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Daily log archive for Feb 2025. Go to the current daily log, or browse the archive index.

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2025-02-28

Karpathy on using LLMs

The only useful thing I did today was watching this Karpathy video in full, apart from watching the latest episode of Severance.

2025-02-27

Podscript UI overhaul

UI overhaul · deepakjois/podscript@ef94c87 · GitHub #podscript #react #shadcn

Overhauled the Podscript web UI with close to 1000 lines of AI assisted React code that uses shadcn components.

I used Cursor heavily because my React foo is kinda rusty. However, I did get it to explain every line of code to me as a learning exercise. Along the way, I was able to prompt the AI to improve some of the code it generated, so I am gonna say it was a very collaborative endeavor.

Roti

Community-Based Research Explores Roti’s Global Histories – SAPIENS #roti #food #history #culture

Kale roti, for example, is a regional delicacy from Bangladesh that contains black gram beans (mashkalai) and other flours, and is eaten with mashed dishes made of chili, eggplant, tomato, or spiced beef. Using ingredients such as melted butter and cake flour changes the flatbread’s texture into the soft and spongy South African butter roti. In South Asia, Kenya, and Uganda, the flatbread goes by “chapati,” from the Urdu-Hindi root word “chapat” (slap), referring to the slapping technique used to flatten dough balls into thin, round discs before cooked on a tawa, or hot griddle. In Guyana, the name “clap roti” similarly points to a clapping technique for fashioning a flaky, tender roti—perfect for picking up steaming hot goat curry. In the Indian province of Gujarat, there is an extra-thin roti called a rotli. In Malaysia, the word “roti” can refer to many types of leavened and unleavened breads, including the famous roti canai, enjoyed as a circular, crunchy, flaky bread. And in various places, people have created versions to accommodate dietary restrictions and preferences, including vegan roti.

Slop

The New Aesthetics of Slop - by Ted Gioia #ai #slop

We have come a long way from the days of Impressionism and Naturalism and all the rest. Those were serious movements. They happened because of dedicated artists committed to their craft.

Slop is the opposite.

It’s the perfect aesthetic theory for 12 year olds with no artistic sensitivty—but possessing a crude sense of humor and lots of pop culture detritus in their heads.

Tech companies embrace this—and even brag about the sloppiness of their Slop. Each generation of AI aspires to new levels of whackness.

AI does not possess a self. It lacks personhood. It has no experience of subjectivity. So any art it creates will inevitably feel empty and hollow.

The Slop Manifesto is pretty cool!

How to code with Claude Sonnet 3.7

Some tips to code with Claude Code from somebody who works at Anthropic. #code #claude #ai #tools

Catherine Olsson: Claude Code is very useful, but it can still get confused.

A few quick tips from my experience coding with it at Anthropic 👉

  1. Work from a clean commit so it's easy to reset all the changes. Often I want to back up and explain it from scratch a different way.

  2. Sometimes I work on two devboxes at the same time: one for me, one for Claude Code. We’re both trying ideas in parallel. E.g. Claude proposes a brilliant idea but stumbles on the implementation. Then I take the idea over to my devbox to write it myself.

  3. My most common confusion with Claude is when tests and code don't match, which one to change? Ideal to state clearly whether I'm writing novel tests for existing code I'm reasonably sure has the intended behavior, or writing novel code against tests that define the behavior.

  4. If we're working on something tricky and it keeps making the same mistakes, I keep track of what they were in a little notes file. Then when I clear the context or re-prompt, I can easily remind it not to make those mistakes.

  5. I can accidentally "climb up where I can't get down". E.g. I was working on code in Rust, which I do not know. The first few PRs went great! Then Claude was getting too confused. Oh no. We're stuck. IME this is fine, just get ready to slowww dowwwn to get properly oriented.

  6. When reviewing Claude-assisted PRs, look out for weirder misunderstandings than the human driver would make! We're all a little junior with this technology. There's more places where goofy misunderstandings and odd choices can leak in.

Beliefs about Groups

Property Rights Part II: Groups Are All In Your Head #groups #psychology

Consider the case of the Hutu and Tutsi. Before colonial powers arrived in Rwanda and Burundi, the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi was tied to roles: Tutsi were cattle herders, and Hutu were primarily farmers. These roles were malleable. A Hutu who gained wealth, for example, could become a Tutsi, and a Tutsi who fell into poverty might be seen as a Hutu. It wasn’t penguin-like. No genetic barrier separated the two; rather, it was a set of beliefs tied to social and economic status that people shared about who belonged where.

