You can read the daily log for the last few days below, or with the Atom feed. Browse the archives for more.
Subscribe to the weekly email digest
2025-04-23
Banking and Crypto
Crypto Might Get Some Banks - Bloomberg #crypto #stablecoin
But narrow banking pops up elsewhere. One important modern form is stablecoins. A stablecoin is a crypto form of banking: You deposit dollars with a stablecoin issuer, it gives you back tokens entitling you to get your dollars back, and meanwhile it does whatever it wants with the dollars. In the unregulated early days of crypto, “whatever it wants” could be quite spicy indeed, but these days stablecoins are a big business and there is something of a norm of parking the deposits in very safe short-term dollar-denominated assets, ideally Treasury bills or reverse repos or a BlackRock money market fund. If you launched a new stablecoin today and said “we will take your dollars and use them to make loans to emerging crypto entrepreneurs,” you’d have a hard time competing with the big incumbent stablecoins that say “we will take your dollars and use them to buy Treasury bills.” (Especially if, like most stablecoins, you didn’t pay interest.)
The Future is Augmentation
Why LLM-Powered Programming is More Mech Suit Than Artificial Human #llm #coding #software #programming
There is a view in many circles that LLMs will replace programmers. I am hesitant to say that this will never happen, becuase a lot of things with LLMs have surprised me recently, and I expect more surprises to come. For now, however, I don’t see LLMs effectively replacing programmers; but they are transforming how we work. Like Ripley in her Power Loader, we’re learning to operate powerful new tools that extend our capabilities far beyond what we could achieve alone.
This transformation will change what we value in developers. Raw coding ability becomes less important; architectural thinking, pattern recognition, and technical judgment become more crucial. The ability to effectively direct and collaborate with AI tools emerges as a vital skill in itself.
The developers who thrive in this new environment won’t be those who fear or resist AI tools, but those who master them—who understand both their extraordinary potential and their very real limitations. They’ll recognise that the goal isn’t to remove humans from the equation but to enhance what humans can accomplish.
In my view, that’s something to embrace, not fear. The mech suit awaits, and with it comes the potential to build software at scales and speeds previously unimaginable—but only for those skilled enough to operate the machines in ways that don’t harm themselves or those around them.
2025-04-21
AI Phobia
AI Phobia Is Just Fear That ‘Easier’ Equals ‘Cheating’ #ai #phobia #skepticism
Why do these businesses care so much? I suspect they aren’t really worried about AI—they're clinging to an old belief that if work isn't visibly difficult to produce, it must be less valuable. When we dig beneath the surface of "no-AI" policies and detection tools, we find an age-old assumption that worth must be measured in struggle. This mindset shows up again and again, from “hustle culture” and the “rise and grind’ mindset that defined the 2010s to recent return-to-office mandates that prioritize presence over performance. In a culture that values butts in seats and availability on Slack, it becomes easy to mistake friction for effort and effort for worth.
Oddly enough, the very thing we’re resisting—the ease of AI—might be what sets us free. AI isn’t the first tool to challenge how we think about work, but it may be the most direct. By shifting the locus of effort, AI forces us to confront our dysfunctional relationship with work. It holds up a mirror to our culture’s deeply rooted belief that struggle equals value—and in that reflection lies a rare opportunity: to reimagine work in terms of outcomes, not optics; human flourishing, not performance theater.
Anne Helen Petersen once memorably described this as "LARPing your job"—performing a theatrical version of productivity. Workers engage in elaborate displays of "being at work": staying visible on Slack, responding to emails at all hours, and maintaining a digital presence that signals industriousness. The tools have evolved—from software that monitors keyboard activity to AI that analyzes facial expressions in video calls—but the underlying philosophy remains pure Taylorism.
The irony is that these measurements often have little correlation with value creation. Knowledge work rarely follows linear patterns. Our most valuable contributions often come from reflection, seemingly "unproductive" conversations, exploration of dead ends, and invisible mental processing.
A Survey of Reinforcement Learning
The State of Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning #llm #rlhf #rl #reinforcement
This piece is by Sebastian Raschka of Build a Large Language Model fame.
Slowly making my way through this. Found it via a tweet and this is a lot of signal for the relatively short length of the article. Really enjoying it!
2025-04-20
Review Code and LLMs
Alex Bird: "I have found that reviewing code is harder than w…" - Mastodon Canada #llm #code #reviews
I have found that reviewing code is harder than writing code. Increasingly, I am trying to write code that is easier to review -- that when someone looks at it, it is easier for them to tell if it does what it ought.
One of my objections to widespread LLM use for code generation is that we replace the easier task of code writing with the harder task of code reviewing.
(I include ensemble/mob programming here as a type of code review -- continuous code review)
2025-04-18
Plastics
Plastics are greener than they seem
Although the drawbacks of the world’s reliance on plastics are all too apparent, the benefits they provide, in the form of reducing waste and cost, are all too easily overlooked. Plastics have made possible a bewildering range of new materials that can replicate the properties of existing ones, and can do things they cannot, while being lighter, more durable, and cheaper and easier to manufacture. These materials have become vital in everything from building to carmaking to consumer electronics.
Take food as an example. Plastic packaging prevents perishable foodstuffs from spoiling, making possible global trade in meat, fish, fruit and vegetables. It enables essentials like rice, cooking oil and powdered milk to be stored and distributed safely and cheaply. A one-litre plastic bottle weighs 5% as much as a glass one; plastic packaging thus reduces shipping costs and emissions.
Plastics have also eased the world’s reliance on older materials, and on the living beings from which many of them came. There are perhaps 10m pianos in the world. If all their white keys were made of ivory, how many elephants would remain?
2025-04-17
Intelligence in Birds and Mammals
Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals | Quanta Magazine
Intentionally Make Close Friends
Post 43: Intentionally Making Close Friends — Neel Nanda #friendships
Good experiment with some interesting ideas.
2025-04-16
Situationships
Bad Romance #situationships #love #dating
A friend of mine is in a situationship where neither of them talks about their dating lives, so she doesn’t know if he’s seeing other people, and he doesn’t know if she is. Instead, she’s piecing together context clues to figure out his status. This is an untenable situation, and I was surprised she was okay with it. But I think the arrangement satisfies some of her needs while keeping alive the hope of real commitment. Sometimes, uncertainty is preferable when seeking clarity could mean learning that what you want is impossible. It’s like the Prisoner’s Dilemma: staying in a mutually tolerable situation feels safer than risking “losing it all” by asking for the truth.
AI as a normal technology
We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity.
Autonomy and Connection
The Age of The Social Paradox - Rob Henderson's Newsletter #books #review
A fascinating new book, “The Social Paradox: Autonomy, Connection, and Why We Need Both to Find Happiness” by William von Hippel, a social psychologist, offers some insight. Drawing from decades of research in social and evolutionary psychology, von Hippel argues that human beings are pulled by two needs: autonomy (our desire to control our own life) and connection (our need to belong). For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, connection took precedence because small, close-knit communities depended on collaboration and mutual trust. Personal freedom in such societies was constrained by interdependent reliance on kin and friends.
Over time, however, modern lifestyles have elevated autonomy at the expense of connection, leaving many people struggling to balance these twin drives.
Von Hippel argues that the pursuit of autonomy often comes with a trade-off: If we want both independence and companionship, we may feel the need to influence or control others to align with our preferences. We want to live on our own terms, but we also don’t want to be alone — so we might try to guide others toward our way of thinking or doing things. As he puts it, “Only when others conform to your preferences can you meet all your autonomy needs while maintaining your connections.” But this approach is rarely sustainable. Relationships built on control rather than mutual understanding create tension and, ultimately, a hollow sense of connection.
VERT - online file converter
File converters have always disappointed us. They're ugly, riddled with ads, and most importantly; slow. We decided to solve this problem once and for all by making an alternative that solves all those problems, and more.
All non-video files are converted completely on-device; this means that there's no delay between sending and receiving the files from a server, and we never get to snoop on the files you convert.
Video files get uploaded to our lightning-fast RTX 4000 Ada server. Your videos stay on there for an hour, or after they're converted (in the case of the input which you upload) or downloaded (in the case of the output which is to be downloaded), whichever comes first.
Their code is open source as well: GitHub - VERT-sh/VERT: The next-generation file converter. Open source, fully local* and free forever.
The rise of end times fascism
The rise of end times fascism | Far right (US) | The Guardian
Inspired by a warped reading of the political philosopher Albert Hirschman, figures including Goff, Thiel and the investor and writer Balaji Srinivasan have been championing what they call “exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.
The Map is Not The Territory - Social Media Edition
cutting through the image - by Adam Aleksic #map #territory #social-media
However, as I’ve previously written, social media platforms want us to think that their map is the territory, because that helps their business model. The more we confuse their “content” with reality, the more we identify with it. Over time, you might really find yourself pursuing regular basket-weaving instead of underwater basket-weaving, simply because that’s what’s available to connect with—but that makes you easier to target as a consumer, since you’re now aligning your identity with the kind of broad metadata the algorithm is able to work with.
Once you identify with the algorithmic version of reality, the manufactured values of the platform become synonymous with your actual values. Content is presented as if it’s “good”—after all, it’s targeted for you, and has lots of “likes” from other people—but these metrics are made up. They reflect the platform priority of engagement optimization, rather than actually being intrinsically “good” or targeted to you.
We might prefer to compartmentalize our “algorithmic selves” from our “real selves” like we’re characters on Severance, but the truth is that they’re both constantly influencing each other. You get basket-weaving videos because you have a latent urge to pursue underwater basket-weaving, and then you ultimately take regular basket-weaving classes because you identified with the spectacular presentation of reality.
Our memes and language are similarly always evolving online and offline, with both mediums constantly influencing each other. The territory affects the map we draw, and then that map affects how we interact with the territory. This is inevitable—it’s just useful to remember which is which.
2025-04-15
Missed a bunch of daily logs because I was locked in. Hopefully I can resume today onwards.
Oliver's Burkeman's Latest Newsletter - No Escape
The Imperfectionist: No escape (from 2022)
I think the general point here, beyond the specific question of how to get writing done, is that we desperately want to be saved. We want to find some person, or some philosophy of life, that will spare us the fear or discomfort or self-doubt or tedium that so often seems to come along for the ride, whenever we try to make progress on things we care about. We hate feeling yoked to reality in such an unpleasant way; we long instead to soar above it, in a realm free from problems. And it’s the mark of a bad self-help book, a dodgy spiritual guru or an incompetent therapist that they’ll be only too happy to encourage the illusion that this might one day be possible.
