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2025-01-24

Add search and index features · deepakjois/debugjois.dev@6f3c661 · GitHub #website

I used the excellent bleve library in Go to build indexing and search capability into the site. The search currently works on the CLI, but the eventual plan is to expose it at a web-based endpoint. I am also searching for a suitable low-cost provider where i can conveniently deploy this.

2025-01-23

John Prideaux from The Economist on Trump's Inauguration

Examining what was said and what was signed on Trump’s day one #podcast #trump

This bit from the podcast transcript stood out for me with references to manifest destiny and the gilded age.

Clip below refers to quotes from Trump as heard on audio.

Jason Palmer [00:03:06] And yet we’ve all been looking forward to the inaugural address as a kind of bellwether for what we’re actually going to get this time around. What was your take?

John Prideaux [00:03:14] The single line that stood out to me most from the speech was about the Panama Canal, which is quite a strange thing to stand out in an inaugural address.

Clip [00:03:23] Violated American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape or form.

John Prideaux [00:03:34] He said about the Panama Canal. We will take it back.

Clip [00:03:37] And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama and we’re taking it back.

John Prideaux [00:03:49] And that is quite striking coming from an American president. I don’t think Donald Trump means he’s going to send in the 82nd Airborne, as George H.W. Bush did in the late 1980s to Panama to take it back by force. But that was kind of the impression that he got. And it was an impression reinforced in other parts of the speech where he talked about America’s manifest destiny, which is an old 19th century theme in American history about conquering and taming the whole of the continent.

Clip [00:04:22] The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory.

John Prideaux [00:04:32] He talked about Manifest Destiny and said that one of the things that was important to him was that America should always be a growing nation. It should be expanding its territory now like it expanded its territory in the 19th century. Not to the same extent, perhaps, but the idea is the same. That is a very old idea of American greatness. It’s really a throwback to William McKinley, who President Trump mentioned a couple of times favourably.

Clip [00:05:03] President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent. He was a natural businessman.

John Prideaux [00:05:12] McKinley was president at the end of the 19th century, at a time when America’s territory expanded. He was also extremely keen on tariffs and had backing from a lot of the wealthiest Americans in the Gilded Age. In McKinley’s age, those wealthy entrepreneurs were people like J.P. Morgan and John D Rockefeller. In the Donald Trump the golden Age as he described his new Gilded Age. There were people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, all of whom were at Trump’s inauguration. There was another striking moment when he talked about going to Mars and planting the American flag on Mars. And at that moment, Elon Musk, whose own goal is to make mankind a multiplanetary species, was delighted and gave a double thumbs up.

Clip [00:05:59] And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.

The Trump Administration and WHO

The Trump Administration just walked out on global health

His decision to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization (WHO) will be catastrophic if it is more than bluster. We all have media fatigue. Wellness disinformation is rampant. But we cannot be complacent. This Executive Order isn’t just another “crazy thing Trump has done” to add to the pile.

The US leaving the WHO is a moral failing even more than it is a catastrophic policy decision.

And it reeks of ignorance from people who have not experienced places where the WHO is the difference between life and death for billions of people. It’s cruel and immoral. And it will harm Americans and the rest of the planet.

Men and the Beauty Industrial Complex

My father had plastic surgery. Now he wants me and my mother to get work done | Well actually | The Guardian #beauty #feminism

Jessica DeFino talks about how men are being coopted into the beauty industrial complex

Girls are born into beauty culture, which teaches us that appearance is a key measure of our worth. It’s communal! Social! Fun! Feminine beauty ideals are modeled by the dolls we play with. (Hi, Barbie.) The rules are passed down in games and stories. (Remember Pretty Pretty Princess?) Products become portals to friendship and connection. We learn to self-surveil and to surveil others, often subconsciously, as a way to gauge our personal success and help our loved ones succeed, too.

Some of us eventually reckon with this, and realize the urge to embody beauty standards isn’t a harmless hobby so much as a harmful obligation. But that can take time.

Your father, freshly exposed to beauty culture in his 50s, isn’t there yet. He still has the mindset of an adolescent. And he’s far from alone!

The cosmetics industry has been reeling men into its multibillion-dollar empire in recent years. Call it inclusivity: the media hailed singer Joe Jonas’s 2022 endorsement of Xeomin, a Botox alternative, as “genderless self-care”. Call it capitalism: Pharrell, Machine Gun Kelly, Harry Styles and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson all cashed in on the celebrity beauty brand boom by launching their own lines. Call it contagion: an increasingly virtual world is an increasingly visual world, and the pressure to prioritize aesthetics is reaching parents, children and even pets.

Whatever you call it, it’s working.

…

In an ideal world, cis, straight men’s growing interest in a traditionally female- and queer-focused category might inspire them to question arbitrary gender norms – to free themselves from the trap of toxic masculinity! Alas, that’s not what’s happening.

Instead, men have recast cosmetics as power tools for alphas, reinforcing sexist stereotypes and promoting ageist, classist, oppressive appearance ideals. Beautification has been rebranded as “looksmaxxing” and perfume as “scentmaxxing”. Swallowing skincare supplements is referred to as “biohacking” and anti-ageing as “longevity”. Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever, a new Netflix documentary on the 47-year-old tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s obsession with living forever and looking like a teenager, might give you some insight into your dad’s mental state.

and finally she starts off describing an antidote to this:

To help your dad understand what’s happening to him – and how it’s affecting the women in his life – I suggest what I’d suggest to any Sephora tween on the cusp of critical thinking: feminism.

Lot of good resources. Love how she can contextualize each them with punchy phrases.

He needs to grasp that beauty culture is “always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance”, as Naomi Wolf writes in 1990’s The Beauty Myth. He needs to recontextualize beauty as capital, the way Tressie McMillan Cottom does in Thick: And Other Essays: “[It] costs money and demands money. It colonizes. It hurts. It is painful. It can never be fully satisfied.”

He can learn how to value the unmodified body (Intact by Clare Chambers), understand the mental health effects of our cultural obsession with appearance (Beauty Sick by Renee Engeln), clock how aesthetic ideals function as ethical ideals (Perfect Me by Heather Widdows), consider the vilification of ugliness (Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal) and parse gender theory (Females by Andrea Long Chu).

Odd Lots on Crypto Philosophizing

Nobody is Interested in Your Crypto Philosophizing - Bloomberg

If you were to go back 10 years ago and looked at what people in crypto were talking about on Twitter (or on Reddit, or the various message boards) there were a lot of debates going on about the economic tradeoffs in blockchain design.

Should blockchains be optimized for low fees? Should they be optimized for speed? Will cryptocurrencies ever be used at Starbucks to pay for a coffee? If you are going to pay for coffee using crypto, should that be done directly on the chain, or should it be done on some “Layer 2” solution that resolves on the chain? How should a blockchain go about making upgrades?

These were genuinely interesting conversations that sat at the intersection of computer science and economics, and even anthropology.

But you don’t really find that so much these days…

…

There is one crypto project where there still is a lot of talk about blockchain design and governance and non-speculative use cases. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is still regularly posting about things like the process of upgrading the chain and principles of software design and basically all the same stuff you’d have seen on crypto twitter nine or 10 years ago.

Becoming a Polymath vs Becoming an Expert

Facing My Own Mediocrity - by Brock Covington

This in short is the story of my life

Months ago, I wrote a post on becoming a polymath, or in other words, how to diversify your skillset and thrive in various pursuits. In the post, one drawback I expressed is that you’ll likely find yourself in a place of mediocrity or with merely moderate proficiency in a desired field; but this reluctance towards mastery or the pursuit of maximized potential is not unique to polymaths. It’s something I’ve struggled with for years and still reflect on.

To best describe this predicament, I’ll explain my own personal experience. Ever since adolescence, I’ve rarely been impeded by a lack of motivation or discipline. Whether it’s fitness, business, literature, videography, or language, the audacity to try anything with confidence is seemingly ingrained in my genes. But the ability to start something is only the beginning. What plagues me is the lack of ambition to see a particular skill through to mastery or chase excellence within a field. I reach a respectable or above average status, but I fail to reach expertise. I've become the proverbial ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ and feel plunged into a pit of frustration. Is it better to be an amateur in a hundred fields or a master of one?

Each new hobby or skill I delve into feels like the twist of an arbor press flattening me further and further until my diversification has rendered me thin and useless. I hear Dostoevsky’s admonition in Netochka Nezvanova, “You're a hundred times greater an artist than I, if only you had my endurance,” except I have the endurance, but lack the focus or specialization to achieve the true mark of greatness.

But the last paragraph offers some guidance on how to go about finding a solution

To me, the complexity that lies in this question is greater than those posed by a lack of motivation of discipline. One is solved by strengthening willpower, while the other requires deep reflection and self-awareness of what one truly desires from their life.

The Adaptive Role of Emotions

Living Fossils reposted an older piece, and it was a good recap: The Adaptive Role of Emotions - by Josh Zlatkus #emotions #evo-psych #evolution

First some evolution basics:

Like most species-typical traits, emotions evolved in what evolutionary psychologists call “the environment of evolutionary adaptedness,” or EEA. The EEA is the environment—technically, a statistical composite of environmental conditions—in which humans evolved.2 It is worth reflecting that humans have only been agricultural for the last 10,000 years (5% our history), industrial for the last 150 years (.075%), and digital for the last 30 years (.015%).3 These modes of existence are unlikely to have influenced our psychological architecture much because they haven’t been around very long compared to other modes of existence, like hunting and gathering in small tribes.4

Our modern environment is similar in some ways to the EEA (we still breathe oxygen) but different in others (we interact with far more people today). These differences often have unfortunate results, such as when our sweet tooth, designed for a sugar-scarce world, meets ice-cream. Indeed, it may be that eating too much is now more deadly than not eating enough. We tend to understand such evolutionary mismatch, I think—at least to the extent we are aware of it—as an inevitable cost to human progress. All else equal, the temptation to eat too much is considered less bad than the possibility of starving.

coming to emotions

With all this as background, it should be easier to understand why I’m rankled by cognitive behavioral therapy’s use of the word “maladaptive” to describe client emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Of course, what CBT means by “maladaptive” is that some emotions, thoughts, and patterns of behavior are inconsistent with a person’s goals. For example, outbursts of anger are not conducive to getting promoted or building friendships. But boy, what a poor word choice for the orientation that holds itself out as the most “evidence-based,” when the evidence is quite strong that emotions are, in fact, adaptations. While CBT should know better, it is not alone. Every therapeutic orientation conceptualizes emotions differently, and I have yet to encounter one that understands them as adaptive in the evolutionary sense.

and finally a call to base therapy on more solid foundations

At the very least, an ultimate explanation for emotions—as adaptations that helped our ancestors navigate problems and opportunities—could become the common starting point for this central topic in mental health. Rather than allow every therapeutic technique its own origin story, within which emotions are defined anew, let’s actually make therapy a scientific enterprise by building on shared, epistemological bedrock.

