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Daily log archive for Nov 2024. Go to the current daily log, or browse the archive index.

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2024-11-30

Was out and about most of the day.

Went to a nice Kerala food restaurant in HSR Layout called Kumarakom.

2024-11-29

Full day of MathAcademy. Hit my all time daily record of points earned! 🎉

2024-11-28

Why I left NYC

why I left nyc - by Kasra - Bits of Wonder #nyc #sf

This randomly showed up in my Twitter, but upon reading I found myself overcome with a feeling of melancholy. I could relate a lot to some of the things said in the article, in my own struggles to find a city/place where I could find my kind of people and feel a shared sense of community.

NYC is also one of my favorite cities in the world, but I never lived there long enough to appreciate the challenges of building community there

in new york, everything felt transient. I constantly met new people, only to never see them again. everyone packs their social schedule, which makes it hard to make spontaneous plans, and some people pack their schedule with multiple social activities in a single night, which makes it hard to have the slow, several-hours-long hangouts I prefer. despite all the work I did to create social spaces that were not just about drinking in dark and loud spaces, it still felt like the “center of gravity” for social life was drinking in dark and loud spaces. I hosted tons of events, but the overlap between “my close friends” and “people who attend my events” was frustratingly small. I had friends in very different worlds, which is nice—but it felt like the worlds they were in were too different, and trying to host one big party where all my friends would be in one place seemed like a recipe for awkwardness, and people not really “getting” each other.

the transience was what got to me. I’ve always wanted something very simple: a small group of close friends that I see consistently, week after week. friends I feel comfortable just sitting with. friends I can make my stupid absurdist jokes with, friends who will prioritize me by setting aside an entire evening rather than just “let’s catch up between 7-8pm three tuesdays from now.” I had a semblance of that kind of community in new york for a while, but by the end of my time there it was nonexistent.

Meditations for Mortals Chapter 3

Continuing the daily ritual of reading one chapter from Meditations for Mortals, here are a few quotes from Chapter 3 titled You need only face the consequences On paying the price.

“At some point, as you seek to spend more of your finite existence in the ways that feel most meaningful to you, the thought will inevitably occur to you that you can’t make a certain choice about your time, however much you’d like to, because the circumstances simply don’t allow it. The obstacle could be as weighty as the belief that you can’t walk away from a marriage or a dispiriting career, because of the emotional or financial impact on yourself or on others. Or it might be as mundane as the notion that you can’t spend half an hour on an exhilarating creative project today, because there are too many emails to be answered, or too many household chores that need completing first. These are valid concerns. But the idea that they eliminate all room for choice isn’t entirely correct. The truth, though it often makes people indignant to hear it, is that it’s almost never literally the case that you have to meet a work deadline, honor a commitment, answer an email, fulfill a family obligation, or anything else. The astounding reality – in the words of Sheldon B. Kopp, a genial and brilliant American psychotherapist who died[…]”

“Freedom isn’t a matter of somehow wriggling free of the costs of your choice – that’s never an option – but of realizing, as Kopp points out, that nothing stops you doing anything at all, so long as you’re willing to pay those costs. ”

“(It’s a particular peril among the progressive-minded, I’ve noticed, to take the fact that a given choice might be unfeasible for the underprivileged as a reason not to make it yourself. But unless it’s you who’s underprivileged, that’s an alibi, not an argument.) ”

“Whatever choice you make, so long as you make it in the spirit of facing the consequences, the result will be freedom in the only sense that finite humans ever get to enjoy it. Not freedom from limitation, which is something we unfortunately never get to experience, but freedom in limitation. Freedom to examine the trade-offs – because there will always be trade-offs – and then to opt for whichever trade-off you like.”

ffmpeg sprites

Love this short post which gives the ffmpeg command to extract sprites from a video and gives a detailed breakdown of each command option: Generate video sprites using just Ffmpeg | steelcm.com #ffmpeg #tools

Denis Villeneuve on the cycle of violence

Mathew Beloni interviewed Denis Villeneuve for the latest episode of The Town podcast: ‘Dune’ Director Denis Villeneuve on Plans for Part 3, ‘Star Wars’ Interest, and Art Vs. Commerce | The Town

I was quite struck by his thoughts on the cycle of violence that plagues humanity.

Beloni: What would you say are the kinds of themes that you are drawn to? If someone was going to predict what your next film or three films down the line would be, would they say he's attracted to these types of scripts?

Villeneuve: I would say existential anxiety, for sure.

Beloni: Existential anxiety. You know, like Nolan seems to be attracted to the concepts of time. Spielberg. It's always about the relationship between family and their kids, and what is it about your…what do you think?

Villeneuve: I see a cycle of violence.

Beloni: A cycle of violence?

Villeneuve: Yeah. Projects that are talking about the cycle of the repetition of history. Cycle of violence. That's something that I'm obsessed by.

Beloni: Hmm. Why?

Villeneuve: Because we're stuck with it. Because I want to find a way out.

Beloni: And what do you mean by a cycle of violence? You mean wars? Do you mean personal violence? Crime? That kind of thing?

Villeneuve: Everything. It's like the idea that we are like, in our genes, the heritage from our ancestors, through our education, to how we are raised, the transmission of anger. How can we get rid of that anger? Of that hate? It's something that is very profound. And it's like we are spinning on ourselves like a dryer. It's like, how can we stop being so stupid? It's a very primitive force, but there's a way out. And slowly.

2024-11-27

Spent the whole day doing Math Academy because I had to catch up for what I missed yest.

