2025-06-28

Peter Steinberger - Building Apps with AI

Slot Machines for Programmers: How Peter Builds Apps 20x Faster with AI | Peter Steinberger #ai #programming Peter built vibetunnel with two other people: GitHub - amantus-ai/vibetunnel: Turn any browser into your terminal & command your agents on the go.

The process was heavily AI assisted and the post above goes into his thoughts around using AI. It's more credible when folks who have actually built something useful that's in the wild and works well talk about AI assited coding.

The Art of the Mega-Prompt

Here’s where things get spicy. While the internet is flooded with “10 AMAZING PROMPTING TRICKS THAT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND” listicles, Peter has a refreshingly blunt take:

This is the greatest bullshit. There are so many people out there that try to explain you… All those long websites about prompting… That’s all bullshit.

Instead, Peter’s secret sauce is beautifully simple: explain what you want from multiple angles, like you’re talking to someone slightly unfamiliar with your product. No structure needed. Just ramble.

Sometimes my prompt is this long where it’s a lot of rambling. Oh yeah. The padding… looks like shit. It needs to be like this and this and this.

He uses WisprFlow. “Heck, they should give me affiliate links by now because I converted so many people.”

Crucial insight:

They’re non-predictable. It’s like nature. So if you don’t like the outcome, just try it again.

Agents have “temperature.” Don’t like the result? Just re-execute without changing the prompt. Like slot machines: press enter, get something new.

Peter’s approach leverages something most don’t realize: we like redundancy. Explain the same thing three ways, we don’t get annoyed. We get clarity.

The Real Skill: Clear Thinking

When Peter starts something fresh, he has a bulletproof SDD workflow using Google AI Studio: brain dump ideas into a 500-line Software Design Document, iterate with “Take this SDD apart” prompts for 3-5 rounds until the spec is bulletproof, then simply tell Claude Code: “Build spec.md” and let it run for a few hours.

Going "no-contact" with family and friends

Why So Many People Are Going “No Contact” with Their Parents | The New Yorker #family #culture

The field of family estrangement is still in its infancy. The tome-like “Handbook of Family Therapy,” a mainstay among psychologists, does not contain an in-depth entry on estrangement. “The cliché ‘hiding in plain sight’ is really appropriate here,” the family sociologist Karl Pillemer, who teaches at Cornell, told me. Kristina Scharp, a director of the Family Communication and Relationships Lab, at Rutgers University and Michigan State, defines estrangement as an “intentional distancing” between at least two family members “because of a negative relationship—or the perception of one.” Sometimes it comes from an accumulation of grievances. Other times, it’s because of one fight—for example, after a parent rejects an L.G.B.T.Q. child when they come out. According to a survey conducted by Pillemer in 2019, twenty-seven per cent of Americans are currently estranged from a relative. If you haven’t experienced it yourself, you probably know someone who has.

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2025-06-25

Top of Hacker News

Fun with uv and PEP 723 | Hacker News

An article I wrote for my new tech blog made it to the top of Hacker News.

Annotating Books

Marginalia mania: how ‘annotating’ books went from big no-no to BookTok’s next trend | Books | The Guardian #books #annotate

Looks like annotating books is in. I recently started doing this because I realised that it increased retention.

There are two kinds of readers: those who would choose death before dog-ears, keeping their beloved volumes as pristine as possible, and those whose books bear the marks of a life well read, corners folded in on favourite pages and with snarky or swoony commentary scrawled in the margins. The two rarely combine in one person, and they definitely don’t lend each other books. But a new generation of readers are finding a way to combine both approaches: reviving the art and romance of marginalia, by transforming their books and reading experiences into #aesthetic artifacts.

It is what her fellow scholar Jessica Pressman calls “bookishness”: a post-digital behaviour that has developed among passionate readers. But that is not to say it is purely performative: annotating a novel can allow us to retrace our first journey with a book, as well as revisit our state of mind at the time. I think of the last book that made me cry, Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss – what would my marginalia have looked like when I read it back in 2021, sobbing through the final pages at the reflections of my own struggles with mental illness? What would I see now in the notes I’d made then?

Annotation has also become a way of connecting: some BookTokkers lavishly annotate a copy of their friend’s favourite book as a gift, stacking the margins with observations and jokes; Marcela is excitedly planning to do this for her best friend. A dear friend of mine inherited the habit from his late mother and he now treasures the precious “scribblings” in the margins of her history and poetry books. Some people specifically seek out books annotated by other readers in secondhand shops – a spark of connection with the past – or even by their authors;

I’m like McAlister, who says that while she annotates her academic reading, well, like an academic, she’s usually too immersed in books to annotate for fun.A

Learnings from 2 years of using AI tools

Learnings from two years of using AI tools for software engineering #ai #software #programming

Working with Generative AI is fertile ground for several cognitive biases that can undermine judgment. I find this a fascinating part of GenAI: how manipulative this technology is.

