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2026-03-12
The market for marriage
The market for marriage - Works in Progress Magazine
Love the way it begins, and the reference to Pride and Prejudice
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good agricultural surplus, must be in want of a wife.
One thing became abundantly clear: most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans. Sometimes marriage is sanctified by religion or the state; other times, it is simply what happens when two people begin living together. For some it is chosen, while for others it is coerced. Some societies prize monogamy, others polygamy, yet neither is a clear predictor of fidelity. In some cultures, both sexes can divorce and remarry freely; in others, only men have that right.
For the most fascinating description was of hunter gatherer marraiges, which made me think how the advent of farming and all the cultural evolution that happened after ended up in some ways to a sort of regression
For around 280,000 years, roughly 95 percent of our history as Homo sapiens, we lived as hunter-gatherers. Today, a few such groups still exist, although these final echoes of a life we lived for millennia will soon disappear as well.
The BaYaka, who live deep in the Congolese rainforest, are one of these. Anthropologist Haneul Jang, who has worked with the BaYaka for over a decade, describes how marriages happen: an enamored adolescent couple will simply walk off into the forest and a few days later, they return and build a hut. There is no ceremony, no exchanging of vows, just a mutual understanding that they are now together. ‘There is something very romantic about it’, she says.
The young man may then do ‘bride service’, where he will live with his girlfriend’s family for a year, hunting and collecting honey with his father-in-law. At some point the relationship may dissolve. This can even happen while the couple still have small children. It will end much like it began, with one individual wandering off into the forest and building a hut with someone else.
This fluidity isn’t unique to the BaYaka but a product of hunter-gatherer societies. Groups are highly mobile, society is egalitarian – any meat from hunts is quickly shared – and there is an almost total absence of material wealth. Fathers look after their children, but they are not necessarily a primary carer. A review of over 45 studies, mostly looking at populations without medical fertility control, found that fathers have a surprisingly small effect on child survival. Other helpers, predominantly grandmothers and siblings, provide more substantial support for the mother.
While Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas classifies most hunter-gatherers as polygynous, this is not accurate. In practice, most men are unable to support more than one wife because there is no stored wealth. Divorce and remarriage happen frequently because helpful extended families give women certainty that they won’t be left raising children alone. The lack of inheritance prevents conflict developing over having children with multiple partners, and the residential mobility means one can literally just walk away from relationships one no longer wants to be in. Consequently, women will frequently have children with two or even three men during their lifetime.
and how in some ways we are back to the old ways again 😊
In contemporary Western settings, things seem to have changed once again. Many people are monogamous and have children with a single partner, much like our agricultural forbearers. But others divorce and remarry, similar to hunter-gatherers. Young couples often live together before deciding whether to commit, like the trial marriages of the Samoans. True polygamy is usually illegal, yet some rich divorced or widowed men can attract young second wives, who can bear them a new set of children. Ethical non-monogamists are a growing and vocal minority. To an outsider, it may seem like we have no marriage system at all.
Traditional controls over marriage have weakened. Couples now choose for themselves, usually for love. The disappearance of bridewealth, dowries, and kin-arranged unions has reduced family involvement. While this might feel like a long steady transition for the West, it’s unfolding rapidly in many parts of the world today.
As states expand schooling, boys and girls mix freely. Mobile phones let them talk privately. Rural-to-urban migration brings people from different ethnic groups together, and when they marry, neither tradition quite applies. Removing the involvement of third parties makes marriages easier to enter and leave.
Changes to website
i have been making a lot of changes to the website, thanks to the productivity benefits unlocked by Claude Code and OpenCode.
I wrote my own little mobile editor that I can log into and make edits to the daily log. In fact, this change is being made on my Android phone using the voice keyword.
The whole thing is a combination of AWS Lambda supported by some GitHub workflow glue. I'm glad I was able to pull this off without incurring any continuous costs on the backend.
2026-03-09
Books You Can Finish In One Sitting
Books You Can Finish In One Sitting – The Painted Porch Bookshop
Found this in Ryan Holiday's latest newsletter (which has nice blurbs for each book, but I can't link to it directly)
The books:
- Montaigne
- The Boy Who Would Be King
- On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long If You Know How to Use It
- War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
- Gift from the Sea: 50th Anniversary Edition
- Book of Five Rings: A Classic Text on the Japanese Way of the Sword
- Address Unknown
- Small Things Like These
- Zen in the Art of Archery
- 84, Charing Cross Road
- Ain't I a Woman?
- The Greatest Sentence Ever Written
America and Public Disorder
America and Public Disorder - Chris Arnade Walks the World
We are the world’s richest country, and yet our buses, parking lots, and city streets are filthy, chaotic, and threatening. Antisocial and abnormal behavior, open addiction, and mentally tortured people are common in almost every community regardless of size.
I’ve written about this many times before, because it is so striking, and it has widespread consequences, beyond the obvious moral judgement that a society should simply not be this way.
It’s a primary reason why we shy away from dense walkable spaces and instead move towards suburban sprawl. People in the U.S. don’t respect, trust, or want to be around other random citizens, out of fear and disgust. Japanese/European style urbanism—density, fantastic public transport, mixed-use zoning, that so many American tourists admire—can't happen here because there is a fine line between vibrant streets and squalid ones, and that line is public trust. The U.S. is on the wrong side of it. Simply put, nobody wants to be accosted by a stranger, no matter how infrequent, and until that risk is close to nil, people will continue edging towards isolated living.
It is why we “can’t have nice things” because we have to construct our infrastructure to be asshole-proof, and so we don’t build anything or build with a fortress mentality, stripping our public spaces down to the austere and utilitarian, emptying them of anything that can be vandalized.
2026-03-07
RSS
Yet another paean for RSS.
Like, there was once a time when an ever-increasing proportion of web users kept tabs on what was going on with RSS. RSS is a simple, powerful way for websites to publish "feeds" of their articles, and for readers to subscribe to those feeds and get notified when something new was posted, and even read that new material right there in your RSS reader tab or app.
RSS is simple and versatile. It's the backbone of podcasts (though Apple and Spotify have done their best to kill it, along with public broadcasters like the BBC, all of whom want you to switch to proprietary apps that spy on you and control you). It's how many automated processes communicate with one another, untouched by human hands. But above all, it's a way to find out when something new has been published on the web.
For more than a decade, RSS has lain dormant. Many, many websites still emit RSS feeds. It's a default behavior for WordPress sites, for Ghost and Substack sites, for Tumblr and Medium, for Bluesky and Mastodon. You can follow edits to Wikipedia pages by RSS, and also updates to parcels that have been shipped to you through major couriers. Web builders like Jason Kottke continue to surface RSS feeds for elaborate, delightful blogrolls:
There are many good RSS readers. I've been paying for Newsblur since 2011, and consider the $36 I send them every year to be a very good investment:
It's almost impossible to overstate how superior RSS is to the median web page. Imagine if the newsletters you followed were rendered with black, clear type on a plain white background (rather than the sadistically infinitesimal, greyed-out type that designers favor thanks to the unkillable urban legend that black type on a white screen causes eye-strain). Imagine reading the web without popups, without ads, without nag screens. Imagine reading the web without interruptors or "keep reading" links.
2026-03-06
Matcha Consumption Mismatch
The mismatch with matcha consumption & Gen Z - Coffee Intelligence
“What’s happening with matcha today is essentially the same playbook we’ve seen in specialty coffee: a culturally rich product gets repackaged for mass consumption, prioritizing visual appeal and customization over the craftsmanship that defines it,” she says.
In Japan, matcha is inseparable from the structure of the tea ceremony. The act of preparation – including whisking, serving and receiving – is not simply functional, but philosophical.
Darleen argues that when matcha becomes primarily a takeaway beverage, the loss is contextual as much as sensory.
“These values are foundational, not ornamental. The Japanese tea ceremony isn’t just a preparation method; it’s a philosophy of presence and intentionality that’s been refined over centuries,” she says. “When matcha becomes a grab-and-go beverage primarily, what’s lost isn’t just the ritual. It’s the entire framework that gave the product its cultural significance.”
The Modern Workplace
This point is very understated:
The modern workplace selects heavily for sustained attention to abstract tasks in static environments. This is evolutionarily unusual. Human cognition evolved for movement, social interaction, novelty, and immediate feedback.
