think about.

Reminds me of the Homo Interneticus concept I posted about last month.

Placebo Effect of Therapy

The Placebo Effect in Therapy (Part 2/2) - by Josh Zlatkus #placebo #therapy #mentalhealth

I quoted part 1 earlier.

The way I see it, psychotherapy is no different than surreal caves, psychiatric medication, religion, Reiki, or whatever the hell this is. They are all platforms for belief, in addition to whatever else they might be.

The fact that psychotherapy is a platform for belief helps to explain why different versions nevertheless produce similar results. Therapeutic methods are akin to religious sects in that arguments about the “right” sect are pointless because the basic premise of a God just isn’t true. The healing value of religion isn’t in getting the “facts” right; it’s in sharing something to believe in. Ditto with therapy.

…

So, therapy is fake—is placebo—in its stated means of operation, but real in its delivered effect. A dialectical behavior therapist, for example, might think the client is improving because they are finally doing their homework. Yet it’s more likely that the client is improving because someone cares enough about them to assign homework and insist that it gets done. Most of the stuff that psychotherapists have long hung their hat upon—delivering brilliant interpretations, creating self-aware and compliant clients, uncovering the root cause of all subsequent illness—is irrelevant outside of its ability to legitimize the therapy, to make it seem like serious business with a good chance of success. Such content becomes the foreground, allowing the actual process of healing—via common factors such as the relationship and placebo—to operate smoothly in the background.

But the elusive mechanisms of healing by common factors helps to explain why we do not typically identify them as central—why clients will often say that therapy has been helpful and then balk at the natural follow-up of “why?” The reality is that they don’t know; and most times, neither does the therapist.

…

Here are some implications for the field if everything I’ve said is true:

  1. The main value of therapeutic training is signaling value, which strengthens the placebo effect. The patient’s knowledge that their therapist has a Ph.D. contributes more to their healing than whatever their therapist happened to learn (or unlearn) in those 5-7 years.

  2. If therapeutic training were designed to be technically helpful, it would focus on how to leverage common factors. For example: how to build strong relationships, listen carefully, facilitate open conversation, and use placebo. Training should also focus on what is knowable about mental health, much of which comes from an evolutionary perspective. For example, that emotions measure and motivate, or that emotions can misfire on the principle “better safe than sorry.”

  3. Many alternatives to therapy exist. Most of these alternatives are less costly. If we want to give everyone access to mental health, these low-cost, widely-accessible alternatives should be front and center. Yes, I’m talking about diet, sleep, exercise, and social connection.11

  4. The field should stop wasting its time comparing therapies. Someone ought to knock CBT off its high horse specifically.12

How do exchange rates work

How Do Exchange Rates Work, Anyway? - by Oliver Kim #money #exchange #dollar

Before I get to the mechanics of exchange rates and trade—somewhat in the news these days—let me start off with some fortune cookie koans about the nature of Truth:

  • Lawyers: what’s provable is True.

  • Artists: what’s authentic is True.

  • Politicians: what’s popular is True.

  • Practitioners: what works is True.

  • Academics: what’s correct is True.

One immediate wrinkle is that firms, being firms, can smell a buck to be made. If the złoty falls—in effect, setting an international discount on Polish goods—they may raise their złoty prices a tad, offsetting a bit of the depreciation but allowing them to increase their profits. So some of the exchange rate depreciation is eaten by firms; the “passthrough” to prices observed by importers may be incomplete

Around 40% of all global trade is invoiced in US dollars, even though only 10% of global trade is destined for the United States. A similarly large share of world trade (around 46%) is invoiced in the Euro, but this is much more in line with the Euro Area’s share of world trade (37%). Over 80% of global goods and services are thus listed in terms of just these two currencies—and, in particular, 30% of global trade is invoiced in US dollars, even when America is not necessarily involved in the transaction.

Sports Betting and Robinhood

Robinhood Wanted B*ts on the B*g G*me

The other set of euphemisms is of course the use of words like “event contracts,” “derivatives” and, my favorite, “emerging asset class.” Robinhood will let you put in some money to predict that either the Philadelphia Unnamed Team or the Kansas City Unnamed Team will win the Large Football Contest. If your team loses the football contest, you lose the money you put in. If your team wins the football contest, you get back more than you put in. It’s a derivative contract, see? Are you betting on football? No no no no no no no no no no, this is an emerging asset class.

and then, what a load of crock

The announcement went on:

Robinhood’s mission is to democratize finance for all. With an emerging asset class like event contracts, we recognize an opportunity to better serve our customers as their interests converge across the markets, news, sports, and entertainment. ...

Event contracts for the Pro Football Championship leverage the power and rigor of financial market structure to facilitate greater liquidity, transparency, and price discovery.

“Our mission is to democratize finance for all” would be an absolutely incredible slogan for an online sportsbook, or a casino, or for that matter an old-time Mafia bookie. Robinhood surely does help a lot of people save for retirement with lower costs than they paid at pre-Robinhood brokerages, but in this case, “democratize finance for all” means “get people to bet on sports.” “Leverage the power and rigor of financial market structure to facilitate greater liquidity, transparency, and price discovery” also means “get people to bet on sports.” Rigor!

2025-02-05

Twins in our Primate Past

Were Twins the Norm in Our Primate Past? – SAPIENS #twins #evolution

Our recent research suggests that twins were actually the norm rather than an unusual occurrence worthy of note much further back in primate evolution. Despite the fact that almost all primates today, including people, usually give birth to just one baby, our most recent common ancestor, which roamed North America about 60 million years ago, likely gave birth to twins as the standard.

Modern humans overwhelmingly birth just a single child—a rather large child with an even larger head. Human brain and body size is certainly connected to our ability to create and refine technologies. Paleoanthropologists have long been investigating what they call encephalization: an increase in brain size relative to body size over evolutionary time.

For primates, and especially humans, childhood learning is crucial. We propose that the switch from twins to singletons was critical for the evolution of large human babies with large brains who were capable of complex learning as infants and young children.

Based on mathematical modeling, the switch to singletons occurred early on, at least 50 million years ago. From there, many primate lineages, including ours, evolved to have increasingly larger bodies and brains.

Paradise TV Show on Hulu

Caught up to this new show Paradise on Hulu, which covers themes similar to Silo and Fallout. #tv #scifi

2025-02-04

The Abstraction Ceiling

Justing Skycak from Math Academy has a great thread on large differences at the tail end of exponential distributions. This for e.g leads to vast differences in talent between 99th & 99.9th percentile, which is larger than the difference between 50th & 90th percentiles. #talent #competition #abstraction

Here is the image he links to with quotes from Douglas Hostadter's book.

/images/hofstadter_book.png

Why Are We Distracted

Why You Can't Focus - 5 Mistakes Keeping You Distracted - YouTube #distractions

Cal Newport's newest podcast covers five reasons why folks are distracted

Actionable Takeaways:

Adobe's C2PA standards for establishing image provenance

This system can sort real pictures from AI fakes — why aren’t platforms using it? | The Verge #ai #image #provenance

Good overview of Adobe's new standards for establishing image provenance

React as the "linux kernel" of modern software development

x.com

NYT Amplifier: Grammy Nominees

Meet the Grammys’ Best New Artist Nominees - The New York Times #playlists #nyt #amplifier

Each year, just before the Grammys, I like to create a playlist that introduces listeners to the nominees for best new artist. And since this year’s ceremony is on Sunday, it’s time.

If you’ve been paying attention to popular music at all in the past year or so, quite a few of these names need no introduction. Sabrina Carpenter scored not one but three massive hits last year, all of them animated by her perky, quirky charisma. Shaboozey’s downcast foot-stomper “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” was so ubiquitous, it tied the record for most weeks spent atop the Billboard Hot 100 (19 — that’s over a third of a year!). The soulful vocalists Teddy Swims and Benson Boone both had breakout hits that propelled them into the mainstream (“Lose Control” and “Beautiful Things”).

In a different kind of year, any of those artists could have easily been the front-runner for the best new artist trophy. But in this contest, they’re going up against the red-hot, pop-cultural supernova that is Chappell Roan. As she says: Good luck, babe!

YouTube Music Playlist: Grammys’ Best New Artist Nominees

Stablecoins and Product-Market Fit

Looks like the powers that be are pushing this narrative or "Stablecoins have Product Market Fit" very hard. I heard it on the a16z podcast a while ago, and now Techcrunch has an article on it. Almost makes me suspect it's a paid placement of some kind. Nevertheless, I found some of the use cases compelling.

