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2025-03-14
Four Thousand Weeks
In today's dose of Oliver Burkeman
Though I’d been largely unaware of it, my productivity obsession had been serving a hidden emotional agenda. For one thing, it helped me combat the sense of precariousness inherent to the modern world of work: if I could meet every editor’s every demand, while launching various side projects of my own, maybe one day I’d finally feel secure in my career and my finances. But it also held at bay certain scary questions about what I was doing with my life, and whether major changes might not be needed. If I could get enough work done, my subconscious had apparently concluded, I wouldn’t need to ask if it was all that healthy to be deriving so much of my sense of self-worth from work in the first place. And as long as I was always just on the cusp of mastering my time, I could avoid the thought that what life was really demanding from me might involve surrendering the craving for mastery and diving into the unknown instead.
The universal truth behind my specific issues is that most of us invest a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves. We don’t want to feel the anxiety that might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right path, or what ideas about ourselves it could be time to give up. We don’t want to risk getting hurt in relationships or failing professionally; we don’t want to accept that we might never succeed in pleasing our parents or in changing certain things we don’t like about ourselves—and we certainly don’t want to get sick and die. The details differ from person to person, but the kernel is the same. We recoil from the notion that this is it—that this life, with all its flaws and inescapable vulnerabilities, its extreme brevity, and our limited influence over how it unfolds, is the only one we’ll get a shot at. Instead, we mentally fight against the way things are—so that, in the words of the psychotherapist Bruce Tift, “we don’t have to consciously participate in what it’s like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality.” This struggle against the distressing constraints of reality is what some old-school psychoanalysts call “neurosis,” and it takes countless forms, from workaholism and commitment-phobia to codependency and chronic shyness.
None of us can single-handedly overthrow a society dedicated to limitless productivity, distraction, and speed. But right here, right now, you can stop buying into the delusion that any of that is ever going to bring satisfaction. You can face the facts. You can turn on the shower, brace yourself for some invigoratingly icy water, and step in.
2025-03-13
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman - Chapter One
There was no anxious pressure to “get everything done,” either, because a farmer’s work is infinite: there will always be another milking and another harvest, forever, so there’s no sense in racing toward some hypothetical moment of completion. Historians call this way of living “task orientation,” because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline, the approach that has become second nature for us today.
2025-03-12
Four Thousand Weeks - Introduction
Read the introduction of Oliver Burkeman's previous book on the plane. #productivity
The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.
Moreover, the busyness of the better-off is contagious, because one extremely effective way to make more money, for those at the top of the tree, is to cut costs and make efficiency improvements in their companies and industries. That means greater insecurity for those lower down, who are then obliged to work harder just to get by.
Four Thousand Weeks is yet another book about making the best use of time. But it is written in the belief that time management as we know it has failed miserably, and that we need to stop pretending otherwise.
2025-03-11
Prep for travel.
2025-03-10
Tallahassee Ghazal
Tallahassee Ghazal – SAPIENS #ghazal #urdu #arabic #poetry
Using an ancient Arabic poetic form, a poet-archaeologist from Florida cycles through feelings of entrapment growing up queer in the U.S. South. But in the end, they celebrate love for this place—and that “most of us are breathing.”
Part of: Poets Resist, Refuse, and Find a Way Through – SAPIENS
Karl Marx in America - Andrew Hartman
Marxism for Americans: Andrew Hartman - Future Hindsight (podcast) | Listen Notes #marx #america #marxism
Andrew Hartman has an upcomingi book: Karl Marx in America
Some notes from the transcript:
I note here that this episode is coming out the day before the 177th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto's publication.
On Marxism and Marx's ideas:
So I've written a book about how Karl Marx's ideas have, I guess, played out throughout American history. And so Marx himself is a very important figure there as a person, but more importantly, sort of as somebody who created a body of work, a body of ideas that have persisted up until this day and in people's minds as being relevant. Marxism has a long and torturous history that is both complex and oftentimes changes depending on the time and context. But for my purposes, to be a Marxist simply means that you have a particular way of understanding capitalism, that is that the most important feature of capitalism is the relationship between those who own things, like what Marx called the means of production. But this would be like the factories or the land or the media. And then everyone else, for the most part, who has to work for them, or as Marx would have put it, has to sell their labor in order to survive. So famously using the language of the Communist Manifesto, this is the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. And Marx, in his time when capitalism of this sort was relatively new and had not gone global, theorized that that aspect of our human relations, that is there would be two classes of people, those who owned and those who worked for those who owned. He theorized that eventually everybody would come to be a member of one of those two classes, or almost everybody. And I think that is to a large extent become true. And that is one of the reasons why Marxism has continued to be relevant to lots of people, even after the failure and fall of most of the states that organized around Marxism, most particularly the Soviet Union. And I think that's why people are still reading and talking about Karl Marx. In fact, there's been like a recent influx of people reading Marx and talking about Marx again, perhaps more so than we've seen since the 1960s or even the 1930s. So to me that Marxism is just a particular way of understanding capitalism.