What Netflix is doing to cinema

What Netflix Has Done to Movies w/ Will Tavlin - Episodes - Tech Won’t Save Us #netflix #pop-culture #movies #tv

Also relevant is this article in n+1 written by the podcast guest: Casual Viewing | Issue 49 | n+1 | Will Tavlin

Summarized this podcast using ChatGPT

1. Introduction: The Evolution of Netflix and Its Consequences

2. Netflix’s Origin Story and Mythmaking

3. Streaming: From Experiment to Industry Domination

4. Netflix’s Expansion: Targeting Television and Film

5. The Disillusionment with Netflix’s Indie Film Push

6. The Rise of the “Typical Netflix Movie”

7. Netflix’s Deceptive Viewership Metrics

8. The Broader Impact on Cinema

Actionable Takeaways

  1. Support Theatrical Releases: Watching films in cinemas helps preserve their cultural and artistic value.
  2. Seek Alternatives: Explore platforms and distributors prioritizing quality over quantity (e.g., Criterion, Mubi).
  3. Demand Transparency: Push for better reporting of streaming viewership and fairer compensation for creators.
  4. Be Critical of Streaming Culture: Recognize how platforms shape what and how we consume media.

Memorable Quotes

bunster

GitHub - yassinebenaid/bunster: Compile shell scripts to static binaries. #go #shell #tools

Bunster in fact is a shell-to-Go Transplier that generates Go source out of your scripts. Then, optionally uses the Go Toolchain to compile the code to an executable program.

Bunster targets bash scripts in particular. The current syntax and features are all inherited from bash. additional shells will be supported as soon as we relase v1.

I played around with this for a bit. I am not sure if I will use it for anything, but the code generated by bunster for the bash script I gave it was very instructive. It was like a deep-dive into how shells work: bunster/runtime at v0.7.0 · yassinebenaid/bunster · GitHub

godump

GitHub - yassinebenaid/godump: Dump any GO variable with ease #go #tools

A versatile Go library designed to output any Go variable in a structured and colored format.

More Bluesky Resources

2025-01-22

Laurie Voss on Building with AI

What I've learned about writing AI apps so far | Seldo.com

Economist Starter Pack

TIL there is an Economist Starter Pack on Bluesky where you call follow many Economist journos: [The Economist’s starter pack](https://go.bsky.app/VP5EvGW) #bluesky #lists

NYT Amplifier David Lynch

David Lynch’s Enchanting Sound Worlds - The New York Times #music #playlist

The soundtracks of Lynch’s movie and TV works also showcased existing songs, often mined from American popular music of past decades, and they clearly were not casual choices — one resonated so strongly with Lynch that he took it for a film’s title. Like Kenneth Anger’s “Scorpio Rising,” which set transgressive biker imagery to 1960s pop, Lynch’s visual and musical juxtapositions could rearrange songs’ DNA, adding depth and new layers of meaning — just try hearing Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” the same way after watching “Blue Velvet.”

Here are 13 songs that helped us step inside David Lynch’s dream worlds.

In heaven everything is fine,

YouTube Music Playlist: The Amplifier: David Lynch's Enchanting Sound Worlds

Matt Levine on Crypto Memecoins

Matt Levine's latest newsletter which contains a section on the Trump Memecoin: The SEC Was Busy Last Week - Bloomberg

Imagine you are elected mayor of a medium-sized city. Just before you take office, you announce a new program. This program is: You have set up a website where people can give you money. If they give you money, their name goes on a list, on your computer. “What do we get for the money,” they ask. “Oh nothing,” you say. “Your name just goes on the list, and I get the money, to spend. That’s it. Nothing happens with the list.”

You can, I think, see two fairly obvious problems here:

  1. If you are telling the truth, people are giving you money for nothing, so why would they do it?
  2. Are you telling the truth? Will people believe you? Will people who want contracts with the city find it useful to be on the list? Isn’t this, you know?

It seems like this would be a scam, or a bribe, or probably both.

Crypto solves these problems. Instead of a website with a list, you launch a memecoin with a ledger. People can give you money and get on the list, but in exchange they get something. The thing they get is: A tradeable entry on the list, an electronic claim saying “I gave you money” that they can sell, at some fluctuating market price, to somebody else. They can make money by giving you money: They give you $10 to get on the list, and then sell their spot on the list to someone else for $12.

So essentially, it's a legitimized form of bribery?

2025-01-21

Beauty Burnout

Signs you may be suffering from beauty burnout | Dazed

Beauty routines are often sold to us as acts of self-love – a way to pamper, express ourselves and feel confident. But for many women, these rituals have become less about joy and more about obligation. The constant upkeep, the endless appointments, the perpetual self-monitoring, the overwhelm of products, the non-stop beauty content and the pressure to meet ever-evolving standards, has left countless women feeling exhausted. Welcome to beauty burnout, a phenomenon where the pursuit of perfection leaves women feeling drained, financially strained, and emotionally overwhelmed.

…

This beauty tax isn’t just about time – it’s a significant financial burden, and a gendered issue that puts women at an additional economic and temporal disadvantage. Women feel the need to invest heavily in their appearance in order to be worthy of visibility, opportunity and respect, in a way that men simply do not. Despite the rising costs of treatments, and the fact that women are getting into debt for beauty, we continue to participate because the penalties for nonconformity can be severe. Research shows that women who don’t adhere to beauty standards face both social and economic consequences, from lower wages to reduced opportunities for advancement.

The paradox is particularly cruel: women are valued for their beauty and physical attractiveness but often penalised and judged for putting effort into enhancing their appearance. The’re expected to employ rigorous self-discipline and monitoring while appearing nonchalant and unconcerned by beauty at all.…

…

The reality is that when we consider the constant self-monitoring, psychological labour and time expended, most women receive a negative return on what is sold to us as beauty ‘investment’. And on top of that, we’re left burnt out and exhausted. Despite our changing role in society and increased earning potential, beauty standards are more prescriptive than ever. The gender status quo is largely preserved, if not worsened, by the increasing aestheticisation of our world and the ever-increasing beauty tax women face.

2025-01-20

podscript rewrite

I rewrote the podscript tool I created last year: Complete rewrite to improve ergonomics of the CLI interface. · deepakjois/podscript@dd8a229 · GitHub

I feel much better about the quality of the code and ergonomics of the CLI interface now. I am hoping to go further now and build a web-based add-on to the basic CLI that can be used from a browser and is more user-friendly.

One of the things I am especially proud of is the abstraction that I came up with on top of the LLM APIs (OpenAI, Claude and Groq) that allows me to send requests to them via a unified interface depending on which model the user wants to use: podscript/llms.go at 104c6aafe06a5283215ab1bc8fd884a1f0959404 · deepakjois/podscript · GitHub

GPU Mode

GPU MODE · GitHub #gpu #discord

Your favorite GPU reading group: https://discord.gg/gpumode

James Collier - Founder of Huel

‘I get hate from both sides – vegans and carnivores’: James Collier on UPFs, emotional eating and why he created Huel | Health | The Guardian #food #nutrition

I am quite a fan of Huel and I used to consume it a lot when in the US. It helped me a lot on days when I was too lazy to cook, or wanted to lock in and focus on something else instead of spending time on food prep.

I had never heard of James Collier before reading this article, but the mention of Huel piqued my interest. I somehow pictured some techbro like figure who was formerly a fan of soylent to be the founder, but Collier's opinions were refreshingly different.

His research led him to reconsider the food system as a whole, and eventually resulted in Well Fed. The book outlines his dietary philosophy, which he calls contemplative nutrition. It has five pillars: physical health, mental wellbeing, sustainability, ethics and togetherness.

Huel – “human fuel” – is instant food. How can its co-founder advocate contemplative eating? Surely that is contradictory to the convenience that Huel promotes to its customers (who are known as Hueligans)? “People can have a 100% Huel diet, but I would never encourage that – in fact, I would discourage it. But it can be one meal a day, or a couple of meals a week, or just have it in your cupboard for whenever times are hard,” he says. “People are grabbing food on the go, making unhealthy food choices. Huel is the best plan B.”

…

When I first heard about Huel, I assumed it was a kind of trendy SlimFast. Is it a diet product? “It’s neither for weight gain nor weight loss,” says Collier. “Huel has been designed as a 2,000 calorie a day intake. It’s also been designed to promote satiety.” I tell him about a friend who credits Huel for getting rid of his beer belly. “Huel can’t take the credit for that, other than it’s made his life easier. There’s no magic solution in Huel. Anyone who changes their diet for the better is going to improve.”

In the book, Collier rails against the term “ultra-processed food”, preferring the phrase “junk food”. It is not difficult to see why: Huel falls into the former category but not the latter. Its products variously contain flavourings, stabilisers, sweeteners, emulsifiers and thickeners. “The term ultra-processed food should have stayed in academia. It has confused the public,” he says. “We need ultra-processing to combat the many environmental and nutritional risks we face. How are we going to get more fibre into people? Let’s use the right sort of ultra-processing.” He points to Weetabix, baked beans and high-fibre bread as the “right” sort – as well as Huel, of course.

2025-01-19

Cursor vs Windsurf

Circa Jan 2025: Windsurf vs Cursor: which is the better AI code editor? #ai #code

These things are evolving so fast that it's likely this will be outdated pretty soon.

TikTok Ban

The Great Creator Reset - by Taylor Lorenz - User Mag

Since 2020, TikTok has served as a major hub for progressive speech and activism. The ban will deplatform thousands of progressive content creators and skew online discourse toward conservative ideologies. It will consolidate media influence within right leaning platforms like Meta and X. Over time, I believe this reconfiguration will permanently alter the political landscape of the creator economy.

…

While the majority of news content creators across the social media landscape are conservative men, a recent study found that TikTok is the only platform where left-leaning news influencers outnumber right-leaning ones. TikTok also has more than double the concentration of news content creators who identify as LGBTQ+ or advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, and 73% of teens who identify as Democrats or lean left use TikTok, compared to 52% of teens who identify as Republican, according to Pew Research.

When to book budget travel

Your Frugal Travel Calendar for the Year Ahead - The New York Times #travel #budget

Good overview of budget travel opportunities across the year.

The Masculinity Crisis as a Crisis of Self-Esteem

The ‘masculinity crisis’ is actually a crisis of self-esteem | Psyche Ideas #masculinity #loneliness #jobs

Yet another wonderful intervention in the masculinity crisis space. I seem to come across a lot of this lately.