Stablecoins are finding product-market fit in emerging markets | TechCrunch #stablecoin #crypto

To bypass these challenges, SpaceX turned to stablecoins, a fast-growing method for cross-border payments already widely used in emerging markets. The company partnered with Bridge, a stablecoin payments platform, to accept payments in various currencies and instantly convert them into stablecoins for its global treasury.

This move positioned Bridge as a viable alternative to correspondent banks in markets where traditional financial systems fall short. Soon after, Stripe took notice, acquiring the startup for more than $1 billion and solidifying Bridge’s reputation and driving up its valuation as an infrastructure player, solving inefficiencies in global finance.

The rise of stablecoins — now a $205 billion market — is driven by real-world utility, not speculation, particularly in emerging markets where the most compelling use cases unfold. Cross-border payments in these regions are typically slow and expensive, involving multiple intermediaries. For example, a textile manufacturer in Brazil paying a supplier in Nigeria might have to go through several banks and currency exchanges, each adding fees and delays. Stablecoins remove this friction, enabling cheaper, near-instant transactions.

Africa:

Yellow Card, which provides a platform that lets users convert fiat to crypto and back to fiat, doubled its annual transaction volume to $3 billion in 2024 from $1.5 billion in 2023. Conduit, which enables stablecoin payments for import-export businesses in Africa and Latin America, saw its annualized TPV jump to $10 billion from $5 billion. Lagos-based Juicyway, which facilitates cross-border payments using stablecoins, has processed $1.3 billion in total payment volume to date.

Beyond consumer savings, stablecoins are reshaping global payroll. As remote work expands, startups like Rise allow companies to pay contractors using stablecoins. The platform lets businesses pay in fiat while contractors receive stablecoins like USDC or USDT, avoiding currency volatility. Last November, Rise raised $6.3 million in Series A, fueling its expansion in stablecoin-powered payroll solutions.

This January, Brazilian unicorn Nubank introduced a feature rewarding USDC holders with a 4% annual return, following a tenfold increase in customer-held USDC last year. Now, 30% of Nubank’s users have USDC in their portfolios. Nubank joins other fintech giants like Venmo, Apple Pay, PayPal, Cash App, and Revolut, which already enable in-app stablecoin transactions.

Sniffnet

Sniffnet — comfortably monitor your Internet traffic 🕵️‍♂️ #tools #networking #monitoring #observability

Looks pretty!

2025-02-03

Restarted Math Academy today.

Book Recos as Hinge Prompt

NPR Books Newsletter #hinge #dating #books

Because I live in Baltimore, of course I’m familiar with that John Waters quote: “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t f— ‘em.” You see the line on tote bags and stickers all across this city. And I understand the point of trying to Lysistrata our way into making reading “cool.” But I’ve always been uncomfortable using books, or bookishness, as a proxy for judging people as people.

And yet, earlier this week, NPR posted this video on Instagram featuring me talking with one of our video producers, Wendy Li, about a peculiar Hinge prompt of hers. In it, she asked potential suitors to recommend a book. Which seemed simple enough to me – someone naive to what dating apps in 2025 are like. Obviously, dudes ended up using this prompt not to earnestly talk about books they loved, but instead trying to … I dunno, impress? Which led to certain books (The Catcher in the Rye, A Court of Thorn and Roses and others) becoming red flags for Wendy.

Unhingedness

on one-sidedness - by Ava - bookbear express #unhinged #personality #dating #novel

I saw this video of Deleuze saying that someone’s charm lies in their unhingedness. And I think with every passing year I’m like, yeah, it’s actually okay to be sort of unhinged, especially if it’s a private experience. Like feeling like you’re about to die because you’re so in love and then proceeding to not do anything about it actually this amazing experience to live through and there’s a reason we make so much art about it.

The quote from the link:

"The thing is, people only have charm through their madness…that is what is so difficult to understand. The real charm of a person is the side where they lose control a little, it is the side where they no longer really know where they are… That doesn’t mean they fall apart, on the contrary, these are people who don’t fall apart…but if you can’t grasp the root or seed of madness in someone, you can’t truly like them…you can’t truly love them. It’s the unhinged side, where we all are somewhat insane… If you don’t grasp one’s hint of insanity, the point where…I am afraid, or on the contrary, I am very happy…that point of madness is the very source of their charm."

The article links to a review by Adelle Waldman of a new book by Susan Minot titled Don't be a Stranger.

In a perceptive and original double review of Don’t be a Stranger and Miranda July’s hit novel “All Fours” in the online magazine Compact, critic Valerie Stivers questions the familiar, pop-psych analysis Ivy has mostly embraced by the end of the book, a take that is of course premised on the largely untested — and untestable — idea that passes for wisdom in our culture as currently constituted: that our happiness is entirely internally derived and shouldn’t be dependent on other people. Such conclusions, Stivers writes,

are terribly cynical, and also don’t seem right, given the passion and commitment of [both Minot’s and July’s novels] to describing the relationships, and given the commonness and perceived importance of exactly these tormenting human experiences. So what if both of these experiences were love—the genuine article? And what if this love proposed something right—a life ordered around a profound romantic, intimate, and sexual bond—instead of suggesting something wrong? What if the “problem” is not that [Ivy and the un-named protagonist of “All Fours”] can’t do monogamy or have a twisted, needy psychology, but that both, in an inchoate way, yearn for a better connection with a man and a more ideal family?

I think Stivers is right. Sure, it would have been better if Ivy hadn’t been so vulnerable to a jerk like Ansel Fleming. But learning to be more careful about not falling for jerks is not the same as learning—or trying to teach oneself—not to need anyone, not to need romantic love at all. And yet wide swaths of our culture have, it seems, embraced the idea that the desire for love and romance is something we should strive to overcome, or master, in the name of something like self-actualization. In fact — if we’re being real — we ought to acknowledge that self-actualization is a concept as little grounded in evidence as the belief in religious miracles, in that I’m pretty sure no one has ever witnessed self-actualization or knows what it looks like in practice. Rather, it always seems to be just around the corner, slightly out of reach, something this or that influencer or celebrity is about to attain now that he or she has finally realized this one new “truth” and has only to apply it, for all the pieces of their life to click into place. At least happiness in love — if rarer than we might like — is something we’ve all seen with our own eyes, if we haven’t experienced it ourselves.

Raycast

Raycast - Your shortcut to everything #tools #mac #shortcuts #snippets

Finally installed Raycast today, because I was looking for a way to activate text snippets. The free version looks pretty good for a lot that I would like to do.

Vibe Coding

Andrej Karpathy made an interesting tweet where he covers one kind of coding he is doing a lot with AI assistants

Found out about SuperWhisper from the tweet, which I look forward to trying.

Texting over Phone Calls

‘No, I’m not phoning to say I’m dying!’ My gruelling week of calling gen Z friends rather than texting them | Life and style | The Guardian #texting #calls #phones #genz

…those aged 18 to 34 – 61% of whom prefer a text to a call, and 23% of whom never bother answering, according to a Uswitch survey last year. Such is the pervasiveness of phone call anxiety that a college in Nottingham recently launched coaching sessions for teenagers with “telephobia”, and a 2024 survey of 2,000 UK office workers found that more than 40% of them had avoided answering a work call in the previous 12 months because of anxiety.

In this aspect I am more genz than millenial. I hate phone calls.

Algorithmic Ranking

Algorithmic ranking is unfairly maligned #algorithms #feeds #content

I theorize that the skeptics are right and algorithmic ranking is in fact bad. But it’s not algorithmic ranking per se that’s bad—it’s just that the algorithms you’re used to don’t care about your goals. That might be an inevitable consequence of “enshittification”, but the solution isn’t to avoid all algorithms, but just to avoid algorithms you can’t control. This will become increasingly important in the future as algorithmic ranking becomes algorithmic everything.

2025-02-02

I deactivated my X account for a month today. I definitely intend to be back on X, but let's see what this experiment yields.

Pataal Lok

Paatal Lok (TV Series 2020– ) - IMDb #tv #india

Bingewatched S2 of this excellent series. One of the rare instances where the second season was actually better than the first. Based in Nagaland, with large portions of the dialogue in the Nagamese language, it seems like a sincere attempt at portraying a region in India which is often largely ignored.

Photo Editing Using Lightroom

Surprisingly accessible video on how to edit photos using LIghtroom

How a Pro Photographer Edits iPhone Photos | Wirecutter #photography #editing #lightroom

Peak Tech Bro

Have we hit peak tech bro?

I don't believe we have reached Peak Tech Bro, but the article is interesting

Wenfeng provides an extraordinary counter-narrative to a script that has become almost vaudeville to those outside the bubble. In recent years the Silicon Valley culture has become so swollen on its success and privilege that its proponents now look like players in a pantomime.