Here are just a few examples of potential cognitive biases:

Automation bias represents our tendency to favor suggestions from automated systems while ignoring contradictory information, even when that information is correct. Once you've experienced success with AI-generated code, it's natural to start over-trusting the system. The confident tone and polished output can make us less likely to question its recommendations, even when experience suggests a different approach.

The framing effect reinforces the impact of the positive, confident phrasing of LLM responses. For instance, if an AI suggests that a particular approach is "best practice," we are more likely to take that at face value and adopt it, without considering context-specific factors.

The anchoring effect can kick in when AI presents a solution before we thought about it. After viewing AI's suggestions, we can find it harder to think creatively about alternative solutions. The AI's approach becomes our mental starting point, potentially limiting our exploration of better alternatives. On the flip side, AI can also help us mitigate anchoring bias, for example when assisting with modernising a pre-existing solution we're already anchored to.

And finally, there is also a version of sunk cost fallacy at work when coding with AI. Investing less human labour into writing code, should make it easier to discard code that’s not working. However, I've caught myself becoming over-attached to large pieces of AI-generated code which I’d rather try to fix instead of revert. Perceived time savings create a psychological investment that can make one reluctant to abandon AI-generated solutions, even when they're sub-optimal.

Th Amplifier: 8 rising pop girls you should hear now

The Amplifier: 8 rising pop girls you should hear now #amplifier #music #playlist

YouTube Music Playlist: The Amplifier: 8 Rising Pop Girls You Should Hear Now

AI Killed My Job

AI Killed My Job: Tech workers - by Brian Merchant #ai #jobs #software #programming

These are some harrowing accounts of engineers from some of the top technology companies in the world, giving their take on what AI is doing to software engineering jobs.

I have been a software engineer at Google for several years. With the recent introduction of generative AI-based coding assistance tools, we are already seeing a decline in open source code quality 1 (defined as "code churn" - how often a piece of code is written only to be deleted or fixed within a short time). I am also starting to see a downward trend of (a) new engineers' readiness in doing the work, (b) engineers' willingness to learn new things, and (c) engineers' effort to put in serious thoughts in their work.

Specifically, I have recently observed first hand some of my colleagues at the start of their career heavily relying on AI-based coding assistance tools. Their "code writing" consists of iteratively and alternatingly hitting the Tab key (to accept AI-generated code) and watching for warning underlines 2 indicating there could be an error (which have been typically based on static analysis, but recently increasingly including AI-generated warnings). These young engineers - squandering their opportunities to learn how things actually work - would briefly glance at the AI-generated code and/or explanation messages and continue producing more code when "it looks okay."

This job market is absolutely punishing. I had a .gov job for the .com crash, a publicly funded .edu job for the 2008 crash, and a safe place inside a Dropbox division making money hand over fist during the COVID crash (Dropbox Sign more than doubled document throughput over 2020). This is my first tech winter on the bench, and I'm getting zero traction. 37 job apps in the months I've been looking, 4 got me talking to a human (2 of which were referrals), all bounced me after either the recruiter or technical screens. Never made it to a virtual onsite.

This has to do with me being at the Staff Engineer level, and getting there through non-traditional means. The impact is when I go through the traditional screens for a high level engineer I flame out, because that wasn't my job. The little feedback I've gotten from my hunt is a mix of 'over-qualified for this position' and 'failed the technical screen.' Attempting to branch out to other positions like Product Manager, or Technical Writer have failed due to lack of resume support and everyone hiring Senior titles.

Last year, a new hire came in to lead another department. Genuinely believe she is a product of the "LinkedIn hustler / thought-leadership / bullshit titles" culture. Super performative.

Recently and during a cross-functional meeting with a lot of people present, she casually referred to a ChatGPT model she was fine-tuning as our "Chief Marketing Officer"—in front of my manager. She claimed it was outperforming us. It wasn’t—it was producing garbage. But the real harm was watching someone who’d given decades to his field get humiliated, not by a machine, but by a colleague weaponizing it.

Today, in the name of “AI efficiency,” a lot of people saw the exit door and my CMO got PIPd.5 The irony here is two-fold: one, it does not seem that the people who left were victims of a turn to "vibe coding" and I suspect that the "AI efficiency" was used as an excuse to make us seem innovative even during this crisis. Two, this is a company whose product desperately needs real human care.

All my life, I’ve wanted to be an artist. Any kind of artist. I still daydream of a future where I spend my time frolicking in my own creativity while my own work brings me uninterrupted prosperity.