Somebody Somewhere

Bingewatched all released S3 episodes so far. This is such an underrated and sweet show: Somebody Somewhere (TV Series 2022–2024) - IMDb #tv

Kendrick Lamar Samplers

The NY Amplifier released this playlist, and I spent the day listening. Not a very knowledgable rap person, so the notes were helpful. Enjoyed it: The Amplifier: Kendrick Lamar's Samples #playlist

2024-11-26

Spent the day flaneuring around Indiranagar and the area around Church St. Visited a lot of bookshops and ate at some cool places.

2024-11-25

Spent almost the entire day sleeping and catching up on all the TV show episodes that landed on the weekend.

Meditations for Mortals

“Most successful people,’ as the entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson has observed, ‘are just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity.”

– Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman: Amazon.com: Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts eBook : Burkeman, Oliver: Kindle Store

I keep recommended Four Thousand Weeks to anybody I met as the only "productivity" book they should read. I consider it more of an "anti-productivity" book, and to figure out what that means you will have to actually read the book.

Anyway, so Meditations for Mortals is kind of like a followup to Four Thousand Weeks. I finished reading the introduction, and the author recommends reading one page everyday for twenty-eight days, instead of trying to read through multiple chapters.

Loved, this quote from the intro, which should give a sense of what this book is about.

“This isn’t one of those books promising that if you implement its contents flawlessly, you’ll have the ideal system for running your life. Human finitude ensures that’s never coming. Which is exactly the reason to dive wholeheartedly into this life, now.”

2024-11-24

Keeping Time

The mind-bending new science of measuring time #time #atomic

As late as the middle of the 20th century, our time remained tied to the Sun. A second was officially defined as a fraction of the solar year. But in 1967, deep in the atomic age, the 13th General Conference on Weights and Measures in Paris ruled that the second would now be defined according to vibrations of the caesium atom. Ever since, timekeeping has become the domain of physicists, extracted in sunless laboratories with precision optics, synthesised by computers and distributed by satellites.

Caesium atoms, when excited by just the right frequency, resonate, like a wine glass shattered by an opera singer. By measuring this frequency, we measure time. Atoms make for handy clockwork. They don’t have mechanical parts, and they don’t wear out. They are attractively standard. While sunlight and pendulums vary, every caesium atom is identical to any other. And they tick very fast.

and the cutest part

As late as the second world war, Londoners could hire a woman named Ruth Belville. Once a week, Belville set her family’s pocket chronometer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. She then visited her clients around the city, telling them what time it was, and they would set their own clocks. The Belvilles had operated this service since 1836. Now Nist servers respond to more than 100 billion requests a day for the time, synchronising between a quarter and half of all machines connected to the internet.

Lots of interest anecdotes and historical trivia about timekeeping in the article.

Also, on a more technical note this reminded of this fascinting podcast that I heard a long time ago, but still remember fondly, about maintaining accurate time on computers: Signals and Threads | Clock Synchronization

LLMs for Indepth Learning

This is a good Twitter post from Justin Skycak of MathAcademy on his experience trying to get LLMs to teach him biology indepth, from the ground up. His methodology and the prompts he used are instructive

2024-11-23

Birthday today 🎉, so was out all day.

2024-11-22

The Cult of Jordan Peterson

The cult of Jordan Peterson | The Economist

This is a good bio of the man, with some funny one-liners.

Sex Lives of College Girls

The Sex Lives of College Girls (TV Series 2021– ) - IMDb #tv

S3 has landed and it is pretty much the same as the last two seasons in its occasionally crude humor and fast-paced dialogue. I can't say it's the best thing in TV right now, but I keep going back for some reason.

The Two Types of Human Laugh

The two types of human laugh | The Economist

The findings, published this week in Biology Letters, are more than light entertainment. They could, instead, point scientists towards the evolutionary roots of laughter. After all, many mammals including dogs, squirrel monkeys, Barbary macaques and chimpanzees produce vocalisations during play that sound remarkably like laughter. One of the first things that infants do early in life is laugh. Even babies born deaf spontaneously produce laughter. Humans are not the only animals that tickle either. Macaques and chimpanzees both engage in the activity too.

All this suggests that laughter from tickling evolved over 10m years ago with the common ancestor that humans shared with these other primates. Dr Kamiloglu suspects that this early sort of laughter probably evolved to help primates build friendly relations, especially during play. With this in mind, she is now keen to study how infectious different sorts of laughs are. If the tickling laugh is one that truly evolved to bring primates together, it ought to be particularly infectious—but nobody has yet tested if it is.

As for all the other forms of laughter that only people produce, these probably evolved millions of years after tickling came along, when the human brain became complex enough to understand irony, slapstick and puns. But he who laughs last, it would seem, laughs longest.

Neurodiversity

Somebody wrote in a nice response to the Economist article on ADHD in the Nov 2 2024 issue: Letters to the editor | Nov 23rd 2024 Edition.

Researching ADHD

I read your article on research that questions whether attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder should in fact be seen as a disorder (“Coming into focus”, November 2nd). The use of the term “neurodiversity” is misleading. An individual does not “have” a neurodiversity, any more than he or she can “have” any other kind of human diversity. Diversity in, say, the ability to control one’s attention or susceptibility to distraction is a description of a statistical fact, not a condition that one catches, inherits or develops. It arises from innate differences in the biology of individuals as well as the accuracy of measurements used to describe those differences.