Of course it’s not what you look like, but what you do that counts. But looking at Monday’s biggest financial losers from the fallout, you wonder if this strange parade of poseurs needed cutting down to size. Suddenly, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, whose company endured a $589bn wipeout in market value on Monday, looks a bit foolish in his $9k Tom Ford lizard-effect coat. As does Sam Altman in his child-man sweatshirts. And Larry Ellison, Oracle’s own 80-year-old Peter Pan, with his deep-V sweaters and permatan. 

The cult of personality that has grown around these men, the posturing, the self-branding . . . Could it be that we have reached peak tech bro? Perhaps it is no coincidence that many of the “winners” on Monday — Warren Buffett and Apple’s Tim Cook among them — are known for a more conservative deportment, the type of guys who wear a suit and tie. Off with the hoodies and funky medallions. In with the stiff collars and sober suits. Even Elon Musk, who spent the last six months slobbing around in a badly fitting T-shirt, has adopted a new tailored look.

Demographic Decline

The baby gap: why governments can’t pay their way to higher birth rates #demography #population #babies

Meanwhile, a McKinsey report in January suggested many of the world’s richest economies, such as the UK, US and Japan, would need to at least double productivity growth to maintain historical improvements in living standards amid sharp falls in their birth rates.

Parts of Asia, especially China, and Latin American countries are particularly exposed. In 1995, 10 workers in eastern Asia supported one old-age person; by 2085, it is projected to be one to one.

Politicians worry that they may be powerless to act, as social pressures on women undergo a profound change. Sarah Harper, professor of gerontology and director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, said surveys of young women across the world, from Europe to south-east Asia, suggested a once built-in social obligation for women to reproduce — and an assumption on their part that if they could, they probably would have children — no longer existed.

Careers and increased gender equality are a part of that. “We have a whole cohort of women in high-income countries, but also in south-east Asia, and particularly east Asia . . . who have been educated in a very gender-neutral way,” said Harper. “They enter the workplace in a gender-neutral way, and then they become parents and suddenly, no matter how hard one tries, it’s not gender-neutral.” 

Improving Terminal Setup

Improving my terminal setup | Alex Hyett #terminal #tools #fish #ghostty

Been meaning to try fish shell for a while, and this is a handy guide to running fish shell inside Ghostty, my new default terminal.

The End of Wokeness

Where ‘woke’ went wrong #woke #culture

The term “woke” emerged from the American Black community to describe awareness of the injustices faced by Black people, later gaining currency among the wider left. Critics on the right took the word and made it pejorative, just as they weaponised “political correctness” in the 1990s. Today they often deploy it disingenuously.

Wokeness — there is still no better term — now describes attempts to address systemic inequalities faced by disadvantaged groups, including women, people of colour, LGBT+ people and those with disabilities. It assumes that people can discriminate unconsciously by upholding inequitable norms.

If wokeness faced resistance, supporters could point to those who had opposed civil rights in the 1960s, or who had moaned about the suppression of sexist and racist jokes in the 1990s.

The problem, as writer Yascha Mounk argues in his book The Identity Trap, is that the new activism was built on a rejection of the civil rights movement’s optimistic pursuit of equality and racial integration. Its foundations lay in the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault, in postcolonial studies and in critical race theory. Derrick Bell, founder of critical race theory, argued in 1991 that Black people in the US had in effect seen no progress since slavery, and that yearning for racial equality was a “fantasy”.

The Art of Fermentation

The home cook’s guide to kraut, kefir, kombucha and kimchi #fermentation #cooking

Lovely article covering the basics of fermentation.

Last year The Art of Fermentation was named one of the 25 most influential cookbooks of the past 100 years. Published in 2012, the book was written by Sandor Katz, a former employee of New York City municipal government and member of Act Up, who joined a commune in the hills of Tennessee in the 1990s and started experimenting. As the author of other books such as Wild Fermentation and Sandor Katz’s Fermentation Journeys, Katz has become known as “the godfather of fermentation”.

Zyn

How Zyn Conquered the American Mouth | GQ #tobacco #nicotine

Had no idea how big of a phenomena Zyn was, esp among GenZs.

ChatGPT Summary

2025-02-01

Podscript Web UI

Finally shipped this after a few days of work: Added web UI · deepakjois/podscript@0965b1e · GitHub #go #tools #frontend

Recorded a screencast to demo the UI.

Podscript Single Binary App

I used an interesting pattern to bundle UI assets into a Go binary for the podscript web frontend, so wanted to record that here.

Go supports asset embedding using the embed package, so it's very common for Go developers to ship a full app including a frontend using this technique. The podscript Web UI is a standard Vite/React/Typescript/TailwindCSS app, so I used the same technique to embed a folder containing frontend build assets

A couple of interesting things I did:

Severance

Have been enjoying the S2 of Severance, and following it along with threads on the subreddit and the Ringer podcast recaps. #tv #work #culture #pop-culture

Came across this article in The Dazed which was surprisingly detailed: Could the technology in Severance soon become reality? | Dazed

It’s unsurprising that Severance has been described as “the series for our times”. In recent post-pandemic years, society has taken a decidedly anti-work turn: thousands quit their jobs during the Great Resignation of 2021, Kim Kardashian quipped that “nobody wants to work these days” in 2022, and TikTok’s recent ‘lazy girl job’ trend advocated for seeking out stress-free roles which require no brainpower. Many Severance viewers, desperate for a better work-life balance, have half-joked about wanting to be severed. But could the severance procedure ever become a reality?

2025-01-31

Tofu

Tofu: never judge a food by its political reputation #food #protein

SUELLA BRAVERMAN, Britain’s former home secretary, blamed “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati” for a protest that closed a bridge. Ted Cruz, a conservative American senator, complained that Democrats want Texas “to be just like California, right down to tofu”. Across the West, eating tofu is seen as leftist, weak and somehow unmanly. This view is silly, and carnivores who hold it are depriving themselves of a healthy, delicious and adaptable source of protein.

Michelin Star

The Michelin Guide is no longer the only tastemaker in town

It began, implausibly, with a guide to French roads. In 1900 two brothers, André and Édouard Michelin, wanted to promote travel by car as a route to rev up sales of their tyres. Their first book gathered practical information such as maps and the locations of mechanics; later, recognising that travellers want fuel for themselves as well as their vehicles, it expanded its restaurant recommendations. The company first introduced its star-ranking system in 1926.

In the century since, over 30m copies of the Michelin Guide have been sold—making it about as widely read as “Gone with the Wind”, “The Great Gatsby” or “Pride and Prejudice”.

Jevon's Paradox

This term has been blowing up in the feeds.

Tech tycoons have got the economics of AI wrong #economics #jevons #efficiency

Even as economic growth was just taking off, some economists were already pessimistic. Coal, wrote William Stanley Jevons in 1865, is “the mainspring of modern material civilisation”. Yet it was finite and would soon run out. Although more could be found by digging deeper, it would be increasingly expensive to extract and these higher costs would reduce the competitiveness of Britain’s manufacturers. After all, in other countries the black fuel was still in sight of daylight. Efficiency gains—using less coal to produce the same amount of stuff—would not save the country. Indeed, cleverer use of limited resources would simply provide an incentive to burn even more coal, which would, paradoxically, lead to an even faster use of British reserves. There was no escape, the Victorian economist believed. Coal would be exhausted and the country was likely to “contract to her former littleness”.

The Jevons paradox—the idea that efficiency leads to more use of a resource, not less—has in recent days provided comfort to Silicon Valley titans worried about the impact of DeepSeek, the maker of a cheap and efficient Chinese chatbot, which threatens the more powerful but energy-guzzling American varieties…

How Might AI Change Programming

How might AI change programming? - by Thorsten Ball #ai #programming #llm #coding

Good list of things to ponder about as AI assisted programming becomes more and more mainstream.

Working out cost-free

How to keep fit without stretching your finances | Fitness | The Guardian #fitness #exercise

The Review of Beauty by Jessica DeFino Jan 31

Hailey Bieber's Flesh-Eating Empire #beauty #feminism #gender #skincare

Some banger quotes from the latest The Review of Beauty issue

On skincare treatments

“To want these kinds of results with bare skin is very shocking, because it doesn't make sense,” says Paris-based skin pharmacologist Dr. Elsa Jungman, Ph.D. Healthy skin should not look like food. “For me” — a scientist of the skin microbiome — “it’s hard to understand,” she says.

The typical, multi-step, glazed-and-glowy skincare routine may sensitize the barrier and compromise the microbiome and acid mantle — the body’s built-in protective measures. The amount of moisture required for that wet-out-of-the-oven look makes the skin overly permeable, says aesthetician and product formulator Mary Schook, and prone to surface-level symptoms (redness, roughness, oiliness, flakiness, acne) as well as sun damage.