I don’t think people generally seek out such quick fixes or back-door solutions out of laziness or entitlement. It’s not because they think they shouldn’t have to put in the same effort as everyone else. Rather, most of the time, it’s the opposite: it’s that they feel so inadequate and unqualified for the task ahead of them (of writing, of marriage, parenting – whatever) that they believe they absolutely need a miracle technique, some sort of edge over other people, some secret from a book, if they’re to have half a chance of not screwing everything up. They don’t realise that everyone else is just winging it, too – and that all they need to do is the straightforward thing that’s been staring them in the face all along: to just write for a few hours a week; to sit down for a few minutes and meditate; to be the most loving spouse or parent they’re capable of being on this particular day, and so on.
AI's impact on the job market
The Post-Developer Era • Josh W. Comeau #ai #jobs #software #programming
Josh Comeau with a solid take.
If you’re a job-seeker, you know that there aren’t as many high-quality job listings as there used to be, and the good ones get swamped with applications. It’s very hard to get an interview, let alone an offer.
But I don’t think this is because companies are actually replacing their developers with autonomous AI agents. As I’ve shared, the real-world experiences I’ve read just don’t support that hypothesis. So what gives? Why is it still so brutal out there?
I think there are a few factors:
Macro-economic stuff. Interest rates are still relatively high, making it harder for startups to attract the funding they need to grow and hire developers. For several years now, the general economic sentiment has been that we’re on the cusp of a recession.
Layoffs. Big tech companies laid off hundreds of thousands of workers over the past couple of years, for a variety of reasons. This means that there are tons of highly-qualified devs out there, looking for work.
AI myths. Some companies are still operating under the belief that AI really will make developers obsolete soon, and so they’re not hiring as aggressively as they otherwise would.
That last point is particularly frustrating. Companies are not hiring the developers they need because they’re convinced that AGI? is right around the corner, and when that egg hatches, we won’t need human developers at all anymore. “It’ll be any week now”, they’ve been saying for years. 😅
2025-04-09
Inquiring Together
Why not inquire together more? - Marginal REVOLUTION #inquiry #questions #discussion #ideas
I find that “inquiring together” works best when you are traveling together, and confronted with new questions. They can be as mundane as “do you think the two people at that restaurant table are on a first date or not?” From the point of view of the observers, the inquiry is de novo. And the joint inquiry will be fun, and may make some progress. You both have more or less the same starting point. There isn’t really a better way to proceed, short of asking them.
For most established social science and philosophy questions, however, there is so much preexisting analysis and literature that the “chains of thought” are very long. The frontier point is not well maintained by a dyadic conversation, because doing so is computationally complex and further the two individuals likely have at least marginally separate agendas. So the pair end up talking around in circles, rather than progressively. It would be better if one person wrote a short memo or brief and the other offered comments. In fact we usethat method frequently, and fairly often it succeeds in keeping the dialogue at the epistemic frontier.
Shopify CEO Memo
This memo of the Shopify CEO mandating AI usage is doing the rounds.
The skeptic in me wonders if something that is obviously useful really needs a top-down mandate. Wouldn't developers automatically adopt it if AI was that transformational? It sounds to me like a bit of a bait and switch where the true agenda is something else - like justifying hiring less and dumping more work on the currently working engineers at Shopify, and using AI as an excuse for keeping up the same level of productivity and output.
On the other hand, this could one of those memos which goes down in technology lore as something that changed computing forever, like the famous Bezos memo: API Mandate: How Jeff Bezos' memo changed software forever | Kong Inc.
AI coding mandates are driving developers to the brink
AI coding mandates are driving developers to the brink - LeadDev
This dropped a day or so after the AI memo above, and is very skeptical about AI Adoption.
For software developers specifically, there are concerns that AI coding tools are introducing errors into their code, failing at many tasks, and compounding technical debt. But they also feel that misguided mandates are inhibiting the successful adoption of AI tools. While AI coding assistants can be helpful, it’s clear that how leaders approach and support engineering teams makes all the difference.
The HN Discussion around it is pretty insightful as well. From the comments:
I think a lot of confusion and frustration about this is the assumption that all programming is the same thing.
I have seen areas with just tons of boilerplate, straight forward UI stuff, basic test skeletons, etc that I guess could work with AI.
But personally, in 30 years I’ve just never done much of that kind of work. Probably because I find it boring. I go look for hard or novel problems, or data structures and APIs that are causing problems (overgrown and hard to use, buggy, etc). A lot of the time is just figuring out what the authors expected the code to do, and anticipating what we will need for the next few years. I don’t see AI helping much with that.
This pattern is maybe 20% about AI specifically and 80% about low-trust leadership.
LLMs require comparatively little training to use, and in fact training (like how to optimize prompts etc.) is probably a waste of time because the model behavior and interfaces change so frequently.
This puts them in the class of tools where the benefit is obvious once there is actually a real benefit (and not, say, the foreshadowing of some future benefit). This sort of tool doesn't require a mandate to gain adoption.
So, in the subdomains of software development where the LLMs are already useful, developers will naturally pick them up, assuming the business has secured the policy support and funding. In the areas where they aren't useful, businesses should trust developers and not waste their time with mandates.
And I say this as someone who uses LLMs all day every day for Python, Go, Bash, C/C++, pretty much everything. But as an active user I see the limitations constantly and wouldn't mandate their use upon anyone.
2025-04-08
Dealing with an internet outage where I am at.
2025-04-06
How Gatsby foretold Trump’s America
How Gatsby foretold Trump’s America #trump #oligarchy
Celebrating its centenary on April 10 2025, The Great Gatsby endures as the defining portrait of Jazz Age extravagance and glamour — a shimmering vision of energy, affluence and possibility. Away from the brightness, however, lies a world where dreams wither beneath corruption and malice.
Observing the deepening faultlines in American society in the early 1920s, F Scott Fitzgerald guessed right: he foresaw tragedy in the country’s impulse towards grandiosity and self-destruction in its reckless dishonesty. While Gatsby doesn’t predict the Trumpian politics of 2025 in any literal sense, it perfectly captures the society that would embrace such politics a century later. The novel’s prescience lies not in foretelling specific events but in diagnosing a culture where power enjoys impunity and cruelty rubs out its traces — a society run by careless people.
Fitzgerald’s verdict on them at the end of Gatsby has become for many a definitive statement on unaccountable elites today: “They were careless people . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Gatsby reaches beyond the moral failures of its characters to expose carelessness as a political force. This includes not only the oligarchy’s immunity from consequence, but also the way extraction was equated with success. The unheeding brutality of so-called world-builders has returned most recently in the dark fantasies of Trumpism, and in Silicon Valley’s fatuous motto, “move fast and break things”.
Women and Work
Women, work and why we’re getting it all wrong #books #workplace #women #feminism
I have tried to articulate my own response to these questions after reading three recent books that explore work in contrasting ways. Patriarchy Inc by Cordelia Fine goes deep into biology and culture to debunk the common (and, in the second Trump era, ascendant) idea that men and women are genetically predisposed to desire different jobs. Charlie Colenutt has produced an oral history of UK workers in their own words, 50 years after Studs Terkel’s US version, Working. And Emily Callaci reanimates the 1970s Wages for Housework movement, a challenge to capitalist assumptions about which labour carries economic worth.
Fine’s book follows her bestselling Testosterone Rex (2017), in which she examines theories that this hormone is what creates inequality between the sexes: in Fine’s analysis, it’s culture, not nature. Patriarchy Inc takes these arguments into the workplace, to demolish the contention that our genetic and hormonal differences mean it’s natural that women and men do different jobs (this would neatly explain why there are so few women in corporate leadership, for example). Fine pithily calls this the “Different But Equal” argument. In her analysis — and it’s one I agree with — we have, rather, been acculturated from birth to expect one type of work or another. Fine calls this “mindshaping”. And it can be reversed.
Once men decide they want to do a job in large numbers, she argues, it becomes high-status. Fine outlines the early history of software programming, when women were considered suited to its demands as “a kind of puzzle-solving — like crosswords”, and held senior roles. In 1957, programmer Elsie Shutt became pregnant and was forced to leave her job at Raytheon Computing in Massachusetts. She carried on freelancing, recruiting other mothers as her workload grew. Shutt’s resulting business, Computations Inc, was rooted in collaboration between “physically dispersed part-time workers, in the days before email and Zoom”. It was very successful.
There’s no definitive answer, Fine says, to explain why women fell away from programming, after peaking in the mid 1980s — 37 per cent of computer science graduates in the US in 1984 were women. Software programming was rebranded as “software engineering” and, as more men rushed in, it became a high-status job. Screening tests became “dubious and gender-based aptitude tests and personality profiles”. Fine’s wider point is that when a significant number of a dominant group take desirable jobs, “social closure” occurs. Men hoard the roles for other men; the same would happen whenever there is a dominant group, because of our inbuilt affinity for others like us: “homophily”. It’s often not conscious, it’s how humans work, left unchecked.
Fine deals in the structures that underpin corporate life. For what happens “on the ground”, I turned to Charlie Colenutt’s Is This Working?. He interviewed 100 people across the UK, and 68 made it into the book, identified only by age and job description. Throughout this long (probably too long) book, the common thread is that it is fate or chance meetings that determine many working lives, rather than planned careers.
Colenutt groups the interviews into sections: “Sales work”, “Bosswork”, “City work” and so on. An online sex worker is with a panel beater, a security guard and a warehouse worker, in “Bodywork”. She’s a student, supplementing an inadequate loan, and finds the work “freeing” — but her account is a glimpse into the invisible, underpaid sectors that service those in well-paid corporate jobs.
The biggest question about work, which Colenutt and Fine approach, focuses on what and who we value. Emily Callaci’s Wages for Housework goes further: it explores a feminist campaign to pay housewives. Why do we tolerate the lack of economic worth assigned to caring? And is a different view possible?
The book is, in part, a chronological account of Wages for Housework in the wider landscape of women’s liberation in the early 1970s, and also contains chapter-long biographies of five key figures in the global movement. I previously knew nothing about this important strand of second-wave feminism and the women behind it, including the American activist and anti-racist organiser Selma James, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, an Italian academic and political radical.
“Wages for Housework,” she writes, “is perhaps best understood as a political perspective, which starts from the premise that capitalism extracts wealth not only from workers, but also from the unpaid work of creating and sustaining workers.” As well as their employee, an employer gets “the labor of the second person who is at home sustaining him”. When the movement emerged in the 1970s, that worker was presumed to be a him.
LLMs from an operator's perspective
LLMs: an operator's view - by James Stanier #llm #operator #manager
In the midst of the current LLM explosion, we as operators find ourselves amongst:
- A blistering pace of improvement in the capabilities of LLMs. New models and products are being released at a rate that is hard to keep up with.
- Immense noise and hype online making all sorts of claims, good and bad, about what the future holds.