Relevance of Marx Today:
Yeah, so like Marx was fallible, he was human. He made mistakes as well as a person, to me, is less interesting than the fact that he made mistakes as a thinker. But his basic conception of capitalism and what it did to humans and also to some extent of what it did to climate or the environment, was essentially true. And that's why people continue to read Marx, for example, Howard Zinn, the left wing historian who was most famous for writing a people's history of the United States that continues to be read all across the world, and that conservatives continue to lament that fact. He wrote a play in the 1990s called Marx and Soho. And that's exactly what Howard Zinn tried to imagine is if Marx were alive at that point in the 1990s, what would he think? And essentially, Marx's theories in this play by Howard Zinn had panned out to a remarkable degree in terms of thinking about the globalization of capital accumulation that had wrecked so many lives and had sort of spread misery across the planet, while some people got rich beyond their wildest dreams. One of Marx's basic theories of capitalism is that it's at one level very wonderful in the terms of, like the things it can do in terms of technological development. It creates the capacity for humans to live without having to labor as much as humans in the past have had to because of the sort of, like, technological advancements, but also even more so, the advancements. Advancements in terms of, like, organizing ourselves into large units, like, what we would call corporations. So I think he would look around and say, look at all this wonderful stuff. But hardly anybody can share in the wonders. And also because of how unequal things are, because a few men control most of the wealth in the world, most people are more alienated than ever. I think he would say, yeah, this is what I expected. But I. I don't think he would have expected it would have taken so long for humans to get their act together, to sort of create something new. And, of course, that's one of the things that Critics across the 20th and 21st century of Marx and Marxism have pointed to, like, what next? Marx predicted that capitalism would fall, that capitalists were creating their own gravediggers. And yet, here we are. Perhaps things are worse than ever in terms of inequality, in terms of exploitation, in terms of our destruction of the very thing we need to survive, that is the planet and all of its resources.
The aspect of freedom in Marx's works
But I think since the fall of the Soviet Union and in particular in the last 10 or 20 years, people are much more interested in sort of freedom aspect of Marxist theory. So if you think about it in these terms, in capitalism, most people don't have a lot of free time because so much of our time is spent working. And while we're at work, most people, like you, could never describe the conditions of work. You kind of laid it out nicely when you're talking about sweatshops in Bangladesh or sweatshops in Amazon warehouses right here in the United States. Most people, while they're at work, they don't experience freedom. Like, there's nothing freeing or liberating about that experience. And they have to spend so many hours of their life under those conditions. Conditions in which a boss, a manager, or the system, in some sense, has almost totalitarian control over them, over their bodies. And yes, you could always say, well, they could just quit. That's not always true everywhere, but maybe in the U.S. yes, if you work at Amazon, you could just quit, but you have to pay the rent. You have to feed your kids. Like, that's part of Marx's whole theory and premise of capitalism is that most of us have to sell our labor in order to survive. And that's not a condition that creates freedom for most people.
On Marx's theory of change
So there's kind of like two layers to how Marx thought about the shift from capitalism to socialism or communism. These were terms that were often used interchangeably in the 19th century for Marx. So, like, if you think about capitalism growing into ever larger institutions and entities, factories, workers would be thrown together in ways that they would come to recognize the similarities of their shared conditions, and that would help them organize against their system of oppression. This is what Marx described in the Communist Manifesto as capitalists digging their own graves. And so he truly believed that the way in which capitalism was developing in terms of, like, the socialization of production, in other words, like things coming together in the producer side, would lead to the socialization of human relations once the humans involved, especially the workers, recognized their conditions. At various points, this happened to a small degree. And I think you could say, like, the labor movement over the course of the last two centuries is a product of this kind of understanding of capitalism and what happens to workers in it. The other side of Marx's theory is he thought a lot about the sort of inevitable crises of capitalism. And so just in his life, he saw several extremely damaging economic crises of capitalism. 1830s, 1850s. And then he didn't live long enough to see, of course, the 1890s, which was one of the worst. He saw one in the 1870s, but then there was another even worse one in the 1890s, each getting worse and worse. And then there's the 1930s. And many Marxist historians would say that the two world wars of the 20th century were the inevitable sort of byproduct of these. These crises of capitalism, that's a debate for another time. So he thought that if workers were organized, if they had that sort of solidarity, they could take advantage of these crises. And as each crisis got worse and worse, the working class would be well positioned to transition, to have a revolution, a socialist revolution. Obviously, it hasn't happened and obvious, or at least not yet, but it's really hard to anticipate that happening right now as we sit in 2025. And so that aspect of Marx and Marxism, I don't think is as relevant as perhaps it once was. Although I I do think that when the working class, through the labor movement organizes, that's one of the most important things that people can do to make their lives and the lives of others better. It's the most important sort of counter force to oligarchy. But the reason why I think Marx is still relevant goes back to his theory of labor exploitation and freedom. Like how he thought thought about capitalism and conceptualized the way it made us unfree, the way it alienated us is still so highly relevant. Maybe it's up to us to imagine how to create something different.