Yet this has not come to pass, and despite graduate level art degrees, the only income I can find is the result of a second-class coding job for a wildly capitalist company. It’s forty hours a week of the dullest work imaginable, but it means I have time to indulge in wishful thinking and occasionally, a new guitar.

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2025-06-23

Emotions vs Feelings

This is a good short YouTube video on distinguishing between feelings and emotions, and hence arriving at a more biological grounding for dealing with them. #feelings #emotions

I generated a summary of the transcript.

Theme Wise Breakdown

Misconceptions About Emotions

Lisa Feldman Barrett opens by addressing common myths: that emotions are hardwired and universal, and that emotions are simply reactive impulses of an "animalistic" brain potentially overridden by rationality. These myths characterize emotions as something that happens to you, causing uncontrollable reactions, or as a sign of morality or mental illness.

Redefining Emotions

Barrett explains that emotions are actually brain-generated constructions. They arise because the brain continuously regulates the body’s internal states (such as glucose or oxygen levels) and uses past knowledge to predict and interpret these bodily signals in relation to the external world. This process produces the experiences we recognize as emotions.

Difference Between Feelings and Emotions

She clarifies that feelings—such as pleasantness, unpleasantness, calm, or activation—are features of emotions but are not equivalent to emotions themselves. Emotions are more complex episodes where the brain is effectively telling a story about bodily states influenced by past experience.

Importance of This Understanding

Barrett discusses how this perspective transforms the way we understand mental health conditions like depression, emphasizing that symptoms may arise from the brain’s metabolic regulation efforts rather than a straightforward pathology. This view invites a broader, more biologically grounded approach to treatment.

Implications for Personal Change

Since emotions are constructed using past experiences to make predictions, individuals are not prisoners of their past but architects of their emotional experience. Psychotherapy can reframe past experiences, and actively cultivating new experiences can alter brain predictions and future emotional responses. This empowers people to take control over their emotional lives by changing their present actions and experiences.

Responsibility and Control Over Emotional Life

Barrett notes that while early experiences shape the brain’s predictive models often without our control, adulthood brings the ability to choose and change experiences. These choices can reinforce or alter the brain’s emotional predictions, offering tools for healing and transformation despite life’s inherent unfairness.

Learning Electronics

Electronic Nights I - Getting Started ? #electronics

Stumbled on this great guide to getting started with electronics which also traces the personal journey of the author from not being able to install a 9V battery or jumpstarting a car to building a electronic gadget.

James Baldwin quote

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

I read this quote in a tweet today and realised that now more than ever in my past, I have truly internalized the message in the quote.

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2025-06-22

Gender Equality in Scandinavia

Why is Scandinavia the Most Gender Equal Place in the World? #gender #inequality #equality #scandinavia

Europe and North America escaped this trap through a fortunate confluence of factors: Christianity sanctified the nuclear family, the Protestant Reformation elevated marital bonds, the Enlightenment championed free expression of dissent, while robust states enforced laws and provided core services. Technological advances, media connectivity, and economic growth then proved transformative: women gained control over their fertility, pursued careers, built diverse friendships, demonstrated equal competence in socially valued domains, and mobilised for reform.

Yet Scandinavia had two unique latent assets which would prove transformative in the 20th century. Scandinavians never idealised female seclusion and there was a nascent culture of associations. Neither entailed gender equality, but rather they provided the latent assets for egalitarian ideological persuasion and capture of state power.

Scandinavian Christianity retained remarkable permissiveness. Ibn Fadlan, travelling from Baghdad in 922, was shocked to see Scandinavian merchants having sex with enslaved women in public view. In 1432, a Venetian captain shipwrecked on Norway’s Lofoten archipelago noted locals bathed naked together, unashamed.

A hundred years later, Andrew Boorde observed Icelandic priests keeping “concubynes”. 17th century travellers noted, with surprise, that bathhouses were sometimes nude and gender-mixed.

In northern Sweden and Finland, where agricultural productivity was low and class divisions were minimal, unmarried men and women might spend nights together without parental approval (‘nattfrieri’ - night courting). In 1799, Malthus noted that Swedish country girls often had “sweethearts for a considerable time before they marry” - frequently accelerated by pregnancy. Even in the late 19th century, 16% of first births to University of Iceland’s Theology Faculty were illegitimate.

What explains this permissiveness?

Low population density, minimal urbanisation, and sparse monasteries and bishoprics likely weakened the Church’s ideological control. Richard F. Tomasson argues, “The older permissive pattern persisted in those areas where the influence of Christian conceptions of marriage was weakest”. This openness enabled high female labor force participation, but that’s only one part of Scandinavia’s feminist secret…

and there is part 2 as well: Why is Scandinavia the Most Gender Equal Place in the World?