- An expectation from our companies to go full-on with "AI", which typically means LLMs, both in developer tooling and in customer-facing products. AI is the new data is the new cloud.
- Echoes in the industry that we are all now overstaffed as a result of productivity gains: that everyone should do more with less, and that AI is the answer to that.
What we'll cover related to LLMs is:
- The (real) rising floor of developer productivity.
- The changing size of organizations.
- The increasing importance of code reviews.
- The changing nature of interviews and identifying talent in short spaces of time.
As an operator, up-skilling your team to use these tools is now essential. Securing the necessary budget to give everyone access to the Pro tiers of ChatGPT, Cursor, or whatever tools represent the best fit for your team is a table stakes activity. And yes, this does mean that your budget will increase, but the productivity gains from an existing team will more than make up for it. Trade the cost of hiring new people for the cost of acquiring tooling.
You should also take the adoption of this tooling seriously. It is not just a case of giving everyone subscriptions and hoping for the best. You need to invest time and effort into training your team on how to use these tools effectively.
ML Inference Optimization Learning Path
One way to find a career in core ML/AI stuff #ai #llm #ml #career #learning
be me june 2024 learn ML model optimizations inference mostly, training a bit optimize SDXL inference post about it find cuda, learn it blogs on kernels for sgemv, softmax, etc. get in-depth knowledge on GPUs fal reaches out offering a role optimize inference of 4 models back to back feel grateful
How to Do Real Work With LLMs
How to Do Real Work With LLMs, Part 1 - by Jon Stokes
LLMs are the next phase of this exact same phenomenon. LLMs enable human language to eat the software that is still eating the world.
2025-04-05
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman - Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
This is my second time reading the book. Actually, it is the first because the first time I listened to it as an audio book. I am also reading this book right now as I slowly embark on a reset of long held belief and patterns of behavior around productivity and achievement.
These excerpts from the chapter titled Cosmic Insignifance Therapy really hit home.
The hazard in any such discussion of “what matters most” in life, though, is that it tends to give rise to a kind of paralyzing grandiosity. It starts to feel as though it’s your duty to find something truly consequential to do with your time—to quit your office job to become an aid worker or start a space flight company—or else, if you’re in no position to make such a grand gesture, to conclude that a deeply meaningful life isn’t an option for you. On the level of politics and social change, it becomes tempting to conclude that only the most revolutionary, world-transforming causes are worth fighting for—that it would be meaningless to spend your time, say, caring for an elderly relative with dementia or volunteering at the local community garden while the problems of global warming and income inequality remain unsolved. Among New Age types, this same grandiosity takes the form of the belief that each of us has some cosmically significant Life Purpose, which the universe is longing for us to uncover and then to fulfill.
Which is why it’s useful to begin this last stage of our journey with a blunt but unexpectedly liberating truth: that what you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much—and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.
It’s natural to find such thoughts terrifying. To contemplate “the massive indifference of the universe,” writes Richard Holloway, the former bishop of Edinburgh, can feel “as disorienting as being lost in a dense wood, or as frightening as falling overboard into the sea with no-one to know we have gone.” But there’s another angle from which it’s oddly consoling. You might think of it as “cosmic insignificance therapy”: When things all seem too much, what better solace than a reminder that they are, provided you’re willing to zoom out a bit, indistinguishable from nothing at all? The anxieties that clutter the average life—relationship troubles, status rivalries, money worries—shrink instantly down to irrelevance. So do pandemics and presidencies, for that matter: the cosmos carries on regardless, calm and imperturbable. Or to quote the title of a book I once reviewed: The Universe Doesn’t Give a Flying Fuck About You. To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realize we were carrying in the first place.
The evolutionary angle here is interesting
These self-centered judgments are part of what psychologists call the “egocentricity bias,” and they make good sense from an evolutionary standpoint. If you had a more realistic sense of your own sheer irrelevance, considered on the timescale of the universe, you’d probably be less motivated to struggle to survive, and thereby to propagate your genes.
Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely—and often enough, marvelously—really is.
Goya Journal - MTR in Bengaluru and Iftar in Lucknow
The latest edition of the Goya Journal newsletter landed in my inbox and a couple of article caught my eye - one about Lucknow, a city I grew up in and about MTR in Bengaluru.
- From Sehri to Iftaar in the Streets of Lucknow — GOYA
- The Story of Bengaluru's Iconic MTR, the Original Udupi Hotel — GOYA
Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Started reading this book on a whim because I saw Oliver Burkeman recommended it. I didn't expect much, and it turned out to be not that different from a typical book in the self-help genre. But skimming it does yield some nice gems, like this quote from Ron Finley
When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them I breathe - I'm a professional breather. We create those false transitions, we make it all look like it's separate, just like we separate a garden, from a state, from a country, and ourselves from nature.
2025-04-04
Stop expecting your partner to fulfil all your needs | Dazed #dating #relationships #expectations
But what if we’ve now swung to the other extreme? Many of us now expect our partners to be everything: our best friends, sexual playmates, therapists, running buddies, cheerleaders, and more. We don’t accept any traits that jar with our own or a single conflicting value – and it’s likely this is making dating harder for us all.
But by approaching dating as nothing more than a tick-box exercise, we drive away possible moments of intimacy and connection. Contrasts in personalities, temperaments, and interests provide the push-and-pull needed to allow relationships to thrive. This doesn’t mean settling for someone who treats you poorly or forcing yourself to persevere with dating someone who doesn’t excite you. But if you like wild Friday nights and your partner prefers Netflix marathons, go party with your friends. If you love Sunday morning hikes and they don’t, go solo or find a buddy. A partner doesn’t have to be your everything.
I’ve been single for a while (aside from a minor situationship detour), and when people ask if I miss dating, I can honestly say I don’t. I get everything I need from my friends, sisters, mum, dogs, and – ahem – vibrational support. But most importantly, I’ve learned to rely on myself. If I want to see a play or catch a comedy show, I go solo. I can still grab lunch at that cute café I’ve been eyeing or curl up somewhere with a coffee and a good book. I stopped expecting one person to be my whole world, romantic or otherwise.
2025-04-03
Matt Levine on Stablecoins
Stablecoins Are Growing Up - Bloomberg #stablecoin #money #finance #crypto
I have always thought of stablecoins as basically unregulated non-interest-paying crypto banks. The idea of a stablecoin is that there is a company, the stablecoin issuer, and you send the company dollars, and it gives you back tokens (“stablecoins”). Each token is supposed to be worth a dollar, and if you hand the issuer back a token it will hand you back a dollar.1 But mostly you hold onto the stablecoins and the issuer holds onto your dollars. You both arguably benefit from this:
- You can use the tokens like dollars on in crypto applications, where actual dollars are hard to use: The stablecoins live natively on various crypto blockchains, can be sent over the blockchain, can be used in smart contracts, etc., in ways that don’t really work with dollars held in bank accounts.
- The issuer has the dollars, which it can invest in super-safe short-dated US Treasury bills, or anything else, to make money. It doesn’t pay you any interest; any profit it makes from its investing is the issuer’s to keep.
But yesterday Circle Internet Group Inc., the big US-based issuer of the USDC stablecoin, filed publicly for an initial public offering. It has previously filed confidentially, but its prospectus is available now. It is an interesting read, and it has caused me to update my model of stablecoins in two respects:
- Circle is not an unregulated bank; it is a tech front-end for US banks and asset managers.2
- I am not as sure as I once was about “non-interest-paying.”
AI Ambivalence
Great articulation of how it is like to use AI for software development.
Imagine you’re a Studio Ghibli artist. You’ve spent years perfecting your craft, you love the feeling of the brush/pencil in your hand, and your life’s joy is to make beautiful artwork to share with the world. And then someone tells you gen-AI can just spit out My Neighbor Totoro for you. Would you feel grateful? Would you rush to drop your art supplies and jump head-first into the role of AI babysitter?
This is how I feel using gen-AI: like a babysitter. It spits out reams of code, I read through it and try to spot the bugs, and then we repeat. Although of course, as Cory Doctorow points out, the temptation is to not even try to spot the bugs, and instead just let your eyes glaze over and let the machine do the thinking for you – the full dream of vibe coding.
I do believe that this is the end state of this kind of development: “giving into the vibes,” not even trying to use your feeble primate brain to understand the code that the AI is barfing out, and instead to let other barf-generating “agents” evaluate its output for you. I’ll accept that maybe, maybe, if you have the right orchestra of agents that you’re conducting, then maybe you can cut down on the bugs, hallucinations, and repetitive boilerplate that gen-AI seems prone to. But whatever you’re doing at that point, it’s not software development, at least not the kind that I’ve known for the past ~20 years.
The entire conclusion section is worth reading as well. Here is the last couple of paragraphs
So there’s my overwhelming feeling at the end of this post: ambivalence. I feel besieged and horrified by what gen-AI has wrought on my industry, but I can no longer keep my ears plugged while the tsunami roars outside. Maybe, like a lot of other middle-aged professionals suddenly finding their careers upended at the peak of their creative power, I will have to adapt or face replacement. Or maybe my best bet is to continue to zig while others are zagging, and to try to keep my coding skills sharp while everyone else is “vibe coding” a monstrosity that I will have to debug when it crashes in production someday.
I honestly don’t know, and I find that terrifying. But there is some comfort in the fact that I don’t think anyone else knows what’s going to happen either.
Hamish Mckenzie on Chaos Media
From the temple to the garden - by Hamish McKenzie #media #chaos
Today, we live in the age of chaos media.
Traditional media’s rigid order has been replaced by mayhem. Conflict supersedes consideration. Speed overwhelms verification. This system is, in many senses, a marvel, with massive democratization potential. Anyone can have a voice, and your idea, if the winds blow just right, can reach billions of people in an instant. One of its great virtues is that it demands that everyone—even the powers that be—speak to each other directly, and others can talk back. Now the savviest politicians sit down for long interviews in nontraditional formats and show their thinking.
Hamish (as the founder of Substack) has a vested interest in the shift away from traditional media. So understandably, this piece is a bit tepid when it comes to outlining a clear alternative. He just seems to just gloss over the corrosive effects of chaos media.
The chaos of our current media moment cannot last, but no one knows exactly what the new landscape will look like when it stabilizes. That’s precisely why your choices today matter so much. Every subscription, every share, every minute of your attention is a vote for the culture you want to see flourish. You can choose to invest in a system that values deep relationships over the flimsy validation that chaos media offers. You can reclaim your attention from the doomscroll feeds and pour it like water onto the seedlings of a better future. These actions aren’t just about getting better content or contributing to a healthier media economy—they cultivate a richer, more thoughtful culture capable of addressing the complex challenges of our time. It’s a culture worth subscribing to.