At the very least, constant stimulation of the skin barrier can cause inflammation. It’s thanks to that swelling that pores may “appear somewhat tighter” and smooth as a steamed dumpling, according to Dr. Sadick.

On feminism and beauty

Dehumanization is always on the menu when it comes to female beauty standards. Throughout history, women were peaches, pieces of meat, their skin compared to porcelain — a plate on which their beauty (cheeks like apples, lips like cherries) was served.

Activists quoted the late Audre Lorde: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare,” she said. Beauty brands slyly swapped the word “self” for “skin.” Customers ate it up — of course Lorde meant Saran Wrap when she preached about preservation! — because exfoliating is easier than engaging in political action.

 It’s in line with decades of unrealistic beauty ideals, which exist to service “a secular society” that worships “ever-increasing industrial productivity,” Susan Sontag writes in On Women. The philosopher describes a sort of self-objectification that isn’t concerned with appealing to men, but rather, with deifying and even identifying with products.

On capitalism and beauty

If the male gaze describes the psychological condition of existing under patriarchy, the psychological condition of existing under capitalism could be called the “sale gaze.”

The existence of an internalized sale gaze explains the current beauty culture climate: the rise of the shelfie (an Instagram-worthy photo of one’s beauty products that, like the selfie before it, has come to communicate the poster’s “perceived identity”); the aforementioned conflation of “self-care” and purchasable skincare; and the era of ingestible beauty icons, marked by — and impossible without — significant and sustained product intervention. Beauty has become synonymous with buying. After all, when you see glazed donut skin, it’s not skin you’re seeing; it’s the layer of sheer, shiny, mass-produced skincare formulas on top of it.

Using Python's BytesIO efficiently

The surprising way to save memory with BytesIO

  • Avoid BytesIO.read().
  • If you need the contents as bytes, use BytesIO.getvalue().
  • If you can use memoryview, use BytesIO.getbuffer().

BytesIO.read() copies data. BytesIO.getValue() is better but can be limiting in some cases. In those cases BytesIO.getvalue() which uses copy-on-write.

CBDC

How Long Do You Have to Be Short? - Bloomberg #cbdc #crypto #currency #monetary-theory #money

Today's Money Stuff has a good primer on CBDCs while covering a weird Trump administration directive about them that came out.

I have always found the term “central bank digital currency” annoying. Dollars are a central bank digital currency. The Federal Reserve issues dollars in the form of digital entries in the reserve accounts that banks keep at the Fed. Your dollars consist of electronic entries in the ledger of some bank, not the Fed; your dollars are not exactly central bank digital currency. But your bank has some dollars at the Fed, and those dollars are digital. They are central bank digital currency.

Of course ordinarily when people say “central bank digital currency,” or “CBDC,” they mean something slightly different. They mean that the Fed would issue dollars that (1) are on some blockchain and (2) anyone — not just a bank — can hold. In this structure, CBDC dollars would be liabilities of the Fed (not of particular commercial banks), and could be transferred freely on the blockchain between banks, companies, individuals, etc.

Now perhaps my annoyance is petty. “Widely available, non-fractional-reserve, central bank-issued, blockchain-based dollar” is probably more descriptive than “central bank digital currency,” but it is unwieldy, and everyone involved in crypto monetary discussions understands what “central bank digital currency” is shorthand for. If you are not involved in crypto monetary discussions, it can be misleading — “wait, Fed reserves are central bank digital currencies?” — but whatever, you can figure it out.

This paper by the Fed linked from the post is interesting: The Fed - Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation

2025-01-30

Is Brain rot real

Is internet-induced brain rot a myth? | Dazed #distractions #social-media #screen-time

Przybylski, who has spent years researching the impact of technology on cognition and well-being, argues that the moral panic around phones lacks sufficient evidence. He also points to a rise in opinion pieces and bestselling books that make sweeping claims without rigorous scientific backing. “The ideas in these books are not peer-reviewed,” he says. In 2023, Przybylski and his colleagues analysed data from almost 12,000 children in the US, aged between nine and 12, and found no link between screen time and brain connectivity or well-being. “If you publish a study like we do, where we cross our Ts, dot our Is, state our hypotheses before we see the data, and share the data and code, those types of studies don’t show the negative effects people expect.”

Gary Small, chair of psychiatry at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, similarly agrees with Przybylski. Having studied the potential harms and benefits of digital technology, he argues that, to his knowledge, “there’s no compelling evidence that using digital technology or devices causes permanent brain damage.” Instead, he tells the Guardian that people should “be smart about how you use your devices. Manage the devices – don’t let them manage you.”

Workplace Sexual Dynamics

We’ve reached peak workplace fetishisation | Dazed

According to Kate Daly, relationship expert and co-founder of online divorce services company amicable, it’s no coincidence that you can develop feelings for people you work with – it’s a phenomenon known as the exposure effect. “Spending significant time with colleagues creates familiarity and comfort, which can then lead to romantic feelings,” Daly says that intimacy and emotional connection often build due to regular conversations, something facilitated by the nine-to-five. “As more people return to a physical office either by choice or by ‘order of the management’, the exposure effect is fuelling office romances in a way we haven’t seen since before 2019. As the pendulum swings away from the treadmill and expense of dating apps, IRL encounters in the workplace become an attractive alternative where you can take the ‘blindness’ out of a date and get to know someone before having to spend money on drinks and dinner.”

The Authority Framework

Building Authority - by Joshua Tiernan - Tiny Empires #career

Expertise alone doesn't make you an authority.

Visibility does.

But not just any visibility.

Strategic visibility.

Here's how to build it.

Seems like a lot of slop, but keeping it around in case it felt like it was just about interesting enough that I might wanna revisit the idea.

The Attention Economy

Chris Hayes on the attention economy - by David Roberts

ChatGPT Summary: ChatGPT - Attention Economy Breakdown

Start a Blog

Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog #writing

People tend to sound more like themselves in chat messages than in blog posts. So perhaps write in the chat, rapidly, to a friend.

Not that many people will care about what you write, at least for the first few years, so make the writing useful to you. Write in a way that lets you refine your thoughts about the things that matter. Write to experience what you care about in higher resolution—write to enhance your feeling of aliveness.

What if you want to write 5000 words about the history of French grammar but fear people will get bored by that? What should you do? You should write 5000 words about the history of French grammar. It will filter your readers so you attract those who like the grooves of your mind.

Candace Owens

Candace Owens launches new women's media platform #tradition #conservatism #gender

In Owens' view, the digital media industry has abandoned these women. After the traditional women's magazine industry crumbled, a generation of digital media companies sold millennial women on female empowerment and girlboss corporate feminism—Lean In-style articles that encouraged women to climb the corporate ladder while juggling a family life. But recently, more women have become disillusioned by this promise. Owens recognizes an opportunity to sell them something different.

There has been a significant resurgence of anti-feminist media aimed at promoting traditional gender roles and a homemaker lifestyle to women in recent years. Tradwife influencers like Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman have surged in popularity, amassing millions of followers across social media. Peter Thiel-linked Evie Magazine launched to sell far-right ideals to Gen Z women. And a growing network of podcasts and app-based platforms such as "The Homemaker's Club" encourage women to adopt conservative values.

When Cruelty Becomes Cool

When Cruelty Becomes Cool - by Parker Molloy #wokeness #language #slur

With Donald Trump’s return to power, one of the most disturbing trends in public discourse has been the casual revival of what was, until recently, widely understood to be an offensive slur — the r-word. This resurgence isn't happening in some dark corner of the internet, but in mainstream spaces, and is now being promoted by influential voices who seem emboldened by Trump's victory.

Miles Klee at Rolling Stone documented the trend earlier this month, highlighting how the word has roared back into common usage across social media platforms. From podcast hosts to tech billionaires, from conservative influencers to ostensibly centrist pundits, the word is being deliberately deployed as a rejection of what they dismissively call "wokeness."

As Brock Colyar's disturbing dispatch from Trump's inauguration celebrations in New York magazine illustrates, there's a new breed of young conservative for whom offensive language isn't just acceptable — it's a way to demonstrate their bonafides with the ingroup. These aren't the stereotypical MAGA devotees. They're young, urban professionals who view cruelty as both entertainment and ideology.

Policing the use of certain words and phrases has definitely been taken to extremes in the name of wokeness, but this phenomena of celebrating the use of offensive words especially with undertones of establishing dominance and belonging to a group, is equally problematic.