They laid out four fundamental demands:

1. All adults should have opportunity for independent development
2. All adults should be economically independent of relatives
3. Society should be neutral toward different domestic arrangements
4. Children's development should be independent of parents' economic circumstances

The Diderot Effect

The Diderot Effect is a social phenomenon where obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption, leading to acquiring more new things that complement or match the original item. This effect is named after the French philosopher Denis Diderot, who described how receiving a new robe made him want to replace his old belongings to match the new one, resulting in a cascade of purchases.

In essence, the Diderot Effect explains how one new purchase can lead to a chain reaction of additional spending to maintain a consistent lifestyle or aesthetic. #consumption #spiral

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2025-06-21

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2025-06-19

Home-Centric vs City-Centric

Found this in a documentary about Tokyo public toilets and it resonated for me in a very different context - spending time in cafes (one of my favorite activities)

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2025-06-18

Authenticity is a mirage

Gen Z and gen Alpha brought a raw, messy aesthetic to social media. Why does it feel as inauthentic as ever? | Eugene Healey | The Guardian #authenticity

Authenticity is the great mirage of the modern age. Its promise – to live unmediated, in full accordance with our values and beliefs – feels like the ideal we’re always reaching for before it vanishes beyond the horizon. And ironically, the more we try to prove we’re authentic online, the more we seem to accelerate its disappearance.

As Generations Z and Alpha joined social media, they responded to the cultural demand for perfection with chaos – raw, unfiltered, deliberately messy content. The curated feed of flatlays gave way to the sloppy photo dump; the finstas; the bedrotting. Finally, our real lives represented on screen. Finally, something real.

Except that this quickly became another role to be performed, a generation-defining content genre that has itself become subject to more and more extreme performances – filming oneself bawling into the camera, extreme overshares, breakdowns in public. Vulnerability-as-aesthetic, where what began as a rejection of perfection has become its own form of perfectionism – the flawless execution of being flawed.

To understand why authenticity is impossible, first we need to understand what social media has done to us. It’s turned personal identity into performance art – and in doing so, has transformed us all into brands (I should know, I’m a brand consultant).

The internet has fundamentally altered the conditions under which genuine self-expression can exist. The solution isn’t to perform authenticity harder, but to recognise and jealously guard the remaining places where real authenticity might still be possible: in unrecorded conversations, in private moments, in closed networks that haven’t yet been colonised by the attention economy.

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2025-06-17

Adults TV Show

What can we learn from TV shows about friendship? | Dazed #tv #adults #friendship

In the last episode of FX’s new comedy series Adults, which follows a group of friends in their twenties, Paul Baker (Jack Innanen) gets a letter from the US government notifying him that his visa is expiring and that he must leave the US and go back to Canada. His friends, Samir (Malik Elassal), Billie (Lucy Freyer), Anton (Owen Thiele) and his girlfriend Issa (Amita Rao), who he lives with, are devastated. To ensure he can stay in the country, Issa asks him to marry her, to which he gratefully, but also begrudgingly, agrees. 

While the journey to get there is incredibly convoluted, they eventually arrive at the courthouse to wed. However, before they’re about to get married, Issa gets cold feet, telling Billie that marrying Paul is different from when she jokingly married her ex-friend Zack-Carlos because her marriage to Paul would be real. To Paul’s surprise, Billie walks down the aisle in Issa’s place, telling Paul that Issa isn’t ready to marry him but that they do not want to lose him and that she will marry him instead. This results in the entire friendship group arguing as they all volunteer to marry their Canadian friend. To end the bickering, Issa rejoins the group at the altar, apologising and professing to Paul: “We all love you. We just want you to stay. So, literally, any of us would marry you. Paul Baker, you choose. What do you want?”

Manifest Cheating

Can you really ‘manifest cheating’ in a relationship? | Dazed #dating #cheating #manifest

At the end of our five-year relationship, my ex suggested that it was my concerns around his loyalty that caused him to cheat in our relationship. In other words, I thought his infidelity into existence (or manifested it). It’s a concept I initially rolled my eyes at, then forgot about entirely, until recently, when The Wizard Liz revealed online that she’d been cheated on while pregnant by YouTuber Landon Nickerson. As a lifestyle influencer and manifestation coach, The Wizard Liz, whose real name is Lize Dzjabrailova, being cheated on has since set the internet into a spin – even the women who dedicate their lives to embodying “divine femininity” aren’t spared from the deeply painful but unfortunately common experience of infidelity. So, what does the spiritually-charged message that you can “manifest cheating” in your relationship do for how we think about modern relationships? 