2025-04-02
Means of Production vs Means of Connecting
The Algorithmic Holiday - by Brett Scott #capitalism #gig #economy
The Gig Economy platforms, by contrast, run a lean version of this. A company like Uber knows that it doesn’t actually need to own tens of thousands of cars - the Means of Production - provided that it owns an information and management architecture that stands between those productive assets and society: Uber owns the Means of Connecting, rather than the Means of Production, which means they can still be a gatekeeper between workers and consumers, while outsourcing finance costs to the individual workers.
Choosing Next.js
Build Times - You should know this before choosing Next.js #nextjs #next #javascript
A breakdown of how Next.js seems to be tied to Vercel in many ways, who don't seem to care about being good open source stewards.
- Lack of adapters
- No official serverless support
- Vercel-Specific, Undocumented Code Paths
- Poor Security Incident Handling
- Lack of transparency in governance
Beauty and Relationships
Does beauty make people good partners? | Dazed #beauty #relationship #love #feminism
So much of romantic relationships is about pressing yourself into a shape you do not recognise, as Faye so accurately puts it. We are told that women are meant to be hyper-feminine and that the right man will put you in your “feminine energy”, as divine feminine con-influencers incessantly express online. But this isn’t a natural state of being as we are so often told, but a naturalised one. We act this way because we are told to and because it gets the best reception from both our desired partners and from the public.
Nobody knows what Leclerc and Mleux’s relationship is like, and yet they assume it’s good because she is beautiful and feminine and adheres to her gender correctly. Conversely, so does he – Leclerc is seen as being good-looking and is immersed in the hyper-masculine and perilous world of motor racing. We praise certain relationships and those within them for their ability to keep up with appearances.
This is not surprising. As beauty critic, Jessica DeFino wrote in her newsletter last year, as a society, we tend to have the moral code of Disney cartoons. We superficially believe that beauty is good; thus, a beautiful couple must have a healthy relationship (look at the contrast with how people talk about and aspire to Dua Lipa and Callum Turner’s relationship). When we see people we perceive as “ugly” (ie who sit outside narrow European beauty standards), we are quick to assume the worst. That their relationship must be bad, that something must be wrong, that they are not really in love. This is exactly why people feel the need to change and transform themselves beyond recognition. It seems contrary to what we ask of people when we are looking for love in the first place. We ask that people genuinely love us for who we are, but the world repeatedly proves that we will only be rewarded for looking a certain way, for not being or looking like ourselves.
In her book Right Wing Women, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin writes that “the tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognise that they are committing suicide.” Dworkin was making a specific reference here to right-wing women who make accommodations to male domination for their own survival. But when I read that quote, I immediately thought about beauty and relationships and the ways we transform ourselves entirely for love and survival. But we deserve to do way more in this life than just survive.
We “survive” by adhering to our gender roles, with their own built-in violence that often result in tragedy. We “survive” by adhering to beauty standards, where people go under the knife and sometimes do not wake up or have lifelong complications due to surgeries. We “survive” by changing ourselves, making ourselves smaller and more easily digestible, to the point where we look in the mirror and can no longer recognise who is staring back at us. It may seem like survival, but as Dworkin would put it, it is a type of death.
Not all people feel forced to look a certain type of way in their relationships; but many of us can relate to feeling pressured within these dynamics to keep up with appearances. Love and the pursuit of it (albeit challenging) are supposed to be fun, exhilarating, and life-affirming, but rarely ever feel that way. So, what really makes a good partner? Maybe once we deprioritise the importance of physical appearance from our lives (and gender), we will genuinely know the answer to that question.
2025-04-01
Travel day. Digital nomadding for at least a month.
Mumbai Recs
A lovely friend sent along some very hyperlocal food recs for Mumbai #food
Chembur - my most fav vadapav in front of post office opens 4 or 5pm
Matunga - Classic pav bhaji or DPs Pav bhaji if you’re interested to try South Indian: Ramashray or madras cafe, there’s a soya chaap wala near madras cafe that’s also v good. Gupta pani puri near the matunga station. Too many Guptas check for the right one haha
Sion : gurukripa samosa. Very famous supplies to most theatres and schools in Mumbai
Dadar : Ashok Vada pav, sandwich also might be good in most places Bombay veg toast here.
Near marine drive : panini at Raju sandwich in front of KC college and K rustoms icecream is famous for the nostalgia value. I like the walnut crunch flavour there tho hahah
2025-03-31
Stationary
Inspired by a friend, I invested in some stationary today
- Clairefontaine Triomphe paper
- Kum pencil sharpener
- Tombow Mono mechanical pencil
2025-03-30
Vibe Coding Manifesto
Vibe Coding Manifesto #ai #coding #vibe
💜Flow over friction – Ride the wave, don't fight it.
💜Iteration over perfection – Perfection is obsolete if you can always reroll.
💜Augmentation over automation – AI is a collaborator, not a replacement.
💜Product thinking over code crafting – What matters is what you build, not how you write it.
💜Rerolling over debugging – If fixing takes too long, regenerate.
💜Human taste over technical constraints – The best tech serves great taste, not the other way around.
2025-03-29
Lucifer
Watched this Malayalam movie called Lucifer which was released a few years ago. It was actually to build some context because a sequel to this movie just released and I have been convinced under mild duress to go watch it.
I haven't watched a lot of Malayalam movies. Lucifer is made in a specific style that uses common tropes in Indian cinema - outsized male protagonist, unrealistic action sequences, bombastic dialogues, lavish sets. It is designed to appeal to a mass market audience and may not appeal to a more nuanced cinema lover. But having said that, I have watched many Bollywood Hindi movies in that genre which are terribly made, and compared to those I thought this movie was very tastefully made. Prithviraj Sukumaran is a genius filmmaker, and Mohanlal as the lead puts the Shahrukhs and Salmans of Bollywood to shame.
2025-03-28
AI and the software industry
How will AI affect the software industry? | Alex Hyett #ai #coding #software #programming
AI is definitely going to cause more people to create software in the same way that Instagram caused more people to take photos. However, not everyone taking photos is a photographer, and not everyone creating software is a software developer.
Anyone can take a photo with their phone, but a photographer understands things like lighting and composition (can you tell I'm not a photographer!) to capture a memory or tell a story that not everyone is capable of.
The same is true for software development. Yes, AI is capable of writing code, but unless you are capable of fully understanding the requirements and the code that it has written, it won't be as good as what a professional developer could do.
Doomerism
The Imperfectionist: Three ideas for turbulent times
From Oliver Burkeman's latest
But “if we can recognise that change and uncertainty are basic principles,” as the futurist and environmentalist Hazel Henderson put it, “we can greet the future… with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.” You can take a crisis very seriously indeed without fooling yourself that you know the worst outcome is certain. In fact, I’d say that to assume the worst is to fail to take it seriously. All of which is worth bearing in mind before you next let some alarmist commentator’s efforts at emotional self-management, masquerading as objective analysis, completely derail your day.
As Eliason notes, this isn’t merely a matter of a mistaken mindset; powerful cultural and economic forces have shaped things this way. Work and physical exercise used to overlap far more than they do, and the shift to work-from-home has eliminated much socialising with colleagues. Plus it’s much easier for corporations to sell “exercise”– in the form of gym memberships, stationary bikes and so forth – than somehow to turn “a physically active social life spent largely outdoors” into a marketable product. Still, most of us probably do have some individual scope to “de-atomise” our lives, finding multiple forms of benefit in the same activity, so that we’re no longer trying to cram things like parenting, exercise and household chores into separate stretches of our all-too-finite time.
Also found this amazing piece from the newsletter: De-Atomization is the Secret to Happiness #exercise #atomization
Things that go wrong with disk IO
Things that go wrong with disk IO | notes.eatonphil.com #disk #io
This is a great article. I encountered the different ways that disk IO can go wrong for the first time when I worked on Badger, a key value database in Go. At that time I remember being puzzled by the number of things to deal with when trying to recover from a disk crash.
There are a few interesting scenarios to keep in mind when writing applications (not just databases!) that read and write files, particularly in transactional contexts where you actually care about the integrity of the data and when you are editing data in place (versus copy-on-write for example).
We'll go into a few scenarios where the following can happen:
- Data you write never actually makes it to disk
- Data you write get sent to the wrong location on disk
- Data you read is read from the wrong location on disk
- Data gets corrupted on disk
And how real-world data systems think about these scenarios. (They don't always think of them at all!)
Containers from scratch in shell
great talk. it has double audio till about 3:20 but that gets fixed after that. this is a great resource to understand container basics by building one from first principles.
Criticisms of the Ghiblification Meme
This is a great articulation of the problematic nature of the latest Ghiblification trend. I don't care so much about other critiques along the lines of copyright infringement so much, but this hits home.
Curious vs Humble
#curious #humble
Doing Things You Love
How I Choose What to Work On - Tynan.com #life #goals
Despite being a lifelong entrepreneur and being relatively successful at it, I don’t write a lot about it because I routinely make decisions that trade money for other things (freedom, autonomy, quality of life, stubborn insistence on what I want a product to be, etc). I suspect that most people who want entrepreneurial advice are more interested in making money than the things I prioritize.
I don’t really even know if I’d suggest my method for other people, since it’s pretty tailored to me and my preferences, but I’m happy to share it in case it gives anyone anything to think about.
If there were a core principle of my method, it would be that life is amazing and my goal is to maximize experiencing life. You need a certain amount of money to do that, and increasing amounts of money make even more things possible, but often these come at the cost of increased stress, reduced time with loved ones, or doing work that doesn’t matter to you.
With that in mind, I will only ever work on things I want to work on. I would rather be poor than make a lot of money doing something I hate, and I think my history of actions (readable on the 15+ years of blog posts I’ve written) prove that. If I were giving advice I’d probably encourage someone to choose the most profitable thing out of all of the things they want to do, but that’s not necessarily advice I’d follow.
If you do something you love, you will become good at it much faster than something you don’t love, and when you are good at something you will have some opportunity to commercialize it.
on money
Part of the reason I’ve been able to do this is because I’ve always designed my life such that it can benefit from having money (pinball arcade rooms and all that…) but is also compatible with having no money.
2025-03-27
Trippy Art
Trippy art partly inspired by Tibetan Buddhist art.
Nature vs Nurture
"Is it nature or is it nurture?" is a damn good question #nature #nurture
Case for not watching Streaming TV shows
The Case Against Streaming TV Shows - by Trungphan2 #tv #streaming
Anyway, let me firm up my case against watching new TV streaming shows with a few additional thoughts:
- How streaming changed TV economics and incentives
- Matt Stone on how streaming distorts the art of TV
- Quentin Tarantino on why TV isn’t memorable
Awesome read.