2026-03-04
Brainrot is a radical act
brainrot is a radical act - by Adam Aleksic #language #social-media
I’m sitting in a Buddhist temple, listening to monks chant the Heart Sutra. Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. The words technically have a meaning, but I find myself carried away by the rhythm instead. The mantra washes over me, connecting me to the present moment.
I’m scrolling on Twitter, seeing the same words show up in every post. Clavicular. Jestermaxxing. Framemogging. Clavicular. Jestermaxxing. Framemogging. Clavicular. Jestermaxxing. Framemogging. These terms also have a definition, but in practice they’re only funny because they’re funny.
Incel brainrot might not be the path to enlightenment, but there is an important connection between these examples. Any time we repeat a word too much, we become desensitized to its meaning. This phenomenon, called semantic satiation, causes us to attend to form over content. All that matters is how we experience an utterance.
The Heart Sutra teaches that “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” There is no fixed interpretation of language, but it is precisely in its unfixedness that language reveals its meaning. The beauty of semantic satiation is that it destroys the “containers” of denotation. Instead of using words to connect to something else, we connect to the words themselves—revealing that it was all form, and none of it.
2026-03-03
LLMs as Index Funds
LLMs as Index Funds - by Venkatesh Rao - Contraptions
Love this analogy. Came across this post via Bhuvan's blog post
Foundation models like GPT and Claude now serve as the index funds of language. Trained on enormous corpora of human text, they do not try to innovate. Instead, they track the center of linguistic gravity: fluent, plausible, average-case language. They provide efficient, scalable access to verbal coherence, just as index funds offer broad exposure to market returns. For most users, most of the time, this is enough. LLMs automate fluency the way passive investing automates exposure. They flatten out risk and elevate reliability.
But they also suppress surprise. Like index funds, LLMs are excellent at covering known territory but incapable of charting new ground. The result is a linguistic landscape dominated by synthetic norms: smooth, predictable, uncontroversial. Writing with an LLM is increasingly like buying the market—safe, standardized, and inherently unoriginal.
2026-03-02
Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking
This article is ostensibly about Cluely's founder Roy Lee, but it does a good job eviscerating some of the Silicon Valley mythmaking.
What I discovered, though, is that behind all these small complaints, there’s something much more serious. Roy Lee is not like other people. He belongs to a new and possibly permanent overclass. One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event. Some people will do incredibly well in the new AI era. They will become rich and powerful beyond anything we can currently imagine. But other people—a lot of other people—will become useless. They will be consigned to the same miserable fate as the people currently muttering on the streets of San Francisco, cold and helpless in a world they no longer understand. The skills that could lift you out of the new permanent underclass are not the skills that mattered before. For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore. Even at big firms like Google, a quarter of the code is now written by AI. Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.
It's hard to read the paragraph below 👇🏽 and not consider it sarcasm. But I have sufficient anecdotal evidence to believe it's not that far from reality.
The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger. Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley. In tech interviews, it’s common for candidates to be asked whether they’re “mimetic” or “agentic.” You do not want to say mimetic. Once, San Francisco drew in runaway children, artists, and freaks; today it’s an enormous magnet for highly agentic young men. I set out to meet them.
It did not seem like a good idea to me that some of the richest people in the world were no longer rewarding people for having any particular skills, but simply for having agency, when agency essentially meant whatever it was that was afflicting Roy Lee. Unlike Eric Zhu or Donald Boat, Roy didn’t really seem to have anything in his life except his own sense of agency. Everything was a means to an end, a way of fortifying his ability to do whatever he wanted in the world. But there was a great sucking void where the end ought to be. All he wanted, he’d said, was to hang out with his friends. I believed him. He wanted not to be alone, the way he’d been alone for a year after having his offer of admission rescinded by Harvard. For people to pay attention to him. To exist for other people. But instead of making friends the normal way, he’d walked up to strangers and asked whether they wanted to start a company with him, and then he built the most despised startup in San Francisco.
Historic Cafes in Tangier
The Sprudge Guide To Historic Cafes In Tangier, Morocco | Sprudge Coffee #travel
I am totally loving the Sprudge guides, because they also contain some lesser known cities as well (for e.g. Kigali)
Martin Parr photos Rural Ireland
A Fair Day: Martin Parr's Photos of Rural Ireland In the Early 1980s - Flashbak #photography
One of my favorite photographers. Which reminds of this wonderful documentary of his that I matched a while ago
This might as well be a good time to mention that I am absolutely obsessed with photography museums and documentaries about photographers.
2026-02-24
Nobody's ever ready
The Imperfectionist: Nobody's ever ready #anxiety #ai
Nothing better than a fresh newsletter edition from Oliver Burkeman to restart logging after a few weeks of intermittent logging due to work travel and Berlinale binge movie watching.
And even he has decided to address AI in his latest.
I’m not going to link to any of these contagious anxiety-spreading pieces, for the same reason I don’t go around actively sneezing in people’s faces when I catch a cold. But it’s fair to say I find the topic a little triggering. Because this basic stance toward life – the anxious attempt to scramble to a place of psychological safety, to avoid being condemned to disaster and cast into the void – goes back a long way with me. So it all feels rather personal, and important for me to say that you don’t, actually, have to live like this. It won’t make you happier. It probably won’t even aid your career. You have the option of living with vastly more creativity and calm than the anxiety-merchants would have you believe – provided you can summon the strength of mind to screen them out.
The stomach-clench of anxiety isn’t anything like that. Rather, it emerges from the feeling that reality poses a fundamental threat to your security, so that hypervigilance and constant effort will be required to forestall annihilation. It implies that it’ll be very difficult indeed to make it to safety (with the corollary that if you fail, it’ll be because you didn’t try hard enough).
The reason “you’re not ready for what’s coming next”, in other words, is that we’re never ready for what’s coming next. To quote the splendid title of a book on Jewish spirituality by Alan Lew, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared. “This” being, of course, the human condition – not the latest subscription product with which OpenAI or Anthropic hope to justify their wild valuations.
Deming vs Drucker
Objectives and constraints – Surfing Complexity #management #organizations
I am also wholeheartedly in the Deming camp
Deming was vehemently opposed to management by objective. Rather, he saw an organization as a system. If you wanted to improve the output of a system, you had to study it to figure out what the limiting factor was. Only once you understood the constraints that limited your system, could you address them by changing the system.
…
I’m in Deming’s camp, but I can understand why Drucker won. Drucker’s approach is much easier to put into practice than Deming’s. Specifically, Drucker gave managers an explicit process they could follow. On the other hand, Deming…, well, here’s a quote from Deming’s book Out of the Crisis:
Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.
I can see why a manager reading this might be frustrated with his exhortation to replace a specific process with “leadership”. But understanding a complex system is hard work, and there’s no process that can substitute for that. If you don’t understand the constraints that limit your system, how will you ever address them?
Ironically, I found this via a followup blog entry by the same author where he admits defeat 🙃: Poor Deming never stood a chance – Surfing Complexity
The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films
The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films - The Atlantic #attention #crisis
This article struck me especially because I am just coming off a ~25-movie binge at Berlinale. It helped that I was watching it in a movie theater, but I am still glad I retain the attention span to got me through most movies. If anything, the reason I found it hard and occasionally snoozed off in a movie was more due to fatigue than due to inattention.
Everyone knows it’s hard to get college students to do the reading—remember books? But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word. Professors are now finding that they can’t even get film students—film students—to sit through movies. “I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “But students will not do it.”
I heard similar observations from 20 film-studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. Malcolm Turvey, the founding director of Tufts University’s Film and Media Studies Program, officially bans electronics during film screenings. Enforcing the ban is another matter: About half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones.
The professors I spoke with didn’t blame students for their shortcomings; they focused instead on how media diets have changed. From 1997 to 2014, screen time for children under age 2 doubled. And the screen in question, once a television, is now more likely to be a tablet or a smartphone. Students arriving in college today have no memory of a world before the infinite scroll. As teenagers, they spent nearly five hours a day on social media, with much of that time used for flicking from one short-form video to the next. An analysis of people’s attention while working on a computer found that they now switch between tabs or apps every 47 seconds, down from once every two and a half minutes in 2004. “I can imagine that if your body and your psychology are not trained for the duration of a feature-length film, it will just feel excruciatingly long,” USC’s Lippit said. (He also hypothesized that, because every movie is available on demand, students feel that they can always rewatch should they miss something—even if they rarely take advantage of that option.)