On Capitalism and Democracy:
But I have been wondering for a while, are capitalism and democracy compatible or incompatible? And I have to say that I've asked this question several times on the podcast, and none of the guests so far have yet to give me a straight answer on whether capitalism and democracy really should hang together or maybe not. Speaker B: Well, I'm so happy that I can break that string. I don't think they're compatible at all. I think they're completely incompatible. But again, I would think of democracy as on a spectrum in much the same way like Marx would think of freedom in relation to labor on a spectrum. This is a very Marxist take on democracy, I think, as well. There have been moments in American history, and the United States is historically probably the most capitalistic nation in world history. And also we like to think one of the sort of, like, originators of political democracy, although that's a more contested history. But at every step, democracy, if we define it as rule by the people, and by the people we mean everybody, at every step, it's been highly constrained. Now, that's true of democracy almost everywhere throughout history, but in particular in the US it's been highly constrained, in large part because of capitalism. And I think that's more true now than ever. And so if we only think of democracy as electing people to lead us or represent us every two to four years or whatever it is, I guess capitalism, democracy can work fine. Although even by that very limited definition of democracy, I think things aren't going so well. We have to sort of expand our imagination when it comes to democracy. We have to think about being free to rule ourselves in all aspects of our lives. And there are so many aspects of our lives where we're not free to rule ourselves. And when you really think about it, the thing standing in the way of that freedom in so many aspects is capitalism or one of its byproducts. If you have a billion dollars, you have so much more power, not only over the political system, but over your own life.
…
but just think about the billions of people across the planet who are completely constrained by the fact that they just don't have enough wealth, money, resources to actually have autonomy over their life, to actually rule themselves, govern themselves, and thus they are controlled by other people. In the US we, I guess, get to choose our. Choose the people who control us, but we have a very narrow set of parameters around which we choose the people who control us. And it seems to get narrower every four years.
On what we can do:
We all feel paralyzed. And so, you know, a lot of us will look locally, sort of tend to our own gardens, which is great. But I guess that's not really going to change the conditions either. One thing that I advise people to do is find ways to connect with other people that will change their and other people's sort of understanding or political consciousness. Form a reading group. And everyone reads something that is very challenging either at an intellectual or a political level. I just think I like that a lot. So, like, one of the things that's really interesting in my book is I've have learned throughout U.S. history, since Marx became a thing in the U.S. people have formed reading groups and they read marks together. And we're not just Talking about sort of grad students, as you might imagine, we're talking about, like, working class people really struggling through difficult texts to try to understand their world. I feel like we need more of that. And to me, that could be a really sort of radical act in today's world of. Of social media and our diminishing attention spans. Spend some time with something difficult like reading a philosophical text like Capital or it doesn't have to be Marx. There's so many other great things. And do it with other people. Talk about it.
ChatGPT Summary of full podcast transcript: ChatGPT - Marxism in America Today
Mysore Food Guide
Mysore Food Guide #mysore #food
A set of places from a local.
Evolution of Spotify in the Indian Market
Diljit Dosanjh Breaks the Bollywood Mold and Shakes Up India’s Music Scene - Bloomberg #music #business #spotify #indian
People’s tastes have also evolved. According to Spotify, domestic fans streamed almost 70% international music on the platform when the company debuted in India in 2019, compared with 70% local music now. Punjabi tunes in particular are topping the charts, not just in India but among a global audience, according to Spotify. Dosanjh is partly responsible for that.
While Indian music is still mainly consumed by Indians and the diaspora, that is starting to change.
The arrival of Spotify and other streaming platforms in India, the second-largest English speaking nation in the world, has played a crucial role in helping India raise the quality of its entertainment output. With diverse musical offerings from India, the number of countries that have songs from the country on top of their streaming lists is growing, said Ashish Pherwani, leader for the Media & Entertainment sector at EY in India.
“There’s more acceptance of Indian music that’s happening right now,” Pherwani said. “It’s just the tip of the iceberg. Honestly, there’s so much more that can happen around Indian content. It’s been a largely diaspora-oriented industry five years back, but that’s changing now.”
Andor
Every Star Wars Project Fails to Get This Basic Thing Right — Except One #andor #starwars
From the beginning of the franchise, Star Wars has been about struggling against tyranny and evil. From the Rebel Alliance fighting the Empire to the Resistance facing off against the First Order and the Jedi dueling with the Sith, the galaxy far, far away has always revolved around the forces of peace and democracy challenging those of authoritarianism. Ironically, with all the depictions of dictators and tyrants, Star Wars has consistently struggled to depict life under authoritarianism realistically. Only the show Andor has broken this trend by giving fans a believable look at how a dictatorship operates.
Andor won praise for its darker tone, more nuanced characters, and complex story. A great deal of this complexity and nuance was directly the result of its focus on portraying the realities of authoritarianism. Through depictions of average people and making Imperial officers more important characters, Andor gave fans a fascinating and scary look at life in the Empire.
From the very first episode of Season 1, fans get a look at how terrible life can be for regular people under imperial rule. Viewers see soldiers bullying people and get a sense of the fear and paranoia pervasive throughout society. When Andor kills two officers and goes on the run, he faces constant suspicion, as many people are constantly afraid that spies and informers will get them sent to prison or worse. This is a more accurate depiction of life under a tyrant.
Andor also gave fans a deeper look at the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB) and the terror it strikes into dissidents. Similar to the Soviet KGB or the East German Stasi, the ISB operates as a secret police force for the Empire, seeking out any potential opposition or rebellion through espionage, coercion, and fear. Further, in depicting and characterizing individual members of the ISB, like Dedra Meero and Blevin, fans finally get some insight into why a person would choose to serve the Empire and fight the rebellion. This reminds viewers that authoritarian regimes are run by real people who choose to oppose democracy, not mind-controlled clones or nameless soldiers.