As more young people move away from traditional religions and, in turn, seek answers in alternative spirituality, it should come as little surprise that New Age practices like manifestation have found their way into dating culture. According to Todd Baratz, a certified sex therapist and relationship expert, concepts like twin flames, divine feminine and masculine energy and practices like astrology are now deeply shaping how many young people understand relationships. “These frameworks offer fresh, new and beneficial language, comfort, and a sense of control in uncertain emotional terrain, but they also can turn love into a performance or a projection,” he says. “Instead of building relational skills – like communication, conflict repair, or emotional availability – people are using spiritual frameworks to bypass hard conversations or justify toxic dynamics.”

How Societies Morph With the Seasons

What Foragers Teach Us about Seasons and Social Change

As an evolutionary anthropologist working with the BaYaka, I initially presumed people simply adjusted because of the seasonal availability of different foods. But their changes extended way beyond sustenance into the realms of politics, economics, rituals, and relationships.

These shifts starkly contrast with my own homes in the U.K. and Spain, countries seemingly locked into fixed sociopolitical and economic orders. BaYaka flexibility made me rethink my assumptions about what is “natural” for human societies, including gender roles, hierarchies, and social group sizes.

And the more expansively I looked, I realized BaYaka flexibility isn’t the anomaly: The rigidity of industrialized, capitalist societies is. Across history and geography, societies have restructured their sociopolitical and economic lives in response to seasonal shifts—and perhaps not solely due to fluctuating resources. People may also do so because they recognize the dangers of stagnation.

As I see it, regular restructuring keeps communities adaptable and resilient. Solving today’s greatest challenges—inequality, authoritarianism, the climate crisis—may require embracing this flexibility as part of the fabric of our societies.

And the BaYaka aren’t unique in their cyclical shifts. The 20th-century French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss documented seasonal transformations among the Nambikwara, an Indigenous Amazonian group whose territory today lies in central Brazil. For five months each year, according to Lévi-Strauss, they inhabited large villages, tending small gardens for food. When the dry season began, they dispersed into smaller, mobile foraging groups. These shifts also ushered a reversal of political authority. During the dry season, leaders became authoritative decision-makers, resolving conflicts directly. When the rains returned, the same leaders no longer held coercive power. They could only attempt to influence through tactics like gentle persuasion or caring for the sick.

Similarly, at the turn of the 20th century, anthropologist Franz Boas observed that inequality peaked during the winter among the Kwakiutl, or Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, a First Nations people along the Pacific Coast of what is now Canada. Boas wrote about Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw winter villages with strict hierarchies and grand ceremonial events. In summer, these rigid structures dissolved as communities broke into smaller, more flexible groups. And rather than people doing this subconsciously solely to adapt to the weather, they were so aware of the political nature of their practices that individuals even changed names when they adopted new social positions for winter ceremonies.

Meanwhile, in my home countries and many others today, institutions seem immutable, changing only during revolutions, coups, or wars.

These cases flip the usual narrative. Instead of assuming that hierarchy is the prize of complexity, these sites suggest not all monumental architecture required a ruling class. For much of human history, societies didn’t follow a single political trajectory—they shifted between different modes of organization, much like the BaYaka do today.

Recognizing humanity’s long tradition of social fluidity puts the present into perspective: The “Western world” is not the culmination of a 10,000-year-long march but an anomaly in a 300,000-year-long history of Homo sapiens’ cultural adaptability.

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2025-06-16

ytt-mcp - MCP Server to fetch YouTube Transcripts

I built an MCP server today!! - GitHub - deepakjois/ytt-mcp: MCP server to get YouTube transcripts #youtube #mcp #transcription

I love how seamlessly I can integrate this with Raycast (see demo video in README page on Github).

The bonus was I really got deep into how uv and Python packaging works.

URL Shortening System - Excalidraw Diagram

I really loved this dense Excalidraw diagram. Adding it here because I wanna come back to it for inspiration

Found it in this tweet

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2025-06-14

The West has stopped losing its religion

The West has stopped losing its religion #religion #genz

“I’ve tried alcohol, I’ve tried parties, I’ve tried sex...none of these work,” says Eric Curry at Pace University, recounting what his peers say about trying to overcome depression, ennui and loneliness. “Young people are looking and searching deeply for the truth.” Mr Curry says his recent baptism was the best decision of his life.

The long rise of secularism, which Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University calls “a dominant trend in demography of recent decades” has shaped many aspects of Western society. These range from more liberal attitudes towards gay marriage and abortion to prospects for economic growth. Its sudden stall—and possible reversal in some places—is unexpected.