Then colonial powers showed up, bringing their own beliefs about human groups. The Belgians, looking for a tidy way to rule, assigned group membership based on external traits—height, nose shape, and skin tone—and issued identity cards that fixed people as either Hutu or Tutsi. What had been fluid became rigid, and what had been a matter of local belief became a matter of colonial administration. Suddenly, group membership wasn’t just in people’s heads; it was on ID cards. But here’s the key: the colonial project worked the way it did because it created new beliefs. Hutu and Tutsi became fixed categories, not because DNA had changed but because the social world had.

This artificial rigidity had horrible consequences, which echo to this day. Once people’s beliefs about group membership hardened, so too did the lines of power and conflict. By the mid-20th century, these categories fueled violent struggles that culminated in the Rwandan Genocide. Even in the aftermath of such horror, the reality remained: the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi is still a matter of belief. Just as in the case of property rights—and moral rules as well—if no one believed the distinction mattered, it would vanish tomorrow. There is no penguin-like essential quality separating the two groups. Hutus and Tutsi are Hutus and Tutsis because someone interprets them as being such.

The Bull Case for Generative AI

Key Takeaways OpenAI Is Not A Real Company - Better Offline (podcast) | Listen Notes #openai

Ed Zitron makes a great case for how generative AI maybe more hype than we imagine it to be.

✅ Generative AI is not a profitable industry – it is entirely propped up by venture capital and cloud subsidies.
✅ OpenAI loses billions every year – even on its paid customers.
✅ The user numbers are misleading – low conversion rates suggest weak market demand.
✅ OpenAI’s product strategy is failing – new offerings are expensive, unreliable, and unprofitable.
✅ Future prospects look bleak – if venture capital dries up, OpenAI and the broader generative AI space could collapse.

Full transcript and summary here: OpenAI is Not a Real Company - Transcript Summary

Reality

2025-02-26

Resend

Send emails with Node.js · Resend #email #api

Resend is the email API for developers.

This may be the simplest and most intuitive API for email sending I have come across so far. I was able to setup my custom domain with it and start sending emails in less than 15 mins. They also have Go and Node SDKs, among others.

2025-02-25

Spent most of the day diving into React and Tailwind.

Agency vs Intelligence

Words of wisdom from Karpathy sensei.

Cursor Rules

I talked to the AI today and told it stuff it doesn't know yet 🤷🏽‍♂️

/images/cursor_rules.png

2025-02-24

Working on a thing!

2025-02-23

What is good coffee

What Is "Good" Coffee? The Dark Side Of Flavour! - YouTube #coffee #flavor #taste

Great video on how subjective coffee tasting is, and how you may not be crazy for not liking that expensive packet of beans.

ChatGPT Summary: ChatGPT - Coffee Quality and Preferences

Garbage

Garbage — Ridgeline issue 203

Craig Mod has a great piece on social norms around garbage in Japan. Most Japanese public spaces don't have a lot of garbage bins and you are supposed to carry your own garbage.

The first time I walked into a random shop in Tokyo and asked to throw away something (a Starbucks cup, perhaps? an item I did not buy from the shop itself) was twenty-five years ago. The owner looked at me like I had just asked him if I could jump on his desk and take a shit. I’ve never bothered a shop with my garbage since.

…

In Kamakura, Starbucks has big signs instructing non-Japanese customers to please not leave their take-away cups in random locations. (Apparently this was becoming endemic.) There are no garbage cans in Kamakura, and, indeed, if you are buying a coffee to go, you will be responsible for that receptacle for, potentially, a very long time. This is your grandé-sized hair shirt to bear.

…

This obsession with the immediate “unburdening” of a thing you created is common in non-Japanese contexts, but I posit: The Japanese way is the correct way. Be an adult. Own your garbage. Garbage responsibility is something we’ve long since abdicated not only to faceless cans on street corners (or just all over the street, as seems to be the case in Manhattan or Paris), but also faceless developing countries around the world. Our oceans teem with the waste from generations of averted eyes. And I believe the two — local pathologies and attendant global pathologies — are not not connected.

…

Personally, I don’t love carrying my garbage around with me, but I recognize that it wouldn’t exist without my intervention. Nobody ran up and asked me to hold an empty cup. I thoughtlessly bought something. Thoughtlessly consumed it, and now I have to hold onto the detritus for a little while? Great. It’s easy. Easy to embrace that modicum of responsibility for your own waste. This is my protest song, the world’s lamest: I will attend to my garbage without complaint. Maybe give it a try next time you’re in Japan? It’s very exciting — to realize you will not be killed by your garbage, that holding a Snickers’ wrapper will not drain your crypto reserves, that not having piles of everyone else’s garbage all around is quite a nice bonus when walking through a city. And it might just keep you from buying unnecessary junk.