There is a global crisis in self-esteem. It affects more or less everybody, but (as I’ll argue) it affects globalised, economically unequal societies the worst. The crisis is almost imperceptible because we’re living it every day, but that only adds to its seriousness. By self-esteem, I mean one’s self-estimation: whether one feels successful, or at least capable of success, by one’s own standards. To lack self-esteem is to feel impotent, even worthless. The crisis is that there is a widespread lack of self-esteem, and a universal competition for it.

This part seems very relatable, esp when I conversations with people around me.

Our culture is saturated with this way of seeing ourselves: we increasingly describe even prosaic aspects of life as an expression of our uniqueness. Choosing what to study, or finding a job, requires a lot of soul-searching these days. We are all implored to follow our passion, with the implication that everybody ought to have one; wanting a normal career that leaves enough free time to be happy feels to some like an admission of inadequacy.

The only way to maintain self-esteem under modern conditions is to outperform others – but there’s always somebody doing better. To be average is to be profoundly unsatisfied, because the fact that (even a handful of) others are doing much better reveals one’s (supposed) intrinsic inferiority. That this dynamic plays out under a model of capitalism characterised by intense income and wealth inequality exacerbates the problem.

The author as an interesting diagnosis of this

My contention is that the competition for self-esteem, and the widespread lack of it that results, is to blame for much of what we attribute to the crisis in masculinity. Men are frustrated because they feel like failures, and they feel like failures because – given the way our society distributes self-esteem – almost everybody has to feel like a failure. Men are increasingly angry and disengaged from mainstream society not merely because they don’t know what manhood means in the absence of privilege, nor because a liberal elite is propagating behavioural norms that suppress their masculine nature. Rather, being angry and disengaged is the natural human response to a society that makes one feel impotent and inferior, and affords a sense of control to very few. (This raises the question of why women might respond differently to the self-esteem crisis; I suggest that the interplay between patriarchal norms and the competition for self-esteem might mean women experience the same frustration, but respond differently.)

and finally, what could be a possible solution

If the competition for self-esteem is the problem, what is the solution? We need to refocus our attention on widening access to self-esteem. This means ensuring access to what we’re accustomed to seeing as a basic standard of living: stable employment, decent housing and healthcare.

It also means, as Michael Walzer, Timo Jütten and other political philosophers have argued, refocusing our shared standards of success. These are called the ‘standards of contribution’ in the academic literature: the standards one must meet to feel like one is a success, who has contributed properly to society.

We must take every opportunity to venerate human achievement in all its diverse forms: we should refocus our attention on caring for loved ones, creating art, engaging in activism and local politics, and volunteering in the community. This can start with reform to the education system and the values it inculcates in children. Finally, we should remind ourselves how much anybody’s success is down to luck (as Michael Sandel argued in his book The Tyranny of Merit, 2020). This isn’t important just because of its implications for the distribution of material goods; reflecting on the importance of luck can function as a kind of meditative exercise, to dampen the competition for self-esteem.

2025-01-18

Site improvements

Finally made some progress on adding minor features to the daily log website:

2025-01-17

Matt Levine on Eurodollars

I talked about the Odd Lots 3-part special series on the history of the eurodollar yesterday. Here is Matt Levine adding more color to it. The whole section from his latest newsletter is worth quoting in full. #finance #banking

My rough mental model is that “dollars” are, in essence, entries on the balance sheets of US chartered banks. If you want to transact in dollars, you need to open an account at a US bank, or at a foreign bank that has a correspondent account with a US bank. And so dollar issuance is regulated by the US Federal Reserve, and anyone who transacts anywhere in dollars is, ultimately, subject to US financial regulation. This comes up a lot when I think about sanctions, or Tether, or Tether as a tool for sanctions evasion. I wrote last year, about Tether:

Dealing in dollars means going through the regulated US financial system, and the regulated US financial system, these days, is rather hostile to certain sorts of commodities dealings. (The ones involving Russia or Venezuela.) If someone came to you with “dollars, but not through the US financial system,” you might find that appealing.

But this mental model is incomplete. Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast has a nice miniseries on the story of the Eurodollar, told by Lev Menand and Josh Younger, that clarified my mental model. Eurodollars are “dollars, but not through the US financial system,” dollar-denominated liabilities of foreign banks that are not necessarily backed by dollar-denominated assets. (Like Tether used to be!) Anyway it is a good series and I learned a lot; you can listen to Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 at those links.

Distorting Darwinism

Distorting Darwinism - by Ilari Mäkelä - On Humans #evo-psych #evolution

Great article with citations talking about armchair Darwinism and its pitfalls.

As a scientific theory, evolution by natural selection is a historic success. Its use in human affairs has a murkier history. In Darwin’s time, evolutionary theory was distorted by philosophers such as Herbert Spencer, famous for coining the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Spencer was not primarily interested in evolution as a biological theory grounded in natural history. Rather, he saw in Darwinism a novel method of promoting his political ideas with the authority of scientific language. Appropriately, his slogan “survival of the fittest” became a justification for views ranging from laissez-faire capitalism to eugenics and pseudoscientific racism. In Spencer’s Social Darwinism, such measures were allowed to hurt the weak, for “the whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, to make room for better.” From the comfort of his armchair, Spencer turned Darwinism from a science of the curious into a philosophy of the powerful.

Not all accepted Spencer’s ruthless worldview. Some found themselves in favor of social solidarity and sympathy for the weak. A major spokesperson for the alternative view was the Christian orator and three-times Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, best known for his vehement anti-Darwinism stance in the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. In his time, Bryan helped fuse creationism into the American mainstream. When faced with a false choice between evolution and humaneness, Bryan chose humaneness.

Getting started with database development

In response to a frontend developer asking about database development #databases #learning

This is a good article on how to transition from one domain to another in software development. I also found a link to this useful page: Getting started with database development

Machine Learning Algorithms

/images/ml_algos.png From: https://x.com/hamptonism/status/1880193410960920717/photo/1 #ml #ai #learning

High Intelligence and Predisposition to Psychological Disorders

High intelligence: A risk factor for psychological and physiological overexcitabilities - ScienceDirect #iq

Abstract:

High intelligence is touted as being predictive of positive outcomes including educational success and income level. However, little is known about the difficulties experienced among this population. Specifically, those with a high intellectual capacity (hyper brain) possess overexcitabilities in various domains that may predispose them to certain psychological disorders as well as physiological conditions involving elevated sensory, and altered immune and inflammatory responses (hyper body). The present study surveyed members of American Mensa, Ltd. (n = 3715) in order to explore psychoneuroimmunological (PNI) processes among those at or above the 98th percentile of intelligence. Participants were asked to self-report prevalence of both diagnosed and/or suspected mood and anxiety disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and physiological diseases that include environmental and food allergies, asthma, and autoimmune disease. High statistical significance and a remarkably high relative risk ratio of diagnoses for all examined conditions were confirmed among the Mensa group 2015 data when compared to the national average statistics. This implicates high IQ as being a potential risk factor for affective disorders, ADHD, ASD, and for increased incidence of disease related to immune dysregulation. Preliminary findings strongly support a hyper brain/hyper body association which may have substantial individual and societal implications and warrants further investigation to best identify and serve this at-risk population.

2025-01-16

FFMPEG by example

As always I am a sucker for a good FFMPEG resource: FFmpeg By Example #ffmpeg

Wellness Culture and Partying

What wellness culture gets wrong about partying | Dazed #alcohol #drinking #wellness

As it turns out, Professor Dunbar’s research has also found that alcohol is a “very good” trigger of this system.

In practice, this means that moderate social drinking can actually have a net positive effect on our overall health. What’s more, Professor Dunbar suggests that these benefits have likely been recognised by our biology for millions of years. “It requires two enzymes acting in tandem to convert alcohol back into sugars that the body can use for energy, but these have to be in perfect balance because the intermediate step is highly poisonous,” he explains. “We share these enzymes only with the African great apes, so the ability to detoxify alcohols (in rotting fruits) is very ancient in our lineage, probably dating back around eight to ten million years.”

Still, he is careful to emphasise that it’s the laughter that actually produces the beneficial effects – and alcohol only helps us get there. “The important difference is between alcohol as a social lubricant and getting incapably drunk as fast as possible. The idea is to sit and talk to people and laugh with them,” he explains – not spend the night blackout drunk before falling asleep fully clothed next to a kebab.

NYT Amplifier

Readers Pick the Songs That Defined Their Year - The New York Times #music #playlist

YouTube Music Playlist: The Amplifier: Readers Pick the Songs That Defined Their Year

Reading as a creative act

Focus your efforts not on “finishing books” but on “answering questions.” Keep the questions you’re trying to answer top of mind. Every now and then, make a list of all the things you’re most curious about, and as you ponder the questions you can list the books or papers that seem relevant for each. The questions are primary; the books and papers are secondary. (Once you’ve formulated your list of questions and reading trails, you don’t necessarily have to take any action on it. It just helps to bring all the subconscious stuff to the surface, so that it can more effectively guide your intuitive choices around what to read next.)

Your reading list will be effectively infinite. Don’t attempt to keep this list organized. I used to maintain an organized database of more than a five hundred book recommendations in Notion, categorized by topic and author etc, and I barely touch it these days. Nowadays whenever there’s a book or paper I’d like to read I just make a note about it in my daily notes. But importantly, I don’t just jot down the name of the book/article – I also jot down why I’m interested in reading it in that moment. What question do I imagine it will answer? How do I expect the book to change me? I find that clearly stating the feelings and reasons behind my interest helps me prioritize more effectively, and it helps me relax about the high likelihood that I will never read the thing I’ve just jotted down.

Notice and relinquish your psychological attachment to the “book” as a form. The book is not the point of intellectual work (neither is the paper); it’s merely a tool that can be used in the service of it. It’s been incredibly helpful for me to slowly purge my romantic preciousness around the book as a physical object. In the past I’d keep all my books in pristine condition, never highlighting or annotating them (even for my PDF files!). Nowadays I highlight and annotate like a madman, though I’m still a little too obsessive about keeping my physical books tidy.

Don’t get too attached to your notes either. I’ve expended lots of effort on making my notes pretty, organized, and extremely thorough (see e.g. my notes on Beginning of Infinity or Bear’s neuroscience textbook), and this hasn’t proved particularly helpful to anyone. Aesthetics matter, but only for the things you or others are likely to look at often; most of your notes won’t meet this condition.

…

I’ve made this mental list of “what matters when reading,” which helps me avoid spending too much time on the wrong thing. In order, what matters most to least is:

  • the output of your reading process (i.e. essays)
  • the existence of the ideas in your brain
  • the notes you take in your notebook
  • the list of books you’ve finished

Interesting Go testing technique

if got, want: A Simple Way to Write Better Go Tests ·mtlynch.io #golang #testing

There’s an excellent Go testing pattern that too few people know. I can teach it to you in 30 seconds.