We might add a third kind of diversity based purely on differences in social constructions about individuals made at different times or in different places by different families, communities, cultural groups, professional organisations and so forth. Divergent conclusions are often reached depending on who is observing one’s manifestations of self-control and attention.

2024-11-21

Landman

Watched the first two shows of Landman: Landman (TV Series 2024– ) - IMDb

It was pretty decent. Punchy one-liners, excellent visuals of the arid Texan landscape and a subject matter (the oil business) that I wasn't too familiar with before watching the show.

2024-11-20

A bizarre love triangle playlist

Latest NYT Amplifier playlist just dropped: The Amplifier: A Bizarre Love Triangle Playlist #music #playlist

Jolene from Beyonce is one of my all-time fav, and I had already heard the song before. Apart from that my fav on that list was Taste by Sabrina Carpenter, followed by Wildflower by Billie Eilish.

Frames

frames - by Ava - bookbear express

The “frame” of particular friendship might be something like: we text each other fairly regularly, we get dinner at restaurants or we go on walks, we split the bill, we talk about feelings, we do not have physical contact with each outside of hugs. And obviously with a category as ill-defined as friendship frames can vary hugely between people, but I think that’s a pretty standard one that holds true for a lot of male-female friendships. Basically, we have a contract for how we behave with each other, and we both honor it unless/until it needs to be renegotiated. The failure case, of course, is that you simply can’t be friends with someone who isn’t interested in maintaining the frame. One particular behavior that really annoys me (a “red flag,” as they call it) is when someone verbally says one thing and then acts in a very different way. Like, they say, Let’s be friends, I understand you’re not looking to date anyone, and then they take you to a very romantic restaurant and pay for dinner. And then suggest sitting on a park bench and try to place a hand on your thigh. It’s like—hey, I can’t maintain this frame all by myself.

I generally see “relationship types” as frames. Friendship is a frame, boyfriend/girlfriend is a frame, marriage is a frame: a set of agreements between two people on how they act towards each other. Of course there are people who are anti-frame (I believe this is called relationship anarchy). I think it’s generally really difficult to forgo social frames because most people expect and need consistency. For instance, it would probably really upset most people if a close friend talked to you really intensely every day for two months and then suddenly switched to talking to you once a month without warning. Frames are functionally how you’ve agreed (either with yourself or with another person) to operate in society.

2024-11-19

What are children for

Links in Progress: What are children for? - by Boom

In this one, Boom’s Phoebe Arslanagić-Little reviews the most important things happening in the world of pronatalism and family policy in the last month.

Conservative News Influencers

The majority of news influencers are conservative men, study finds

This morning, The Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan research organization, published a deep 122 page report that found that the news influencer landscape skews male and leans disproportionately conservative, creating a concerning imbalance in our online news landscape that could ultimately have profound political consequences.

…

In a media environment where about 4 in 10 adults under 30 regularly get news from news content creators, this imbalance isn’t just inequitable—it’s a systemic distortion of public discourse that ultimately undermines democratic values, entrenches conservative messaging, and accelerates polarization. I've written before about how desperately the left needs to build an infrastructure to amass online influence, these stats highlight just how urgent that mission is.

and a surprising tidbit about how TikTok is actually an exception in some ways

Politically, TikTok also bucks the trend: it’s the only platform where right-leaning news influencers (25%) do not outnumber left-leaning ones (28%). TikTok also has a higher concentration of news content creators who identify as LGBTQ+ or advocate for LGBTQ+ rights (13%), which is more than double the proportion on other platforms.

As I've written previously, TikTok remains a hub for progressive activism online. But unfortunately, this has made the app the target of right wing ire and directly fed efforts to shut it down.

Postgres Tips

What I Wish Someone Told Me About Postgres | ChallahScript #databases #tools

Great list of easy to understand tips for when I get around seriously using the Postgres database, hopefully in the not so distant future.

Don't Deceive Yourself

don't deceive yourself - by Celine Nguyen - personal canon

Started following Celine Nguyen on Substack only recently. Her essays contain detailed analysis and lovely references.

What disturbs me, what keeps me up at night, is how I lie to myself. “Self-deception,” Joan Didion wrote in 1961, “remains the most difficult deception”:

The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer…one shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which had involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough.

But how do you resist this kind of danger, when—by definition—the deceived self can’t even identify the lie? I’m trying to teach myself how to see what I don’t know about myself; to find the failures that my ego tries to ignore.

…

I used to be jealous of the people who seemed to just write more, do more, make more work than me! But lately I’ve realized that, while some are lucky to have an easier life (the prototypical trust fund kids, for example)…many of those people, in Didion’s words, knew the price of things. They wanted to make certain projects happen, and embraced the consequences.

The Stone Soup Theory of Billionaires

The Stone Soup Theory of Billionaires - by Brett Scott #money #anthropology

This is a powerful counter-narrative to the prevailing gospel which worships billionaires and their achievements. I will quote the intro in full, but the whole article is worth reading.

In recent years there’s been a strong outbreak of the Great Man Theory of History. This is the idea that single powerful or inspired men - literally men - create history and should be adored, or, on the flip side, reviled. Trump is obviously one of these people, but so too is Musk, Bezos, Putin, and so on. Regardless of whether they’re imagined as superheroes or supervillains, it’s assumed that the future somehow springs fully-formed out of them.

When you imagine that the course of history uniquely resides in single individuals like this, you also imagine that slight shifts in their decisions affect everything for the rest of time. They’re like the star characters in a great global soap opera, but one in which nobody else has any role but to watch them, and either praise or condemn their actions.