2026-02-15
Boy Kibble
Move Over, Girl Dinner. Boy Kibble Has Arrived. - The New York Times #food
Boy kibble — also known as “human kibble” since women eat it, too — is a ruthlessly efficient, male-coded rejoinder to the extemporaneous charms of “girl dinner.” The latter is a TikTok term for the assemblage of light bites that women sometimes cobble together and eat as a meal, with little care for gastronomic coherence. Boy kibble, in contrast, focuses on some nutritional ideal — here a mix of carbs, protein and fiber — that helps one achieve a specific body type or fitness goal. Pleasure-seeking details like flavor and aesthetics are tossed to the side.
Most nights, my dinner is a form of boy kibble, except I didn't make it myself. It's a Hot and Savoury meal packet from Huel. So I guess I can relate a bit.
“In contrast to girl dinner, which is fun, whimsical and creative,” said Ms. Bitar, boy kibble is not “focused on flavor, it’s not focused on joy. It’s focused on efficiency and results.”
2026-02-13
How Courtship Transformed Masculinity
How Courtship Transformed Masculinity - by Alice Evans #romance #relationships #culture #anthropology
Ask an economist what drives progress towards gender equality, they’ll probably emphasise sustained economic growth, contraceptives, and female employment. Talk to a political scientist, hear that it’s all about feminist activism. All valid, but I want to add a culture of female choice, male competition, and marital companionship.
While romantic love is experienced worldwide, there is enormous variation in the extent to which it is celebrated or suppressed. In regions where marriages are arranged by kin or coerced through brutal violence, her wants and welfare count for little. If divorce is stigmatised, she cannot credibly threaten exit and must then endure any abuse.
…
What follows is a speech I performed at my German friends’ wedding: two thousand years of history through the lens of marriage, starting with Ancient Rome to the Reformation, Wars of Religion and subsequent Romanticism, all the way to 1970s counter-cultural liberalisation.
Situationism - what people do is more often a function of their circumstances
Getting the Crab to the Beach - by Josh Zlatkus #evo-psych #evolution #psychology
A few months ago, I wrapped up a long series on human behavior arguing for situationism—the idea that what people do is more often a function of their circumstances than their character. I was pleased to discover afterwards that Angela Duckworth agrees.
In my musings on mental health, I frequently return to images of animals radically out of place: crabs in the canopy, otters in the desert, armadillos in the arctic. What would we learn by studying such animals? One obvious lesson is that if we wanted to help them, we should send them home. It would be a waste of time—or worse—to focus on what they were thinking, feeling, or doing, since these would be the downstream outputs of an animal in the wrong environment.
For example, we could draw all sorts of conclusions by watching a crab scrabble at the smooth surface of a tree branch. Perhaps there is food just under the bark. Maybe it’s a mating ritual or territorial instinct. The correct explanation, of course, would be that the crab is trying, unsuccessfully, to burrow in the sand. Yet we’d have a hell of a time figuring this out if we didn’t already know that crabs belong on the beach.
…
Humans, of course, are crabs in the canopy. We are vacuum cleaners on the roof. This modern world we have built, in the blink of an evolutionary eye, is not our ancestral home. So we live in many ways for which we were not designed—for example, in the constant presence of so many strangers. Yet few people carry this perspective with them, even into fields like therapy, where you might expect it to be foundational. The result is that when distress appears in its various confusing forms, therapists and laypeople rarely treat it as situational pathology—as the noxious byproduct of a poor fit between person and environment.
Millenials vs GenZ
Enjoyed this little dig at GenZ culture (as an elder millenial)
Won't Fix Self Help
"Won't Fix" self help #self-help #self-improvement
I can't read this article (members only!), but I love and wholeheartedly endorse the concept.
I'd like to propose a third option: the reasonable // rational recognition that most of your personal flaws are "Won't Fix" bugs, and the single most productive thing you can do about them is stop trying to patch them.
The self-help industry's entire business model depends on convincing you that every single bug in your system is fixable, that with the right framework, the right habits, the right coach, you'll finally refactor yourself into a clean, well-architected human being. But how many of your core personality traits have actually changed in the last decade?
The honest answer, for most people, is...very fucking few.
I also like the coding analogies used in the post 😊.
Self-improvement culture is a perpetual second-system rewrite of the self. You're constantly trying to architect Human 2.0, the version of you that's disciplined and calm and focused and doesn't check their phone 96 times a day (which is, by the way, the actual average for American adults, according to Asurion's widely cited research). But Human 2.0 never ships. You keep accumulating half-finished refactors and abandoned meditation streaks alongside a growing sense that something is fundamentally wrong with your willpower.
The alternative is the wrapper pattern. When you have a piece of legacy code that works but has an ugly interface, you don't rewrite it. You write a thin layer around it, a wrapper, that presents a clean interface to the rest of the system while leaving the messy internals untouched. The legacy code keeps doing what it always did, and the wrapper translates between the old system and the new requirements.
In Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day Stevens, the butler, reflects on the decades he spent perfecting his professional dignity at the expense of, well, everthing else. His entire life was a refactoring project: eliminate the personal, optimize for service, become the ideal version of what a butler should be. By the end of the novel he's technically excellent and profoundly diminished. He optimized the wrong thing for forty years because he never stopped to ask whether the specification itself was flawed.
Won't Fix is the practice of questioning the specification. Most of the things you're trying to fix about yourself are only problems relative to some imagined ideal of a person you were never going to be. Your distractibility is a bug in the "focused knowledge worker" spec but might be a feature in the "person who notices interesting things and connects them unexpectedly" spec. Your sensitivity and your stubbornness, your tendency to monologue about niche topics at parties: all Won't Fix, and all load-bearing, and all probably okay in the big, heat-death-of-the-universe scheme of all things.
Stop trying to ship Human 2.0. Tag the bugs, write the wrappers, and get back to building something worth building. The most productive version of you probably looks a lot like the current version of you, plus a few well-placed adapter patterns and minus about thirty self-help books worth of guilt about not being somone else.
2026-02-11
LLM Information Inflation
This section from Brandur's latest newsletter made me laugh out loud
A conventional practice for execs at Snowflake was to send out what was called a “snippet”. Usually on a weekly cadence, these were emails containing personal notes on ongoing action and details on what their divisions were working on. The first thing you notice about “snippets” is the sheer volume of them – in the default set of on-boarding mailing lists you start getting them from every part of the organization on day one. The second thing you notice about snippets is their length – comprehensive detail, painstaking even. Essays once a week.
One might even say a suspicious amount of detail. Detail that includes a few too many tables, emoji, and emdashes. Yes, most of these were undoubtedly LLM-generated.
But LLM use isn’t just reserved for execs. In fact, Gemini was on by default, so everyone who received one of these long scrawls got a short, three point summary on top of it. The summary was so concise and so convenient that most recipients (including yours truly) read nothing further.
You have to step back and appreciate the absurdity of this situation. An executive enters three lines to produce a small novella which he then bulk emails to the rest of the organization. Receivers get an automatic three line summary that … looks a lot like what the sender wrote in the first place. The novella’s read by no one except a few stragglers who aren’t in on the joke yet. Is this progress?
There’s a punch line about information theory in here somewhere.
2026-02-10
Raw Japanese Denim Guide
Raw Japanese Denim: A Beginner's Guide #jeans #selvedge
Just putting it here for future reference. I currently own a pair of Nudie jeans made from Japanese raw denim, and another pair of bespoke Japanese raw denim jeans stitched at Monks of Method. Since over six months ago, I have only been alternating between these two jeans for my bottomwear. I haven't gone back to any of my other bottomwear in that time, no cap!
So I guess it will be a while before I have to go back and buy another pair of denims. Which is a bit of a bummer because some of these jeans look really cool. Maybe I can donate one of my jeans and get one of these instead, just to keep things fresh.