Instead of writing Go tests like this:

// The common, unrefined way.
username := GetUser()
if username != "dummyUser" {
  t.Errorf("unexpected username: got %s, want: %s", username, "dummyUser")
}

Write your tests like this, beginning each assertion with if got, want :=:

// The underused, elegant way.
if got, want := GetUser(), "dummyUser"; got != want {
  t.Errorf("username=%s, want=%s", got, want)
}

The if got, want :=: pattern works even better in table-driven tests. Here’s an example from my library for parsing social media handles.

History of the Eurodollar market

Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast has a special 3-part series on the history of the eurodollar market, hosted by two special guests. It is a very accessible introductions to one of the key facets of the global financial system.

Transcripts are available on Bloomberg as well as on the Listen Notes website: Part 1, 2 and 3.

Russia and Ukraine

‘Putin’s Revenge.’ Lucian Kim on Why Russia Invaded Ukraine #podcasts

Lucian Kim is a journalist and based on his background and what he said on his podcast, his book should be a great primer on causes that led to the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine: Putin's Revenge: Why Russia Invaded Ukraine (Woodrow Wilson Center Series): Kim, Lucian: 9780231214025: Amazon.com: Books #books

If you don't want to read the book, the podcast is a great listen.

2025-01-15

Is our obsession with skincare becoming a disorder?

Dermorexia: Is our obsession with skincare becoming a disorder? | Dazed #skincare #beauty

I tried to make a general point about skincare on X recently and got pulled into a bit of an argument without me having any part in initiating it. I normally don't engage in long debates over X because I find it unproductive, so I extricated myself pretty quickly.

This article makes many points I wanted to make in a very articulate manner.

While beauty has always been prized, recently it seems like culture has become more visual, shallow and individualistic. Today we are seeing our own faces more than ever before. This, combined with increasingly advanced and accessible technology (digital and surgical) and a heightened fear of ageing, has created an environment where people have developed an obsessive preoccupation with “glowing up” and the elaborate skincare routines that promise to achieve it. But as 13-year-old girls start seeking Botox and people are going into debt to afford their treatments, is this preoccupation veering into disordered territory?  

Jessica DeFino, beauty researcher, writer, and critic of The Review of Beauty, believes so. Last year, she coined a new term to describe the obsessive behaviours that we are starting to see around skincare regimens: “dermorexia”. As she defines it, dermorexia is a fixation on skincare and reaching an aesthetic goal that becomes harmful, negatively affecting the health of our skin as well as our mental health.

The beauty industry has always sold us the idea that the aesthetic of our skin is synonymous with skin health, with “clear”, poreless, glassy skin being seen as good, rather than skin that functions effectively. “Skin serves a huge purpose beyond aesthetic purposes,” DeFino tells Dazed. “The aesthetic goal of perpetually youthful, poreless skin with no texture or pigmentation is not a health goal.” 

Trying to reach that goal is often detrimental, as it can impair the skin barrier and disrupt the skin microbiome. Excessive product use and harsh ingredients can cause inflammatory conditions like acne, psoriasis, rosacea, eczema and dermatitis. As the immune system’s first line of defence, our skin is vital. “There really are full body and brain consequences to impairing it day after day with excessive skincare and harsh ingredients, particularly on younger vulnerable skin,” says DeFino.

as for what can be done

To improve skincare practices, consumers should seek advice from credible medical professionals rather than influencers. This approach helps people understand which skin conditions can be legitimately treated and which are natural variations to accept, discouraging the pursuit of unnecessary or ineffective products. However, when it comes to protecting young people, much of the onus really falls on parents. “So much responsibility and focus has been put on the young girls who are doing these elaborate skincare routines,” says DeFino. “What we really need to recognise is that they are just playing with the world that we, the adults, have created for them.”

2025-01-14

Stablecoin Bank

In all the bluster and bullshit about crypto, stable coins are one thing that I can get behind. To quote somebody on a podcast, "stablecoins have found product market fit". This is a good, sane piece from somebody advocating for a stablecoin bank to bring stablecoin payments to the mainstream and breaking the monopoly and high interchange fees of the likes of Visa and Mastercard. #finance #banking #crypto

Apple is Killing Swift

I came across this article written in Oct 2024 only now, because the Changelog newsletter featured it in their Jan 2025 newsletter: Apple is Killing Swift - by Jacob Bartlett

Modern Swift is a slave to the top-down whims of the Apple MBA cabal: who prize secrecy and sneer at community input. Unshackled from Lattner’s influence, or even the relentless drive to craftsmanship imposed from Jobs, it’s all about shipping the latest proprietary profit driver.

It's a scathing takedown of what Apple is doing with Swift, and on the face of it, seems pretty legit. I also found insightful the section where he describes the different models of open source programming language governance.

This also made me curious about why the Ladybird browser project led by Andreas Kling chose to use Swift going forward, which he tweeted about in Aug 2024

Career Situationship

That's the phrase of the day, I guess 🙃: Danger Signs That You’re Stuck in a Career Situationship | True You Journal

Bibliotherapy

Link: Bibliotherapy: Can reading help treat your depression? | Dazed #books #depression #mentalhealth

Didn't realise bibliotherapy is actually a thing. Also reminds of the recent Japanese book I read The Bookshop Woman which was about a woman who met people in cafes, got to know them and then recommended them books.

Today, bibliotherapy involves meeting with a trained bibliotherapist (a book doctor, if you will) to discuss goals, life struggles, and how books can be helpful for progression. The session is uniquely followed by a “book prescription”, which outlines a reading list to help process and better understand the issues discussed. Each book prescription is tailored to help clients understand emotions, gain insight, and discover new perspectives. The overall goal is to provide comfort from the aspects of life that can sometimes be too heavy and blinding to process alone. It is a mechanism for making sense of challenging situations and finding reassurance for various situational triggers.

…

Ella Berthoud has been a bibliotherapist since 2007. She regularly hosts courses on the practice and offers one-on-one sessions. Speaking to Dazed, she describes bibliotherapy as the pratice of prescribing fiction to cure life ailments. “It’s the art of giving the right book at the right time to the right person,” she says, adding that she believes that issues like anxiety, depression, divorce, navigating childbirth and worrying about climate change can be alleviated through literature as putting words to a once indescribable feeling can help actualise the the validity of a reader’s own experience. While she occasionally prescribes non-fiction to her clients, Berthoud largely prescribes fiction due to her belief that this genre energises the subconscious and leads to a transformation from within.

…

Emely Rumble, a psychotherapist and decolonial literature-based therapist, likes the practice’s accessibility, affordability and adaptability. In her eyes, bibliotherapy is simple and doesn’t require complex tools or techniques. From the humble nooks of a public library, it can offer a beacon of hope or a lesson in empathy.

The Global Collapse of Coupling and Fertility

Yet another Alice Evans article: The Global Collapse of Coupling & Fertility #loneliness #masculinity #marriage #gender #feminism

There are interesting parallels between this and the loneliness article from yesterday. A lot of the material seems familiar to folks like me who have followed Alice Evans for a while. But one bit about South Asia bucking this trend of decline in coupling caught my eye.

Why are marriages high in South Asia?

South Asia has, I suggest two distinctive features:

  1. Caste and kinship networks are secured through marriage, which remain vital for status and social inclusion. Girls are typically socialised to marry, obey their in-laws and stay put. A litany of relatives ask, “When are you getting married?” Singledom and divorce are both heavily stigmatised.
  2. Gender gaps in smart phone ownership are especially large. Lack of access to modern technology inhibits women’s cultural leapfrogging.

With status so heavily tied to marriage and caste, and little confidence in dissent, weddings remain a firm fixture.

Both of these don't seem like desirable phenomena to me, so not exactly thrilled about the prospects of marriage rates being high due to these specific reasons. I would rather we dismantled caste and improved the gender gap in phone ownership 🙃.

Also found this great article that was linked: The relationship recession is going global

But in recent years most of the fall is coming not from the decisions made by couples, but from a marked fall in the number of couples. Had US rates of marriage and cohabitation remained constant over the past decade, America’s total fertility rate would be higher today than it was then.

The central demographic story of modern times is not just declining rates of childbearing but rising rates of singledom: a much more fundamental shift in the nature of modern societies.

Relationships are not just becoming less common, but increasingly fragile. In egalitarian Finland, it is now more common for couples who move in together to split up than to have a child, a sharp reversal of the historical norm.

2025-01-13

NYT Amplifier: Get to know Bad Bunny in 9 songs

Get to Know Bad Bunny in 9 Songs - The New York Times

Below is a chronological primer for those looking to understand how Bad Bunny’s musical arc has unfolded — you’ll find one song from each of his albums, and a little more.

Youtube Music Playlist: Get to know Bad Bunny in 9 songs #music #playlist

The Anti-Social Century

The Anti-Social Century - The Atlantic #loneliness #masculinity

This is a long and quite nuanced article on loneliness. It touches upon the usual factors - television viewing, time spent on mobile phones, time spent indoors, AI etc. But the one factor that interested me specifically was what he calls the phenomena of "Secular Monks"

In 2020, the philosopher and writer Andrew Taggart observed in an essay published in the religious journal First Things that a new flavor of masculinity seemed to be emerging: strong, obsessed with personal optimization, and proudly alone. Men and women alike have been delaying family formation; the median age at first marriage for men recently surpassed 30 for the first time in history. Taggart wrote that the men he knew seemed to be forgoing marriage and fatherhood with gusto. Instead of focusing their 30s and 40s on wedding bands and diapers, they were committed to working on their body, their bank account, and their meditation-sharpened minds. Taggart called these men “secular monks” for their combination of old-fashioned austerity and modern solipsism. “Practitioners submit themselves to ever more rigorous, monitored forms of ascetic self-control,” he wrote, “among them, cold showers, intermittent fasting, data-driven health optimization, and meditation boot camps.”

…

Richard V. Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me that for men, as for women, something hard to define is lost when we pursue a life of isolationist comforts. He calls it “neededness”—the way we make ourselves essential to our families and community. “I think at some level, we all need to feel like we’re a jigsaw piece that’s going to fit into a jigsaw somewhere,” he said. This neededness can come in several forms: social, economic, or communitarian. Our children and partners can depend on us for care or income. Our colleagues can rely on us to finish a project, or to commiserate about an annoying boss. Our religious congregations and weekend poker parties can count on us to fill a pew or bring the dip.

and then he throws in this very counter-intuitive insight

Home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities). But it’s wreaking havoc on the middle ring of “familiar but not intimate” relationships with the people who live around us, which Dunkelman calls the village. “These are your neighbors, the people in your town,” he said. We used to know them well; now we don’t.