This same style of thinking is often applied to their wealth. The Great Man Theory of Wealth assumes that extreme riches are the result of inspired work that the person undertakes. If Bezos had not got up one morning in 1994 and had an idea for Amazon.com, we’d never have a global e-commerce platform. I mean, there are only 8.2 billion of us on the planet. Surely, the chances of a second person working out that you could match buyers and sellers on the Internet is incredibly small!

It’s always imagined that the Great Man builds something. He built a nation. He built a company. This isn’t the full reality. Here’s what actually happens: other people mostly build the thing, and the role of the Great Man is simply to be the focal point around which it’s built. To understand this, let’s turn to the parable of the Stone Soup.

He further goes on to break down and rebut several arguments that support the idea that somehow these billionaires deserve the wealth that they have acquired.

Professional Managerial Class

A two-part exploration of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) on Bill Mitchell's blog triggered memories of my own path down exploring this phenomenon a couple of years ago.

The work of author – Barbara Ehrenreich and her then husband – John Ehrenreich – in the 1970s, first introduced the term – Professional–managerial class.

The PMC according the Ehrenreichs were a “social class within capitalism that by controlling production processes through occupying a superior management position, is neither proletarian nor bourgoeisie”.

The PMC was occupied by “scientists, lawyers, academics, artists, and journalists”.

While the Ehrenreichs focused on the mechanisms whereby this class, through their education and networks, advanced the interests of capital, Catherine Liu focused more on the disdain that the PMC have for the lower-paid occupations – the sense of superiority and virtue.

Time to dust off the paper copy of the book lying in my shelf and attempt to re-read it.

We Have Never Been Woke

Found references to this book in some of the PMC stuff I was reading because it articulates some similar ideas: We Have Never Been Woke | Princeton University Press

From a review in The Guardian:

“Woke” is not a particularly useful term, more often used in disparagement than in analysis. Al-Gharbi recognises this, disavowing it as a slur, refusing even to define it. What matters to him is how the concept is deployed in practice both by supporters and detractors.

The key to understanding wokeness, Al-Gharbi insists, is the struggles of “symbolic capitalists” – “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction”. In other words, writers and academics, artists and lawyers, museum curators and tech professionals. It is a social stratum that attempts to entrench itself within the elite, elbowing out others already there, by using the language of social justice to gain status and accrue “cultural capital”. Theirs is a struggle within the elite presented as a struggle against the elite on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed.

This is not simply cynicism or hypocrisy, Al-Gharbi argues. Symbolic capitalists have constructed myths about their social roles that allow them genuinely to believe in fairness and equity while entrenching inequality and injustice, myths that have been accepted by many social institutions and power-brokers. The consequence is that the language of social justice has helped “legitimize and obscure inequalities”, allowing sections of the elite to “reinforce their elite status… often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized and disadvantaged”.

A Materialist Analysis of US Election Results

Why Are Poor Americans Voting for the Party of the Rich? | Ones and Tooze Podcast #materialism

Adam Tooze gave, from all that I have read, a really fresh analysis of the US election results from a materialist theory perspective. It's a long quote I picked out from the full transcript, but it's really worth reading. I really like the middle school analogy at the end between Kamala as a "spelling-bee girl" and Trump as a "high-living frat boy", both throwing a party and where the "academically unambitious high-school girls" (an analogy for white non-college educated women) would go.

The Professional Managerial Class (PMC) as an analytical category that I covered in the sections above also make an appearance.

Yeah, this is a great question. And I mean, I think at the most general level, the issue with materialism and the critics of materialism—materialism being the big, grand, metaphysical, almost philosophical idea that it's what we eat that determines who we are more than what we think. It's realities, it's the means through which and the way in which we reproduce our lives that shapes identities and assumptions about the world, right? That basic premise.

The thing about it is that it's so often applied as a means of rather coarse—not to say crude—simplification. You know, this for workers, that for capitalists. And then, surprise, surprise, the world doesn't make that much sense if you're trying to apply that. And in this particular case, as you're saying, what are we to make of the fact that better-off people seem to be voting for redistribution? It's turkeys voting for Thanksgiving, you might say. Conversely, you have working-class voters voting for a business party that's promising to produce huge tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.

To my mind, the thing here is that materialism is misunderstood. And if you take it seriously, it's the precise opposite of simplification. It requires an almost infinitely painstaking attention to detail. It's, you know, almost like a novelist's attention to detail. And in this particular case, I think we need to just start by recognizing that the very minimum class schema we need to understand American politics right now is a three-class rather than a two-class model.

I mean, like, one element is an idea of the working class. Let's define that in terms of dependent employment—being working for somebody else, relatively low incomes (so, by all means, earning less than the average, so $50,000 or less), and a lack of control at work that goes hand in hand with relatively less credentials, less education.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are what you might call the rich people, the upper class, who have not just higher incomes but wealth and power and the security that goes with that. In the Marxist sense, they may actually literally control the means of production—a big hotel, a factory, a business, or whatever.

But you can't understand the politics of the US right now unless you've acknowledged that there's a third social class. Let's call it the professional-managerial class, who are credentialed by the education system, occupy positions of authority within the economy and society at large, and they exercise control directly, often over working-class Americans. And that starts literally at the beginning in kindergarten or elementary school, where you have a college-educated person taking charge of your kid and their kid's education, or taking charge of you yourself and subjecting you to education.