The most plausible explanation for the changing trend is the covid-19 pandemic. Lockdowns, social isolation and economic shocks affected almost all countries and age cohorts at about the time that the data on religious belief hit an inflection point. This is especially the case for Gen Z, whose years of early adulthood were disrupted, leaving many young people lonely or depressed and looking for meaning.

“The pandemic really was a catalyst” for becoming religious, says Sarah, a 20-year-old student at Liberty University, who grew up outside the Church but converted after joining a Bible-study group on Zoom during the lockdowns. “Probably over 75% of my friends who are Christians became Christian since the pandemic.”

Young men are becoming particularly keen on God, overturning a norm that spans cultures and time: that women are the more devout sex. In America Gen Z women are now more likely to have no religious affiliation than their male peers, according to a study by the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank.

Instead, wider cultural changes appear to be playing a role. For most of the past two decades, God was on the receiving end of bad publicity, while atheism found pop-culture swagger. Books such as “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins, an Oxford don who in 1996 compared religion to the smallpox virus, or “God is Not Great” by the late Christopher Hitchens, a journalist, became bestsellers. Now, however, it is sales of the Bible that are booming (up by 22% in America last year).

The most important driver of secularisation in the West in recent decades has been people abandoning their religion, says Stephanie Kramer, also of Pew. Loss of faith has had a far bigger effect on the numbers than ageing, migration or fertility. So if the net outflow of the devout were to end, as now appears to be happening, then Christians would retain their majority in America for at least the next 50 years, Ms Kramer predicts, rather than falling below 45% as previously expected. Hardly anyone saw this coming, just as hardly anyone predicted the pandemic. God moves in mysterious ways—and so do people.

How much protein do we need

How much protein do you really need? #protein

Fats and carbohydrates, eat your hearts out—protein is the macronutrient of the moment. Rich people love the stuff. They treat it like ambrosia. Are they onto something?

Having protein on your plate is important. It is made up of amino acids, of which the body needs 20 types in order to grow, produce hormones and stay healthy. Nine of these amino acids must come from food. The World Health Organisation recommends 0.83 grams of protein a day per kilogram of body weight (g/kg) for healthy adults to maintain muscle and tissue health.

Elderly folk may be better off eating more, since muscles wither with age and older bodies are less efficient at absorbing protein. A review published in Nutrients in 2021 suggested that a ratio closer to 1.2g/kg, together with resistance training, could help limit muscle shrinkage in older people. Children and teenagers, who are still growing, may also want more than the minimum, depending on how active they are. A paper from 2020 suggested that pregnant and breastfeeding women need double the recommended amount to maintain muscle mass and feed their child.

Notes for Managing ADHD

Notes on Managing ADHD

Skimmed it, archiving it for later reading…

Fixing My Broken Attention Span

How to Fix a Low Attention Span #distractions #attention

In a sea of content about how the attention crisis is making life worse, Daniel Immerwahr, a history professor at Northwestern University, is a rare dissenting voice. The people who claim that there is a crisis of attention — “attentionistas,” he calls them jokingly — often come from legacy media, a field made up of people uniquely prone to becoming distracted by social media, partly because their jobs require long, unsupervised stretches of concentration. “To blame something on an ‘attention crisis’ is to blame it on the public: ‘We’re producing the good stuff; you guys just don’t appreciate it.’ And that’s exactly what every person in a dying medium has said,” he tells me, comparing the phenomenon to the fear felt by Anglican priests in the 18th century who worried that the popular new medium of the day — the novel — was distracting women from prayerful obedience. That the culture is potentially moving away from longform writing and toward audio and visual content isn’t necessarily a sign of intellectual deterioration, he argues: Who’s to say these formats aren’t simply better at transmitting ideas?

“Everyone says that the internet is polarizing our politics and shredding our attention, but actually it can’t be both,” he says. Rather, we’re in an age of “obsessional politics,” where people are factious and often misinformed but not apathetic. They’re watching multi-hour livestreams and plunging down rabbit holes and “doing their own research” — all activities that require massive amounts of sustained attention. And in doing so, they’re finding community.

Fetch YouTube Transcripts

Something broke with my ytt tool, so I had to go around looking for a way to extract YouTube transcripts quickly from the CLI. With the magic of youtube-transcript-api, uv and bash, I was able to cook up this one-liner.

This is a great example of how uv is a gamechanger for the Python ecosystem. Before this, I would have never considered using Python because of all the package and version management hell I would have to go through to make this seamless.

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2025-06-13

A list of bad advice

Good list: Very Bad Advice · Collaborative Fund #lists #self-improvement #life

Non-things by Byung-Chul Han

Started reading this book: Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld - Kindle edition by Han, Byung-Chul, Steuer, Daniel. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. #books #culture #critical-theory

It's a pretty good read so far. I have lots of highlights on my Kindle app. Using this to test how well updating my daily log from Android works.