Bluesky Starter Packs for MI/AI/RL

I really want to move to Bluesky to track real time tech information content, instead of X. I found this Reddit thread which has some relevant starter packs: Blue Sky Researcher Starter Packs for ML/AI/RL

Also found this tool (haven't tried it yet!) to convert Bluesky Starter Packs to Lists: Convert BlueSky Starter Packs to Lists

Swearing

Fuck, shit, and everything in between: a quick history of swearing #swearing #language #linguistics

The most interesting thing I gleaned from the article is that Steven Pinker outlines five main types of swearing:

  1. Dysphemistic Swearing: Used to emphasize harsh realities (e.g., "Pick up your dog’s crap").
  2. Abusive Swearing: Used to insult or intimidate others (e.g., "You fucking idiot").
  3. Idiomatic Swearing: Casual use of swearing for emphasis (e.g., "Get your shit together").
  4. Emphatic Swearing: Highlights intensity (e.g., "That’s fucking brilliant").
  5. Cathartic Swearing: Relieves pain, anger, or frustration (e.g., shouting "Fuck!" when stubbing a toe).

2025-01-12

Dating in 2025

How are young people feeling about dating in 2025? | Dazed

Yet another random article in Dazed about dating culture, but I like the way it's summarized in the first paragraph.

Modern dating is the pits. Many of us have experienced the perilous conditions within today’s dating pool firsthand or, if you’re safely coupled up, listened to your single friends’ terrifying dispatches from ‘the trenches’. Research also supports the idea that dating is a little trickier to navigate for today’s young singles: young people are having less sex than previous generations; birthrates are falling (with four in ten women who would like children stating that they had not yet done so because they had not found a suitable partner); Gen Z men and women are at loggerheads politically; and people are so socially isolated that loneliness has been declared a global public health concern by the World Health Organisation.

2025-01-11

Building Effective Agents

Building effective agents - Anthropic #ai #agents #workflows

Great article by Anthropic cutting through the bullshit and hype of AI agents.

"Agent" can be defined in several ways. Some customers define agents as fully autonomous systems that operate independently over extended periods, using various tools to accomplish complex tasks. Others use the term to describe more prescriptive implementations that follow predefined workflows. At Anthropic, we categorize all these variations as agentic systems, but draw an important architectural distinction between workflows and agents:

  • Workflows are systems where LLMs and tools are orchestrated through predefined code paths.
  • Agents, on the other hand, are systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, maintaining control over how they accomplish tasks.

NYT Amplifier: Bob Dylan Wasn’t the Only 1965 Newport Highlight. Hear 14 More

Bob Dylan Wasn’t the Only 1965 Newport Highlight. Hear 14 More. - The New York Times #music #playlist

Link to YouTube Music Playlist

Modern Internet Culture Seen Through The Lens of British Politics

What Elon Musk’s tweets about sex abuse reveal about British politics #internet #culture

In 2004, two years before the launch of X (then Twitter), Michael Goldhaber, an American thinker, published an essay arguing that the internet would produce a new type of human, just as printing had. Homo typographicus would be followed by Homo interneticus. His “mentality significantly altered” by the effects of intense internet use, interneticus would be unmoored from time and space, disrespectful of old sources of authority and facing a constant battle for his attention.

Found the original article: The mentality of Homo interneticus: Some Ongian postulates | First Monday

In this comparision Keir Starmer is typographicus, and Kemi Badenoch is interneticus

Interneticus, wrote Mr Goldhaber, would attach himself to new communities based on affinities “unshackled by space, unbounded by borders”. So the causes that most animate Ms Badenoch are litigated online and heavily influenced by America: gender identity; critical race theory; diversity, equity and inclusion schemes. She wants her party to think deeply about the civilisational questions the internet poses, such as the loss of presumption of innocence that emerges from online “pile-ons”.

…

Sir Keir was baffled: had her party not been in power for 14 years, while reports into the abuse gathered dust? Why was she tweeting about it now? Yet, wrote Mr Goldhaber, the internet would erode notions of time, because unlike musty books which immediately betray their age, pixelated text is continually refreshed. Interneticus would live in a “space devoid of chronological ordering…an ever-changing now”. And so the court judgments of over a decade ago pinging round X seem as urgent as if they had been written yesterday.

…

A decade ago another prime minister, David Cameron, crowed that his defeated rivals had tangled themselves in online debates: “Britain and Twitter—they’re not the same thing.” Or as Mr Goldhaber put it: “For Homo interneticus, cyberspace is most of the real world, and the rest is an appendage of it.“

Jujutsu

The Jujutsu version control system | Hacker News #tools #git

Someday soon, I need to try Jujutsu.

The Evolution of AI Assisted Coding

The Evolution of AI-assisted coding features and developer interaction patterns | sankalp's blog #ai #coding

Great overview of the history and current state of affairs in the AI assisted coding landscape.

How to Use Figma

This tutorial video came highly recommended by somebody on X #tutorial #figma

Oddly Influenced Podcast E1: Boundary Objects

Oddly Influenced | Transcript: E1: Boundary Objects

Here’s the quick definition:

  1. People collaborating on projects can be divided into groups (“social worlds”, in the jargon). Think of testers and programmers on a software project.
  2. Those groups have different values, goals, ways of looking at their jobs. Yet they are collaborating to accomplish one single thing in the world.
  3. One way to organize collaboration is to highlight certain words or things – those are the boundary objects, so-called because they lie at the boundaries between social worlds.
  4. These boundary objects are a bit delicate because they have to accomplish two things at once.
    4.1. When people from different social worlds use a boundary object with each other , they have to agree that they’re talking about the same thing, yet…
    4.2. The different interpretations they give to that word have to be flexible enough that they don’t cause arguments, wasted time, and so on.

…

“Social worlds” is a term of art in sociology, one that I didn’t find a good definition of. But it goes something like this:

Humans are social animals who talk to each other. You and I perceive the world, but we interpret the photons that strike our eyeballs in the light of previous social interactions. It’s people around us who tell us what to value, how to value it: what’s interesting, what’s boring; what to pay attention to, and what to pretend doesn’t exist; what has meaning and what doesn’t.

Differing social worlds is what makes it possible for two entirely sincere people to interpret the same event in not just opposing but in seemingly completely disconnected ways.

So how is it that the collector and scientist collaborated to produce something whose value lasted a century? The answer the paper gives is that they use boundary objects to help them coordinate.

Close Readings: Marcus Aurelius

This is a great podcast about Marcus Aurelius’ book The Meditations and it's timeless appeal. #books #stoicism

This specific portion of the podcast transcript appealed to me a lot:

Thomas Jones: And as for the longer term legacy of Marcus' thought and writings that The Meditations are still quite widely read and quoted, perhaps more quoted than read. Claire Hall in a recent piece on Galen for the LRB began by saying that Galen couldn't stand gym bros. Marcus' teachings are popular with tech bros. What is it about them that seems to appeal so much to a certain kind of modern man?

Emily WIlson: It's so funny, isn't it? I mean, the Silicon Valley version of stoicism seems to get more and more popular. And, of course, the fact that we've emphasized this is a self help for someone in a position of enormous privilege, which doesn't ask you to interrogate your privilege and instead sort of leans into it where you were born to be a leader and you can be even more leaderish and even more of a bro boss if you do a tiny bit or you don't even have to read very much of it. Just spend 5 minutes reading because it's also the kind of book that you can get a little bit out of and get most of the gist of it with 5 minutes of reading labor. So I think there are many reasons why it's as popular as it is, especially with the tech bros, but not just with them.

Right? I mean, it's striking to me that, you know, I've been teaching at university level for decades, and Marcus Aurelius is not usually part of the university syllabus in most places. And yet, I've looked up some various bestseller lists, and it's always almost at the top, and it's always sort of in the top 500 of all books on Amazon. It's extraordinarily best selling nowadays, which means it's not just Elon Musk who's reading it or buying it at least even if he's not reading it. It's a lot of people who are buying it and thinking this is going to give them some kind of insight into how to live.

And, of course, the fact that it does dig into things that we all wrestle with about fear of death and other people and how do we deal with with change and the temptation to be furious or annoyed all the time. Those are relatable issues even if the actual lived experience of Marcus Aurelius was not not relatable whatsoever because most people are not Roman emperors.

Thomas Jones: But also that he'd lived through a a pandemic and economic collapse and these things. So there are ways even though he'd not lived in the

Emily WIlson: So times of huge change. Yes. So stoicism is a philosophy for times of huge social upheaval and change and for people who are experiencing lack of political power and anger and lack of agency. As a result, it gives you that sense of agency in a time where you feel you don't have any. And that also suggests why is it appealing to people who don't have power as well as those who do.

Thomas Jones: Yeah. And sometimes in in tweet length bites.

Emily Wilson: Exactly. Yes. Yeah. In fact, I don't know if there's a moxiebelius spot, but there should be. I mean, it seems like it's made for that.

Miranda July's All Fours on NPR Books Podcast

Link: In 'All Fours,' Miranda July tackles love, sex and reinvention in middle age : NPR's Book of the Day : NPR #books #ageism #desire

This book takes place in a transitional time. I mean, quite literally, like, perimenopause is a big, huge biological time of transition. If you think of puberty, we know that biological things are happening, but we never just think of those things. We think romance, like every song on the radio in some ways, is about that time or about this certain kind of love.

And I remember thinking, oh, every love story is a hormone story. And so what is the love story for this time of transition? What is this hormone story of perimenopause? And to know that you don't just need to know the facts from your doctor, which would be nice. We would appreciate that. But also, what is the story? In what way are you supposed to fall in love during this time?

Because it's a wild time. Some part of yourself is going to come out that has perhaps been starved before. And this moment when all your hormones are in transition, you're meant now to be sort of jumbled around enough inside that that blind spot comes forward and it's hungry.

Cal Newport on X

Link: 7 Habits To Make 2025 Your Best Year Yet | Cal Newport - YouTube #twitter #x

Cal Newport had some very insightful thoughts on a podcast while answering a reader question.

With over 200 million followers, Musk has the biggest account on X and increasingly uses it to wield political power. Look at this thing. In 26 days around the election, Musk fired off 3,870 posts that had more than 33 billion views. My God! If I was a shareholder in one of these companies, I'd be like, "What are you doing? Come on!" These 3,870 posts could have been like, "Are you thinking about our company?" Musk's reach transcends Trump's, with each of his posts typically seen by twice as many users as posts from the president-elect. As the post returns to Twitter, Trump's influence is smaller on there. As Musk prepares for a central role in the U.S. government, the billionaire has a political megaphone unmatched in modern society.