Andor proved to be a remarkable show by giving fans an exciting adventure story, full of action and twists, while also exploring the darker elements of the Star Wars universe. It also managed to do something that George Lucas has arguably tried to do since the first movie released in 1977. Andor depicted a story of freedom struggling against tyranny that included nuance and a realistic depiction of how dictatorships and rebels actually operate.
2025-03-09
Is Posh Moisturizer Worth It
Is posh moisturiser worth the money? #skincare #moisturizer
All the skincare tips I need.
The three types of moisturiser can help. Humectants, such as hyaluronic acid and glycerin, pull moisture from inside the body onto the surface of the skin. Occlusives, such as petroleum jelly and shea butter, block water from evaporating from the skin. Emollients, such as ceramide, smooth the skin by filling in gaps between skin cells. A review published in January in Experimental Dermatology found that ceramide made skin look and feel smoother and also reduced inflammation of the skin.
If the goal is soft, well-hydrated skin, experts say that cheaper products work just as well as the boutique options. “You don’t need to break the bank,” says Nour Kibbi, a clinical associate professor of dermatology at Stanford University. Where splurging may pay off, says Abigail Waldman, a dermatologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts, is on products that reduce the signs of ageing. As people age, skin-cell production slows and the skin thins. Older people also produce less collagen, which keeps the skin plump. This combination leads to wrinkles.
Retinol and other retinoids, a class of products chemically derived from vitamin A, reduce the appearance of wrinkles by increasing cell and collagen production. A study published in JAMA Dermatology in 2007 tested the effectiveness of retinol by comparing the arms of 36 elderly people who, three times a week, had had lotion with retinol put on one arm and lotion without retinol on the other. After six months, the researchers found that the arms with retinol had fewer fine wrinkles. Nearly 20 years later, experts still recommend retinol as a way to reduce the signs of ageing.
2025-03-08
Chill day. Watched some shows. Did some travel planning.
2025-03-07
The Lead-Pipe Theory of the Internet
Came across this great quote from the book The Socratic Method by Ward Farnsworth : Amazon.com: The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook (Audible Audio Edition): Ward Farnsworth, John Lescault, Blackstone Publishing: Books #books #socrates
The book will also offer some ideas about how Socratic teachings relate to our current cultural and political difficulties. Let us backtrack a moment. The ancient Romans built elaborate networks of pipes to deliver water where they wanted it to go. The networks were a marvel. But many of the pipes were made of lead, and the water carried the lead along with it. One school of thought regards this as part of the reason for the decline and fall of Rome: lead poisoning gradually took its toll, impairing the thought and judgment of many Romans, especially at the top. The theory is much disputed; perhaps it contains no truth. But as a metaphor it is irresistible. We have built networks for the delivery of information-the internet, and especially social media. These networks, too, are a marvel. But they also carry a kind of poison with them. The mind fed from those sources learns to subsist happily on quick reactions, easy certainties, one-liners, and rage. It craves confirmation and resents contradiction. Attention spans collapse; imbecility propagates, then seems normal, then is celebrated. The capacity for rational discourse between people who disagree gradually rots. I have a good deal more confidence in the lead-pipe theory of the internet, and its effect on our culture, than in the lead-pipe theory of the fall of Rome.
Against Self-Improvement
The Marginalian – Marginalia on our search for meaning. #self-help #self-improvement
Loved this quote from the book On Getting Better
We can’t imagine our lives without the wish to improve them, without the progress myths that inform so much of what we do, and of what we want (we don’t tend to think of ourselves as wanting to be what we are already). Whether we call it ambition, or aspiration, or just desire, what we want and what we want to be is always our primary preoccupation, but it is always set in the future, as though what could be — our better life, our better selves — lures us on. As though it is the better future that makes our lives worth living; as though it is hope that we most want.
On Vibe Coding
Will the future of software development run on vibes? - Ars Technica #ai #coding
As Karpathy humorously acknowledged in his original post, the approach is for the ultimate lazy programmer experience: "I ask for the dumbest things, like 'decrease the padding on the sidebar by half,' because I'm too lazy to find it myself. I 'Accept All' always; I don't read the diffs anymore."
At its core, the technique transforms anyone with basic communication skills into a new type of natural language programmer—at least for simple projects. With AI models currently being held back by the amount of code an AI model can digest at once (context size), there tends to be an upper limit to how complex a vibe-coded software project can get before the human at the wheel becomes a high-level project manager, manually assembling slices of AI-generated code into a larger architecture. But as technical limits expand with each generation of AI models, those limits may one day disappear.
But there are limits to how far Willison will go. "Vibe coding your way to a production codebase is clearly risky. Most of the work we do as software engineers involves evolving existing systems, where the quality and understandability of the underlying code is crucial."
At some point, understanding at least some of the code is important because AI-generated code may include bugs, misunderstandings, and confabulations—for example, instances where the AI model generates references to nonexistent functions or libraries.
Even so, the risk-reward calculation for vibe coding becomes far more complex in professional settings. While a solo developer might accept the trade-offs of vibe coding for personal projects, enterprise environments typically require code maintainability and reliability standards that vibe-coded solutions may struggle to meet. When code doesn't work as expected, debugging requires understanding what the code is actually doing—precisely the knowledge that vibe coding tends to sidestep.
Linus Torvalds on Being a Visionary
Linus Torvalds is not a visionary - YouTube #linus #vision
This quote resonates so much, esp when I see all the folks on X walking around in an AI driven haze. It feels okay to not be a part of that crowd and still feel validated.