Non Monogamy
Found this paper in this Dazed article: Non-monogamous relationships are ‘just as happy’ as monogamous ones | Dazed
I LOLed at this paragraph in the article:
The flipside is that the research doesn’t find any consistent benefits to opting out of monogamy either: perhaps surprisingly, people in non-monogamous relationships do not experience “significantly” higher levels of sexual satisfaction. Could this revelation dampen the envy and resentment which some monogamous people clearly feel towards people they assume to be having more sex than them? Could it be the beginning of a detente between two warring factions, who clearly have more in common than they realise? Maybe all relationships trend towards sibling-like companionship punctured by perfunctory bouts of missionary, regardless of how many partners you happen to have. Maybe the non-monogamous aren’t all sex-crazed libertines who live in communes and spend their time having drug-fuelled orgies and making their own kimchi, but human beings with ordinary desires and disappointments, just like you and me.
Complements in Tech
Complementarity matters a lot in tech. One of the drivers of growth at the sector level is that many products complement one another at the product level: if there are smarter phones, there will be more apps; if there are more apps, there will be even smarter phones. This was also a driver of the more recent runup in AI: R&D budgets for designing chips and capex budgets for building them only make sense in light of demand from companies building AI models, and that demand is reasonable because there are so many more consumer use cases.
Conway's Game of Life
Conway’s Game of Life is an example of emergence and self-organisation.
When we surround ourselves with abundant, diverse ideas, complex ideas emerge. These ideas are unique and do not resemble the ideas from which they emerged. Even if the initial set of ideas seem simple and disconnected, spontaneous order can emerge, leading to brilliant ideas.
Emergence and self-organisation are all around us. In the sciences, society, art and in nature.
from: How to live an intellectually rich life - by Utsav Mamoria
2025-03-26
Amplifier NYT - Up-tempo songs
6 (Up-tempo) New Songs You Should Hear Now - The New York Times #amplifier #nyt #playlist #music
Social Media and Health Awareness
Are you actually as unhealthy as you think? | Dazed
This comes through in the marketing where words like “essential” make taking a supplement like sea moss, a red seaweed being promoted for its “92 essential minerals”, seem vital for full body regeneration. In reality, however, there are actually only 13 consumable minerals necessary for human functions, not 92. If you don’t know at least some of the minerals you’re taking, what they do, or if you’re even deficient in any of them, is gagging down a spoonful before breakfast every morning really the epitome of health? And worse, does not taking it make you think you’re less healthy than you are?
Orthorexia nervosa, a disorder defined by the NIH as an attempt to attain optimum health through attention to diet, was first coined in 1997 by Steven Bratman, MD, American physician and author. Over the last few years, eating-disorder treatment centers have been reporting a rise in cases, with studies finding that higher Instagram use was associated with a greater tendency towards orthorexia nervosa. It can be difficult to notice and easy to hide, especially since obsessively healthy eating is seen as a superior habit, hidden behind moralistic and virtuous adjectives related to “cleanliness”.
The truth is, you’re probably not as unhealthy as social media makes you think. No, you don’t have to choke down a spoonful of sea moss to earn a healthier life, go on a meat-only diet to cure assumed deficiencies, or feed into a $700 handful of pre-breakfast supplements to “balance hormones”. “While it’s great that people are paying attention to their health, the wellness industry tends to exaggerate problems, making people feel like they’re more unwell than they are,” Crum says. “The fundamentals of good health –adequate protein, fibre, hydration, sleep, and stress management – are far more effective than any single supplement.”
Simon Willison on using LLMs to code
Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code #llm #coding
Nothing new here, just a good reference to point to in case anybody asks me.
An elegy to a pencil
an elegy for the pencil - by Adam Aleksic #pencil #writing #tools
Indeed, the experience of writing by hand is increasingly on its way out. Schoolchildren are no longer learning cursive, as computers are integrated ever earlier into the classroom. White-collar jobs are revolving more around screens than printed paper. At a certain point in the future, the pencil is going to feel as obsolete as the stone and chisel. That’s just the way technological change works.
Faulkner, Steinbeck, Atwood, Nabokov, and Morrison have all expressed a preference for pencil and notebook—preferences which surely shaped their ultimate contributions to our collective identity. There’s nothing “childish” about that.
Bubblegum Dystopia
Why do we feel like we can afford more things while being stressed about the cost of living? - YouTube #economics #cost #luxuries
Claude Summary:
The Shift in Value Between Necessities and Luxuries
The core insight is about a fundamental economic shift in the relative cost of necessities versus luxuries over the past several decades:
In the 1970s:
- A TV cost about $500 (10% of a house down payment)
- A house down payment was around $532
- One TV = approximately 10% of a house down payment
Today:
- A TV still costs about $500 (0.5% of a house down payment)
- A house down payment is around $102,000
- One TV = approximately 0.5% of a house down payment
This explains why:
- Older generations view younger people as "financially irresponsible" for buying luxuries - they're applying outdated economic ratios
- People today can simultaneously have many consumer goods while struggling with basic living expenses
- Necessities (housing, healthcare, food) have increased dramatically in price while consumer goods have become relatively cheaper
- This creates a "bubblegum dystopia" where people live with economic uncertainty and housing insecurity while surrounded by affordable entertainment and technology
The shift occurred because:
- Necessities have inelastic demand (people must pay regardless of price increases)
- Companies selling non-necessities had to drive down costs through commodification to compete for the shrinking pool of disposable income
- This results in more affordable luxuries but lower-quality, mass-produced items with "no soul"
More vs Extra
Always do Extra - Ben Northrop #self-improvement
But aren't More and Extra the same thing? No! They sound similar, but they're actually very different. Here's a simple example:
Say for this sprint you're assigned two form screens that take user input and then persist it to the database. Pretty straight-forward. This is your Normal Work - the default expectation of what you need to get done to be in good standing on your project.
Doing More would be completing those two screens and then taking on a third screen that's just like it. Yes, this would help move the project along faster and make your manager happy, and that's great, but in the long-run, More doesn't give you much.
Extra is different than More. Extra is finishing those two screens, but then researching a new library for form validation that might reduce the boilerplate code. Or it's learning ways to protect against common security vulnerabilities from data entry. These little off-ramps from the main highway of Normal Work could be dead-ends and not have any practical value to the project. But they might also be important contributions. And that's the thing with Extra. While the tangible value to the project is uncertain (it could be nothing this time or it could be something), the value to you is real.
Evolutionary Stability: Revolution vs Renovation
https://www.newsblur.com/newsletters/story/8083317:79711f #revolution #renovation #stability
“Renovation is the point of equilibrium between creation and destruction, saving what is valuable and discarding what is outmoded or dysfunctional. It entails a long march through society’s institutions at a pace of change our incremental natures can absorb. Renovation shepherds the new into the old, buffering the damage of dislocation which at first outweighs longer-term benefits … Its aim is transition through evolutionary stability, within societies and in relations among nation-states and global networks.”
In short, evolutionary stability is the better bet for making change than the confident ineptitude of shock and awe tactics that impede it by arousing reactive resistance and rejection before any new approach to governance can take hold.
AI Blindspots
AI Blindspots | AI Blindspots #ai #coding #llms
A good set of pointers by Edward Yang (ezyang)
Blindspots in LLMs I’ve noticed while AI coding. Sonnet family emphasis. Maybe I will eventually suggest Cursor rules for these problems.
Self Study ML
Indian Woman and The Patrilocal Trap
Why is Indian Women's Welfare Devalued? - by Alice Evans
Through my interviews with men and women from across six Indian states, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Morocco and Turkey, I’ve developed the concept of “The Patrilocal Trap”. Historically across Eurasia, sons inherited family assets and cared for elderly parents. Families maintained trusted networks through strategic marriages, socialising daughters to marry, please their in-laws, and stay put. Divorce is heavily stigmatised.
If women are raised for loyalty and unable to credibly threaten exit, they may not necessarily challenge men’s patriarchal entitlements. Instead, she may quietly comply. These films brilliantly capture what quantitative research often misses: the systematic subordination of women's time, preferences, and wellbeing to men’s comfort and convenience.
Violence among hunter gathererers
For the first 290,000 years of our species’ approximately 300,000 year history, everyone was a hunter gatherer. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker argued that hunter gatherers were extremely violent. Better Angels claims that at least 14 percent of prehistoric hunter gatherers died violently. This equates to a violent death rate of at least 420 per 100,000 people per year, using data on typical hunter gatherer mortality rates.
This is a much higher rate of violence than almost anywhere in the modern world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To put it in perspective, global deaths from all types of violence between 2004–21 were around 8 per 100,000 people per year. Even the most violent cities in the world today, in Northern Brazil, South Africa, and on the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border, have murder rates of only around 100 per 100,000 per year.
The implication in Better Angels is that the human mind evolved and developed in a world plagued by constant, endemic violence.
Our 2022 study examined both the ethnographic data – contemporary studies of groups that existed until some modern contact – and archeological data on hunter gatherer violence, much of which comes from data gathered after the publication of Better Angels. We reviewed quantitative estimates of rates of violence in ethnographies, filtering for groups that are most representative of our pre-agricultural ancestors. Our archeological estimates are based on reanalyzing a dataset developed by Gomez et al. (which was released after Better Angels was published and has dozens of extra samples), which attempts to measure rates of violent death by looking for evidence of trauma to skeletal remains. Our study produced estimates for lethal violence around four times lower than Pinker’s figures.
To repeat the key point: Our study produced estimates for lethal violence around four times lower than Pinker’s figures.
Although we think that our study advances the state of knowledge, it must be said that both the archaeological and anthropological (ethnographic) evidence are unusually shaky. The archaeological record for the pre-agricultural period is extremely sparse, and the anthropological evidence is limited and geographically biased.
The defining characteristic that drives high rates of violent death in our species is not our proclivity for lethal violence but rather our capacity for it. Human beings are unusually vulnerable to violence. We have massive heads, thin skin, puny muscles, little to no protective fur; we can’t fly, swim, or burrow away, and we’re not even very good at running away. Our children are even more fragile, particularly as babies, and take ages to mature.
At the same time, our offensive abilities make us the most lethal species on the planet. Violent attacks in a hunter gatherer context are essentially undefendable. We have abilities to collectively organize, plan, and deceive far in advance of any other species. Even lions are afraid of us. Our stone-tipped tools, poisons, and projectile technology appear to have killed off almost all of the planet’s megafauna, like mastodons, giant kangaroos, and saber-tooth tigers.
When we think about how violent psychologically typical people are, it is important to remember that an outsize proportion of violence is committed by psychologically atypical people.