Ideological Propaganda by Way of the Algorithm

how the algorithm keeps you under control - by Adam Aleksic #algorithms #ideology #culture #sociology

In their 1947 Dialectic of Enlightenment, the philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer voiced their concerns about how the popular media of the time_—film, radio, and magazines—_primarily functioned to pacify the general population.

To them, the “culture industry” was a tool to both occupy our senses and influence our attitudes toward the world. Through the mass production of entertainment, the media-makers are able to dominate people’s leisure “from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next morning.” The flat, repetitive nature of the content, meanwhile, enforces social structures by pushing the same conformist narratives, and the movie-goer never questions anything since he “sees the world outside as an extension of the film he has just left.”

Adorno and Horkheimer would probably be losing their shit today.

…

Notably, all of this content is user-generated. There’s no bogeyman imposing cultural messaging from the top down. Rather, conformity is ingrained into the very structure of social media. The act of participating on TikTok, for example, schematizes certain assumptions like valuing follower counts or view counts. This ties one’s self-worth to what goes viral on the algorithm, incentivizing the creation of ever more content. ch If you as the viewer enjoy a meme, you mentally legitimize the algorithm that brought it to you. If you engage by liking or commenting, you even help it crowdsource information about the type of audience that should receive that meme in the future. To exist on social media at all is to opt into a technofeudalistic fiefdom where we individually and collectively feed platforms the information they need to keep us docile.

Thoreau's idea of success

How to REALLY Avoid Living a Life of Quiet Desperation | The Art of Manliness #masculinity #self-help #self-improvement #philosophy

True success in Thoreau’s view thus cannot be understood in terms of monetary or conventional values, or even in the kinds of epic adventures that show well on Instagram.

A dedicated homebody, he rarely traveled far from home. He refused to dedicate himself full-time to his father’s pencil manufacturing business, though he possessed the mechanical acumen and inventiveness that could have turned him into something of an industrial magnate. Instead, he structured his life to allow for as little work, and as much writing and meditative leisure as possible. And even when it came to that writing, while he did care about his works being read and praised (at least by those he respected), he was unwilling to alter them in order to court a broader audience. Indeed, Thoreau’s friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, thought that if his protégé had one flaw, it was a lack of ambition.

Yet in some ways this criticism misses the mark. For while Thoreau wasn’t ambitious for the traditional status markers held up by society, he was ambitious for something else: life. Life at its very essence. Life in its fullest form.

 Social theorist Gregg Easterbrook astutely calls this process of getting what we want, but never feeling like we have enough, “abundance denial.”

Compounding this cycle of dissatisfaction — and the desperation it produces — is the fact that attaining external desires often costs money. Money that can only be procured in trade for one’s time and labor. And this frequently isn’t the only payment required: the work one must perform frequently demands compromises to one’s individual values, principles, and dreams. It demands a loss of independence; even the entrepreneur must defer to the whims of the marketplace.

Thus, the more you want, the more you have to work to pay for it, the less autonomous you become, and the further removed you get from the beating heart of life.

Thoreau thus rightly argued that “the cost of a thing” was not simply a matter of its price tag, but “the amount of what I will call life, which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

2025-02-22

How to live a meaningful life

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

Key points – How to make your life feel more meaningful

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

LLM Codegen Workflow

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

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

2025-02-21

What is your lore

How Deep Is Your Lore? - WSJ

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

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

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

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

…

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

Woke

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

More interesting stuff about the origins of the word woke

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

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

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

…

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

…

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

The psychological centre of gravity

The Imperfectionist: Reality is right here

From Oliver Burkeman's latest

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

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

…

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

Reasons for drop in software engineering vacancies

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

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

and finally

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

2025-02-20

How GenZ sees the world

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

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

Key Takeaways:

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

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

Paradox of Abundance

Paradox of Abundance: Automation Anxiety Returns

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

Using Willpower to Change Circumstance

Vacation Insights - by Josh Zlatkus - Living Fossils #mentalhealth

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suffering Well

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

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

Expectation

Meaning

Viktor Shvets on Govt Spending

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

Risks of an Imbalanced Economy

Addressing Concerns About Government Inefficiency

2025-02-19

Pros and Cons of uv

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

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

we are all androids

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

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

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

Government Debt

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

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

Romantic Love

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

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

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

Manto and Chughtai

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

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

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

How we lost the flow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trust the experts

Just Trust the Experts - Scott H Young

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

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

You are using Cursor AI incorrectly

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

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

2025-02-18

Export to Prompt

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

2025-02-17

Finally!

/images/math_academy.png

2025-02-16

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

2025-02-15

Math Academy!