X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it, really is a playground of elites in a very broad sense. It was a place where intellectual, academic, technocratic, and political elites gathered, hashed out ideas, sought status, and collaboratively worked with each other to try to establish cultural Overton windows. So it was an important place for various elites. Most people in the country could care less. It's not a heavily used platform. It doesn't have a large number of active users. It doesn't play a large role in most people's day-to-day life. It's the smallest of the platforms in terms of usage. It's dwarfed by something like Facebook. That's why it was valued so little. That's why it was like a $40 billion company, whereas Meta is honing in on a trillion-dollar valuation. Whatever it is, $800 billion valuation—it's a pretty small company. But the people who write about it are part of that category of cultural elites to which it made a really big deal. So if you're covering technology, it's a really big deal. This was the clubhouse where we all were.

There was a change in fortune as the ownership of that clubhouse changed. The clubhouse became different. It was like a bigger kid took over the treehouse and put up a "No Girls Allowed" sign, like you would have had back when you were in fourth grade. The cultural-political equivalent of that is that the composition changed. There was a period in the lead-up to the last Donald Trump presidency and through the Biden presidency, up through Elon taking over Twitter, where certain groups sort of had control within these elites. Then it switched to like the other team got control of it, and this was very traumatic if you were someone who was hanging out in this clubhouse. But for the rest of the country, I don't think it mattered much. It did set the agenda for what elites wrote about, what other elites talked about. Elite politicians would look at what was happening on here, and this would set their agenda about how they thought about things or how they were reacting to things.

I think it was good for our culture at large that Elon Musk bought and semi-broke this platform because it reduces its influence on those cultural elites. Great fracture! It makes it more partisan, so its influence goes down. If it's more nakedly like, "This team has it; this team doesn't," its impact on how a politician thinks about what matters goes down. Its impact on how a journalist thinks about what they're going to write about or not write about goes down. Its impact on an academic trying to think about what they want to say or not say or pursue goes down. And that's for the good because it's entirely non-representative. It doesn't represent any sort of coherent understanding of the world. It's status-seeking elites from different sides all fighting with each other. Because, I guess if you do a little bit of math, 33 billion views with 3,870 posts would be about 8.5 million views per post, which I guess if you compare it to 335 million people in the U.S., it's only like—it's less than 3%. And it's the same people. That's the whole problem.

The problem is it didn't fall apart. Early on, there was this accusation of, "Look, when Musk took this over and started firing all these people, the platform itself technically was going to fall apart." I'd be like, "That would be great from my perspective as a cultural critic because this is not a useful contribution to our culture." The problem is Elon Musk is good at running tech companies, and he knows what he's doing. He fired a ton of people, brought in some 10xers, drastically cut down the expenses of running it, and you know what? It's perfectly stable again, and he's building. So that's the problem. He's too good at running companies to accidentally break it. But now it's just become like a smaller playhouse. There are these two sides fighting on there now. It's mainly just this side, and I don't think it's culturally important.

Dynamic variables in bash

Dynamic shell variables | Redowan's Reflections #bash #tools #tricks

Dynamic shell variables allow shell scripts to define and access variables based on runtime conditions. Variable indirection (${!var} syntax) lets you reference the value of a variable through another variable. This can be useful for managing environment-specific configurations and function dispatch mechanisms.

Here’s an example:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# script.sh

config_path="/etc/config"
var="config_path"

echo "The value of \$config_path is: ${!var}"

The value of $config_path is: /etc/config

Here, ${!var} resolves to the value of the variable config_path because var contains its name. This allows you to dynamically decide which variable to reference at runtime.

The article goes on to demonstrate the different uses of this technique: context-aware environment management, function dispatch, temporary file handling.

2025-01-10

Flaking

‘People feel they don’t owe anyone anything’: the rise in ‘flaking’ out of social plans | Social etiquette | The Guardian

Many dozens of respondents on the receiving end of flaking ascribed the phenomenon to growing levels of social fragmentation because of social media and smartphones, a general sense of apathy in the population and an increasing normalisation of inconsiderate behaviour in the interest of personal needs and desires.

Being able to just send a quick text to cancel, various people said, meant people did not have to face those they stood up and incentivised late cancellations.

“Increasingly with gen Z and millennials there is a fetishisation of introversion,” said Andrew, 23, from Brisbane who works in telecoms sales. “Web comics and memes make a moral comparison to extroverts, who are supposedly loud, obnoxious people. Introverts are [depicted as] moral people who own cats and crochet. But our generation is also experiencing record high loneliness, so I think we shouldn’t praise choosing loneliness or celebrate [extreme levels of] introversion.”

Cognitive Load in Software Projects

Cognitive load is what matters #software #complexity

Sometimes we feel confusion going through the code. Confusion costs time and money. Confusion is caused by high cognitive load. It's not some fancy abstract concept, but rather a fundamental human constraint. It's not imagined, it's there and we can feel it.

When reading code, you put things like values of variables, control flow logic and call sequences into your head. The average person can hold roughly four such chunks in working memory. Once the cognitive load reaches this threshold, it becomes much harder to understand things.

Great breakdown of how cognitive load can creep into a software project and how it's important to keep it to a minimum when writing code. Also love the references back to John Ousterhout's book

self-authorship

character - by Elaine - manners & mystery #self-help #purpose

In adolescence, we develop a psychological makeup shaped by cultural norms and expectations, which is what Robert Kegan calls the “socialized mind,” the third order of consciousness in his theory of adult development. This is when parents feel like their job is done because their kids have gone from acting like selfish brats to becoming responsible adults. About 35% of adults undergo a further transformation later, which is the shift from the socialized mind of adolescence and early adulthood to the “self-authoring mind.” This is where people develop “an inner seat of judgement” to evaluate external expectations. Instead of letting their culture dictate their beliefs, they author their own identity, their own set of beliefs, and develop personal authority.

You go through life doing what’s expected of you—first in school, then in your first job, your first serious relationship—until one day you wake up and ask, “Do I really have to do this?” Do I have to work at this company? Do I have to hang out with this person? Do I have to go to this party? And the answer is no. We are freer than we give ourselves permission to believe.

…

So why do we spend so much of our limited time doing things we don’t actually want to do? I think the problem isn’t that we don’t know what we want. It’s that pursuing the things we want necessitates giving up on what we think we should want, thereby renouncing an identity that made us feel safe for 20+ years, and it’s hard not to view that relinquishing as a threat to our sense of belonging, rather than an evolution toward a higher purpose. Kegan observes that the departure from the socialized mind toward the self-authoring mind is fraught with “terror and anticipated loss.”

Japanese clutter

The life-changing magic of Japanese clutter | Aeon Essays

Tsuzuki dismissed the West’s obsession with Japanese minimalism as ‘some Japanophile’s dream’ in the introduction to the English translation of Tokyo: A Certain Style (1999). ‘Our lifestyles are a lot more ordinary,’ he explained. ‘We live in cozy wood-framed apartments or mini-condos crammed to the gills with things.’ Yet more than three decades after Tsuzuki tried to wake the dreaming Japanophile, the outside world still worships Japan for its supposed simplicity, minimalism and restraint. You can see it in the global spread of meticulously curated Japanese cuisine, the deliberately unadorned concrete of modernist architects like Tadao Andō, and even through minimalist brands like Muji – whose very name translates into ‘the absence of a brand’ in Japanese.

Millions around the world continue to turn to Japanese gurus for help in purging their diets, closets and living spaces of all but the most essential items. Books like Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2011) and Fumio Sasaki’s Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism (2015) reframe clutter as a dire threat to mental health and spiritual growth. They have become colossal hits in the United States and other countries. However, as the world turns to Japan to tidy up, it’s important to remember that these books were originally intended for Japanese readers; they weren’t written for the world outside. If Japan truly were a minimalist paradise, why would it need Kondos and Sasakis in the first place?

Website to Markdown

My Favorite Website to Markdown Tools For LLMs #markdown #website #converter

Testing Go Iterators

Writing & Testing a Paginated API Iterator in Go #golang #iterator #testing

Some interesting code to test the iterators.

Lists of interesting people and their blogs

Somebody asked about tech blogs to follow in a group. I had a few lists in my working memory that some folks on the internet made, so I figured let me just put them all here for recall later. #lists #blogs #blogroll

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

The Fannie and Freddie Trade Is Back - Bloomberg

This link is behind a paywall, but you should have it in your inbox if you subscribe to Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter (which is free to subscribe here)

It contains a great basic explainer of the structure of the US home loan market and the key players Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Classic Money Stuff stuff, I guess 😀!

The Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac saga has been going on for, depending how you count, 16 years, or perhaps many decades. There are strong feelings and a lot of lore. It’s back in the news now, and I thought it might be nice to start with the basics.

In the US, as a matter of policy for many decades now, the federal government wants it to be relatively easy to buy a house. Most people do not have enough money to buy a house, so this policy mostly means that the government wants someone to lend buyers the money on generous terms. In practice, “generous terms” means something like “a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage with an interest rate not that much higher than Treasury bond rates.”

…

Sally Rooney Intermezzo review

A Lover’s Theory of Marxism in Sally Rooney’s Romance Novels

Love the Marxist lens of the analysis in the article.

In his 1914 study The Theory of the Novel, the Marxist literary theorist György Lukács argues that the bourgeois novel as it emerged in modern Europe featured a critical split between the hero’s interior life, which contained their moral ideals and unspeakable desires, and the “world of convention,” a system of arbitrary rules that gave the hero’s life objective meaning but was itself inherently meaningless. It is not, after all, a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife; at best, this only happened to be true among the landed gentry of Regency-era England, whose irrational customs Austen so carefully reproduced. Everything that drives the Bennet sisters to marry in Pride and Prejudice — the etiquette of courtship, the laws of inheritance, class relations between landowners and tenant farmers — all of these are what Lukács calls “recognized but senseless necessities,” not organic expressions of human nature. It horrifies Elizabeth, for instance, when she learns that her prudent best friend intends to marry for “worldly advantage” rather than for love. “The more I see of the world the more am I dissatisfied with it,” Elizabeth laments, “and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters.”

What this theory suggests is that, by showing us people trying to reconcile themselves with an arbitrary system, the novel is constantly dramatizing its own struggle with the formal conventions that make it a novel. In Intermezzo, the first time Margaret sleeps with Ivan, the very inconceivability of the act fills her with a queasy elation. “Life has slipped free of its netting,” Rooney writes. “She can do very strange things now, she can find herself a very strange person.” Like Elizabeth Bennet, Margaret sees love as her best chance — maybe her only chance — to break free of the world of convention, to abscond from the collective fiction that is society and emerge into what Margaret, letting her young lover caress her hand at a restaurant outside of town, perceives as “the borderless all-enveloping reality of life.” Yet convention has a way of reasserting itself. In her more sober moments, Margaret reminds herself that “life is itself the netting, holding people in place, making sense of things. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence.” Sure enough, learning that Ivan has told his brother about their relationship, Margaret cannot help but imagine with horror the kind of person Peter must think she is: “a middle-aged woman taking advantage of a naive grieving boy, and for what, for her own gratification, her own pleasure.”