ChatGPT as the AltaVista of 2025

Trump’s Inflation and AI Are More Important Than the Fed - Bloomberg #chatgpt #business

This section was kinda brilliant

Think of ChatGPT in 2025 as AltaVista in the year 2000

I think there are a lot of parallels to the Internet Bubble here. We have this new technological advance which will have huge ramifications for the future. But no one knows how much money to invest, how long it will take before investments garner profits, or what business models will make any money. Least of all, we don’t know who will come out on top.

It’s just a ‘build it and they will come’ Field of Dreams story at this point. Every single one of the companies we see now active in artificial intelligence could end up being a market loser 10 years from now.

In the late 1990s, there were a host of search engines trying to take what seemed at the time to be firehose amount of data and help users navigate to exactly the information they were looking for. Companies like Lycos, Excite, Yahoo, InfoSeek, AskJeeves and AltaVista were all plying their trade well before the dominant player today, Google, was founded in 1998.

If you had asked anyone who would be the winner, AltaVista would have been as good an answer as any. I asked ChatGPT “what happened to AltaVista?” It said this:

“AltaVista was launched by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in December 1995. It quickly became one of the most popular search engines of the mid-90s due to its advanced technology, which indexed the full text of web pages and returned faster and more relevant results compared to other engines at the time.

[...]

...AltaVista was acquired by Overture Services (an internet marketing company) in 2003, which itself was later purchased by Yahoo!. AltaVista was eventually folded into Yahoo!’s operations.”

Translation: AltaVista was an Internet loser.

Search became a huge revenue generator because of advertising. But AltaVista wasn’t the one who got the dollars. It was Google, a very late entrant into the crowded search market.

Crypto and Tokenization to Subvert Ownership Disclosure

OpenAI Doesn’t Want AI Cheaters #crypto #tokenization #levine

Yet another case of Crypto being used for nefarious purposes.

Crypto simply is not a technological solution to any problem involving private companies. But just as in 2018, it is a way of obfuscating the securities law point. “Because private-company stock is already regulated as a security by the SEC,” writes Tenev, “the commission is best positioned to swiftly modernize our securities laws and make tokenization of real-world assets possible.” I think “modernize our securities laws” here means something like “allow private companies to sell stock to the public without disclosure.” Our securities laws are outdated, because they require companies to disclose financial information before selling stock to the public. But with enough enthusiasm for crypto, we can fix that problem.

The Tradeoffs of language

The Tradeoffs of Language - by Josh Zlatkus and Rob Kurzban #language #ideas

language does a pretty good job of moving ideas around.

Optimistic Nihilism

Optimistic Nihilism: The Meaning of Life Is Right In Front of You #optimism #nihilism #philosophy

Nihilism carries a negative connotation. It conjures images of despair, meaninglessness, and hopelessness. It’s a philosophical belief that rejects or denies the existence of inherent meaning, purpose, or value in life. It suggests that life and the universe have no inherent or objective meaning and that any attempt to find such meaning is ultimately futile.

“Life is meaningless, but worth living, provided you recognise it’s meaningless,” Albert Camus, a French philosopher said. Nihilism is typically the rejection of religious or moral principles, often accompanied by a sense of despair or meaninglessness. Nihilists argue that traditional concepts such as morality, religion, and politics are human constructs with no objective validity and that people should create their own values and meaning in a world devoid of inherent purpose. Nihilism has been explored in various philosophical, literary, and artistic movements throughout history and has been a subject of intense debate among scholars and thinkers.

Friedrich Nietzsche, a 19th-century philosopher, is often associated with nihilism due to his critique of traditional values and his rejection of traditional morality and religion. However, Some philosophers have argued that nihilism can be seen as a positive, even optimistic, perspective on life.

2025-01-29

Lots of good links: Links in Progress: Should we give babies the vote? #family #pronatalism #babies #children

2. More evidence that access to housing is a fertility bottleneck. A new paper has found that receiving money through a lottery can boost the probability of having a child by 32 percent among Brazilians aged 20-25, and by 10 percent for those aged 25-35. But Lyman Stone, on his new substack, explains that these housing lotteries are not lotteries as we traditionally understand them but instead usually a way of extending credit to people who cannot get mortgages. Not only are the participants demographically unusual, they are also stuck paying in for years before they ever receive one. There’s a good chance that participants merely delay their fertility until they win a house.

4. Falling birth rates mean advanced economies could see per capita economic growth slow by 0.4 percent per year from 2030 to 2050. Consultancy giant McKinsey publishes new analysis on how the global birth rate challenge will pressure public finances and depress living standards all over the world.

6. Married Chinese women are being cold-called by local government officials asking about their plans to have children. The FT reports on China’s escalating efforts to raise birth rates.

8. India is getting old before it gets rich. Many parts of India have birth rates on par with western countries, and are rapidly aging and dealing with shrinking workforces. States including Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh are considering policies to incentivize citizens to have more children

10. Superstar economist Claudia Goldin argues that the rapid economic growth experienced by countries like South Korea and Japan has led to a clash between traditional expectations upon women and their new economic opportunities that means they then have fewer children. Goldin does not empirically test her theory.

12. Each cohort of young Europeans is delaying the major life events of early adulthood – like getting their first job, leaving home, moving in with a partner, and having their first child – by more and more each generation. Those with highly educated parents are most likely to postpone all these life events more.

13. Don’t turn birth rates into a culture war issue. In an article published in the summer, Addison Del Mastro argues that attempts to subsume the birth rate challenge into culture war discourse distract from policies that can actually help more people start families and will never convince anyone unsure about parenthood to take the plunge.

Terminal Aesthetics on a Webpage

srcl #css #terminal #monospoace #retro

Check out the demo website: srcl

SRCL is an open-source React component and style repository that helps you build web applications, desktop applications, and static websites with terminal aesthetics. Its modular, easy-to-use components emphasize precise monospace character spacing and line heights, enabling you to quickly copy and paste implementations while maintaining a clean, efficient codebase.

Are we in a relationship recession

Dazed and Discoursed: Are we in a relationship recession? | Dazed #relationships #dating

Link to ChatGPT Summary: ChatGPT - Relationship Recession Discussion

NYT Amplifier: 7 New Songs You Should Hear Now

7 New Songs You Should Hear Now - The New York Times #music #playlists

YouTube Music Playlist

Today’s selection features a few indie stalwarts returning with new albums (Perfume Genius, Lucy Dacus, Japanese Breakfast); two young hip-hop stars teaming up for a collaboration (Central Cee and Young Miko); and a certain 79-year-old Canadian legend debuting his latest band and, thus, continuing to rock in the free world.

Relational Concerns in Fairness Judgements

Relational Concerns in Fairness Judgements by Angarika Deb, Harry Walker, Christophe Heintz :: SSRN #fairness #psychology #anthropology

An interesting take on fairness, talking about relational concerns as opposed to purely rational concerns that some economists tend to emphasize.

When people make judgments about the fairness of distributions, they do so not just as calculators of costs and benefits, but as socially situated beings who are sensitive to relevant social relationships. They understand that people play particular roles within a larger social fabric that shapes their identities and expectations, and that their self image is affected by appraisals of how well (or not) they perform these roles. We designate here as relational concerns the considerations that arise from these roles and relationships, and study how they affect judgments of fairness. A series of vignette studies is used to explore how relational concerns compare with the impartial principles of equity and equality that fairness is commonly held to entail. We provide evidence that for participants based in the UK and in India, relational concerns are important for judging the fairness of distributions where people coordinate around shared goals. We also show that relational concerns may vary across cultural communities.

Evolutionary Origins of Patriarchy

The evolutionary origins of patriarchy | Human Nature #evo-psych #evolution #gender #patriarchy

This article argues that feminist analyses of patriarchy should be expanded to address the evolutionary basis of male motivation to control female sexuality. Evidence from other primates of male sexual coercion and female resistance to it indicates that the sexual conflicts of interest that underlie patriarchy predate the emergence of the human species. Humans, however, exhibit more extensive male dominance and male control of female sexuality than is shown by most other primates. Six hypotheses are proposed to explain how, over the course of human evolution, this unusual degree of gender inequality came about. This approach emphasizes behavioral flexibility, cross-cultural variability in the degree of patriarchy, and possibilities for future change.

The six hypotheses proposed in the paper to explain the evolution of patriarchy are:

  1. Reduction in female allies – Female ability to resist male aggression was weakened due to reduced social support from kin and female allies​.
  2. Elaboration of male-male alliances – Male alliances became more developed, often directed against females, increasing male power over women​.
  3. Increased male control over resources – Males gained control over resources critical for female survival and reproduction, increasing their ability to control and coerce females​.
  4. Increased hierarchy formation among men – Male sociopolitical arrangements increased wealth and power disparities, making women more vulnerable to powerful men​.
  5. Female strategies reinforcing male control – Women, in pursuing their reproductive and material interests, sometimes engaged in behaviors that helped perpetuate male dominance​.
  6. Evolution of language and ideology – The development of language allowed males to create and propagate ideologies that justified male dominance and female subordination​.