2025-02-14

Math Academy, and coping with life stuff.

2025-02-13

Chinese Marriages

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

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

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

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

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

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

NYT Amplifier: 10 Songs That Celebrate the Sound of Philadelphia

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

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

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

USAID

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

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

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

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

Tyler Cowen on Stablecoins

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

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

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

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

How Much Protein Do We Actually Need?

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

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

The linked article: Big Food Gets Jacked

Production grade frontend app in Go and WebAssembly

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

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

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

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

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

Website improvements

Managed to tweak two minor things on the website

2025-02-12

Math Academy and a LOT of chores.

2025-02-11

How do radical ideas go mainstream

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

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

What enabled this remarkable shift?

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

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

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

Podscript Support for Amazon Bedrock and Gemini

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

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

Jessica DeFino interview in L’ADN magazine

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

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

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

In Praise of Ponzis

In Praise of Ponzis #crypto #product #marketing

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

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

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

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

Jujutsu Version Control System

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

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

2025-02-10

How to Achieve Immortality

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

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

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

We should all be concerned about that.

…

This is what art does. Even at secondhand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economics as politics and philosophy

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

How Venture Capital Works

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

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

Grand Strategy

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

Rob Henderson reviews On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis.

This one stood out to me.

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

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

2025-02-09

The Psychology of Severance

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

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

Tokyo Drift

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

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

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

Writing Good AI Prompts for Code Generation

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

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

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

2025-02-08

Tapestry

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

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

Marriage Material Shortage

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

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

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

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

How I use AI

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

some thoughts on friendship

some thoughts on friendship - by Ava - bookbear express

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

Cairo's Female Skaters

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

Loved watching this (extremely) short film

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

High Agency is Tech's Latest Buzzword

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

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

From Business Insider:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Git - template for commit messages

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

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

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

and then adjusted ~/.gitconfig like this:

[commit]
  template = ~/.gitmessage

What to read

everything i read in january 2025 - by Celine Nguyen

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

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

Suspectibility to Misinformation

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

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

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

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

The transcript was a great read.

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

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

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

we are destroying software

We are destroying software | Hacker News

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

2025-02-07

Cerebras and DeepSeek

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

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

2025-02-06

Pure Lithium

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

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

Meco - an app for consolidating newsletters

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

httptap

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

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

Written in Go, runs only on Linux.

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

Monastic Academy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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the way a sovereign currency "works"

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

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

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

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

MAGA Obsession for the 1950s family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Attention Singularity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Placebo Effect of Therapy

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

I quoted part 1 earlier.

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

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

…

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

How do exchange rates work

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

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

  • Lawyers: what’s provable is True.

  • Artists: what’s authentic is True.

  • Politicians: what’s popular is True.

  • Practitioners: what works is True.

  • Academics: what’s correct is True.

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

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

Sports Betting and Robinhood

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

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

and then, what a load of crock

The announcement went on:

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

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

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

2025-02-05

Twins in our Primate Past

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

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

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

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

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

Paradise TV Show on Hulu

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

2025-02-04

The Abstraction Ceiling

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

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

/images/hofstadter_book.png

Why Are We Distracted

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

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

Actionable Takeaways:

Adobe's C2PA standards for establishing image provenance

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

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

React as the "linux kernel" of modern software development

x.com

NYT Amplifier: Grammy Nominees

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

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

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

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

YouTube Music Playlist: Grammys’ Best New Artist Nominees

Stablecoins and Product-Market Fit

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

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

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

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

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

Africa:

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

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

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

Sniffnet

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

Looks pretty!

2025-02-03

Restarted Math Academy today.

Book Recos as Hinge Prompt

NPR Books Newsletter #hinge #dating #books

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

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

Unhingedness

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

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

The quote from the link:

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

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

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

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

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

Raycast

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

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

Vibe Coding

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

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

Texting over Phone Calls

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

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

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

Algorithmic Ranking

Algorithmic ranking is unfairly maligned #algorithms #feeds #content

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

2025-02-02

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

Pataal Lok

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

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

Photo Editing Using Lightroom

Surprisingly accessible video on how to edit photos using LIghtroom

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

Peak Tech Bro

Have we hit peak tech bro?

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

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

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

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

Demographic Decline

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

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

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

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

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

Improving Terminal Setup

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

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

The End of Wokeness

Where ‘woke’ went wrong #woke #culture

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

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

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

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

The Art of Fermentation

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

Lovely article covering the basics of fermentation.

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

Zyn

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

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

ChatGPT Summary

2025-02-01

Podscript Web UI

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

Recorded a screencast to demo the UI.

Podscript Single Binary App

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

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

A couple of interesting things I did:

Severance

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

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

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