Lithub List of Lists

The Ultimate Best Books of 2024 List ‹ Literary Hub #lists

Dropping it here so that I don't forget Lithub has list of lists when I am looking for one in the future.

2025-01-09

yt-dlp hacks

Found here: q and qv zsh functions for asking questions of websites and YouTube videos with LLM #ytdlp #youtube #hacks #llm

yt-dlp -q --skip-download --convert-subs srt --write-sub --sub-langs "en" --write-auto-sub --print "requested_subtitles.en.url" "$url"

In plain English, this command will:

  1. Find a video at the specified URL
  2. Look for English subtitles (both manual and auto-generated)
  3. Convert them to SRT format
  4. Print out the URL where these subtitles can be found
  5. Do all this quietly (minimal output) and without downloading the actual video

The placebo effect in therapy

The Placebo Effect in Therapy (Part 1/2) - by Josh Zlatkus #therapy #mentalhealth

Yet another article from living fossils which reinforces my beliefs about the efficacy of therapy (or the lack thereof)

Despite these difficulties, thousands of studies have attempted to compare the effectiveness of various therapeutic techniques. Clinical psychology has asked no other question—which therapy is best?—with such fervor. And despite ongoing demands for better research, I think it is fair to say that if there were significant and reliable differences in therapeutic approaches, researchers would have found them by now. They haven’t.8

Research has, however, established therapy as a moderately effective solution to a wide range of mental problems. Perhaps a better question to ask at this point, then, is why does therapy work at all? If all or most techniques deliver some benefit, then clearly something they share is responsible—for example, a safe environment, a collaborative relationship with a supposed expert, the structure of weekly or biweekly sessions, and, of course, the expectation that therapy will work. I.e., placebo.

They also point out that despite the moderately net-positive effects of therapy, the drawbacks are worth noting as well

In A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, Heying and Weinstein note that “The benefits (of new technologies) are obvious, but the hazards aren’t.” Freud’s introduction of the “talking cure,” and the proliferation of various techniques since, has probably been net-positive for the average person’s mental health. But there have been negatives, too. Mental health is increasingly behind a paywall, dispensed by experts, and accompanied by medication. The costs of these developments loom larger when a person recognizes that, well, therapy is not penicillin.

Another subtle but potentially pivotal change has taken place in the treatment of mental distress: it has become a scientific enterprise. While the benefits of this are obvious, the hazards—such as the dismissal of social, cultural, religious, personal, natural, creative, and even magical forms of healing—are not. Under the guidance of a field desperate to be scientific, clients of the mental industry rarely perceive alternate approaches to healing, which nevertheless predominated throughout most of human history. The therapist’s office is indeed constructed from the remnants of the family home, the church, the rotary club, and the proverbial bowling alley.

Property Rights

Property Rights Are All in Your Head – Part I #property #rights

The article argues that property rights are not objective facts but rather psychological constructs based on shared beliefs and conventions. Unlike physical properties (such as the number of protons in an element), property rights exist only in people's minds and are enforced through social and moral agreements.

Abbamania

Podcast: Chal Ravens and Thomas Jones · Abbamania #abba #music

Absolutely fantastic podcast covering the history of the band Abba. Loved listening to every second of it. It was accompanied by this article which reviews two Abba books: Chal Ravens · Twinge of Saudade: Abbamania

2025-01-08

Dubai Itinerary

36 Hours in Dubai: Things to Do and See - The New York Times #dubai #travel

How to spend 36 hours in Dubai: Beyond the over-the-top luxury and futuristic towers, discover bustling souks, a contemporary art district and desert cycling trails.

Seems like a slightly off-beat itinerary.

2025-01-07

Locked in, working on something.

2025-01-06

Category Theory

On getting started with Category Theory | Ludwig #maths #programming

For me, Category Theory has been one of these things where, once you learn about it, you can literally see it everywhere. Everything starts looking like morphisms between objects and functors between categories. I have found the overwhelming majority of the ideas in it to be truly, deeply intuitive. It's still a work in progress to have a real sense of how immensely powerful they are, and my definition of the "essence of category theory" is still getting new shades every week.

Overall, it did help me sank in two immensely important things, that were previously only intuitions: the power of abstraction and composition

Coffee Shops

Are "bad" coffee shops damaging specialty coffee's reputation? - Coffee Intelligence

THERE is no shortage of coffee shops that label themselves as “specialty” – but the number of coffee shops that serve a cup of coffee that would meet James Hoffmann’s expectations are few and far between.  

Not all establishments live up to the promise of quality that the label implies. Many cafés invest in high-end equipment, for example. La Marzocco espresso machines and Mahlkönig premium electric burr coffee grinders have become increasingly common in coffee shops in recent years – but have the baristas been trained in proper brewing techniques? More often than not, the answer is no.

Others charge premium prices for coffee made from lower-grade coffees that fall short of specialty-grade standards, or serve otherwise excellent coffee using poorly maintained equipment.

2025-01-05

Are you really okay being this incurious?

Are you really okay being this incurious? - by Bhuvan #curiosity #reading

Somebody recommended this Substack to me, and as soon I discovered it, I had this instant bolt of relatability and a deep urge to read every single post in the archives. This guy lives in the same city as I am in currently and writes so brilliantly, I would love to meet him sometime and pick his brain.

I've been thinking about this because, for some reason, I started noticing that a lot of people around me are ok, not knowing a lot of things. In fact, they've deliberately made the choice not to explore. This was bothering me because I don't know what that feels like. I'm more or less talking about reading. Not just books but all forms of reading.

Why would people be okay not knowing something?

I don't get it. What's the point of life if it doesn't involve a deep desire to discover weird and wonderful things? Is that life even worth living?

I especially like this frenzied rant in which he drops a load of interesting references one after the other in quick succession.

What's the whole fucking point of life if you don't look forward to discovering The Lord of The Rings and marveling at how the fuck Tolkien imagined such a rich world of fantasy, or staring awkwardly at people's toes for clues after reading Sherlock Holmes, or discovering some German dude called Hegel for the first time and thinking was he high on cheap skunk weed when he wrote whatever the fuck he wrote, or feeling that existential gut-punch when you discover Byung-Chul Han, or feeling that righteous anger and urge to start a fucking revolution after reading an introduction to Marx, or losing yourself in the maddening delights and oneiric reveries of Gaston Bachelard, or learning about the backstory of our fractured world in Adam Tooze's Crashed, or trying to grasp what Tracy Smith means when she says poetry is about expressing "the feelings that defy language", or feeling a deep ache in your heart when you translate Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's “A Brook of the Scarpe”?

What's the whole fucking point of life if you don't look forward to discovering the magical world that's waiting for us in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Books of Earthsea, or the madness in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or the feeling of reading Mario Puzo's The Godfather for the second time, or wondering why Amartya Sen titled his book Home in the World, or slouching as you read Brad DeLong's Slouching Toward Utopia, or learning about the great booms and busts that William Quinn wants to tell us about?

What's the whole fucking point of life if you don't laugh out loud at the endless sexual escapades and divinely human follies of the gods in Stephen Fry's Mythos series, or feel the pain of the homeless Uyghurs through their poems, or marvel at the lyrical beauty of the French poets and be startled at their weird French...ness, or wrestle with the "conflict of dharma" that Kaushik Basu reveals in his translation of the epic Mahabharata, or feel a sense of reverence wash over you and fill you with awe as you read Carl Sagan's Cosmos, or look forward to raging against the machine after reading Yann Moulier-Boutang's Cognitive Capitalism, or get incandescent with anger after reading Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, or go on a galactic journey with Asimov's Foundation?

2025-01-04

Conversational Doorknobs

Somebody complimented me on a conversation I had in a group and said they loved the flow of it, and that I should do it more often.

I am not sure how good of a conversationalist I am, but I have definitely gotten better at it over the years with a lot of work. One of the key ideas that helped me a lot, after I first came across it a few years ago is the idea of a "conversation doorknob".

Good conversations have lots of doorknobs #conversations

Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (“Why won’t he ask me a single question?”) while taker has a lovely time (“She must really think I’m interesting!”) or gets annoyed (“My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?”).

When done well, both giving and taking create what psychologists call affordances: features of the environment that allow you to do something. Physical affordances are things like stairs and handles and benches. Conversational affordances are things like digressions and confessions and bold claims that beg for a rejoinder. Talking to another person is like rock climbing, except you are my rock wall and I am yours. If you reach up, I can grab onto your hand, and we can both hoist ourselves skyward. Maybe that’s why a really good conversation feels a little bit like floating.

What matters most, then, is not how much we give or take, but whether we offer and accept affordances. Takers can present big, graspable doorknobs (“I get kinda creeped out when couples treat their dogs like babies”) or not (“Let me tell you about the plot of the movie Must Love Dogs…”). Good taking makes the other side want to take too (“I know! My friends asked me to be the godparent to their Schnauzer, it’s so crazy” “What?? Was there a ceremony?”). Similarly, some questions have doorknobs (“Why do you think you and your brother turned out so different?”) and some don’t (“How many of your grandparents are still living?”). But even affordance-less giving can be met with affordance-ful taking (“I have one grandma still alive, and I think a lot about all this knowledge she has––how to raise a family, how to cope with tragedy, how to make chocolate zucchini bread––and how I feel anxious about learning from her while I still can”).

Pimosa - a video editing app

Pimosa - Simple Video, Photo & Music Editing Tools in one app. #tools #video

This showed up via Hacker News, and I was intrigued because I have been looking at a simple entry point to editing some videos I have collected in the last year or so.

The video screenshots did a really good job at portraying the simplicity of the tool. Hope to try it sometime soon.

Meditations with Mortals Epilogue

Finally, we have come to the end of the book. It has been a blast reading it, and I have taken away a lot of things from it.

If you’ve accompanied me this far, I trust it won’t come as a devastating shock to learn that, notwithstanding this book’s subtitle, no one should expect to fully embrace their limits, confront their mortality and find psychological freedom in a mere four weeks. Self-help promises such as ‘six weeks to six-pack abs’ or ‘thirty days to a stress-free you’ may get broken far more often than they’re kept, but when it comes to imperfectionism, it’s worse, because by definition the journey is never complete. Were I to suggest that completing it might be possible, I’d simply be fueling the same old fantasy of sorting your life out, in a marginally more sophisticated way. The truth is that you’ll never be certain that an unmeetable challenge or regrettable choice isn’t just around the next corner, or that the projects I hope you’re newly energized to dig into will meet with success. The spiritual teacher Joan Tollifson calls our yearning for finality ‘the compulsion to closure,’ a sort of tic, eminently forgivable, but which the world can never satisfy – and which we might gradually therefore learn to relax, so as to more wholeheartedly take our place in, and, as part of, the unending flow of reality.