I am not a visionary. I'm an engineer. I'm happy with the people who are wandering around looking at the stars but I am looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole before I fall in.
2025-03-06
The Joy of React
The Joy of React #react #course
Speedran sections of this course because I got this sudden urge to learn React a bit more in depth.
I have to build another static site, and instead of doing it in Go like this one, I wanna do it in React. I feel like there will be less of a cognitive dissonance between the frontend tech and the the tech used to build the static site if I just do it all in Typescript. Let's see how the experiment turns out.
2025-03-05
Writing Styles of Famous Tech People
On Writing #1 - by Zvi Mowshowitz #writing #styles
Great post breaking down how famous tech folks write, and their peculiar style.
2025-03-04
The Return of Romanticism
We Really Are Entering a New Age of Romanticism #culture
An article from Ted Gioia which gave me a lot of hope.
In the old days, movie villains were mobsters or crime syndicates. Nowadays they are tech innovators. This kind of shift in the popular imagination does not happen by chance.
Now let’s revisit the (even older) history.
Back in the 1700s, ruthless algorithms had a different name. They called them Rationalism—and the whole Western world was under the sway of the Age of Reason. But like today’s algorithms, the new systems of the Rationalists attempted to replace human wisdom and experience with intrusive and inflexible operating rules.
It didn’t work.
“This rationalistic philosophy, which had been expected to solve all the problems, had failed to rescue society from either despotism and poverty,” explains Edmund Wilson in his masterful study To the Finland Station.
“The mechanical inventions of which it had been expected that they would vastly improve the lot of humanity were obviously making many people miserable,” he continues.
(By the way, it’s no coincidence that recent tech overreach has been accompanied by a New Rationalism, championed by crypto swindler Sam Bankman-Fried and his many fellow travelers. But that subject deserves a whole article of its own….Now let’s return to history.)
The Rationalists of the 1700s (and today) put their faith in three things—and they all backfired.
(1) The most obvious failure was the attempt to impose rational rules on the political system. This led to the French Revolution, which soon collapsed in terrible bloodshed, and resulted in the dictatorship of Napoleon.
Millions of people died because the dominant algorithms didn’t work.
(2) The second obsession of the Rationalists in the 1700s was the total systematization of all knowledge. (Does that sound familiar?)
They didn’t have ChatGPT back then. But they did the best they could with the immense efforts of the French Encyclopedists and German taxonomists.
Everything got classified, codified, quantified, named, and placed on a chart. Foucault later mocked this as an “archeology of human sciences.”
Everything was forced into the system—even (or especially) humans.
That’s because this way of understanding the world failed to grasp anything that evolved or grew or changed or lived. Like the tech-gone-wild ethos of the current day, the messy human element was removed from the Rationalist systems.
(3) But the Rationalists of the 1700s made one more mistake—and it reminds us again of our current situation. They let a brutal technocracy destroy people’s lives—driven by dreams of profit maximization, and ignoring the human cost.
It wasn’t called Silicon Valley back then. The name given to the technocracy in the 1700s was the Industrial Revolution.
We don’t fully grasp the horrors of the factory sweat shops today—because the Romanticists worked on fixing the problems of industrialism in the 1820s and 1830s. This new generation of artists, humanists, and compassionate critics of the technocracy passed laws against child labor, unsafe working conditions, abusive hours, and other exploitative practices.
In other words, the Romanticists replaced the algorithm with humanist values. Rationalism on its own would never do that.
Canva Design Essentials
Graphic Design Essentials #canva #design
Decided to watch this video series from Canva's Design School collection on a whim. Finally took the time to properly go through the color theory stuff which is well explained.
Freelancing as Software Engineer
Came across a couple of articles this week that contained some good tips on how to get freelancing gigs. #freelancer #jobs #software
Nerd Reich
The Nerd Reich #silicon #valley #politics #fascism
Have to admit this is a great name for a newsletter by Gil Duran that critiques the politics of Silicon Valley. He has been at it for a long time now, long before current political developments post the presidential elections.
He came on the Angry Planet podcast and did a scathing takedown of the current administration and its policies: Welcome to the Nerd Reich - Angry Planet (podcast) | Listen Notes
Some excerpts from the podcast transcript.
About Curtis Yarvin
So we're gonna get real granular with some of the stuff at the top, and explain some of the personalities. Who is Curtis Yarvin? Speaker 4: Curtis Yarvin is a software programmer mostly based in San Francisco who in the early two thousands started writing under the name Mintius Moldbug, a series of essays largely focused on the need to replace democracy with dictatorship. Back then, he's sort of an anonymous troll, not using his real name. People who'd known him a long time say he's always been like that and people probably didn't take him too seriously. But he caught the ear of some important people eventually. Most notable, Peter Thiel, who, by, you know, a few years later was investing along with Andreessen Horowitz in Curtis Charbon's software idea for something called Urbit to create this decentralized peer to peer computer network, you know, on libertarian vision. And he was became known for his ideas as Peter Thiel's house philosopher. And he's continued to write these things in, in subsequent years and laying out more aggressively and in more detail how one might go about replacing a democratic government with a sort of corporate tech dictatorship.