2026-02-04
Your Life is the Sum Total of 2,000 Mondays
Your Life is the Sum Total of 2,000 Mondays #life #finitude
We plan our lives like we're editing a movie trailer.
The trip to Portugal, or the product launch, or the transformation photo at the gym. The big moment where everything crystallizes into meaning. We accumulate these peaks in our imagination, and then arrange them into a montage that proves our existence mattered, and that we really lived.
Then we spend the actual substance of our lives doing laundry and feeling crappy about it...
If you work a standard career from twenty-five to sixty-five, you'll experience roughly 2,080 Mondays. That's 2,080 alarm clocks set against your biological preferences and 2,080 inbox avalanches, plus 2,080 instances of navigating traffic or public transit while still metabolically processing the weekend. Add in the Tuesdays through Fridays, and you're looking at roughly 10,400 ordinary workdays across a career. Meanwhile, if you're fortunate enough to take two weeks of vacation annually for forty years, you'll accumulate 560 vacation days. The ratio is roughly 19:1 in favor of the mundane.
So we get to a question worth sitting with:
Do you actually like your average Monday?
The psychologist Philip Zimbardo has a framework called "time perspective theory." People differ in how much mental weight they assign to past, present, and future. Future-oriented people tend to achieve more by conventional metrics, but they also exhibit a consistent pattern of sacrificing present satisfaction for hypothetical future rewards. When researchers follow these people over time, they find that the anticipated future keeps receding and the scaffolding remains permanent.
Seneca diagnosed this exact pathology in first-century Rome. He observed that people guard their property vigilantly but waste their time freely, treating it as an infinite resource. "You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire," he wrote.
The barely tolerated Monday is a down payment on a life that never arrives, a perpetual advance payment for goods that don't ship.
human infohazards
human infohazards - by Adam Aleksic - The Etymology Nerd #linguistics #culture #social-media
Traditionally, we’ve used the model of a virus to describe how ideas spread. I’ve already written about memes as if they can “infect” new “hosts” along an epidemiological network, and we literally use the phrase “going viral” to describe internet popularity.
I don’t think the idea of viral memetics is quite right to describe what’s happening here, so I’ll be referring to these infohazards through the framework of parasitic memetics. Unlike a virus, which just replicates and moves on, the parasite lives inside the host of the internet, feeding on the resources of our attention. There is a clear formula to a parasitic meme:
- Do something terrible
- People criticize you, bringing you attention
- Attention brings profit and influence, making it easier to do more terrible things
- Repeat
And yet there’s a fundamental difference between this problem and the atomic bomb: one infohazard is an irrefutable fact of nature, and the other is entirely dependent on the current structure of social media platforms. Parasitic memes are only possible online because everything is optimized around attention metrics. Beyond easily circumventable terms of service, there is no measurement rewarding kindness or social cohesion. This means that, if you disregard your own morality, the internet becomes a game you can optimize, where you “win” through any content possible, especially if someone criticizes you.
Parasitic memes are uniquely enabled by the ease of distribution. Newspapers and television channels had plenty of problems, but at least those forms of media had institutional gatekeepers preventing obviously evil content from being transmitted. Those barriers are now gone, and more people are finding out that they can use the disconnect to their advantage.
2026-01-30
Grindcore
Grindcore is the new hustle culture #technology #work #culture
In Silicon Valley, long hours have fused with a monastic male wellness aesthetic
But the “grindcore” lifestyle has taken on fresh intensity against the backdrop of a frantic San Francisco AI arms race, and growing anxiety among AI labs that a rival — or worse, China — might be the first to achieve AI supremacy.
It is not just tech bosses pushing the trend. Founders and engineers are jumping at the chance to broadcast how hard they are toiling. In September, dozens took to social media to announce their participation in what was dubbed the “great lock-in” of 2025 — in other words, spending the final three months of the year rejecting work-life balance to produce their most valuable labour yet.
Intriguingly for a world known for its badly dressed nerds, this narrative has been fused with a monastic male wellness aesthetic.
Instead of downtime enjoying the Californian sun and surf, grindcore adherents should fill the remainder of their day with workouts, Paleo diets and Chinese peptides. Many are embracing “manosphere” culture propagated by Maga-adjacent influencers that preaches antifeminism ideals and physiognomy.
“The current vibe is no drinking, no drugs, 9-9-6 [working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week], lift heavy, run far, marry early, track sleep, eat steak and eggs,” Daksh Gupta, the 23-year-old co-founder of an AI start-up, told the San Francisco Standard recently.
2026-01-28
The Computational Case for Hypocrisy
The Computational Case for Hypocrisy - by Aditya Kulkarni #evo-psych #evolution #psychology
Training massive AI models like Gemini or ChatGPT is an exercise in brute force. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars and requires server farms the size of industrial parks. The result of this process is a “Base Model”—a frozen, complex network of mathematical weights that “knows” how to predict the next word in a sentence.
Humans have an equivalent “Base Model,” too.
It resides in evolutionarily older decision systems that operate largely outside conscious processes. Just like an LLM, this biological base model was pre-trained on a massive dataset: millions of years of evolutionary trial and error. Its weights are heavily optimized for a specific set of survival outputs: Consume high calories. Pursue mating opportunities. Dominate rivals.
As AI researchers have discovered, it is almost impossible to subtract from a neural network. If you take a fully trained neural network and try to force it to “unlearn” a core concept—or aggressively “retrain” it on new, contradictory data—you trigger a phenomenon known as Catastrophic Forgetting. Because knowledge in a neural network is distributed across billions of connections, you cannot simply isolate and delete a specific bad behavior without unraveling the rest of the system. If you force the model to unlearn “aggression,” you might accidentally degrade its ability to navigate terrain or recognize faces.
When AI researchers want to “fine-tune” an AI model to learn a new, specific behavior, they often use a technique called Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA).
Instead of melting down an AI model’s neural weights and recasting them, researchers have discovered that simply attaching a small, thin layer of new parameters on top of the model allows you to change its behavior. It is a lightweight mask that sits over the heavy, deep machinery. This “Adapter Layer” intercepts the output of the frozen model and steers it in a new direction.
To change the behavior, you don’t touch the foundation. You build an addition.
Evolution likely arrived at the same architecture…
Instead, evolution built a “LoRA Adapter”—the neocortical Press Secretary. This adapter doesn’t stop the impulse from firing; it layers a transparency over it. It translates the raw signal—“I want to eat this cake”—into the socially acceptable output: “I am carbo-loading for a run.”
The Press Secretary evolved because “re-training” the amygdala is practically impossible. It would be like reshooting an entire movie just to translate the dialogue into French. You don’t fly the actors back to the set; you just add dubbed audio. Hypocrisy is the adapter layer that allows a Paleolithic brain to operate in our modern civilization.
we've created a society where artists can't make any money
we've created a society where artists can't make any money #writing
I began to realize that many of the essays I read—in prestigious and well-know. magazines—were edited and written and fact-checked by people barely able to make a living from their work. Many magazines were labors of love; others were underwritten by a generous donor or a government grant. (The London Review of Books, I learned, operates at a loss: £27 million since the magazine was founded. It’s thanks to a former editor’s family trust that they’re able to continue publishing.)
The writer W. David Marx’s latest book, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century (November 2025), argues that this narrative of decline is true—that art and culture are less innovative than before. I wanted to review Blank Space because Marx’s first two books (Ametora and Status and Culture) were exceptionally good…and because I wanted to understand if I agreed with him. Were things really getting worse? And did the question of money—how little of it there seemed to be, how precarious cultural labor was—have something to do with it?
You can read my review essay below, or on Asterisk Magazine’s elegantly designed website
2026-01-27
Why software work estimations are hard
How I estimate work as a staff software engineer #software #estimates
Just putting it here so that the next time somebody comes along wondering about this, I can point them here.
I’m also going to concede that sometimes you can accurately estimate software work, when that work is very well-understood and very small in scope. For instance, if I know it takes half an hour to deploy a service1, and I’m being asked to update the text in a link, I can accurately estimate the work at something like 45 minutes: five minutes to push the change up, ten minutes to wait for CI, thirty minutes to deploy.
