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.

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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.

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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.

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2025-03-11

Prep for travel.

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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.

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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.

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2025-03-08

Chill day. Watched some shows. Did some travel planning.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

• Getting Software Engineering Jobs
• freelancing: how I got clients part 1

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

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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.

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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

• GRID: A simple visual cheatsheet for CSS Grid Layout
• FLEX: A simple visual cheatsheet for flexbox

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."

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2025-03-01

What to Pack in a Bug-Out Bag | The Art of Manliness #survival #prepper #outdoors

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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.

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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

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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.

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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 🤷🏽‍♂️

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2025-02-24

Working on a thing!

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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.”

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2025-02-22

How to live a meaningful life

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

Key points – How to make your life feel more meaningful

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

LLM Codegen Workflow

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

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

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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:

• GenAI impact
• Interest rate changes explain some of the drop, but not everything
• The tech sector seems to react to sudden events with more intensity than any other industry
• A perception that engineering is no longer a bottleneck could be a reason for lower hiring
• Still too many engineers, after overrecruitment in 2021-2022?
• Are smaller teams more efficient?

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.

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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

• Suffering Is Inevitable: The modern mental health model wrongly implies suffering is avoidable, leading people to feel blameworthy for their struggles.
• Encouraging Resilience: Instead of treating people as victims in need of external solutions, we should promote self-reliance and resilience.

Meaning

• Suffering Should Not Be Meaningless: The DSM strips suffering of personal or cultural meaning, reducing it to a clinical issue rather than an existential experience.
• Traditional Coping Mechanisms: Historically, people turned to religion, art, community, and philosophy to make sense of suffering. These approaches were often more effective and enduring than modern clinical methods.
• Loss of Rituals for Suffering: Modern society has largely abandoned ceremonies, myths, and traditions that once helped people navigate pain. Instead, suffering is now seen as something to be managed or eliminated rather than integrated into life.

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

• Persistent deficits carry risks, but they are less severe for monetarily sovereign nations like the U.S.
• Global rebalancing efforts (e.g., the Plaza Accord in the 1980s) have historically triggered economic crises, suggesting that shifting U.S. deficits may not be simple.
• The Trump administration views deficits as signs of excessive spending, but they have been a key driver of U.S. economic strength.

Addressing Concerns About Government Inefficiency

• The U.S. federal workforce is relatively small compared to other developed nations (8.5 employees per 1,000 people vs. 22 in Germany, 14 in Australia, and 10 in Canada).
• Total government spending as a share of GDP (35%) is lower than most developed economies (which typically range from 40%-60%).
• While bureaucracy exists, there is no strong evidence that the U.S. government is excessively inefficient compared to international standards.

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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.

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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

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2025-02-17

Finally!

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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 🤞🏽.

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2025-02-15

Math Academy!

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2025-02-14

Math Academy, and coping with life stuff.

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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

• Buttondown now has API access in the free plan. So I wrote some code to post the weekly newsletter directly to the site: Add code to post draft to Buttondown · deepakjois/debugjois.dev@9682b8d · GitHub
• Added some plain Javascript to copy link to clipboard when somebody clicks an anchor link: Add event handler to copy anchor link to clipboard · deepakjois/debugjois.dev@6351f94 · GitHub

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2025-02-12

Math Academy and a LOT of chores.

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