And it goes all the way through to the hospitals where your kids are born and your parents die, and the folks that regulate what you can build in your front yard and everything else, right? The entire apparatus of managerialism. And you can see where I'm going with this. Once you've got that three-part schema in place, which is thoroughly materialistic, you can, I think, easily understand the dynamics which are in play here.

The stereotypical working-class Trump voter admires the man himself, right? He admires—or she admires—the billionaire businessperson and his cronies. They've done well, and they exercise the privileges of having done well because they're allowed to speak their mind and do their own thing. And above all, what they're allowed to do is flaunt and show disrespect and scorn for the values of the professional middle class, which the rich folks can afford to just spit on, and working-class people have to suffer, right?

Trump and co. can say out loud what many ordinary Americans think, which is that they simply can't get with the highfalutin ideas of everyone from the schoolteacher to the librarian, all the way up to the fancy Ivy League professor and the folks on television who want to talk about complex norms of transgender identities or structural racism or climate change—these big abstractions, difficult concepts. And yet, what the working-class observer will point out is that it's not actually those people, in the final analysis, who call the shots. The people who do are the people like Trump. And those are the people that you kind of admire. And if somebody like that is willing to just shoot their mouth and speak their mind and say whatever they like, and it turns out to be a relatively conservative message, then this plays extremely well with that working-class constituency.

And this is not anti-materialist or a refusal of materialism. It's a very specific set of resentments, deeply embedded in the existence of many working-class Americans every day of the week. And as you start from there, what is difficult to understand about the fact that working-class men are not keen to vote for fancy, high-powered lawyer ladies as candidates of the Democratic Party? There's just nothing to my mind that strikes me as surprising about this at all, right?

And the appeal—or rather the distaste—is compounded by the fact that that fancy lawyer lady is treating Trump as though he's a buffoon. And one of her most successful punchlines in the campaign to the New York Times-reading class is, "I'm speaking now," right? Which is this sort of maternal assertion of power towards whoever it is who's supposed to shut up at that point. In this case, it was a heckler, but it expresses something that working-class Americans will find easy to relate to in a negative way.

I mean, is it really surprising that white women without college degrees preferred Trump over Hillary and then Harris by a margin of 25 to 28%? I struggle to understand why anyone finds this surprising. Like, you know, imagine a middle school class, and imagine there's two people throwing a party, and one of them is like the state champion spelling bee girl, and the other one is a high-living frat boy who appears to know how to have a good time. Where would you expect the less academically ambitious girls in the class— which side, which party do you expect them to go to, right?

So the very fact that American liberals find this so hard to digest to the point at which they begin to question their own metaphysical assumptions, you know, to my mind, is an expression of the extraordinary material—profoundly material—divides there are in US society that literally render the behavior of one group almost incomprehensible to the people who supposedly understand everything, right? The liberal educated group.

And one of the reasons why we can't see this incredibly obvious, incredibly powerful three-way split is that it's very badly captured by the statistics that we have to rely on. It's really appalling how inadequate the sociological data are on American elections. Basically, what do we have to do? We have to rely on two categories to do almost all the work. One is college versus non-college, and the other one is $50k, $50k to $100k, $100k plus.

As though these were adequate categories for describing the complex reality of American society. I mean, it's telling that even if you just combine those two elements, you end up with something quite informative, which is that amongst men without college degrees, there is a huge propensity to vote Trump amongst those with over $100k in income. Because, you know, just imagine the novelistic character here: this is the small business owner who didn't go to college and nevertheless has made good, and therefore knows very well that folks like Harris or Clinton are just a huge pain-in-the-ass lawyer lady that they want to have absolutely nothing to do with, right?

And so there's this scornful rejection of those values, firmly rooted in materialism, translated into a cultural politics of mutual scorn and contempt, you know, which have very, very deep roots in American society in this current moment. So I think materialism is all the way. It gives us all the juice that we need, but we need a more refined, complex, richer understanding of these social, economic, and cultural hierarchies.

2024-11-18

NYT Amplifier Playlist

The new NYT Amplifier playlist just landed and I have been listening to it: The Amplifier: 7 New Songs You Should Hear Now #music #playlist

Graucha Max by Darkside is one of my favs.

Walking in Japan

Walking Japan (again): From Fukuoka to Nagasaki #travel #japan

Yet another lovely read from Chris Arnade. Yet another antidote to the Japan slop hitting my timeline from folks visiting there from India, and just marking off places they found in a tourist guide.

Work as the central point of your life can sound empty and meaningless and not something you think I would admire given that I write about needing something spiritual that isn’t confined to this world, but also tries to make sense of what comes after death. Yet when you are a stakeholder in your job, that is when you are your own boss, which is one of the defining differences between craftsmanship and simple labor, then there can be a spiritual component, which while not as deep and complex as faith, can give someone a clear sense of purpose that extends beyond this life.

In Japan, partly due to permissive zoning laws, but also because of historical precedent, there are independently owned and run restaurants almost everywhere, although they tend to cluster next to train stations, which are also almost everywhere. These small businesses are the economic and meaning-making engine for almost everyone who works in them, which is often both parents, and a few of their children. That sense of ownership, coupled with a culture of thoughtfulness, means the food in them is almost always amazing, no matter the location.