Today, we pursue information without gaining knowledge. We take notice (nehmen Kenntnis) of everything without gaining any insight (Erkenntnis). We travel (fahren) across the world without having an experience (Erfahrung). We communicate incessantly without participating in a community. We collect vast quantities of data without following up on our recollections. We accumulate ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ without meeting an Other. In this way, information develops a form of life that has no stability or duration.

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2025-06-12

How should you choose your career

How Should You Choose Your Career? - Scott H Young #career #jobs

“Cool” careers tend to be overrated. All else being equal, the career paths that look fun, interesting or high-status tend to be more competitive. That might be fine if you’re passionate and highly-ambitious, but it does mean you’re picking a steeper hill to climb than a less-glamorous career in which you do useful work.

It matters, I care

It matters. I care. #news #cynicism

Let me be clear: It fucking matters. Truth matters. Documentation matters. Fighting corruption matters. That accountability seems out of reach right now doesn’t change that. When we internalize the belief that nothing can change, we stop demanding change. When we accept corruption as normal, we stop fighting it. When we dismiss documentation of wrongdoing as pointless, we give wrongdoers exactly what they want: permission to continue unchecked and with no record of their actions.

I understand the despair in these kinds of responses. We’ve all watched impeachments fail, courts falter, institutions buckle, and politicians repeatedly trade away democracy for their next campaign check. But giving up on the very idea that truth and morality matter is not just cynicism, it’s surrender.

Without a commitment to documenting truth, all that’s left is propaganda. And we’ve already seen this play out in what were once some of the most respected publications: Major news outlets have bowed to Trump rather than defend their reporting. They depict Trump’s outright lies as mere misstatements and spin his illegal actions as “controversies”. They engage in reflexive bothsidesism, desperately seeking to present “balance” even when one side is demonstrably false. They describe attacks on human rights as mere policy differences. They uncritically repeat government statements that plainly don’t reflect reality. In so doing, they’re not just betraying their fundamental purpose and abandoning their essential role in democracy. They’re helping ensure a world where truth becomes whatever power says it is, and undermining our collective power to build a better world.

Everything Feels Like It Doesn't Make Sense

Everything Feels Like It Doesn't Make Sense #culture #trump

Studs Terkel spent his career during a time of immense change (not too different from now) documenting in Working what happens to the people who do the work that makes everything else possible. He wrote:

This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence - to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.

He interviewed hundreds of people whose labor gets erased from our stories about progress: steelworkers, waitresses, cleaning ladies, farmers, firefighters. He talks with Roberto Acuna, a farm laborer and organizer. Roberto says:

When people have melons or cucumber or carrots or lettuce, they don’t know how they got on their table and the consequences to the people who picked it. If I had enough money, I would take busloads of people out to the fields and into the labor camps. Then they’d know how that fine salad got on their table.

There's a violence in making people invisible, in treating their work as just an input rather than recognizing their humanity. There is violence in ignoring the humans behind the story, ignoring the child fraught with misery in the name of progress.

Steve Bannon described the Trump strategy as "flooding the zone” where you overwhelm people with so much stimulation that they can't focus on any one thing long enough to understand it. The stories like Studs told get lost. It's the same principle that drives social media algorithms: flood your vision with everything at once so you keep scrolling instead of stopping to think.

why the age of AI is the age of philosophy

why the age of AI is the age of philosophy #philosophy #ai

This section was particularly interesting

Four differences between humans and AI

1. Particularity: Humans are individuated beings persisting over time; AI instances are ephemeral and not singular entities, undermining claims of AI consciousness.
2. Subjectivity: Humans have phenomenological experience ("what-it’s-like-ness") that AI lacks, making human reasoning deeply personal and reflective.
3. Capacity to Reason as Free Agents: Humans can commit to premises, change minds, and act intentionally; AI’s reasoning is "zombie reasoning"—functional but without interiority or genuine agency.
4. Physicality: Humans are embodied beings; AI is abstract and disembodied, lacking the lived experience crucial for moral philosophy and understanding physical pain or embodiment.

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2025-06-11

who do you go to for advice

who do you go to for advice? - by Ava - bookbear express #friendship #romance

Everyone agrees with this conceptually, but most people have relatively little interest in living it. Making friends is impossible as an adult. It’s impossible, I don’t have time. I just don’t connect with anyone in the city I live in. We’re taught that we should work hard to get into and sustain romantic relationships, but friendships are supposed to be automatic and effortless. If you have to try, aren’t you doing something wrong?