This has parallels with modern society. In Sweden, 1 percent of the population commits 63 percent of all violent crime. Comparably high-quality data does not exist for every Western country, but the tidbits we have suggest that this pattern is normal. It has also been established that sociopathy is highly heritable and has a strong genetic component. However, there is a long-standing debate as to whether it should best be understood as a mental disorder or an evolutionary adaptation. If our interpretation of the dynamics of hunter gatherer violence is correct, it lends support to the idea that sociopathy is an adaptation.
In a modern context, sociopathy can be interpreted as a high-risk, high-return behavioral strategy, with sociopaths overrepresented both in high status professions and people with large numbers of sexual partners but also in incarceration, drug abuse, accidental death and other undesirable outcomes. In a prehistoric hunter gatherer context, a similar dynamic may have been at play, with some sociopaths benefitting by acquiring multiple wives or achieving some degree of group dominance (as Gau did), while others suffered social rejection and early death (like Twi).
The idea that some people are simply bullies by nature might be difficult to accept in cultures with deep commitments to liberal values and personal freedoms, but we shouldn’t shy away from the deep implications it has for our society. If it is true, it suggests that we should heed the example set by our prehistoric ancestors and deal with them by working collectively to restrain them rather than blaming society for their existence and attempting to treat them as if they were the same as everyone else.
This has obvious implications in the area of crime and incarceration, but also in other areas like education where protecting people from bullies could be prioritized.
The most important implications are for political institutions. The wars, genocides, and democides of the twentieth century are a warning of what happens when the worst people get their hands on the instruments of power in modern states.
Evolution of violence from hunter gatherer societies to agricultural societies
Nevertheless, the elevated rates of violence among agriculturalists can only partially be attributed to the influence of sociopathic leaders. The fact is that the invention of agriculture fundamentally changed the dynamics and incentives for violence in our species.
We hypothesize that agriculturalists were more warlike than nomadic hunter gatherers for three main reasons:
- They stored food, had more possessions, and lived at high population densities. This made it easier to monopolize resources through the use of force and harder to avoid conflict by running away. It also means that the rewards of attacking other groups of agriculturalists are larger. Moreover these denser, sedentary populations exhibit greater disparities in size and technology, creating power imbalances that incentivize violence by reducing the risks for powerful attackers and making total annihilation of opposing groups viable.
- Their hierarchical and inegalitarian social organization made it easier to organize collective violence and coordinate on violations of non-violent norms. Leaders could coerce group violence for selfish reasons. Women had lower social status and so were less able to curb the more aggressive tendencies of men. For the same reason, it was much easier for individual men to monopolize women and slaves as part of the spoils of war.
- Small-scale farmers tend to be more self-sufficient and less inter-connected with other groups than hunter gatherers, who typically exhibit more fluid group affiliations and widespread trading networks. This means that small-scale farmers are less incentivized to cooperate with other groups and also lack the family and cultural ties that would stop them from fighting if it were in their interests.
These factors made the incentives for conflict much greater and made it much harder to overcome the Hobbesian Trap, even though agriculturalists were descended from hunter gatherers who, for hundreds of thousands of years, faced strong evolutionary pressures against violence.
2025-03-25
Assembled my Nuphy Air60 V2 keyboard with a custom keycap set. I really like the fact that I can just place it over my laptop keyboard and it just works without any disruption.
Final result
Build a Team that Ships
Build a Team that Ships #software #best-practises
I started my first company 15 years go, and I still can’t manage. I suspect that very few people can. With AngelList, we want a team of self-managing people who ship code.
Here’s what we do:
- Keep the team small. All doers, no talkers. Absolutely no middle managers. All BD via APIs.
- Outsource everything that isn’t core. Resist the urge to pick up that last dollar. Founders do Customer Service.
- People choose what to work on. Better they ship what they want than not ship what you want.
- No tasks longer than one week. You have to ship something into live production every week – worst case, two weeks. If you just joined, ship something.
- Peer-management. Promise what you’ll do in the coming week on internal Yammer. Deliver – or publicly break your promise – next week.
- One person per project. Get help from others, but you and you alone are accountable.
If they can’t ship, release them. Our environment is wrong for them. They should go find someplace where they can thrive. There’s someplace for everyone.
Economic Policy of the Trump Administration
The Parallel Economy and the New Rules of American Power
We have a few forces at work - (1) bot-driven information warfare has distorted our perception of economic reality and (2) seemingly deliberate policy volatility creates conditions for an economic downturn (3) and a Trump 'parallel economy' is positioned is emerging to capitalize on the resulting confusion - perhaps, reducing Trump’s market concerns. Understanding all of this requires unpacking four interconnected phenomena:
Bots: Automated (and hijacked) information flows have created an environment where most people don't know what's factually true anymore
Recession: The administration appears to be intentionally engineering economic volatility as a "necessary detox” as I wrote about last week, with JP Morgan placing recession odds this year rising to 40% and Goldman Sachs to 20%.
Parallel Economy: The parallel economy built by Donald Trump Jr. is a reason why President Trump might not care too much about the market selloff.1
Fried Brains: We have ‘temporal dysphoria’. There is a profound mismatch between the pace of information cycles and the ability of humans to adapt to the change in said pace.
We're living in a reality shaped by automated outrage machines, while facing an economic downturn engineered through deliberate trade policy chaos. As this volatility harms everyday Americans, the Trump family could be positioning itself to profit from a parallel economy. Meanwhile, social media has so thoroughly warped our perception of time that we can no longer process events in a coherent timeline - there’s even a chart for it!
2025-03-24
Back from travels. Settling in.
The Economist on Longevity Research
Dreams of improving the human race are no longer science fiction #longevity #anti-aging
The lack of data is no accident. Medical research has, to a very large extent, focused on treating debilitating afflictions, rather than on improving the capabilities of people who are already healthy. Regulators have developed systems to test whether drugs prevent or alleviate known ailments, but these are typically not well suited to assess whether a treatment has a positive effect on those who are already well. Since such enhancements might be considered less urgent, it is anyway less clear how risks and rewards should be balanced. What is more, naturally occurring substances cannot be patented, so there is little incentive for pharmaceutical firms to pour money into research on their effects.
Charles Brenner, a biochemist at the City of Hope, an American medical-research centre, has suggested that Mr Johnson’s “polypharmacy” is likely to be harmful and dismissed his claimed immortality as “delusional”. Without proper clinical trials of his various treatments, it is impossible to judge with any certainty. That is why the world of enhancement is excited about a study called TAME, which is the first clinical trial that targets ageing specifically to be approved by America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
2025-03-23
Career Advice in 2025
Career advice in 2025. | Irrational Exuberance #career #software #jobs
Very relatable for me atm.
If you pull all those things together, you’re essentially in a market where profit and pace are fixed, and you have to figure out how you personally want to optimize between people, prestige and learning. Whereas a few years ago, I think these variables were much more decoupled, that is not what I hear from folks today, even if their jobs were quite cozy a few years ago.
Going a bit further, I know folks who are good at their jobs, and have been struggling to find something meaningful for six-plus months. I know folks who are exceptionally strong candidates, who can find reasonably good jobs, but even they are finding that the sorts of jobs they want simply don’t exist right now. I know folks who are strong candidates but with some oddities in their profile, maybe too many short stints, who are now being filtered out because hiring managers need some way to filter through the higher volume of candidates.
I can’t give advice on what you should do, but if you’re finding this job market difficult, it’s certainly not personal. My sense is that’s basically the experience that everyone is having when searching for new roles right now. If you are in a role today that’s frustrating you, my advice is to try harder than usual to find a way to make it a rewarding experience, even if it’s not perfect. I also wouldn’t personally try to sit this cycle out unless you’re comfortable with a small risk that reentry is quite difficult: I think it’s more likely that the ecosystem is meaningfully different in five years than that it’s largely unchanged.
Scribbling with Pencils
Issue 113: The Reading Life of... Michael Rance #blackwing #pencils #scribbling #reading
There is nothing perhaps more beautiful to me in one's reading life than marginalia. I love going through a friend's copy of a book and attempting to decipher their scribbles. Same goes for reading the book notes from a person one is dating: 'why did they underline this passage? Were they thinking of me?'. I am a prolific proponent of writing in one's books. Note-taking directly on the page transforms a white, almost-cold object into a well-worn and colorful extension of thought.
The only thing that I write my notes with are pencils. I am annoyingly specific about what pencils I must be working with: the Palomino Blackwings, ideally the black model, and they must be sharpened. The blackwings are perfect. They create a crisp, dark line, and they float across the page. They are a modern reproduction of the pencils that John Steinbeck (among others) wrote with. I like knowing that I am holding a similar instrument as the one that Steinbeck held as he furiously wrote The Grapes of Wrath. I am romantic and foolish sometimes!
I have a fairly intricate note-taking process. In my books I underline passages that are of some interest to me, and in the margin nearest the spine I will jot down asterisks to note how essential the passage is for my brain.
Sometimes I will underline specific words, and write letters in the margin that correspond to what I want to do with the words.
'R' means that i want to read the thing in question. '
'r' means that I want to do further research.
'def' means that I need to define the word, if I don't have it in my vocabulary.
'mem.' means that I want to memorize the passage.
'ST' means that I want to actively study the passage. I use this when I am smitten by something about the prose style, or the construction of the narrative, and want to learn from it to use in my own writing practice.
Outside of the margins I will write brief notes, questions, reflections. Same goes for the top of the page. If the book is especially important or for a project that I am doing, I will go through after finishing the book and place multi-colored stickers so that they hang from the outside of the book. Below is an example from Halldór Laxness’ Independent People, which I read for a newsletter piece that I wrote (shameless plug, sorry!).
Game of Life
What Can We Learn about Engineering and Innovation from Half a Century of the Game of Life Cellular Automaton?—Stephen Wolfram Writings #engineering #innovation #conway
I recently wrote a CSS grid based Game of Life animation, that served as a background for a webpage. Had a lot of fun writing it. When I showed the webpage to a bunch of my dev friends, everyone was impressed with the animation, but I was a bit surprised how few of them were able to recognize the original inspiration from Conway's Game of Life. Next time, I will send this article to them.
Toxic Preconditions
The Imperfectionist: Toxic preconditions #burkeman
From Oliver Burkeman's latest newsletter
A more wide-reaching form of toxic precondition is what Anne-Laure Le Cunff, in her brilliant just-published book Tiny Experiments, calls “the tyranny of purpose” – the oppressive idea that the activities with which we fill our days must be leading up to something, to some final and finished state of having arrived at our destination in life, if they’re to be worth doing in the first place. Her book is a practical guide to living experimentally and with curiosity in the deepest sense of those terms – ie., not just as a cleverer way of putting your five-year vision into action, but because living experimentally and with curiosity is an inherently fulfilling way to live. Imagine the projects you could launch, the hobbies you could explore, the ways you could conduct your social life or parenting, and much else besides, if you needed no reassurance that the new way of doing things was every going to become a permanent feature of your life! Wouldn’t you suddenly feel much, much freer to act?