For most of us, the majority of software work is not like this. We work on poorly-understood systems and cannot predict exactly what must be done in advance. Most programming in large systems is research: identifying prior art, mapping out enough of the system to understand the effects of changes, and so on. Even for fairly small changes, we simply do not know what’s involved in making the change until we go and look.
The pro-estimation dogma says that these questions ought to be answered during the planning process, so that each individual piece of work being discussed is scoped small enough to be accurately estimated. I’m not impressed by this answer. It seems to me to be a throwback to the bad old days of software architecture, where one architect would map everything out in advance, so that individual programmers simply had to mechanically follow instructions. Nobody does that now, because it doesn’t work: programmers must be empowered to make architectural decisions, because they’re the ones who are actually in contact with the code2. Even if it did work, that would simply shift the impossible-to-estimate part of the process backwards, into the planning meeting (where of course you can’t write or run code, which makes it near-impossible to accurately answer the kind of questions involved).
In short: software engineering projects are not dominated by the known work, but by the unknown work, which always takes 90% of the time. However, only the known work can be accurately estimated. It’s therefore impossible to accurately estimate software projects in advance.
Intelligence and Wisdom
Why Intelligence Is a Terrible Proxy for Wisdom
Simply put: smart people, by virtue of being very fucking smart, are better at constructing post-hoc rationalizations for beliefs they hold for emotional or social reasons. Everyone does this to some extent. We form impressions and then search for evidence to support them. But intelligent people search more effectively. They find better evidence, or at least better-sounding evidence. They anticipate counterarguments and preemptively defuse them. They build fortresses of logic around conclusions they reached for entirely non-logical reasons, and those fortresses can become so elaborate and well-defended that the person living inside them never realizes they’re trapped.
Philip Tetlock’s research on expert political judgment found that the experts with the most impressive credentials and the strongest reputations for insight performed barely better than chance at predicting geopolitical events, and sometimes performed worse than simple algorithms. The experts who performed best tended to be what Tetlock called “foxes” rather than “hedgehogs,” borrowing from Archilochus’s ancient distinction. Hedgehogs know one big thing and apply it everywhere, while foxes know many small things and adapt flexibly. The hedgehogs were frequently the most intelligent and articulate members of the sample. They also consistently overestimated their own accuracy and failed to update their beliefs when predictions went wrong.
Intelligence, it seems, can produce a particularly fraught form of intellectual pride. You’ve been right so many times before, in so many situations, in ways that others couldn’t match.
Wisdom is knowing what you don’t know.
Wisdom is what tells you to ignore the memecoin // prediction market bet, even though you could construct an excellent narrative explaining why this time will be different. Wisdom is what tells you that your political opponents might have a point, even though you could demolish their arguments in debate. Wisdom is what tells you not to install Clawdbot on your personal device and give it access to your banking details, even though you could become the next Tony Stark.
Intelligence can be measured on tests.
Wisdom is a good deal harder to quantify.
The Age of Pump and Dump Software
The Age of Pump and Dump Software | by Tautvilas Mečinskas | Jan, 2026 | Medium
The usual suspects are covered here: Cursor's browser, Yegge's Gas Town project and ClawdBot (now Moldbot).
I havent used any of them, and I wont bother. Pump and Dump does seem like an apt description. There is a larger story here around how so much of software we are building - and this gets turbocharged in the age of agent assisted coding, we don't think about maintaining them in the long run. I don't view the projects above as long running projects that will still be usable several years into the future.
However, there is an alternate narrative where these software are just playgrounds to experiment with fresh new ideas, and it's all just getting started.
2026-01-23
Oliver Burkeman on "Unclenching"
The Imperfectionist: The freewriting way of life
Freewriting, as you may know, is the technique whereby you set a timer, open a text file or notebook, then just write whatever comes to mind, even if it looks like absolute garbage. It’s been central to my process of clarifying and expressing ideas for a while now, despite the fact that it challenges every bit of my perfectionistic, control-freakish soul. More recently, though, I’ve started to see it as a microcosm for a whole way of being in the world. Because I think the principles of freewriting contain an entire philosophy for living a meaningful, vibrant, productive life – whether or not you happen to be a writer or use the technique itself.
This is because freewriting is a form of what I’m going to call (perhaps regrettably) unclenching – a psychological “move” that involves relaxing in the midst of anxiety and uncertainty. Surrendering control, but thereby unleashing a vastly greater capacity for action, creativity and aliveness.
In the end, I suppose that this unclenched approach to life works because it reflects how things actually are. We all are freewriting our lives, inevitably, whether we like it or not. Even the most hidebound plan-maker and routine-follower is still choosing, again and again, to keep following those plans and routines, in each new moment that arises. And even the most anxious worrier, forever trying to rule out future uncertainties, remains subject to the fundamental truth that anything could happen at any moment.
Unclenching into life demands that we relax in the midst of the uncertainty and insecurity, because “in the midst of the uncertainty and insecurity” is where we always are. The reward is the aliveness, agency and sense of purchase on life that comes from no longer pretending otherwise.
2026-01-22
Using ChatGPT in relationships
The new relationship dealbreaker: using ChatGPT | Dazed
A sore subject rather than a make-or-break in her relationships, Kaya has also had several heated conversations with someone she’s dating over his “constant” use of AI chatbots. In the future, she predicts she’ll start to distance herself from people who rely on them.
For similar reasons, 30-year-old Ross is already there. “It does put me off people,” the content editor says, explaining that if they went on a date with someone who openly used ChatGPT, they wouldn’t see them again. “When someone has the app, I think less of them.”
Thinking less of somebody just because they have ChatGPT is probably a bit much. But relying on it for articulating your thoughts is a bit messy. I suppose I would be okay with it if it is used to tighten up a piece of informational content. But using ChatGPT to argue with your friend or partner on text is a huge red flag. I would reconsider my relationship with that person if that happens.
2026-01-21
Cafe Recommendations in Tokyo's Sangenjaya district
The Sprudge Guide To Coffee In Tokyo's Sangenjaya District | Sprudge Coffee
I love guides that go beyond focusing just on cities, but instead focus on specific neighborhoods. Bookmarking this one for my next trip to Tokyo.
Just two brief stops on the Tokyo Metro away from the incessant energy of Shibuya sits the district of Sangenjaya—a youth-oriented neighborhood characterized by its station-side maze of winding alleyways crowded with bars and hidden eateries, a thriving community of both local and international students milling in the streets, and a collective of young creatives opening up shop. Fueling this ever-present undercurrent of vitality in Sangenjaya are countless cafes, each seeking a precarious balance between preserving traditions and pioneering innovations.
…
Sangenjaya exists, sandwiched between buzzing neighborhoods like bustling Shibuya and youth-oriented, trend-loving Shimokitazawa, as a laid-back location where the quiet magic happens. More than just the hometown of one of Tokyo’s most lauded roasters, Sangenjaya plays host to a coterie of atmospheric and innovative cafes, all of which provide delightful spots to sip, snack, and soak in the charm of one of Tokyo’s most beloved enclaves.
2026-01-20
Loneliness
2026-01-19
Your reality is someone else's content
your reality is someone's content - by Adam Aleksic #culture #communication #social-media
I’ve written before about how there are two types of communication: the ritual kind, meant for connecting with other human beings, and the transmission kind, optimizing for distribution of information. Every new technology since the telegraph has continued to prioritize transmission at the expense of ritual. All that matters is how much you can communicate, to how many people—everything is done for views.
But ritual is what gives life meaning. There’s a reason it feels better to talk with a friend on a picnic blanket than watch your friend’s TikToks for the same length of time. Either way, you’re getting the same amount of information about your friend, but only the picnic feels special.
These are only the most obvious examples. I think the viral Sydney Sweeney ad last summer was another example of clip farming, just less on the nose. The real advertisement wasn’t the weird genetics joke, but the subsequent discourse around the advertisement. The purpose of the campaign was to make people uncomfortable enough to talk about it online, and now American Eagle stock is up 100%.
The more we rely on the transmission view of communication, the less incentive there is to treat other people with care. Companies like Cluely can raise millions of dollars by promoting academic dishonesty, and crypto scammers can inflate the value of their shitcoins by popularizing racist memes. If the point is distribution above connection, it’s okay to hurt other people as long as your message gets across.