Sex Strikes

Are sex strikes really the best response to the behaviours of men? | Dazed

Pretesting

The ‘secret strategy’ that could boost your ability to learn | Psyche Ideas #learning #hacks

Imagine you are planning to learn about the solar system but, before you start, your teacher gives you a multiple-choice quiz on the topic. You haven’t learned a single fact about the solar system yet, so the questions, such as ‘Which of our dwarf planets is not a plutoid?’ or ‘Which planet is the least dense in the solar system?’, leave you staring blankly. Naturally, you are bound to make mistakes. You might understandably feel that this guessing in the dark is a complete waste of time. In fact, it’s not – a growing body of research shows this early test can significantly enhance your later learning.

Researchers believe pretesting is beneficial because it improves the way that we process the to-be-learned material…

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Increased attention to the to-be-learned material could be another factor. Pan and his colleagues have observed reduced mind-wandering after pretesting, and other researchers have shown that participants’ eyes focus more on sentences related to the questions they received in advance. Other potential mechanisms include an improved motivation to learn and that pretesting acts as a metacognitive ‘reality check’, highlighting what you do and do not know and encouraging you to fill in knowledge gaps.

Whatever the mechanism is, when you later need that information, you’re more likely to recall it after a pretest than if you had simply read it.

Mental Health Diagnosis

What a psychiatric diagnosis means – and what it doesn’t mean | Psyche Ideas #mentalhealth

A diagnosis is a prototype

In the official diagnostic manuals, categories such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or generalised anxiety disorder come with stringent criteria for applying the diagnosis. The view taken by clinicians is usually not so rigid. Instead, these categories are often understood as prototypical: they are based on the typical or illustrative example of a mental health problem from which real-world presentations will often deviate. From this perspective, a diagnosis is a ‘best fit’ match between someone’s experiences and a prototype, which represents the most specific or notable features of a condition.

Self Care and the Beauty Industry

Jessica DeFino is back again to eviscerate the beauty industry and their shenanigans: Post-Election, Beware 'Self-Care'

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence,” Audre Lorde wrote in her 1988 essay collection, A Burst of Light. “It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

If the activist were alive today, she would hardly recognize the concept of self-care, and we would hardly recognize her.

Consider: Her forehead would be wrinkle-free — a placid, paralytic approximation of youth — courtesy of Botox. Her frown lines would be filled with a smidge of injectable Juvéderm, and her eyes would appear wide and awake; perhaps from a blepharoplasty, perhaps from a syringe of filler to the tear troughs.

This time specifically, she is writing about the origins of the phenomena when "skin-care" got substituted by "self-care".

I can’t say what Lorde would make of the surface-level “self-care” the beauty and wellness industries promote today, since it only rose to popularity in 2016. Following the (first) election of U.S. President Donald Trump, activists circulated the above quote from Lorde to emphasize the importance of tending to one’s needs in times of political upheaval. Cosmetic companies slyly swapped the word “self” for “skin”. Customers ate it up — of course Lorde meant collagen levels when she preached about preservation! — because people were tired, and applying eye cream is easier than engaging in political action.

Over the next year, skincare became the fastest growing market in beauty, amassing $5.6 billion in sales and totaling 45% of the industry’s growth. And over the next eight years, every failure of care by the government created another opportunity for Big Beauty to expand the reach of its narrowing standards, all under the banner of wellness.

Bihar's Daughters are Coding

Alice Evans looks at “the Honour-Income Trade-Off” in Bihar where girls are enrolling into programming schools and then going on to get coding jobs: Bollywood, Are You Watching? Bihar's Daughters Are Coding

2024-11-17

Podcast Recap

2024-11-16

Spent the whole day outside and did fun things!

Dot Mandala

Made this dot mandala at StoryZone and had loads of fun. We were given a 3 min intro with the tools and off we went for two hours just randomly trying out things. I chose to focus on bright colors and simple patterns. Check out the result below.

HSR Food

Tried two places in HSR Layout:

2024-11-15

Been rewatching Andor S1 since I tweeted about it a couple of days ago.

Tokyo

Lots of Indians are going to Tokyo, and I keep seeing pics on X. But they also seem to be doing the same stereotypical things, that I did back when I was there several years ago.

This NYT article about visiting Tokyo has a slightly offbeat 3-day itinerary: 36 Hours in Tokyo: Things to Do and See - The New York Times #tokyo #japan #travel #offbeat

Jung Quote

"People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls."

Carl Jung Psychology and Alchemy

The Bro Vote

I read about this in the Vox Culture newsletter from Rebecca Jennings. The newsletter doesn't seem to be accessible online, but there is a members exclusive article which covers the same thing: From Joe Rogan to Theo Von, Gen Z podcasts and livestreams helped Trump win | Vox #trump

Could it be that growing up in a fundamentally different media environment than generations before them, one populated by individual influencers who often preach the values of entrepreneurship, self-improvement, and, ultimately, self-interest over everything else, galvanized the youngest voters to vote for a man who shared that same spirit? Or could it be that young men have helped make this content popular because they like what it says?

What’s clear is that Donald Trump catered to the bro vote and won.

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Ten years later, men are even lonelier, more likely to be single, more skeptical, and more afraid than ever. They find solace and community online, in places that older folks still don’t understand, where they see idealized versions of masculinity winning. They cheer on UFC fights and boxing matches, use “edgy” slurs, trade in risky crypto investments, bootlick Silicon Valley billionaires, listen to toxic dating advice, and denigrate women.

They vote for a man who has done everything you’re not supposed to do — steal, lie, rape, idolize Hitler — because his election fulfills their fantasy that men really can get away with whatever they want.