About pseudo-intellectualism in Silicon Valley:
The critique seems to be that democracy doesn't work and it's bad and it hasn't solved all the problems and it just creates more problems. But no no the the other part to understand about these guys is that they're not intellectuals. They are pseudo intellectuals. They pretend to be smart. They pretend to understand things like history.
Look, I'm not a historian. Right? Studied a lot of politics, but I'm not a political scientist. These guys act like they're all a bit altogether, political science, historian. But when you look at what they're actually doing, and I'm working on a piece actually that categorizes their argument style because they all have it in common.
They take something in history, completely misinterpret or warp it, cherry pick whatever facts they want, all to fit their thesis and try to say that everything in history proves that what I'm saying is right. Now a critical thinker and an intellectual is also aware of the contradicting information and you have to make your presumptions and your predictions based on a more nuanced version of things. For instance, I think that most tyrannies have a history of collapsing and being overthrown. And I think that'll happen with whatever these guys are trying to do. However, in history, we see that sometimes tyranny can last a few decades or longer.
So the question is, will this last a long time? Ten, twenty years, the rest of our productive lives? Or can we overthrow it, overturn it in a couple of years in the next election or whatever. Right? So, you know, but they cherry pick the information and pretend they know what they're talking about.
On the Silicon Valley ideology
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. That's true. Anyway, but, it the Silicon Valley ethos, I mean what? Yeah. I mean, if I create a video game, am I gonna become a total asshole?
Speaker 2: Mhmm. Yes. Okay.
Speaker 4: There are a few who don't seem to be like that, but I do think that it gives rise to this sort of, idea of supremacy. That you are of a superior intelligence because you understand technology and because you have managed to make a lot, a lot of money. And it's something I observed while I was working in politics was it seemed to me that if you have power, then you want money. If you have money, then you want power. If you want both, then you kinda wanna live forever and be God, and that's where you start to have a problem.
And so I think we're at the part where the the people with money have realized that they have power, they're using it. And And we're also starting to see that their ideology their ideology get really, really weird, and they're starting to talk a lot more about God and living forever and getting off the planet and being bigger than being human. And so I think that theory that I kind of thought up a long time ago that crossed my mind came is is coming to fruition because we do see this weird interesting turn, you know, there's this there's this bundle of ideologies that, a couple of researchers, Timnit Gebru and Emil Torres put together called tescreal, t e s c r e a l. Transhumanism, exotropianism, singularitarianism, rationalism, cosmism, effective altruism, and longtermism. I can't believe I remembered all of them off the top of my head.
But it's this I these ideas that have bubbled up out of Silicon Valley that essentially amount to an ideology of tech supremacy. We are smarter than everyone. We are richer than everyone, and a desired destiny to rule the world. And you see this coming out in terms of this sort of abundance agenda, which basically amounts to, let tech people do whatever they want without regulation and they'll save us. Right?
Podcast summary by ChatGPT here: ChatGPT - Silicon Valley Authoritarianism Rise
2025-03-03
Erotic Writing
Erotic writing is becoming more explicit #erotica #books #literature
But eroticism is changing. Open “Onyx Storm”, the latest romantasy book (a genre that blends romance and fantasy) by Rebecca Yarros, and things are rather clearer. Hardy perennials are out. Words like “hard” are in—as too are words including “cock”, “fuck” and “straddle”. And people are buying it. Sales of erotica are booming: thanks to pre-orders, “Onyx Storm” had already been on Amazon’s bestseller list for 19 weeks by the time it was published in January. After release, it shifted almost 3m copies in a week. It sold faster than any novel in America in the past 20 years.
There is now a vast variety of erotica available, including cosy erotica (knitwear is torn off), Austen erotica (Mr Darcy has assets even more impressive than £10,000 a year) and fairy erotica. There is even erotica featuring—readers may wish to brace themselves—physicists. These titles contain such explicit lines as, “Your dissertation on liquid crystals’ static distortions in biaxial nematics was brilliant, Elsie.”
What has driven this is new digital formats, such as audiobooks. (Ms Yarros and Ms Maas dominate those charts, too.) The e-book has been especially consequential. It is discreet—no one can see what you are reading on a tablet. And it lets authors self-publish cheaply, as Ms James did in 2011 with “Fifty Shades of Grey”, a story of sadomasochism. It was later republished by Vintage, but romance lovers retained the habit of reading books digitally.
Authorial autonomy online means it is “impossible to police” what goes into books, says Hal Gladfelder of the University of Manchester. The ubiquity of internet pornography means that even to try to do so would feel “ridiculous”.
In one sense this new generation of erotic prose is more realistic than what came before. Floral analogies are out; proper body parts are in. But in another sense, it is not remotely realistic. Everyone is gorgeous; names like “Xaden” and “Aetos” dominate; most characters have remarkable powers, if not superpowers.
Crypto Bailout By Trump
Issue 78 – President on brink of bailout for bitcoin #crypto
From Molly White's latest newsletter.