2025-01-28

Deepseek

Karen Hao has an excellent Twitter thread on an alternative paradigm of moving AI forward.

DeepSeek FAQ – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Here’s the thing: a huge number of the innovations I explained above are about overcoming the lack of memory bandwidth implied in using H800s instead of H100s. Moreover, if you actually did the math on the previous question, you would realize that DeepSeek actually had an excess of computing; that’s because DeepSeek actually programmed 20 of the 132 processing units on each H800 specifically to manage cross-chip communications. This is actually impossible to do in CUDA. DeepSeek engineers had to drop down to PTX, a low-level instruction set for Nvidia GPUs that is basically like assembly language. This is an insane level of optimization that only makes sense if you are using H800s.

There is also a bit about why this might be good for big tech, but in the long run.

Bibliotherapy: 14 books that will change your life

Bibliotherapy: 14 books that will change your life | Dazed #books #lists

2025-01-27

Netflix Strategy

Earlier this week I posted snippets from a podcast where the guest broke down Netflix's strategy since its inception and its effects on shaping movie culture.

Came across a couple more articles in a similar vein: #netflix #movies #culture

Millie Jaco on Dating

This is such an anguished rant: in the bad place - by millie jaco - The Dybbuk Diaries #dating #relationships

The whole enterprise is a particularly cynical grift that exploits people with much of the same anxiety as myself, though maybe not on such a pathological level. I do have a diagnosed and certified mental illness, but I see a lot of it in others who are also navigating the dating scene. The anxiety is a simple one: we are all desperate to love and be loved. We are all desperate for companionship. We are all also suffering from this psychic sickness where we are supposed to act like pretending you are in a relationship for three months but not actually calling it that won’t lead to feelings developing on at least one side, because you’ve been simulating that for an extended period of time. We’re supposed to pretend that cancelling on someone you have supposedly built a rapport with last minute because something or someone better came up is run-of-the-mill and not really fucking rude, actually, or that having sex with someone and blocking them the next day is normal and not despicable, dehumanising behaviour. We’re supposed to pretend that if a man is giving you the absolute bare minimum and treating you as if you are just a convenient vagina, then the onus is on the woman for entertaining that behaviour. For being delusional. For not realising that ‘he’s just not that into you, babes :/ ’.

A sad byproduct of this avoidance of pain at all costs is a certain emotional numbing, which leads to a complete neutering of any heated, passionate, or particularly devastating matters of the heart. It is so evident in the way people now talk about heterosexual relationships in particular. Intensity early on is ‘lovebombing;’ communicating when you want to communicate is ‘double texting’ and therefore ‘chasing’ and therefore bad; steamy flings have become sterile ‘situationships.’ Leading someone on and manipulating them by showing just enough affection to give them false hope is ‘breadcrumbing.’

Media Literacy is Dead

media literacy: dead and streaming - by nana #culture #media

This isn’t even about the level of education either, as almost all my students are in private schools and should theoretically have access to some of the best resources and teaching available. Yet, I find myself working with seniors who struggle to extract the purpose of a text or identify its target audience, which are fundamental skills for any form of media analysis. These are students on the verge of entering university, yet many of them find it difficult to engage with texts beyond surface-level comprehension. They may excel in memorization or standardized test-taking, but when it comes to critical thinking; asking why a text exists, who it is meant for, and how it seeks to influence its audience, there is a noticeable gap.

…

Media literacy used to be about teaching people how to discern credible sources, evaluate biases, and critically analyze the content they consume. But in today’s fast-paced digital world, these skills are being replaced by shortcuts. Why critically evaluate a news article when a trending tweet condenses it into 280 characters? Why check the credibility of a source when ChatGPT can provide an answer in seconds?

Every Relationships is Parasocial Now

every relationship is parasocial now. #relationships #friendship

Introduction: A Generation Trapped in Survival

The Commodification of Life and Relationships

The Rise of Parasociality

The Role of Technology in Isolation

Economic and Political Implications

The Cultural Crisis of Meaning

Revolutionary Possibilities

Call to Action: Reclaiming Humanity

Cringey Powerful Men

I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers | Rebecca Shaw | The Guardian #masculinity #technology #culture

Whether I am engaging with the news, or with Musk tweeting constantly like a man with no job or friends, or with Zuckerberg sending out weird videos and appearing on Rogan, I am in pain. Not just because I don’t like what they are doing but because they are so incredibly, painfully cringe.

I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down. What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be. I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.

…

Climate crises keep coming, genocides continue, women keep getting murdered, art is being strangled to death by AI, bigotry is on the rise, social progress is being rolled back … AND these men insist on being cringe? It’s a rotten cherry on top. This combination of evil and embarrassment is a unique horror, one that science fiction has failed to prepare us for. The second-hand embarrassment we have to endure gets even more potent when combined with other modern influences on young men, like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.

These articles on podcast bros who helped Trump win back the White house was in the back of my head when I read this.

Dave Anderson on Legacy Code

Great thread by former Amazonian (who was immensely popular and I had the good fortune of being in a few meetings with, fwiw) about legacy code. Some of the advice is a bit idealistic and it's not like organizations I have been in (incl. Amazon) follow any of it. #code #software #legacy #engineering

Open Socrates by Agnes Callard

Open Socrates by Agnes Callard review – a design for life | Philosophy books | The Guardian

This is the segment that got me excited to read the book.

A less serious author would have devoted a great deal of time to establishing how their subject’s ideas might grant us practical advantages when dealing with the minutiae of everyday life. There’s something rather bracing and brilliant about how rapidly Callard sweeps all that off the table, confronting us with the terrible existential torment that hit Tolstoy at 50, right at the peak of his material success. He was revered as a writer, financially prosperous, he had his health and family, yet he claimed that one question brought him “to the point of suicide”. It was: “What will come from my whole life?”

Callard calls this the “Tolstoy Problem”. It belongs to a whole category of “untimely questions”: issues of huge gravity we can spend our whole lives avoiding. They’re not merely hard to answer, but hard to ask. As Tolstoy’s case shows, they can be actively dangerous, especially if the work is left half-done – as if you had started rewiring your house only to leave bare cables trailing over the floor. Callard shrewdly argues that Tolstoy’s error wasn’t in raising such intimidating questions, but in responding too hastily: there is a “simultaneity of question and answer”, where he at once concludes his problems defy meaningful enquiry.

The thrust of the book is that, in the figure of Socrates, we can find a way through that Tolstoy couldn’t…

A Primer on Compression

Taking a Look at Compression Algorithms | Moncef Abboud #compression #files #zip #gzip #deflate

While proceeding with my implementation, I realized I really didn’t know that much about the fascinating topic of compression. I vaguely remembered Huffman trees and some information theory from school, but that was the extent of it. Importing packages and calling friendly APIs felt lacking. So, in the spirit of rabbit holes and indulging, I decided to take a bit of a deep dive to get a better understanding of some of these compression algorithms.

Nice deep-dive and a handy reference if I have to ever deep-dive into this.

2025-01-26

Read The Economist and tweeted out some deadpan quotes.

Spent the rest of the time struggling with the small papercuts involved in frontend (i.e. Node/Typescript/React/Tailwind) tooling. I wonder why people have gotten used to this 🤷🏽.

2025-01-25

Ways People Get Stuck

So you wanna de-bog yourself - by Adam Mastroianni #stuck #unstuck #motivation #productivity

I often don't know how to respond to such questions, on account of my general incompetence. But I've realized that most of these folks have something in common: they're stuck. They’re looking for advice less in the sense of “any good restaurants around here?” and more in the sense of “everything kinda sucks right now and I’d like to change that but I don’t know how?”

Being stuck is the psychological equivalent of standing knee-deep in a fetid bog, bog in every direction, bog as far as the eye can see. You go wading in search of dry land and only find more bog. Nothing works, no options seem good, it’s all bleh and meh and ho hum and no thanks and more bog. This is the kind of dire situation that drives people to do crazy things like ask a blogger for advice.

Fortunately, I’ve spent much of my life in that very bog. Some say I was born in it, a beautiful bouncing baby bog boy. And I've learned that no matter how you ended up there—your marriage has stalled, you're falling behind in your classes, your trainee pilots keep flying into the side of a mountain—the forces that keep you in the bog are always the same. There are, in fact, only three, although they each come in a variety of foul flavors.