For now, it seems they’re right.

Male Loneliness

The article above about The Bro Vote triggered a journey down the rabbit hole of male loneliness.

My starting points were two articles I had come across in Sept from Alice Evans (and linked in the daily log as well), which I re-read:

Found this report titled State of American Men 2023 from one of Alice Evans' other articles (which is only tangential related). PDF here (the executive summary is great): STATE-OF-AMERICAN-MEN-2023.pdf

Read a few more articles but came away a bit unsatisfied. Decided to ask ChatGPT to give me a succinct breakdown, and I thought it did a pretty good job.

Male loneliness has increased in recent times due to shifting societal norms, changing labor markets, and evolving relationship dynamics. Traditional forms of male bonding, such as workplace camaraderie and community-based activities, have diminished with the rise of remote work and urbanization. These changes have led to fewer opportunities for men to form and maintain deep friendships. Research by Niobe Way, author of Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, highlights how boys are often socialized out of forming close emotional bonds as they age, leading to a lack of intimate friendships in adulthood. This socialization, combined with modern lifestyles that prioritize individualism over community, exacerbates male loneliness.

Additionally, the decline in marriage rates and delays in forming long-term relationships play a significant role. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg's work in Going Solo reveals how the increasing prevalence of single-person households—particularly among men—contributes to feelings of isolation. Digital dating culture, while ostensibly expanding opportunities to connect, often fails to provide the deep, meaningful relationships men seek. This is compounded by the fact that men are less likely than women to maintain social networks outside of romantic relationships, leaving them more vulnerable to loneliness when those connections are absent or fail.

Finally, mental health stigmas continue to inhibit men from seeking help or sharing their struggles. The societal expectation for men to embody self-reliance and emotional stoicism discourages them from building supportive networks. Studies such as those by Brené Brown on vulnerability show that the inability to express emotions openly hampers relational depth. These combined factors underscore how recent societal shifts have uniquely affected men, leading to increased loneliness and a pressing need for cultural and structural solutions.

Kyla Scanlon on How Trump Won

How Trump Won, What Happens Next, and How Disconnects Drove Democracy

Kyla is already great at taking disparate narratives and summarizing them. So I am not going to attempt to quote from her piece. Just go read the whole thing, it's great!

The majority of the article is focused on economic and policy analysis, but even she refers to the idea of Trump winning over young male voters, by linking out to this Bloomberg article: Trump’s Appeal to Young Men in Three Charts: Election 2024 - Bloomberg

More Trump and Election Analysis

Just gonna collect the random links under one heading:

Selection Effects

Selection Effects by Byrne Hobart in the Capital Gains newsletter

The last para is killer, and I can really relate to it as a person with wayyy too many interests

One irony of all of this is that these filters are self-reinforcing: if you select into a particular peer group that's really excited about political activism, recreational math, vegan cooking, cryptography, or whatever, you get constant evidence from your daily life that these are universally interesting topics. And if you've selected into these groups, you'd probably rather live in a world where that perception is true! So being aware of selection effects has tradeoffs: you'll know more about the rest of the world if you periodically check yourself in that way, but a lot of what you learn makes the world a slightly less friendly place.

Living Fossils - Just Tell Me What To Do

"Just Tell Me What To Do" - by Josh Zlatkus #psychology #therapy

Yet another banger of an article from the awesome folks at Living Fossils. It's so beautifully written and yet hard to summarize. It covers the usual topics that show up in other Living Fossils posts around technology upending culture and religion and the limits of therapy.

Humans rely on many sense-making methods to patch together an understanding of the world around them. One of these methods is, of course, our senses. If I touch a bush and get pricked, that’s enough information for me to avoid that bush in the future. However, if I want to know how the bush came to be prickly, then I must rely on more than my senses. I must instead rely on something like religion, culture, or science. I think of these as sense-making institutions; they try to explain what our built-in senses cannot.

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So here’s the big picture. Science has stolen like a fox into the henhouse and killed many of our ancient ways of making sense of the world around us. For some questions, science has provided more accurate answers which tend to be less comforting than those made, at least in part, for comfort. For other questions, science has discredited existing answers without replacing them. It’s up to those in the modern world to fill in the blanks. To some extent, all of us are playing Mad Libs.

Obviously, the increased accuracy, transparency, and choice that science offers can be good. At the same time, the shifting, open landscape that it creates can be deeply confusing and disorienting. It often leads people to seek shelter, to cast around for something—or someone—to tell them what to do.

Andor

The Power & Beauty of Revolution in ‘Andor’ | by Nick | Medium

The quality of Andor’s writing is clear here. The directness of its politics is demonstrated. And the series underpins one thing: only through sacrifice, collective action, and the long slog of inches gained, will true revolution come.

2024-11-14

Lampy

Came across this really cool lamp: Lampy – shop.absurd.industries

/images/lampy.png

Linguistic Observer Effect

How the word 'slop' went mainstream.

the linguistic observer effect - The Etymology Nerd

By lending “slop” the legitimacy of the New York Times, we would instantly be elevating it against potential synonyms, giving it more of a platform to spread than its competitors. Alternatively, we could kill the word by making it seem unnatural, like Taylor Lorenz likely did with her 2021 article about the then-nascent word “cheugy.” I called this the Linguistic Observer Effect: by publicly observing a word, we inadvertently alter its trajectory.

Ben went on to publish his article, and I wrote a substack post wondering what would happen to the word.