Friction was the feature
Friction Was the Feature - John Stone's Blog #ai #slop
Today, a candidate armed with an LLM can parse dozens of job postings, lift phrasing from each, and generate a set of keyword-optimized cover letters in no time. They can auto-tailor their resume to each posting. They can submit 30 applications in one sitting.
This is better, right?
Not for anyone, actually. Applications soar; recruiters drown. So we bolt on more automation: applicant tracking systems, resume parsers, AI interview schedulers. We convince ourselves we’ve built a better machine, but we haven’t redesigned the only machine that matters: the system matching the right people to the right work.
…
We automated the production of artifacts but haven’t fixed judgment. The result is a marketplace of immaculate verbiage with very little meaning, of noise without signal.
Everyone looks more “efficient.” Very little about it feels effective.
Recruiting is just one place where friction used to be the feature. When the marginal cost of creating words falls toward zero, any system that uses those words as a proxy for quality begins to fail.
For a long time, we treated certain artifacts as measures of effort or quality. A thoughtful cover letter. A carefully written reference on behalf of a colleague. A multi-page strategy doc. They were hard enough to produce that their existence told you something about the person behind them.
Once AI arrived, those artifacts quietly turned into targets. We told people to personalize outreach, respond to more emails, and write more detailed documents. LLMs optimize for those metrics beautifully. But as they do, the metrics stop tracking the thing we actually care about: competence, sincerity, fit, progress.
This is what I call “Goodhart’s inbox”. We’re surrounded by messages and docs that perfectly satisfy the surface criteria we asked for. But the more we optimize for these outputs, the less focused we are on outcomes: whether anyone is actually understanding each other or moving work forward.
2026-01-18
Guardian Profile on Adam Tooze
The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age | Economics | The Guardian
I am an unabashed Tooze Boy, so I thoroughly enjoyed reading every bit of this long article.
Anil Dash on a Career in Tech
How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026? - Anil Dash #jobs #software
The first, and most important, thing to know is that it’s not just you. Nearly everyone in tech I have this conversation with feels very isolated about it, and they’re often embarrassed or ashamed to discuss it. They think that everyone else who has a job in tech is happy or comfortable at their current employers, or that the other people looking for work are getting calls back or are being offered interviews in response to their job applications. But I’m here to tell you: it is grim right now. About as bad as I’ve seen. And I’ve been around a long time.
The public narrative is dominated by the loud minority of dudes who are content to appease the egos of their bosses, sucking up to the worse impulses of those in charge. An industry that used to pride itself on publicly reporting security issues and openly disclosing vulnerabilities now circles its wagons to gang up on people who suggest that an AI tool shouldn’t tell children to harm themselves, that perhaps it should be possible to write a law limiting schools from deploying AI platforms that are known to tell kids to end their own lives. People in tech endure their bosses using slurs at work, making jokes about sexual assault, consorting with leaders who have directly planned the murder of journalists, engaging in open bribery in blatant violation of federal law and their own corporate training on corruption, and have to act like it’s normal.
This too shall pass. One of the great gifts of working in technology is that it’s given so many of us the habit of constantly learning, of always being curious and paying attention to the new things worth discovering. That healthy and open-minded spirit is an important part of how to navigate a moment when lots of people are being laid off, or lots of energy and attention are being focused on products and initiatives that don’t have a lot of substance behind them. Eventually, people will want to return to what’s real. The companies that focus on delivering products with meaning, and taking care of employees over time, will be the ones that are able to persist past the current moment. So building habits that enable resiliency at both a personal and professional level is going to be key.
As I’ve been fond of saying for a long time: don’t let your job get in the way of your career.
Laptop Boyfriends
[The Laptop Boyfriends Can’t Stop Watching YouTube in Bed](https://archive.ph/XNB0H#selection-2381.0-2388.0
…YouTube has joined sleep and sex on the short list of activities that occur between the sheets. “The post-coital cigarette is a lost art, so now it’s the post-coital vape and YouTube,” says Weeks. In Gaffney’s relationships, he believes “it was the time and place in which I consumed that was the issue.” He imagines his romantic partners “probably would’ve wanted to do things sexually and that opportunity wasn’t afforded to them because I was watching YouTube.”
Nadia, 30, lives in Paris with her software-engineer husband, who is also 30. She first became aware of his YouTube obsession while watching the Netflix reality-competition series Culinary Class Wars together. Bafflingly, he could identify esoteric gastronomy techniques and recognize chefs from restaurants he’d never even visited. “He just knows so much,” she says. “And I know it’s all from YouTube because he’s not, like, reading cookbooks frequently.” (Nadia asked to go by only her first name for privacy.)
But for every relationship in which YouTube is a bridge between partners, there’s another in which it’s a wedge. For Nadia’s husband, YouTube is a solo activity that exists in addition to shared television time. “Sometimes after a day of socializing, he specifically can’t focus on something on the TV or a 45-minute Netflix show, so he has to watch a 20-minute YouTube show and then another 20-minute YouTube show,” Nadia says. “Once a week, he’s like, ‘No, give me my loafing time with my YouTube alone,’ because apparently watching a movie with me is socializing.”
When pressed to explain why men do this, many I spoke to point to YouTube’s supposed educational value. “ I’m in awe of the magnitude of YouTube, how I can really go down any wormhole and learn anything I want,” says Gaffney.
There is a pervasive sense that time spent on YouTube is more edifying than time spent on, say, TikTok. “He’s somebody that hates the idea of wasting time,” says Watters of his YouTube Shorts–loving partner. The content “is still entertainment, but he can justify it like he’s getting smarter, he’s gaining knowledge. This is valuable.”
I suppose 👆🏽 is one way to justify a YouTube addiction.
2026-01-17
Einstein on being a loner
“I am a typical loner in my daily life... my awareness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has prevented me from feelings of isolation.” — Albert Einstein
This totally made my day. I am very much a loner, but in talking with many folks I have realised that I have very rarely been miserable about it. On the contrary I would say I am pretty happy loner.
Cracked Engineers
Forget Vibe Coders: ‘Cracked Engineers’ Are All the Rage in Tech — The Information
Not exactly the kind of article
In November, a young robotics startup called Gradient began interviewing applicants for an engineering internship at the Palo Alto, Calif.–based company. But after talking to a half-dozen of them, the startup decided to ditch its plan to add interns.
Why exactly? “Not worth our time,” said J.X. Mo, 23, Gradient’s co-founder. While some of the applicants had seemed promising, “none of them would be cracked enough for us to hire them,” he said.
These days, plenty of people within tech are after the same thing Mo is: a “cracked engineer,” a buzzphrase that describes an idealized version of a software engineer capable of thriving in the AI era through scrappiness, workaholism and technical savvy.
After looking at this figure, I figure I would put myself more in the category of a 5X engineer with the "willingness to use AI tools" and "capable of thriving in the AI era through scrappiness, workaholism and technical savvy", EXCEPT I am not exactly a workaholic 🙃. Does that make me "semi-cracked" then!?
Before it became a banner for a certain kind of programmer, the term “cracked” originated from videogames, as slang describing an especially adept gamer. Someone with a series of gnarly kills in Call of Duty? They’re totally cracked—that kind of thing.
Within tech, the people most eager to hire a cracked engineer are often startup founders at early-stage companies that haven’t yet accumulated significant venture capital. With limited funds, they need engineers who can operate as the company’s only coder—or perhaps one of a handful at most. And while some engineers specialize in writing code for machine learning or cloud infrastructure, cracked engineers are versatile enough to do it all.
Furthermore, these founders often view cracked engineers as more likely to be undiscovered savants who aren’t after cushy positions at big tech companies, rather than programming veterans. They are typically in their 20s, but they may have accumulated a decade of work experience by the time they reach their mid-20s, startup founders say. Most have little interest in managing other people.
Flat White Under Attack
Is There Really Such A Thing As A Large Flat White? | Sprudge Coffee
My vote is No.
The flat white is under attack. Or at least according to one Guardian contributor. The aggressor? Milk. More milk. Flat whites apparently now come, confusingly to some, in two sizes—small and large—which some see as a grave offense to the hallowed Antipodean espresso drink.