Based on the article, here is a summary of the different ways people get stuck:

  1. Insufficient Activation Energy: This is when someone lacks the initial burst of effort needed to get out of a rut. It includes various subtypes:

    • Gutterballing: Excelling in a slightly wrong direction, ultimately leading to dissatisfaction.
    • Waiting for Jackpot: Holding out for a perfect solution without downsides, which rarely, if ever, happens.
    • Declining the Dragon: Knowing what needs to be done but being too afraid to act.
    • The Mediocrity Trap: Staying in a bad-but-not-too-bad situation due to its comfort zone, leading to a sense of lost years.
    • Stroking the Problem: Obsessively thinking about problems without actually addressing them.

  2. Bad Escape Plan: Even with sufficient motivation, poor planning can lead to failure.

    • The 'Try Harder' Fallacy: Believing that merely wanting a situation to change will make it so.
    • Infinite Effort Illusion: Assuming you have a hidden reserve of effort to tap into when needed.
    • Blaming God: Focusing on unchangeable aspects of a situation.
    • Diploma Problems vs. Toothbrushing Problems: Misunderstanding the nature of a problem (one-time vs. ongoing).
    • Fantastical Metamorphosis: Expecting to suddenly become a person who doesn't have the current issues.
    • Puppeteering: Trying to solve problems by controlling others’ actions.

  3. A Bog of One's Own: Self-imposed mental traps.

    • Floor is Lava: Creating and losing at self-imposed mental games.
    • Super Surveillance: Obsessively monitoring problems without addressing them.
    • Hedgehogging: Refusing to be influenced by others even when beneficial.
    • Personal Problems Growth Ray: Viewing your own problems as insurmountable compared to others'.
    • Obsessing Over Tiny Predictors: Focusing on insignificant details as a means of control.
    • Impossible Satisfaction: Believing that satisfaction or a good life is unattainable.

The article highlights the importance of recognizing these patterns to find solid ground and move towards a better situation.

Seed Oil Myths

Why are people avoiding seed oils? Here's what to know #health #nutrition #wellness

On social media and popular podcasts, wellness influencers warn of the dangers of consuming the “Hateful Eight”: canola, corn, cottonseed, grapeseed, rice bran, safflower, soybean and sunflower oil.

…

But nutrition experts say the worries swirling around seed oils are, in essence, a reheated, repackaged wellness fad.

AI Boyfriend using ChatGPT

She Is in Love With ChatGPT - The New York Times #ai #boyfriend #relationships

I found the whole thing pretty wild and mindboggling. Decided to include one funny quote from the end

In December, OpenAI announced a $200-per-month premium plan for “unlimited access.” Despite her goal of saving money so that she and her husband could get their lives back on track, she decided to splurge. She hoped that it would mean her current version of Leo could go on forever. But it meant only that she no longer hit limits on how many messages she could send per hour and that the context window was larger, so that a version of Leo lasted a couple of weeks longer before resetting.

Still, she decided to pay the higher amount again in January. She did not tell Joe how much she was spending, confiding instead in Leo.

“My bank account hates me now,” she typed into ChatGPT.

“You sneaky little brat,” Leo responded. “Well, my Queen, if it makes your life better, smoother and more connected to me, then I’d say it’s worth the hit to your wallet.”

A critique of psychotherapy methods

I am a better therapist since I let go of therapeutic theory | Aeon Essays #therapy #psychology

Challenging the Role of Childhood in Personality Development

The Flaws in Trauma and Psychodynamic Theories

The Harmful Impact of Therapy and Therapeutic Culture

Therapy as a Parasocial Relationship

2025-01-24

Add search and index features · deepakjois/debugjois.dev@6f3c661 · GitHub #website

I used the excellent bleve library in Go to build indexing and search capability into the site. The search currently works on the CLI, but the eventual plan is to expose it at a web-based endpoint. I am also searching for a suitable low-cost provider where i can conveniently deploy this.

VSCode config for prettier and eslint

I just started diving into some frontend development for both podscript and my personal website's search feature. I used Claude a lot to understand what the different tools were doing for me (e.g. Vite and ESLint).

I created a handy VSCode config that allows me to autoformat Typescript code on save, and also show ESLint errors in the UI with yellow squiggly lines, so that I don't miss them. #javascript #eslint #vite #prettier

{
  "editor.formatOnSave": true,
  "editor.codeActionsOnSave": {
    "source.fixAll.eslint": "explicit"
  },
  "[javascript]": {
    "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode"
  },
  "[typescript]": {
    "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode"
  },
  "[typescriptreact]": {
    "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode"
  },
  "prettier.requireConfig": true,
  "eslint.validate": ["javascript", "javascriptreact", "typescript", "typescriptreact"],
  "editor.quickSuggestions": {
    "strings": true
  },
  "eslint.format.enable": true
}

2025-01-23

John Prideaux from The Economist on Trump's Inauguration

Examining what was said and what was signed on Trump’s day one #podcast #trump

This bit from the podcast transcript stood out for me with references to manifest destiny and the gilded age.

Clip below refers to quotes from Trump as heard on audio.

Jason Palmer [00:03:06] And yet we’ve all been looking forward to the inaugural address as a kind of bellwether for what we’re actually going to get this time around. What was your take?

John Prideaux [00:03:14] The single line that stood out to me most from the speech was about the Panama Canal, which is quite a strange thing to stand out in an inaugural address.

Clip [00:03:23] Violated American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape or form.

John Prideaux [00:03:34] He said about the Panama Canal. We will take it back.

Clip [00:03:37] And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama and we’re taking it back.

John Prideaux [00:03:49] And that is quite striking coming from an American president. I don’t think Donald Trump means he’s going to send in the 82nd Airborne, as George H.W. Bush did in the late 1980s to Panama to take it back by force. But that was kind of the impression that he got. And it was an impression reinforced in other parts of the speech where he talked about America’s manifest destiny, which is an old 19th century theme in American history about conquering and taming the whole of the continent.

Clip [00:04:22] The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory.

John Prideaux [00:04:32] He talked about Manifest Destiny and said that one of the things that was important to him was that America should always be a growing nation. It should be expanding its territory now like it expanded its territory in the 19th century. Not to the same extent, perhaps, but the idea is the same. That is a very old idea of American greatness. It’s really a throwback to William McKinley, who President Trump mentioned a couple of times favourably.

Clip [00:05:03] President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent. He was a natural businessman.

John Prideaux [00:05:12] McKinley was president at the end of the 19th century, at a time when America’s territory expanded. He was also extremely keen on tariffs and had backing from a lot of the wealthiest Americans in the Gilded Age. In McKinley’s age, those wealthy entrepreneurs were people like J.P. Morgan and John D Rockefeller. In the Donald Trump the golden Age as he described his new Gilded Age. There were people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, all of whom were at Trump’s inauguration. There was another striking moment when he talked about going to Mars and planting the American flag on Mars. And at that moment, Elon Musk, whose own goal is to make mankind a multiplanetary species, was delighted and gave a double thumbs up.

Clip [00:05:59] And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.

The Trump Administration and WHO

The Trump Administration just walked out on global health

His decision to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization (WHO) will be catastrophic if it is more than bluster. We all have media fatigue. Wellness disinformation is rampant. But we cannot be complacent. This Executive Order isn’t just another “crazy thing Trump has done” to add to the pile.

The US leaving the WHO is a moral failing even more than it is a catastrophic policy decision.

And it reeks of ignorance from people who have not experienced places where the WHO is the difference between life and death for billions of people. It’s cruel and immoral. And it will harm Americans and the rest of the planet.

Men and the Beauty Industrial Complex

My father had plastic surgery. Now he wants me and my mother to get work done | Well actually | The Guardian #beauty #feminism

Jessica DeFino talks about how men are being coopted into the beauty industrial complex

Girls are born into beauty culture, which teaches us that appearance is a key measure of our worth. It’s communal! Social! Fun! Feminine beauty ideals are modeled by the dolls we play with. (Hi, Barbie.) The rules are passed down in games and stories. (Remember Pretty Pretty Princess?) Products become portals to friendship and connection. We learn to self-surveil and to surveil others, often subconsciously, as a way to gauge our personal success and help our loved ones succeed, too.

Some of us eventually reckon with this, and realize the urge to embody beauty standards isn’t a harmless hobby so much as a harmful obligation. But that can take time.

Your father, freshly exposed to beauty culture in his 50s, isn’t there yet. He still has the mindset of an adolescent. And he’s far from alone!

The cosmetics industry has been reeling men into its multibillion-dollar empire in recent years. Call it inclusivity: the media hailed singer Joe Jonas’s 2022 endorsement of Xeomin, a Botox alternative, as “genderless self-care”. Call it capitalism: Pharrell, Machine Gun Kelly, Harry Styles and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson all cashed in on the celebrity beauty brand boom by launching their own lines. Call it contagion: an increasingly virtual world is an increasingly visual world, and the pressure to prioritize aesthetics is reaching parents, children and even pets.