And although many still describe bitcoin as “digital gold”, believing that it should serve as a hedge against economic turmoil in similar ways as some people view actual gold, bitcoin and other crypto assets are once again demonstrating that they are among some of the first assets to decline among broader economic uncertainty. With looming tariffs by the Trump administration against Canada, Mexico, and China, concerns from the Federal Reserve about those and other policies’ impacts on inflation, and continuing wobbles in the labor market, people are selling off risky assets like crypto in hopes of better weathering the economic storm on the horizon. The comparatively new bitcoin ETFs set new records for the highest single-day outflows on February 25, with investors withdrawing more than $1 billion in total from the eleven ETFs.3
Seeming to respond to the panicked pleas from the cryptocurrency industry, Trump rescued bitcoin from its below-$80,000 slide in a Sunday Truth Social post reiterating his plans for a “U.S. Crypto Reserve”, which he added would contain “XRP [Ripple], SOL [Solana], and ADA [Cardano]”. Further panic from bitcoin maximalists likely prompted his quick addendum two hours later that “And, obviously, BTC and ETH, as other valuable Cryptocurrencies, will be the heart of the Reserve. I also love Bitcoin and Ethereum!” Nice save.4
Why I don’t feel threatened as a software engineer
Why I don’t feel threatened as a software engineer #llm #software #programming
My perspective on this as a developer who’s been using these systems on a daily basis for a couple of years now is that I find that they enhance my value. I am so much more competent and capable as a developer because I’ve got these tools assisting me. I can write code in dozens of new programming languages that I never learned before.
But I still get to benefit from my 20 years of experience.
Take somebody off the street who’s never written any code before and ask them to build an iPhone app with ChatGPT. They are going to run into so many pitfalls, because programming isn’t just about can you write code—it’s about thinking through the problems, understanding what’s possible and what’s not, understanding how to QA, what good code is, having good taste.
There’s so much depth to what we do as software engineers.
I’ve said before that generative AI probably gives me like two to five times productivity boost on the part of my job that involves typing code into a laptop. But that’s only 10 percent of what I do. As a software engineer, most of my time isn’t actually spent with the typing of the code. It’s all of those other activities.
The AI systems help with those other activities, too. They can help me think through architectural decisions and research library options and so on. But I still have to have that agency to understand what I’m doing.
So as a software engineer, I don’t feel threatened. My most optimistic view of this is that the cost of developing software goes down because an engineer like myself can be more ambitious, can take on more things. As a result, demand for software goes up—because if you’re a company that previously would never have dreamed of building a custom CRM for your industry because it would have taken 20 engineers a year before you got any results... If it now takes four engineers three months to get results, maybe you’re in the market for software engineers now that you weren’t before.
Are we all severed
Are we all severed? | Dazed #severance #tv #culture #work
This article started with Severance but went to many places
Severance is often described as a dystopian work of science fiction, but there are stark similarities between the show’s world and our own. While it’s not possible to literally bifurcate your consciousness – yet – how many of us contain parts of our identities just to get through the day? How many of us have gone to work while depressed, brokenhearted or grieving? On a macro level: how many of us have gone to work knowing that wars, famines, and genocides are happening? Arguably, under late capitalism – which prioritises work over all else – we’re all kind of severed.
It’s partly a psychological survival strategy; compartmentalisation is a very common trauma response. Our brains can only handle so much. But it’s fair to say we feel considerable pressure to compartmentalise in the first place because society isn’t structured in a way which allows people to look at trauma head-on. Why is it that Mark must return to work three weeks after Gemma’s death_,_ when a steady return to normal functioning after a bereavement can typically take two or more years? The need for him to be productive and keep working is so urgent, so imperative, that he allows his employer to stick a microchip in his brain. But Severance does not condone severance: Lumon uses the innies’ ignorance to exploit them in a number of innovatively cruel and evil ways. Instead, it emphatically skewers the ridiculousness of modern life, where productivity (and appearing sane) always takes precedence over personal pain.
NoteGPT
NoteGPT - AI Summarizer and Generator for Enhanced Learning #tools #ai
Useful suite of tools to perform a lot of AI assisted tasks like transcription, summary generation etc.
Men and Close Friendships
Too many men lack close friendships. What’s holding them back? | Psyche Ideas #friendship #masculinity #culture
High-quality, close friendships involve intimacy, the fragile closeness born of risking ourselves and being met with acceptance and belonging. This kind of closeness can evade men in environments that operate on norms of indifference or active hostility towards expressing what is happening in their inner worlds.
Alao, 33, a Nigerian gay man, put it more bluntly: ‘Straight men have a lot to learn from us.’ For him, the casual tenderness and care often seen in same-gender male relationships shouldn’t be confined to the queer community. Trans men echoed this perspective, drawing from their unique vantage point of navigating masculinity while remembering their previous girlhoods or womanhoods. ‘As a man with a girlhood, I’m confident in expressing vulnerable needs,’ said Liam, 28, a graduate student in New Jersey. He added that friendships with cisgender men often feel like ‘a step down in intimacy’. These relationships could be richer, he believes, if cisgender men risked sharing their own ‘vulnerable needs’, and also learned how to meet that need in others.
We have, as a society, always demanded bravery from men. But so many are still lost when it comes to the bravery that close relationships demand.
Reading - Switching from Paper to Screens
What does switching from paper to screens mean for how we read? | Psyche Ideas #reading #screen
Reading is so commonplace that it’s hard to appreciate how much of a challenge it poses to the human brain. As you read this sentence, you’re using the visual forms of words to access their meanings and pronunciations from memory, and then using this information, and the neural systems that evolved for spoken language, to construct larger units of meaning: phrases, sentences and extended discourse. Reading is a relatively recent cultural invention; our brain did not evolve to read. Only after years of education and practice do people learn to coordinate the brain systems needed to support skilled reading. This process is inherently difficult, as evidenced by the fact that a significant proportion of people struggle to attain reading proficiency despite having normal intelligence and opportunities for education.