Besides the fact that you shouldn’t expect to transform your life in four weeks, it can be startlingly liberating to consider that in some domains, you might never change it at all – and that that’s fine. The psychotherapist Bruce Tift suggests the following reflection: pick the trait that bothers you the most about yourself or your life – your tendency to procrastinate or get distracted, perhaps, or your short fuse, or your proneness to gloomy moods – and then ask yourself what it feels like to imagine that some version of it might dog you to the end of your days. What if I’ll always have anxious reactions – the clench in the stomach, the sharp intake of breath – to minor events that don’t warrant them? My first response is to feel crestfallen; but soon thereafter comes relief. I get to give up on that futile struggle, which means I needn’t wait for it to be won before diving into reality. Maybe I never needed to change in order to justify my existence. Maybe I was always up to the task of building a meaningful life.

2025-01-03

Caught a bad sore throat. Looks like I will be staying in for a couple of days.

Meditations for Mortals Day Twenty Seven

This chapter is titled C’est fait par du monde: On giving it a shot

The lesson, to reiterate, isn’t that you ought to start a religion. It’s that if that old windbag can do so, you can probably have a go at launching any project about which you’ve been experiencing self-doubt – and that there’s no reason why you can’t be the one to make a fortune, or a long-lasting difference to the world, as a result. Likewise, if you’ve been thinking of making a radical change in your life – traveling the world in midlife, say, or educating your kids outside the school system – there’s a solid chance you can scrabble together the resources and figure out a way. You won’t feel like you know what you’re doing. But nobody ever does; that’s just how it is for finite humans, attempting new things. The main difference between those who accomplish great things anyway and those who don’t is that the former don’t mind not knowing. They were not less flawed or finite than you. Everything they ever did was done by people.

Meditations for Mortals Day Twenty Eight

This chapter is titled What matters: On finding your way

And so I won’t be concluding here by revealing the meaning of life. But I do have thoughts.

The first is that it simply need not follow, from our cosmic insignificance as individuals, that our actions don’t matter. The idea that things only count if they count on the vastest scale is one more expression of our discomfort with finitude: accepting that they might count only transiently, or locally, requires us to face our limitations and our mortality. And so to avoid that unpleasantness, as the philosopher Iddo Landau has explained, we gravitate towards an unnecessarily grandiose standard of what matters – then get demoralized when our achievements don’t make the grade. We feel pressured to do something extraordinary with our lives, or to an extraordinary standard of merit, or in a way that’s applauded by an extraordinary number of people – even though it’s true by definition that only a few people can ever be extraordinary in any given domain. (If we could all stand out from the crowd, there’d be no crowd from which to stand out.) Why shouldn’t an anonymous career spent quietly helping a few people get to qualify as a meaningful way to spend one’s time? Why shouldn’t an absorbing conversation, an act of kindness, or an exhilarating hike get to count? Why adopt a definition that rules such things out?

Where to Work After 40

Ask HN: Where to Work After 40? | Hacker News #software #jobs

Here is one of the top answers, but the whole thread is worth reading if you are in the same boat.

I have a couple ideas for you from my own experience.

There's about a bajillion C/D+ stage 100-500 person software companies in any B2B vertical you could mention who would fight hard for your type of experience. Not necessarily SaaS click-and-drool tools for corporate drones, but unique and opinionated products that have some significant engineering innovation inside. Those companies have essentially no ability to attract talent organically, anyone interested in FANG would turn up their noses, and their number one problem is quality people. In many cases the CEO/CTO leadership is incredibly strong and smart; the colleagues are happy, motivated, intelligent, and disciplined; and the work/life balance is good for the middle aged. They're vital to their customers but under continuous competitive pressure so it is far from a snoozy place to serve out time - it's a mission and a struggle every day, things change often, the pace is fast. It can be very rewarding and compensation is decent. The tradeoff is the big exit is vanishingly unlikely.

Second idea is go into consulting/professional services. Not Accenture or anything horrible like that, but dozens of boutique/smaller firms with decently inspiring leadership and a very high standard of colleague. Work is variable in interest and environment, pressures are somewhat unfairly around whether you are billable or not which is not really in your control as an engineer.

2025-01-02

Locked in on something. Didn't do a whole lot else.

2025-01-01

Locked in on something. Didnt do a whole lot else.

2024-12-31

Fully locked in to something I am working on.

2024-12-30

dotnet versions

I am playing with .NET on OS X, and here are some notes for posterity.

I can install a specific older version of .NET (for e.g. .NET 6) using the following brew command.

brew install dotnet@6
export DOTNET_ROOT="/opt/homebrew/opt/dotnet@6/libexec"
export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/dotnet@6/bin:$PATH"

However, when I do this I cannot access the latest .NET version which I installed previously using brew install dotnet.

I found this homebrew tap: GitHub - isen-ng/homebrew-dotnet-sdk-versions: dotnet-sdk versions HomeBrew Tap

The first thing I was doing slightly wrong was that I was installing dotnet (the runtime) instead of dotnet-sdk.

I realised the correct way to install multiple versions of dotnet-sdk is as follows.

brew install dotnet-sdk
brew tap isen-ng/dotnet-sdk-versions
brew install --cask dotnet-sdk6
brew install --cask dotnet-sdk7

vscode C#

After a bit of trial and error, I figured out that most of what I need for C# development in vscode is available with the C# dev kit extension: C# Dev Kit - Visual Studio Marketplace

Running LLMs locally

How I run LLMs locally - Abishek Muthian #llm #ollama #local

2024-12-29

Meditations for Mortals Day Twenty Six

This chapter is titled You can't hoard life: On letting the moments pass

Among spiritual traditions, Buddhism is uniquely insightful when it comes to this specific form of suffering – how we make ourselves more miserable than necessary, not just by railing against negative experiences we’re having, or craving experiences we aren’t having, but by trying too hard to hold on to good things that are happening exactly as we wanted them to. That’s what’s going on whenever you fail to savor a moment in nature, or with a newborn, or while eating an exceptional meal, because you’re too focused on trying to savor it, or somehow extend it into the future. It’s also what happens when you’re too busy attempting to ‘make memories’ from an experience so as to be able to reflect upon it later – or, worse, to post pictures on social media. Another version of the same phenomenon occurs when you reach the end of a day on which you’ve been unusually successful in getting your work done, or sticking to your fitness routine, but then instead of thinking ‘What a great day!’ and luxuriating in your achievement, you find yourself thinking: ‘Yes! Now that’s the kind of day I’m aiming for, and now it’s my job to make sure that this is merely the first of many such days to come!’ Congratulations: you turned a potential source of easy delight into a cause of further stress.

Perhaps all anxiety,’ writes Sarah Manguso, ‘might derive from a fixation on moments – an inability to accept life as ongoing.’ Our attempt to grip on to fleeting experiences expresses the desire to store them up, use them for future purposes, freeze time in its tracks, or in some other way to resist the truth that this is it. And yet it follows from our finitude that the value of anything good that’s happening now has to lie, at least in part, in our experience of it as it occurs, rather than in how we might co-opt it into our long-term project of trying to feel less finite. When I say I’d like to look out over the valley every morning ‘forever,’ I’m denying my finitude in a rather obvious way, because even if I were never to move house again and to live to the age of 130, there’d be no ‘forever’ about it. That would just be a few more decades of morning coffees, a less-than-invisible speck of time against the backdrop of the eons. All my clenching and grasping would have done precisely nothing to render the experience permanent.

You can have a hundred tea ceremonies; you could even have all of them with the same people. But you can only have that ceremony, that cup of tea, once. Then that stretch of time evaporates forever. If it didn’t – if, in defiance of all logic, it somehow persisted, so that you could return to it whenever you liked, for as long as you liked – it would be vastly less precious. The transience is the whole point.

Meditations for Mortals Day Twenty Seven

This chapter is titled Inconceivable: On the solace of doubt.

Those of us accustomed to relying on our intellects to power us through our days can get jumpy at the idea of relying on them less – of not always stopping to do research or think things through before acting on our intuitions. Yet over the course of humanity’s history, it must have been far more common than not to feel adrift in a world of mysteries, obliged to proceed on the basis of blind hunches alone. So there need be no shame in the feeling that you don’t yet fully understand the field you work in, or how to date, or be in a relationship, or be a parent. It doesn’t mean something’s wrong, and it doesn’t mean you can’t take constructive action – or, alternatively, relax – until all the answers are in. It just means that we’re limited in our capacity to get a grip on our infinitely complex reality. It makes little sense to let that hold you back from living in it.

2024-12-28

Did some cooking and perfected my 5-person chai recipe as we prepped to host guests in the evening today. Another chill day mostly off the screens.

2024-12-27

Went to a cafe to work, but ended up meeting a friend and then more ppl joined and I basically yapped from 9am to 9pm straight.

I went to Mūru Mūru in Indiranagar and had their hot chocolate and it was pretty amazing.

The Lonely Hunter

I heard these lines in a books podcast this morning and have been thinking about it ever since.

Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still, But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.

The Lonely Hunter by William Sharp - Famous poems, famous poets. - All Poetry #poems #loneliness #grief

This poem explores themes of longing, grief, and the search for connection. The speaker, a solitary figure, yearns for a lost love, represented by a white flower. They wander through a verdant landscape, haunted by memories and the hope of reunion.

ghostty

Ghostty released today: Ghostty 1.0 | Hacker News #terminals

I already have it as my terminal with the following minimal config:

theme = GruvboxDarkHard
macos-titlebar-style = hidden
window-decoration = false

Ghostty is revolutionary in many ways, but I found this article about its native platfrom integration particularly compelling: Ghostty Is Native—So What? | g.p. anders

2024-12-26

I am supposed to start grinding on stuff today, but I have visitors coming so might not be able to fully lock in.

The Bookshop Woman

The Bookshop Woman: Nanako Hanada, Cat Anderson: 9781914240812: Amazon.com: Books #books #japan

I have been reading The Bookshop Woman since I got it as a secret santa gift. It's a pity I am reading a physical copy, because I don't usually highlight or copy quotes from it. It has a lot of quotable bits that I believe folks will resonate with a lot.

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Japanese Stationary

This tweet I made about Japanese Stationary seems to have reached a wider audience than normal.

2024-12-25

Christmas Break Day 3. Caught up on the last two episodes of Dune Prophecy S2, and generally just chilled all day.