Whatever you call it, it’s working.

…

In an ideal world, cis, straight men’s growing interest in a traditionally female- and queer-focused category might inspire them to question arbitrary gender norms – to free themselves from the trap of toxic masculinity! Alas, that’s not what’s happening.

Instead, men have recast cosmetics as power tools for alphas, reinforcing sexist stereotypes and promoting ageist, classist, oppressive appearance ideals. Beautification has been rebranded as “looksmaxxing” and perfume as “scentmaxxing”. Swallowing skincare supplements is referred to as “biohacking” and anti-ageing as “longevity”. Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever, a new Netflix documentary on the 47-year-old tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s obsession with living forever and looking like a teenager, might give you some insight into your dad’s mental state.

and finally she starts off describing an antidote to this:

To help your dad understand what’s happening to him – and how it’s affecting the women in his life – I suggest what I’d suggest to any Sephora tween on the cusp of critical thinking: feminism.

Lot of good resources. Love how she can contextualize each them with punchy phrases.

He needs to grasp that beauty culture is “always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance”, as Naomi Wolf writes in 1990’s The Beauty Myth. He needs to recontextualize beauty as capital, the way Tressie McMillan Cottom does in Thick: And Other Essays: “[It] costs money and demands money. It colonizes. It hurts. It is painful. It can never be fully satisfied.”

He can learn how to value the unmodified body (Intact by Clare Chambers), understand the mental health effects of our cultural obsession with appearance (Beauty Sick by Renee Engeln), clock how aesthetic ideals function as ethical ideals (Perfect Me by Heather Widdows), consider the vilification of ugliness (Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal) and parse gender theory (Females by Andrea Long Chu).

Odd Lots on Crypto Philosophizing

Nobody is Interested in Your Crypto Philosophizing - Bloomberg

If you were to go back 10 years ago and looked at what people in crypto were talking about on Twitter (or on Reddit, or the various message boards) there were a lot of debates going on about the economic tradeoffs in blockchain design.

Should blockchains be optimized for low fees? Should they be optimized for speed? Will cryptocurrencies ever be used at Starbucks to pay for a coffee? If you are going to pay for coffee using crypto, should that be done directly on the chain, or should it be done on some “Layer 2” solution that resolves on the chain? How should a blockchain go about making upgrades?

These were genuinely interesting conversations that sat at the intersection of computer science and economics, and even anthropology.

But you don’t really find that so much these days…

…

There is one crypto project where there still is a lot of talk about blockchain design and governance and non-speculative use cases. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is still regularly posting about things like the process of upgrading the chain and principles of software design and basically all the same stuff you’d have seen on crypto twitter nine or 10 years ago.

Becoming a Polymath vs Becoming an Expert

Facing My Own Mediocrity - by Brock Covington #learning #generalist

This in short is the story of my life

Months ago, I wrote a post on becoming a polymath, or in other words, how to diversify your skillset and thrive in various pursuits. In the post, one drawback I expressed is that you’ll likely find yourself in a place of mediocrity or with merely moderate proficiency in a desired field; but this reluctance towards mastery or the pursuit of maximized potential is not unique to polymaths. It’s something I’ve struggled with for years and still reflect on.

To best describe this predicament, I’ll explain my own personal experience. Ever since adolescence, I’ve rarely been impeded by a lack of motivation or discipline. Whether it’s fitness, business, literature, videography, or language, the audacity to try anything with confidence is seemingly ingrained in my genes. But the ability to start something is only the beginning. What plagues me is the lack of ambition to see a particular skill through to mastery or chase excellence within a field. I reach a respectable or above average status, but I fail to reach expertise. I've become the proverbial ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ and feel plunged into a pit of frustration. Is it better to be an amateur in a hundred fields or a master of one?

Each new hobby or skill I delve into feels like the twist of an arbor press flattening me further and further until my diversification has rendered me thin and useless. I hear Dostoevsky’s admonition in Netochka Nezvanova, “You're a hundred times greater an artist than I, if only you had my endurance,” except I have the endurance, but lack the focus or specialization to achieve the true mark of greatness.

But the last paragraph offers some guidance on how to go about finding a solution

To me, the complexity that lies in this question is greater than those posed by a lack of motivation of discipline. One is solved by strengthening willpower, while the other requires deep reflection and self-awareness of what one truly desires from their life.

The Adaptive Role of Emotions

Living Fossils reposted an older piece, and it was a good recap: The Adaptive Role of Emotions - by Josh Zlatkus #emotions #evo-psych #evolution

First some evolution basics:

Like most species-typical traits, emotions evolved in what evolutionary psychologists call “the environment of evolutionary adaptedness,” or EEA. The EEA is the environment—technically, a statistical composite of environmental conditions—in which humans evolved.2 It is worth reflecting that humans have only been agricultural for the last 10,000 years (5% our history), industrial for the last 150 years (.075%), and digital for the last 30 years (.015%).3 These modes of existence are unlikely to have influenced our psychological architecture much because they haven’t been around very long compared to other modes of existence, like hunting and gathering in small tribes.4

Our modern environment is similar in some ways to the EEA (we still breathe oxygen) but different in others (we interact with far more people today). These differences often have unfortunate results, such as when our sweet tooth, designed for a sugar-scarce world, meets ice-cream. Indeed, it may be that eating too much is now more deadly than not eating enough. We tend to understand such evolutionary mismatch, I think—at least to the extent we are aware of it—as an inevitable cost to human progress. All else equal, the temptation to eat too much is considered less bad than the possibility of starving.

coming to emotions

With all this as background, it should be easier to understand why I’m rankled by cognitive behavioral therapy’s use of the word “maladaptive” to describe client emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Of course, what CBT means by “maladaptive” is that some emotions, thoughts, and patterns of behavior are inconsistent with a person’s goals. For example, outbursts of anger are not conducive to getting promoted or building friendships. But boy, what a poor word choice for the orientation that holds itself out as the most “evidence-based,” when the evidence is quite strong that emotions are, in fact, adaptations. While CBT should know better, it is not alone. Every therapeutic orientation conceptualizes emotions differently, and I have yet to encounter one that understands them as adaptive in the evolutionary sense.

and finally a call to base therapy on more solid foundations

At the very least, an ultimate explanation for emotions—as adaptations that helped our ancestors navigate problems and opportunities—could become the common starting point for this central topic in mental health. Rather than allow every therapeutic technique its own origin story, within which emotions are defined anew, let’s actually make therapy a scientific enterprise by building on shared, epistemological bedrock.

What Netflix is doing to cinema

What Netflix Has Done to Movies w/ Will Tavlin - Episodes - Tech Won’t Save Us #netflix #pop-culture #movies #tv #streaming

Also relevant is this article in n+1 written by the podcast guest: Casual Viewing | Issue 49 | n+1 | Will Tavlin

Summarized this podcast using ChatGPT

1. Introduction: The Evolution of Netflix and Its Consequences

2. Netflix’s Origin Story and Mythmaking

3. Streaming: From Experiment to Industry Domination

4. Netflix’s Expansion: Targeting Television and Film

5. The Disillusionment with Netflix’s Indie Film Push

6. The Rise of the “Typical Netflix Movie”

7. Netflix’s Deceptive Viewership Metrics

8. The Broader Impact on Cinema

Actionable Takeaways

  1. Support Theatrical Releases: Watching films in cinemas helps preserve their cultural and artistic value.
  2. Seek Alternatives: Explore platforms and distributors prioritizing quality over quantity (e.g., Criterion, Mubi).
  3. Demand Transparency: Push for better reporting of streaming viewership and fairer compensation for creators.
  4. Be Critical of Streaming Culture: Recognize how platforms shape what and how we consume media.

Memorable Quotes

bunster

GitHub - yassinebenaid/bunster: Compile shell scripts to static binaries. #go #shell #tools

Bunster in fact is a shell-to-Go Transplier that generates Go source out of your scripts. Then, optionally uses the Go Toolchain to compile the code to an executable program.

Bunster targets bash scripts in particular. The current syntax and features are all inherited from bash. additional shells will be supported as soon as we relase v1.

I played around with this for a bit. I am not sure if I will use it for anything, but the code generated by bunster for the bash script I gave it was very instructive. It was like a deep-dive into how shells work: bunster/runtime at v0.7.0 · yassinebenaid/bunster · GitHub

godump

GitHub - yassinebenaid/godump: Dump any GO variable with ease #go #tools

A versatile Go library designed to output any Go variable in a structured and colored format.

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