One of these findings is the screen inferiority effect. As its name suggests, this effect refers to demonstrations that – with all else being equal – a text that is read on a digital screen will be less well understood than the same text if it is read on paper. If you’re reading this article online, for example, your understanding of its content may (at least to some degree) be compromised. After reading the article, you might be able to accurately answer questions about its gist, but not necessarily be able to report the details as well as if you had read it on paper. The effect has been documented across different languages and writing systems, indicating that it is robust.
Some studies, however, have provided evidence that the size of this effect is influenced by a number of variables. One of these variables is the nature of the text: the comprehension of narrative texts (in which readers become immersed in a story) seems to be less affected by how the text is displayed, compared with the comprehension of expository texts. So, if you’re engaged in an interesting novel, as opposed to studying a textbook, your grasp of the text will likely be less influenced by whether it’s on a screen or in print form. Another important variable is the amount of time available to read, with the screen inferiority effect being larger when readers are under pressure to read rapidly. If you have to read something very quickly, you’d probably be better off reading it in print. There is some evidence that reading skill is an important variable, too, with the screen inferiority effect being more pronounced for less skilled readers.
2025-03-02
Stablecoins
Stablecoins: the real crypto craze #crypto #stablecoin #finance
stablecoins are increasingly used for real-world purposes, too. Migrants send remittances with them, replacing a correspondent-banking system beset by high fees and delays. The Turkish trader says that shopkeepers in the Grand Bazaar pay suppliers with the coins as they are the fastest option. In countries where inflation erodes savings and dollars are scarce, they are catching on as a store of value. A survey of stablecoin-holders in Turkey and four other emerging markets by Castle Island Ventures, which invests in crypto startups, and Visa, a payments giant, finds that nearly half use them for this purpose.
Oversight is not all bad for stablecoins, facilitating interest from mainstream finance. Stripe, a payments firm, has bought Bridge, a stablecoin-infrastructure startup. Visa has built a platform to help lenders issue coins; BBVA, Spain’s second-largest bank, will be among the first to use it, perhaps for money transfers. Stablecoins have shown their value in the backrooms of the Grand Bazaar. Their next task is to do so in the regulators’ offices and boardrooms of Washington and Wall Street.
Being Independent
Pure Independence · Collab Fund #self-help #self-improvement #independence
Great piece by Morgan Housel
I have seen many people achieve some level of financial independence only to be sucked into a new kind of dependence: the culture of their tribe. Financial freedom is achieved, but it’s replaced with sycophancy to a new boss, or a blind adherence to tribal views you might disagree with deep down.
It’s a unique form of poverty: rather than needing to work for money, you are indebted to needing to think a certain way.
I once heard a good litmus test: If I can predict your views on one topic by hearing your views about another, unrelated topic, you are not thinking independently. Example: If your views on immigration allow someone to accurately predict your views on abortion and gun control, there’s a good chance you’re not thinking independently.
Grid and Flexbox Visual Cheatsheets
Nice visual cheatsheets. #grid #flexbox #css #cheatsheet #tools
Personal Renewal by John Gardener
PBS - JOHN GARDNER - EDUCATION AND EXCELLENCE #self-help #self-improvement #ambition
We've all seen men and women, even ones in fortunate circumstances with responsible positions who seem to run out of steam in midcareer.
One must be compassionate in assessing the reasons. Perhaps life just presented them with tougher problems than they could solve. It happens. Perhaps something inflicted a major wound on their confidence or their self-esteem. Perhaps they were pulled down by the hidden resentments and grievances that grow in adult life, sometimes so luxuriantly that, like tangled vines, they immobilize the victim. You've known such people -- feeling secretly defeated, maybe somewhat sour and cynical, or perhaps just vaguely dispirited. Or maybe they just ran so hard for so long that somewhere along the line they forgot what it was they were running for.
"Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account."
I'm not talking about anything as narrow as ambition. After all, ambition eventually wears out and probably should. But you can keep your zest until the day you die. If I may offer you a simple maxim, "Be interesting," Everyone wants to be interesting -- but the vitalizing thing is to be interested. Keep a sense of curiosity. Discover new things. Care. Risk failure. Reach out.
I've watched a lot of mid-career people, and Yogi Berra says you can observe a lot just by watching. I've concluded that most people enjoy learning and growing. And many are dearly troubled by the self-assessments of mid-career.
Such self-assessments are no great problem at your age. You're young and moving up. The drama of your own rise is enough. But when you reach middle age, when your energies aren't what they used to be, then you'll begin to wonder what it all added up to; you'll begin to look for the figure in the carpet of your life. I have some simple advice for you when you begin that process. Don't be too hard on yourself. Look ahead. Someone said that "Life is the art of drawing without an eraser." And above all don't imagine that the story is over. Life has a lot of chapters.
The more I see of human lives, the more I believe the business of growing up is much longer drawn out than we pretend. If we achieve it in our 30's, even our 40s, we're doing well. To those of you who are parents of teenagers, I can only say "Sorry about that."
2025-03-01
What to Pack in a Bug-Out Bag | The Art of Manliness #survival #prepper #outdoors