Which brings us, I think, to the fundamental toxic precondition lurking behind every other toxic precondition: the strong desire we have for some kind of guarantee – before we embark on a new activity, or even just allow ourselves to relax into life – that it’ll all unfold safely and securely, that we’ll retain the feeling of being in control. That’s what you’re surrendering, in a small way, when you go ahead and write a few hundred words of your novel, with no certainty they’ll be any good. Or when you move forward with the day’s projects despite not having carried out your morning routine to the letter. It’s also what you’re surrendering when you decide to cut yourself a bit more slack in life – because who knows what chaos might unfold if you stopped yelling internally at yourself to work harder or do better, if you stopped watching yourself like a hawk for signs of backsliding? In other words: we don’t erect toxic preconditions simply because we’re irrational, self-defeating idiots. We do it because we want to feel secure, and to avoid the risk of experiencing emotions we’re unsure we’d be able to handle.
You never had control; all you had was anxiety. And when you let go of that, even a little bit, what you’re left with is one of the most powerful reasons imaginable for taking any action that feels as though it might make life more meaningful or vibrant, which is that frankly, at the end of the day, you might as well.
Musk Discovers Magic Money Printers
Elon Musk Discovers the "Magic" of Modern Money #mmt #money
In which Elon Musk discovers MMT
These “magic money computers”, as Musk calls them, “can just make money out of thin air.” Daddy DOGE seemed genuinely gobsmacked. “It just issues payments.” “They just send money out of nothing.”
I guess Elon missed the MEMO from various central bankers—Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Jerome Powell, Neel Kashkari, Mario Draghi—all of whom have acknowledged that this is how modern money works. I guess he also missed thousands of articles, books, chapters, working papers, etc. that MMT scholars (alone or in collaboration with others) have written or recorded over many decades.
The point is, there’s no “bombshell” in what Musk told Senator Cruz.
Stephanie Kelton then follows this up with a whirlwind history of "money-printing" which makes for fascinating reading
No one who read Warren Mosler’s Soft Currency Economics almost thirty years ago would be the least bit surprised to learn that present-day governments “spend money out of nothing.” And if you’ve read Randy Wray’s Understanding Modern Money, Michael Hudson’s Temples of Enterprise, or David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, then you know that governments have created “money out of nothing” from the very beginning.
You might even say that the ancient Mesopotamians invented blockchain technology some 4,000 years ago. Instead of a network of computers, these ancient societies used clay tablets to securely record transactions that were transparent, immutable, and resistant to tampering. You find the same kind of early blockchain technology throughout the Middle Ages, when English kings issued hazelwood tally sticks as a form of tamper-resistant currency with its own embedded record-keeping technology.
In fact, Mesopotamian clay tablets were so ubiquitous that scientists are still discovering them today. Just last week, The Guardian ran this terrific article about an impeccable new discovery.
…
Money was invented for the purpose of moving real resources into the public domain. From the very beginning, it was conjured into existence to build armies, temples, palaces, navigable waterways, granaries, roadways, bridges and more. Whether they used “imprints on Mesopotamian clay tablets, notches on sticks, writing in chalk on slate or, later, fountain pen on parchment paper, stamped and milled coins, inked paper notes, [or] today’s electronic entries store on computer hard drives,” powerful collectives have issued payments out of nothing to maintain the functioning of their societies and further their broader ambitions.
The DOGE “bombshell” is tantamount to a team of archeologists declaring, "I found 14 magic money tablets that send money out of nothing." Nothing new under the sun.
2025-03-16
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman - Chapter 4
If skillful time management is best understood as a matter of learning to procrastinate well, by facing the truth about your finitude and making your choices accordingly, then the other kind of procrastination—the bad kind, which prevents us from making progress on the work that matters to us—is usually the result of trying to avoid that truth. The good procrastinator accepts the fact that she can’t get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect. By contrast, the bad procrastinator finds himself paralyzed precisely because he can’t bear the thought of confronting his limitations. For him, procrastination is a strategy of emotional avoidance—a way of trying not to feel the psychological distress that comes with acknowledging that he’s a finite human being.
2025-03-14
Four Thousand Weeks
In today's dose of Oliver Burkeman
Though I’d been largely unaware of it, my productivity obsession had been serving a hidden emotional agenda. For one thing, it helped me combat the sense of precariousness inherent to the modern world of work: if I could meet every editor’s every demand, while launching various side projects of my own, maybe one day I’d finally feel secure in my career and my finances. But it also held at bay certain scary questions about what I was doing with my life, and whether major changes might not be needed. If I could get enough work done, my subconscious had apparently concluded, I wouldn’t need to ask if it was all that healthy to be deriving so much of my sense of self-worth from work in the first place. And as long as I was always just on the cusp of mastering my time, I could avoid the thought that what life was really demanding from me might involve surrendering the craving for mastery and diving into the unknown instead.
The universal truth behind my specific issues is that most of us invest a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves. We don’t want to feel the anxiety that might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right path, or what ideas about ourselves it could be time to give up. We don’t want to risk getting hurt in relationships or failing professionally; we don’t want to accept that we might never succeed in pleasing our parents or in changing certain things we don’t like about ourselves—and we certainly don’t want to get sick and die. The details differ from person to person, but the kernel is the same. We recoil from the notion that this is it—that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at. Instead, we mentally fight against the way things are—so that, in the words of the psychotherapist Bruce Tift, “we don’t have to consciously participate in what it’s like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality.” This struggle against the distressing constraints of reality is what some old-school psychoanalysts call “neurosis,” and it takes countless forms, from workaholism and commitment-phobia to codependency and chronic shyness.
None of us can single-handedly overthrow a society dedicated to limitless productivity, distraction, and speed. But right here, right now, you can stop buying into the delusion that any of that is ever going to bring satisfaction. You can face the facts. You can turn on the shower, brace yourself for some invigoratingly icy water, and step in.
2025-03-13
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman - Chapter One
There was no anxious pressure to “get everything done,” either, because a farmer’s work is infinite: there will always be another milking and another harvest, forever, so there’s no sense in racing toward some hypothetical moment of completion. Historians call this way of living “task orientation,” because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline, the approach that has become second nature for us today.
2025-03-12
Four Thousand Weeks - Introduction
Read the introduction of Oliver Burkeman's previous book on the plane. #productivity
The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.
Moreover, the busyness of the better-off is contagious, because one extremely effective way to make more money, for those at the top of the tree, is to cut costs and make efficiency improvements in their companies and industries. That means greater insecurity for those lower down, who are then obliged to work harder just to get by.
Four Thousand Weeks is yet another book about making the best use of time. But it is written in the belief that time management as we know it has failed miserably, and that we need to stop pretending otherwise.
2025-03-11
Prep for travel.
2025-03-10
Tallahassee Ghazal
Tallahassee Ghazal – SAPIENS #ghazal #urdu #arabic #poetry
Using an ancient Arabic poetic form, a poet-archaeologist from Florida cycles through feelings of entrapment growing up queer in the U.S. South. But in the end, they celebrate love for this place—and that “most of us are breathing.”
Part of: Poets Resist, Refuse, and Find a Way Through – SAPIENS
Karl Marx in America - Andrew Hartman
Marxism for Americans: Andrew Hartman - Future Hindsight (podcast) | Listen Notes #marx #america #marxism
Andrew Hartman has an upcomingi book: Karl Marx in America
Some notes from the transcript:
I note here that this episode is coming out the day before the 177th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto's publication.
On Marxism and Marx's ideas:
So I've written a book about how Karl Marx's ideas have, I guess, played out throughout American history. And so Marx himself is a very important figure there as a person, but more importantly, sort of as somebody who created a body of work, a body of ideas that have persisted up until this day and in people's minds as being relevant. Marxism has a long and torturous history that is both complex and oftentimes changes depending on the time and context. But for my purposes, to be a Marxist simply means that you have a particular way of understanding capitalism, that is that the most important feature of capitalism is the relationship between those who own things, like what Marx called the means of production. But this would be like the factories or the land or the media. And then everyone else, for the most part, who has to work for them, or as Marx would have put it, has to sell their labor in order to survive. So famously using the language of the Communist Manifesto, this is the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. And Marx, in his time when capitalism of this sort was relatively new and had not gone global, theorized that that aspect of our human relations, that is there would be two classes of people, those who owned and those who worked for those who owned. He theorized that eventually everybody would come to be a member of one of those two classes, or almost everybody. And I think that is to a large extent become true. And that is one of the reasons why Marxism has continued to be relevant to lots of people, even after the failure and fall of most of the states that organized around Marxism, most particularly the Soviet Union. And I think that's why people are still reading and talking about Karl Marx. In fact, there's been like a recent influx of people reading Marx and talking about Marx again, perhaps more so than we've seen since the 1960s or even the 1930s. So to me that Marxism is just a particular way of understanding capitalism.
Relevance of Marx Today:
Yeah, so like Marx was fallible, he was human. He made mistakes as well as a person, to me, is less interesting than the fact that he made mistakes as a thinker. But his basic conception of capitalism and what it did to humans and also to some extent of what it did to climate or the environment, was essentially true. And that's why people continue to read Marx, for example, Howard Zinn, the left wing historian who was most famous for writing a people's history of the United States that continues to be read all across the world, and that conservatives continue to lament that fact. He wrote a play in the 1990s called Marx and Soho. And that's exactly what Howard Zinn tried to imagine is if Marx were alive at that point in the 1990s, what would he think? And essentially, Marx's theories in this play by Howard Zinn had panned out to a remarkable degree in terms of thinking about the globalization of capital accumulation that had wrecked so many lives and had sort of spread misery across the planet, while some people got rich beyond their wildest dreams. One of Marx's basic theories of capitalism is that it's at one level very wonderful in the terms of, like the things it can do in terms of technological development. It creates the capacity for humans to live without having to labor as much as humans in the past have had to because of the sort of, like, technological advancements, but also even more so, the advancements. Advancements in terms of, like, organizing ourselves into large units, like, what we would call corporations. So I think he would look around and say, look at all this wonderful stuff. But hardly anybody can share in the wonders. And also because of how unequal things are, because a few men control most of the wealth in the world, most people are more alienated than ever. I think he would say, yeah, this is what I expected. But I. I don't think he would have expected it would have taken so long for humans to get their act together, to sort of create something new. And, of course, that's one of the things that Critics across the 20th and 21st century of Marx and Marxism have pointed to, like, what next? Marx predicted that capitalism would fall, that capitalists were creating their own gravediggers. And yet, here we are. Perhaps things are worse than ever in terms of inequality, in terms of exploitation, in terms of our destruction of the very thing we need to survive, that is the planet and all of its resources.