Six months later, I think we have our answer. “Slop” has reached sustained usage in the media, and I’ve even heard my friends casually use the phrase (though I know they weren’t saying it earlier this year). This almost definitely happened because of the Times piece:

tty demystified

The TTY demystified #tty #tools

Tribalism in Human Beings

Tribalism and Modern Elections - by Alice Evans #evolution #culture

book recommendation from the article: Tribal by Michael Morris: 9780735218093 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

Two Fundamental Psychological Systems:

Tribalism in the Digital Age: Epistemic Tribalism In a fragmented media landscape, people form echo chambers, valuing in-group cohesion over objective truth.

How to do great work

From: x.com

/images/graham_great_work.png

2024-11-13

Math Roadmap

Good roundup of math topics.

thanks to @aagrabakijasmine on X

Dating Standards and Hot People

Too much exposure to hot people is warping our dating standards | Dazed #dating

These quotes are so relatable, but the whole article is well worth reading!

It’s been well established that the digital ubiquity of “unrealistic beauty standards” is whittling away at our self-esteem and mental health. What has been unpacked less exhaustively, however, is the impact it’s having on our dating lives. Online, men are calling Sydney Sweeney and Margot Robbie “mid”, rating the latter a seven out of ten on the universal scale of hotness, and a lot of my gorgeous friends lament never being hit on in real life. “Back in the olden days they [men] would see like 200 baddies in their whole life and now it’s like, they are desensitised to it,” posited influencer Tinx, to resounding agreement on TikTok and beyond. Over half of US adults say dating has gotten worse over the last ten years. Has overexposure to good-looking people skyrocketed our standards?

…

A 2014 study conducted by Carlota Batres, assistant professor of psychology at Franklin & Marshall College and the director of the Preferences Lab, found that participants with access to the internet favoured more masculine men and thinner, more feminine women. “The internet influences our perceptions of what it is that we find attractive,” she tells Dazed. It’s a theory bolstered by a later study by Batres, which found that our visual diet – or the faces we see most (on or offline) – shapes our perception of what’s beautiful. It’s no wonder that a dissonance is occurring when we step out of the lacquered digital realm into the real world of idiosyncrasies and textured skin, where we’re illuminated by fluorescent overhead lighting instead of ring lights, and you see every angle of someone’s face.

It’s a take echoed by psychologist and researcher Michelle Drouin: “I think you can put it down to basic habituation. We have now become habituated to the images that we’ve seen online and we think that that’s our reality… Physical attraction is what makes someone walk across the room for someone else. And if you don’t have that initial prime attraction, because you’re so habituated to all the beautiful, perfect images that you see online, then what’s the trigger that makes you walk across a room?”

Life is a Gift

Nov 11 was Dostoevsky's birthday, and X seems to be flooded with a bunch of quotes. This one caught my eye

2024-11-12

Podcast Recap

LLMs and Go

Some links to work with LLMs in Go #golang #llm

2024-11-11

Economist on ADHD

Researchers are questioning if ADHD should be seen as a disorder

As somebody who recently realised I had very clear ADHD-like symptoms for most of my adult life, I have spent way too much time researching and understanding the disease. I have posted about some of the stuff I have uncovered before.

It is like being inside a pinball machine with a hundred balls,” says Lucy. “Three inner monologues,” says Phillip. “Like several tracks playing at the same time,” says Sarah. This is how people with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) describe what is going on in their heads at any given moment. With so many thoughts jostling for attention, it is a struggle to concentrate. Appointments fly by. Relationships founder. Feelings of inadequacy—alongside anxiety and depression—start to creep in.

…

But for a growing number of experts, the evolving scientific understanding of ADHD is leading them to question whether it should be seen as a disorder at all.

Instead, they say, ADHD may simply represent another point on the spectrum of neurodiversity: the range of different ways of thinking and behaving that count as normal. They point to other, non-pharmaceutical interventions that have been shown to make a difference to people with symptoms, from building a supportive environment that harnesses their strengths to offering tools that help them cope with the challenges of daily life.

Day of the Jackal

Loved the first four episodes: The Day of the Jackal (TV Mini Series 2024– ) - IMDb #tv

2024-11-10

OS X CLI Utilities

Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities

Some nice ones:

Uruguay and Teslas

TIL, Uruguay is a great place to import Teslas: Where to buy Teslas in Uruguay: imported straight from China - Rest of World

Uruguay, a small country with a robust public charging network, tax cuts for EVs, and minimal bureaucratic hurdles for car imports, has become a natural landing pad for Teslas.

2024-11-09

Turns out it took me longer to actually feel fully recovered despite the fever receding earlier this week. Decided to take a break from daily logging. But now I am back!

Podcast Recap

2024-11-05

Declared podcast and feed bankruptcy and marked everything I missed during the fever as read. I should do that more often.

Starting watching Rivals: Rivals (TV Series 2024– ) - IMDb #tv

2024-11-04

Fever seems to be gone! 🕺🏽

Podcast Recap

2024-11-03

Substance

Watched Substance movie. Pretty good watch! The Substance (2024) - IMDb

Caught up with the latest episode of Special Ops: Lioness #tv

2024-11-02

Finished bingewatching The Diplomat S2. The ending was just so silly, but at least it sets up the third season really nicely.

2024-11-01

Gonna stop with the fever updates. Will log once my fever has completely gone.

Started watching The Diplomat S2, and realised I need to go back and do a full recap of S1 because I have forgotten everything: The Diplomat (TV Series 2023– ) - IMDb #tv