Except there is one tiny little difference between the flat white and the other drinks listed. What makes the flat white different is that there is no agreed upon definition of the flat white. Even among Australians, who spread it around the world, and New Zealanders, who in actually invented it. We know because we asked thousands and thousands of them all about over a decade ago, when arguing about flat whites still seemed novel. The closest thing to agreement we could find in our survey was that the flatty was “small-ish”. Think of it like a small latte. Further confounding things was the lack of consensus on whether a flit whoite had a double shot of espresso or a single. Ratios here are just as important, if not more, than total drink size, so that’s not ideal.
2026-01-11
The end of the world
From: Laura Manach :bongoCat:: "#Meme #Humour" - Mastodon
Very relatable atm.
Tsundoku
I knew this term, but I liked how the tweet came together with the pics and everything.
In Japanese, "tsundoku" means collecting books and letting them pile up, not for neglect, but for the joy of knowing they're there, full of untold stories.
RIP Sweetgreens
The Rise and Fall of the Ultimate Millennial Power Lunch #salad #millenial
It seems like just yesterday when I was ordering Sweetgreens on the app several times a week and walking the few blocks in from my apartment (or WeWork) in NYC (where I was living at that tmie) to pick it up from the store. How things have changed!
In the first two months of last year, Sweetgreen’s stock price had declined more than 30 percent. The company had already made significant changes, dropping seed oils, adding “protein plates,” and hiring a bunch of robots in an apparent effort to cater to the early 2020s’ three defining dining trends: the MAHA movement, the protein fixation, and the push to cut costs by eliminating human labor. But not even air-fried potatoes could stop Sweetgreen’s free fall. In August, with operational losses reaching $26.4 million, the chain fired workers, and also the fries. As the year ended, Nathaniel Ru, who co-founded the company in 2007, stepped down from his role. Today, a share of Sweetgreen stock costs less than $8. In late 2024, it was more than $43.
…
Sweetgreen’s early success was not a fluke. As a restaurant, it truly did do something incredible. The company put high-quality organic produce in interesting combinations, incorporating fresh herbs and global ingredients, and going heavy on crunch and citrus. It sourced from small farms that it listed proudly on chalkboards inside each store, appealing squarely to a cohort who knew they really should be shopping at the farmers’ market, even if they usually got their groceries from Instacart, guiltily. And Sweetgreen was an early adopter of online ordering, allowing its customers to waste less time waiting in line. When a Sweetgreen opened in my city, in 2016, replacing a restaurant that had been serving hamburgers for 65 years, I was excited about it the same way I was excited when fiber internet came to my neighborhood: Finally, a better way to live.
The next paragraph makes me feel very seen (not in a good way!)
Sweetgreen was what you ate while listening to, if not the Hamilton soundtrack, then a self-improvement podcast at 1.5 speed, ripping through emails or shopping online before dutifully composting your beautifully designed, biodegradable bowl. It was the perfect fuel for the grinning strivers of the long 2010s, when a better world was possible, and in fact something you could buy. When a dear friend of mine got married, what she wanted to eat more than anything else while being poked and prettied in the hotel suite was Sweetgreen. It was the most reliable, most delicious, least risky meal either of us could think to pick up at an exceptionally frenetic moment. But it also made sense, spiritually, on a day that often requires total command over both one’s appearance and a large number of spreadsheets—a day that is a public declaration of hope for the future, and, in some ways, the first day of your adult life.
I think Sweetgreen didn’t change so much as the world around it did. A $15 salad was never really an investment in one’s health, but it certainly doesn’t feel like that in this economy—and besides, that moment has passed. The optimism of the previous era has given way to something more nihilistic. The people who were once going to guac this week are now quiet quitting and scarfing tallow. The “power” in Millennial power lunch has, largely, been replaced by impotence and apathy. WeWork went bankrupt; Hamilton became cringe; trying so hard to do the right things all the time started to feel pointless and naive. When I told a friend and fellow former Sweetgreen enthusiast about this story, he said, “What’s the point of eating a salad when we’re all going to die?” He was joking, kind of.
Morning Coffee Rave Parties ftw
An aversion to alcohol is making sober raves an increasingly popular party option | CNN
On a Saturday morning in October, Park Jihyun woke up at 5:30 a.m. to go raving in Seoul.
And much about her prep routine was counterintuitive.
Instead of shimmying into a miniskirt, the 29-year-old pulled on a pair of running tights. Instead of slipping her feet into a set of precarious heels, she slipped into running shoes. And in lieu of hailing a cab to the party, she ran from her apartment to the venue in Yongsan-gu, arriving after an hour-long, 5-mile jog, ready to hit the dance floor.
“It’s just random people who meet for the first time. But as we start dancing together, it becomes crazier as time flies,” Park says.
Since launching in May, the Seoul Morning Coffee Club’s Coffee Rave has become a viral success, drawing hundreds of like-minded Seoulites from the comfort of their beds to dance at daybreak.
Attendees, who have paid 20,000 won (about $14) for their ticket, start trickling in at 7 a.m., and line up for their drink of choice, often an iced Americano or a matcha. By 8 a.m., the DJ is pumping out hypnotic bass beats for an enthusiastic crowd of revelers who are jumping in unison in the clear, bright light of day, with nothing but caffeine to fuel their booze-free rave.
2026-01-10
Should you have a library in your loo
Should you have a library in your loo? #library #loo
I swear I had not thought that an entire article could be written on this topic.
The design world, for the most part, is on board. Furniture maker Matthew Burt recently launched the Loo Library, a beautifully compact shelving unit in walnut and stainless steel with semi-circle cutouts in the corners, designed to fit snugly into even the smallest cloakroom. “The idea was to create something with interest and gravitas, while ensuring books could be easily reachable from the loo,” says Burt.
Because it’s not just an issue of title selection (we’ll come to that) — positioning is key in a loo library, too. Books can’t be too close to the pan or too low to the ground, but must be within grasp from a seated position. Unlike the bedside table, in the loo you are privy to both hazards and logistical impediments. The books must be light enough to be easily held, not too precious, but also not too dog eared or well thumbed.
…In Japan, there is a term, mariko aoki, to describe the urge to defecate when entering a bookstore — a phenomenon born, perhaps, from some deeply held or Pavlovian association of reading and the loo.
2026-01-08
Coffee in California
A California Gesha Makes Its International Auction Debut | Sprudge Coffee #coffee #california #usa
TIL, coffee is grown in California
When you think of coffee production in America, the first place that comes to mind is undoubtedly Hawaii, Kona in particular. But it is not the only state commercially growing coffee. California is home to a few extremely small coffee farms, though few have risen above novelty; even the most avid specialty coffee drinkers are unlikely to have ever tasted any. But that may be changing soon thanks for Frinj Coffee. The Ventura-based farm will be the first continental American producer to take part in an international coffee auction.
2026-01-05
A Metabolic Workspace #productivity
There is a rude but clarifying question here: are you collecting information to use it, or are you collecting information because collecting feels like intellectual work? If it's the latter, you're not building a Second Brain; you're building an anxiety management system that happens to look like productivity.
Ranking Classical Philosophy Books
From: Correcting an Error - by Jared Henderson
It's a 4hr video, so not sure when I am gonna get around to it. But wanted to log it here so that I could point to it next time.
2025 GenZ Trends
Nostalgia Economy and Analog Awakening #genz #buzzwords #slang
For some random reason I have this GenZ Trends newsletter in my feed reader which has become a bit of a guilty pleasure to read.
In the 2025 recap, I came across this long list of buzzwords. Some of my favorites
Slop life: Acceptance of overstimulating, low-quality consumption as a default mode. (I, II, III)
…
Locking in: Self-optimization as a seasonal ritual. (I, II)
…
Restivals: Festival culture shifts toward livestreaming and at-home experiences rather than physical endurance. (I, II)
…
Floodlighting: A dating term for oversharing trauma early to manufacture intimacy; an emotional jump scare. (I, II)
…
Monkey barring: Dating behavior where someone lines up the next relationship before letting go of the current one, swinging from partner to partner without ever being single. (I, II)
Monk mode: A self-imposed period of extreme discipline and withdrawal framed as productivity-driven, often involving no dating, no socializing, and obsessive self-improvement. (I, II)
…
What To Buy That Improves Quality of Life
What To Buy That Improves Quality of Life #things #buyitforlife
A good list.