The aspect of freedom in Marx's works
But I think since the fall of the Soviet Union and in particular in the last 10 or 20 years, people are much more interested in sort of freedom aspect of Marxist theory. So if you think about it in these terms, in capitalism, most people don't have a lot of free time because so much of our time is spent working. And while we're at work, most people, like you, could never describe the conditions of work. You kind of laid it out nicely when you're talking about sweatshops in Bangladesh or sweatshops in Amazon warehouses right here in the United States. Most people, while they're at work, they don't experience freedom. Like, there's nothing freeing or liberating about that experience. And they have to spend so many hours of their life under those conditions. Conditions in which a boss, a manager, or the system, in some sense, has almost totalitarian control over them, over their bodies. And yes, you could always say, well, they could just quit. That's not always true everywhere, but maybe in the U.S. yes, if you work at Amazon, you could just quit, but you have to pay the rent. You have to feed your kids. Like, that's part of Marx's whole theory and premise of capitalism is that most of us have to sell our labor in order to survive. And that's not a condition that creates freedom for most people.
On Marx's theory of change
So there's kind of like two layers to how Marx thought about the shift from capitalism to socialism or communism. These were terms that were often used interchangeably in the 19th century for Marx. So, like, if you think about capitalism growing into ever larger institutions and entities, factories, workers would be thrown together in ways that they would come to recognize the similarities of their shared conditions, and that would help them organize against their system of oppression. This is what Marx described in the Communist Manifesto as capitalists digging their own graves. And so he truly believed that the way in which capitalism was developing in terms of, like, the socialization of production, in other words, like things coming together in the producer side, would lead to the socialization of human relations once the humans involved, especially the workers, recognized their conditions. At various points, this happened to a small degree. And I think you could say, like, the labor movement over the course of the last two centuries is a product of this kind of understanding of capitalism and what happens to workers in it. The other side of Marx's theory is he thought a lot about the sort of inevitable crises of capitalism. And so just in his life, he saw several extremely damaging economic crises of capitalism. 1830s, 1850s. And then he didn't live long enough to see, of course, the 1890s, which was one of the worst. He saw one in the 1870s, but then there was another even worse one in the 1890s, each getting worse and worse. And then there's the 1930s. And many Marxist historians would say that the two world wars of the 20th century were the inevitable sort of byproduct of these. These crises of capitalism, that's a debate for another time. So he thought that if workers were organized, if they had that sort of solidarity, they could take advantage of these crises. And as each crisis got worse and worse, the working class would be well positioned to transition, to have a revolution, a socialist revolution. Obviously, it hasn't happened and obvious, or at least not yet, but it's really hard to anticipate that happening right now as we sit in 2025. And so that aspect of Marx and Marxism, I don't think is as relevant as perhaps it once was. Although I I do think that when the working class, through the labor movement organizes, that's one of the most important things that people can do to make their lives and the lives of others better. It's the most important sort of counter force to oligarchy. But the reason why I think Marx is still relevant goes back to his theory of labor exploitation and freedom. Like how he thought thought about capitalism and conceptualized the way it made us unfree, the way it alienated us is still so highly relevant. Maybe it's up to us to imagine how to create something different.
On Capitalism and Democracy:
But I have been wondering for a while, are capitalism and democracy compatible or incompatible? And I have to say that I've asked this question several times on the podcast, and none of the guests so far have yet to give me a straight answer on whether capitalism and democracy really should hang together or maybe not. Speaker B: Well, I'm so happy that I can break that string. I don't think they're compatible at all. I think they're completely incompatible. But again, I would think of democracy as on a spectrum in much the same way like Marx would think of freedom in relation to labor on a spectrum. This is a very Marxist take on democracy, I think, as well. There have been moments in American history, and the United States is historically probably the most capitalistic nation in world history. And also we like to think one of the sort of, like, originators of political democracy, although that's a more contested history. But at every step, democracy, if we define it as rule by the people, and by the people we mean everybody, at every step, it's been highly constrained. Now, that's true of democracy almost everywhere throughout history, but in particular in the US it's been highly constrained, in large part because of capitalism. And I think that's more true now than ever. And so if we only think of democracy as electing people to lead us or represent us every two to four years or whatever it is, I guess capitalism, democracy can work fine. Although even by that very limited definition of democracy, I think things aren't going so well. We have to sort of expand our imagination when it comes to democracy. We have to think about being free to rule ourselves in all aspects of our lives. And there are so many aspects of our lives where we're not free to rule ourselves. And when you really think about it, the thing standing in the way of that freedom in so many aspects is capitalism or one of its byproducts. If you have a billion dollars, you have so much more power, not only over the political system, but over your own life.
…
but just think about the billions of people across the planet who are completely constrained by the fact that they just don't have enough wealth, money, resources to actually have autonomy over their life, to actually rule themselves, govern themselves, and thus they are controlled by other people. In the US we, I guess, get to choose our. Choose the people who control us, but we have a very narrow set of parameters around which we choose the people who control us. And it seems to get narrower every four years.
On what we can do:
We all feel paralyzed. And so, you know, a lot of us will look locally, sort of tend to our own gardens, which is great. But I guess that's not really going to change the conditions either. One thing that I advise people to do is find ways to connect with other people that will change their and other people's sort of understanding or political consciousness. Form a reading group. And everyone reads something that is very challenging either at an intellectual or a political level. I just think I like that a lot. So, like, one of the things that's really interesting in my book is I've have learned throughout U.S. history, since Marx became a thing in the U.S. people have formed reading groups and they read marks together. And we're not just Talking about sort of grad students, as you might imagine, we're talking about, like, working class people really struggling through difficult texts to try to understand their world. I feel like we need more of that. And to me, that could be a really sort of radical act in today's world of. Of social media and our diminishing attention spans. Spend some time with something difficult like reading a philosophical text like Capital or it doesn't have to be Marx. There's so many other great things. And do it with other people. Talk about it.
ChatGPT Summary of full podcast transcript: ChatGPT - Marxism in America Today
Mysore Food Guide
Mysore Food Guide #mysore #food
A set of places from a local.
Evolution of Spotify in the Indian Market
Diljit Dosanjh Breaks the Bollywood Mold and Shakes Up India’s Music Scene - Bloomberg #music #business #spotify #indian
People’s tastes have also evolved. According to Spotify, domestic fans streamed almost 70% international music on the platform when the company debuted in India in 2019, compared with 70% local music now. Punjabi tunes in particular are topping the charts, not just in India but among a global audience, according to Spotify. Dosanjh is partly responsible for that.
While Indian music is still mainly consumed by Indians and the diaspora, that is starting to change.
The arrival of Spotify and other streaming platforms in India, the second-largest English speaking nation in the world, has played a crucial role in helping India raise the quality of its entertainment output. With diverse musical offerings from India, the number of countries that have songs from the country on top of their streaming lists is growing, said Ashish Pherwani, leader for the Media & Entertainment sector at EY in India.
“There’s more acceptance of Indian music that’s happening right now,” Pherwani said. “It’s just the tip of the iceberg. Honestly, there’s so much more that can happen around Indian content. It’s been a largely diaspora-oriented industry five years back, but that’s changing now.”
Andor
Every Star Wars Project Fails to Get This Basic Thing Right — Except One #andor #starwars
From the beginning of the franchise, Star Wars has been about struggling against tyranny and evil. From the Rebel Alliance fighting the Empire to the Resistance facing off against the First Order and the Jedi dueling with the Sith, the galaxy far, far away has always revolved around the forces of peace and democracy challenging those of authoritarianism. Ironically, with all the depictions of dictators and tyrants, Star Wars has consistently struggled to depict life under authoritarianism realistically. Only the show Andor has broken this trend by giving fans a believable look at how a dictatorship operates.
Andor won praise for its darker tone, more nuanced characters, and complex story. A great deal of this complexity and nuance was directly the result of its focus on portraying the realities of authoritarianism. Through depictions of average people and making Imperial officers more important characters, Andor gave fans a fascinating and scary look at life in the Empire.
From the very first episode of Season 1, fans get a look at how terrible life can be for regular people under imperial rule. Viewers see soldiers bullying people and get a sense of the fear and paranoia pervasive throughout society. When Andor kills two officers and goes on the run, he faces constant suspicion, as many people are constantly afraid that spies and informers will get them sent to prison or worse. This is a more accurate depiction of life under a tyrant.
Andor also gave fans a deeper look at the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB) and the terror it strikes into dissidents. Similar to the Soviet KGB or the East German Stasi, the ISB operates as a secret police force for the Empire, seeking out any potential opposition or rebellion through espionage, coercion, and fear. Further, in depicting and characterizing individual members of the ISB, like Dedra Meero and Blevin, fans finally get some insight into why a person would choose to serve the Empire and fight the rebellion. This reminds viewers that authoritarian regimes are run by real people who choose to oppose democracy, not mind-controlled clones or nameless soldiers.
Andor proved to be a remarkable show by giving fans an exciting adventure story, full of action and twists, while also exploring the darker elements of the Star Wars universe. It also managed to do something that George Lucas has arguably tried to do since the first movie released in 1977. Andor depicted a story of freedom struggling against tyranny that included nuance and a realistic depiction of how dictatorships and rebels actually operate.
2025-03-09
Is Posh Moisturizer Worth It
Is posh moisturiser worth the money? #skincare #moisturizer
All the skincare tips I need.
The three types of moisturiser can help. Humectants, such as hyaluronic acid and glycerin, pull moisture from inside the body onto the surface of the skin. Occlusives, such as petroleum jelly and shea butter, block water from evaporating from the skin. Emollients, such as ceramide, smooth the skin by filling in gaps between skin cells. A review published in January in Experimental Dermatology found that ceramide made skin look and feel smoother and also reduced inflammation of the skin.
If the goal is soft, well-hydrated skin, experts say that cheaper products work just as well as the boutique options. “You don’t need to break the bank,” says Nour Kibbi, a clinical associate professor of dermatology at Stanford University. Where splurging may pay off, says Abigail Waldman, a dermatologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts, is on products that reduce the signs of ageing. As people age, skin-cell production slows and the skin thins. Older people also produce less collagen, which keeps the skin plump. This combination leads to wrinkles.
Retinol and other retinoids, a class of products chemically derived from vitamin A, reduce the appearance of wrinkles by increasing cell and collagen production. A study published in JAMA Dermatology in 2007 tested the effectiveness of retinol by comparing the arms of 36 elderly people who, three times a week, had had lotion with retinol put on one arm and lotion without retinol on the other. After six months, the researchers found that the arms with retinol had fewer fine wrinkles. Nearly 20 years later, experts still recommend retinol as a way to reduce the signs of ageing.