2026-01-04
The gap between a Helpful Assistant and a Senior Engineer
The gap between a Helpful Assistant and a Senior Engineer : ezyang's blog
One of the important functions of a senior engineer is to be able to evaluate the context a software project lives in and figure out if we need to do something, even if it isn’t explicitly asked for. This is contrast to a helpful assistant, who is first and foremost obligated to follow the user’s instructions. This leads to a gap between a Helpful Assistant and a Senior Engineer.
Well, imagine a human L7 engineer who has just been hired by a big tech company to head up some big, new, multi-year initiative. Will they say, “Sure, I can help with that!” and start busily coding away? Of course not: they will go out and start reviewing code, reading docs, talking to people, asking questions, shadowing oncalls, doing small starter tasks–they will start by going out and building context. Here, the “helpful assistant” frame for LLMs is limiting: sure, Claude might ask you a few questions to clarify the task upfront, but if your coding agent starts asking you about “relevant partner teams” and “org-wide priorities for this half” you are definitely going to raise an eyebrow.
Thorsten Bell on AI Assisted Coding
Joy & Curiosity #68 - by Thorsten Ball - Register Spill
For more than 15 years I thought that I loved writing code, that I loved typing out code by hand, that I loved the “cadence of typing”, as Gary Bernhardt once called it, when sitting in front of my editor and my fingers click-clacking on my keyboard.
Now, I’m not so sure anymore.
2025 was the year in which I deeply reconsidered my relationship to programming. In previous years I had the occasional “should I become a Lisp guy?”, sure, but not the “do I even like typing out code?” from last year.
What I learned over the course of the year is that typing out code by hand now frustrates me. It frustrates me in the same way that filling out a printed form by hand frustrates me. Writing my name and middle name and last name and my street address and my zip code in capital letters with this stupid pencil when all of this could’ve been done by a computer, god, why do I have to do this, why do you punish me? This is so stupid, so laborious, this shouldn’t exist. I once considered not taking the 50 Euros of reimbursement that Deutsche Bahn offered after a train was delayed for two hours because I would have had to fill out a form by hand.
Amp is now faster and better at writing code than I am and whenever I do have to go in and type some code it feels like I’m pulling out the sewing needle after the sewing machine broke down, like hammering nails by hand after the nail gun’s battery died.
And yet it was fun! It was fun to write code by hand, for many, many years, and when it stopped being fun I was sad. Do I even love programming and building software if the actual writing of code is now a nuisance?
And the sadness went away when I found my answer to that question. Learning new things, making computers do things, making computers do things in new and fascinating and previously thought impossible ways, sharing what I built, sharing excitement, learning from others, understanding more of the world by putting something and myself out there and seeing how it resonates — that, I realized, is what actually makes me get up in the morning, not the typing, and all of that is still there.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: National Book Award by Omar El Akkad: 9780593804148 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books #palestine #gaza
On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.
2026-01-02
Common People
“I wanna live like common people
I wanna do whatever common people do
Wanna sleep with common people
I wanna sleep with common people like you”
Well, what else could I do?
I said “I’ll, I’ll see what I can do”
– Pulp, Common People
Found here: The Watching Menace: Crowds, Voyeurism and Photography - Flashbak
Hope is a discipline
Pluralistic: The Post-American Internet (01 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow #ccc #ai #law
Like I said at the start of this talk, I have been doing this work for 24 years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, throwing myself at a door that was double-locked and deadbolted, and now that door is open a crack and goddammit, I am hopeful.
Not optimistic. Fuck optimism! Optimism is the idea that things will get better no matter what we do. I know that what we do matters. Hope is the belief that if we can improve things, even in small ways, we can ascend the gradient toward the world we want, and attain higher vantage points from which new courses of action, invisible to us here at our lower elevation, will be revealed.
Hope is a discipline. It requires that you not give in to despair. So I'm here to tell you: don't despair.
NB: Hope is a discipline is a quote originally attributed to Mariame Kaba. I recently came across it and since then I have been seeing it everywhere. I think it's a pretty powerful statement.
2025-12-31
Raw Denim Tiers
Three Tiers Raw Denim #jeans #clothes
Since September, the only two pieces of bottomwear I have been wearing are a pair of raw denim Nudie jeans, and a pair of Japanese raw denim jeans custom stitched by Monks of Method in Bengaluru. I haven't even washed them yet, getting by with occasional application of a denim refresher.
Andrej Karpathy does a 180
This is from year-end AI newsletter by The Information, and it made me chuckle.
2025-12-30
eSIM annoyance
I switched to eSIM in 2025, and I am full of regret - Ars Technica #phones #mobile
Most people won’t need to move their phone number very often, but the risk that your eSIM goes up in smoke when you do is very real. Compare that to a physical SIM card, which will virtually never fail unless you damage the card. Swapping that tiny bit of plastic takes a few seconds, and it never requires you to sit on hold with your carrier’s support agents or drive to a store. In short, a physical SIM is essentially foolproof, and eSIM is not.
Obviously, the solution is not to remove multifactor authentication—your phone number is, unfortunately, too important to be unguarded. However, carriers’ use of SMS to control account access is self-defeating and virtually guarantees people are going to have bad experiences in the era of eSIM. Enshittification has truly come for SIM cards.
This hits home as somebody who has three numbers I have to maintain across the three different countries I have bases in.
This bit in the end summarizes my feelings about technology enshittification nicely
We gave up the headphone jack. We gave up the microSD card. Is all this worthwhile to boost battery capacity by 8 percent? That’s a tough sell.
Book Recommendations on Learning Philosophies
The readings section here is interesting
Over the years I’ve accumulated a small list of books that I like to recommend:
- The ABCs of How We Learn by Daniel L. Schwartz, Jessica M. Tsang, Kristen P. Blair. The “ABC” is a gimmick and wears thin in predictable ways, but it also forces the authors to limit how many entries to have. Don’t let this get in the way of high-quality advice from experts.
- How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice by Paul A. Kirschner, Carl Hendrick. This book wears the research even more explicitly on its sleeve, but every paper is distilled into actionable content.
- Understanding How we Learn: a Visual Guide by Yana Weinstein, Megan Sumeracki. A third way to organize similar ideas. Also combines cognitive science and education.
Each one has the following important charactersitics:
- Its content is research-based, not just opinion.
- It is written in an accessible style, suitable for non-experts.
- It provides actionable advice.
- It’s fairly small.
Simply implementing a handful of key ideas (that are new to you) from these books will make you a much more effective educator.
In addition, I’ve also found these very useful and thought-provoking, though they are not as immediately actionable:
How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School from The National Academies Press. This is a significant summary of the research on learning.
The Teaching Gap by James W. Stigler and James Hiebert. An important book about what goes wrong specifically in American schools.
Books others have recommended:
- How Learning Works: Eight Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching came recommended by Adam Shostack. I have read the first edition, which had seven principles. I thought it was both full of good research and had a lot of actionable feedback. I found some chapters weaker, and was annoyed by its boosterism for analogy without recognizing its problems. But these are minor issues; if this book appeals to you, go ahead!
and for computer scientists
Specifically for computer scientists, I have some very specific things you should read to gain perspective:
- Justin Reich’s Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education, which traces and shows the follies of a certain mindset that is pervasive in computing’s view of education. Odds are, even after you read this, you’ll still tell yourself, this time it will be different. In doing so, you will fail to understand that these are issues about humans, not about technology. Well, what can I say: I tried.
- Morgan Ames’s The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child is an excellent deconstruction of the OLPC project, which was an apotheosis of technological solutionism. Most of these issues could be, and were, predicted at the outset, but computing valorizes sunny optimism over knowledge and experience.
- Morgan Ames also wrote Hackers, Computers, and Cooperation: A Critical History of Logo and Constructionist Learning. This deconstructs a pervasive mindset in computing education for its strengths and (many) weaknesses. If you don’t have the energy to read Ames’s book, at least read this article, because OLPC is the product of this mindset combined with lots of resources.
- Audrey Watters’s The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade. It’s easy to imagine these as ZIRP phenomena, and many are, but (a) the underlying mindset is pervasive in computing and (b) every decade spawns a new set of technologies and views that can spawn a new one of these articles.