Of course, the reason why most people don’t have friends isn’t because they never made them, but because they lost them over time. Maintenance is always the battle in love and in work. Asking your friends for advice doesn’t just serve you—your vulnerability and trust serve the relationship, as long as you make space to pay it back in kind.

The rewards and challenges of romantic relationships are so much more prominent in our culture than those of friendship. We’re presented with a straightforward narrative: meet the right person, marry them, and you’ll have figured out a major part of life. It’s no wonder that people often neglect close friends or renounce them or a partner.

The Cult of Creativity

How creativity became the reigning value of our time | MIT Technology Review #creativity

Given how much we obsess over it, the concept of creativity can feel like something that has always existed, a thing philosophers and artists have pondered and debated throughout the ages. While it’s a reasonable assumption, it’s one that turns out to be very wrong. As Samuel Franklin explains in his recent book, The Cult of Creativity, the first known written use of creativity didn’t actually occur until 1875, “making it an infant as far as words go.” What’s more, he writes, before about 1950, “there were approximately zero articles, books, essays, treatises, odes, classes, encyclopedia entries, or anything of the sort dealing explicitly with the subject of ‘creativity.’”

This raises some obvious questions. How exactly did we go from never talking about creativity to always talking about it? What, if anything, distinguishes creativity from other, older words, like ingenuity, cleverness, imagination, and artistry? Maybe most important: How did everyone from kindergarten teachers to mayors, CEOs, designers, engineers, activists, and starving artists come to believe that creativity isn’t just good—personally, socially, economically—but the answer to all life’s problems?

Thankfully, Franklin offers some potential answers in his book. A historian and design researcher at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, he argues that the concept of creativity as we now know it emerged during the post–World War II era in America as a kind of cultural salve—a way to ease the tensions and anxieties caused by increasing conformity, bureaucracy, and suburbanization.

Absolutely. The two criteria go together. In techno-solutionist, hypercapitalist milieus like Silicon Valley, novelty isn’t any good if it’s not useful (or at least marketable), and utility isn’t any good (or marketable) unless it’s also novel. That’s why they’re often dismissive of boring-but-important things like craft, infrastructure, maintenance, and incremental improvement, and why they support art—which is traditionally defined by its resistance to utility—only insofar as it’s useful as inspiration for practical technologies.

At the same time, Silicon Valley loves to wrap itself in “creativity” because of all the artsy and individualist connotations. It has very self-consciously tried to distance itself from the image of the buttoned-down engineer working for a large R&D lab of a brick-and-mortar manufacturing corporation and instead raise up the idea of a rebellious counterculture type tinkering in a garage making weightless products and experiences. That, I think, has saved it from a lot of public scrutiny.

AI Assisted Coding Best Practises

AI-assisted coding for teams that can't get away with vibes - nilenso blog #ai #coding #programming #best-practises

Some very handy tips here.

Why I Gave Up My Smartwatch

Why I Gave Up My Smartwatch

Michel Foucault once described the modern subject as a self-surveying creature. Bent over spreadsheets, calorie counters, and productivity graphs, we monitor ourselves with the vigilance once reserved for prison guards. The smartwatch is simply the most intimate upgrade of that tendency: a panopticon you clasp on willingly every morning.

At first, it’s exciting. You learn how long you sleep, how fast your heart beats, how many steps you walk. But knowledge invites expectation. And expectation breeds disappointment. A night of rest that feels refreshing gets downgraded by your sleep score. A jog becomes unsatisfying if the zone chart looks too flat. Even sitting still can trigger a guilt-inducing vibration to "stand up and move."

Eventually, I stopped responding to my body. I was responding instead to a dashboard.

William James once said that the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the root of judgment, character, and will. It’s also the thing the smartwatch systematically erodes. It pings. It buzzes. It gives you little taps, like a child tugging on a sleeve. And each tap is a fork in the road: attend to your body, or attend to your device? This conflict isn’t always conscious, which is what makes it so dangerous. You lose the thread without realizing it. You forget what the body felt like before it was measured.

There’s a reason monks don’t wear Apple Watches.

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2025-06-09

Taxes of the Built Environment

Taxes of the Built Environment - by Josh Zlatkus #diaper #culture #technology #skill

An interesting aside in an otherwise unrelated piece about…erm…potty training.

As a brief aside, I think part of the reason we are so impressed with the abilities of ancient peoples is that we are surrounded in the modern world by so much technology, which obviates doing anything all that impressive. Don’t get me wrong: if our ancestors could see me typing away on my computer, their jaws would hit the floor. They’d be much more impressed by the computer itself, of course, than my ability to poke its keys, but I also think they’d reserve some of their astonishment for how quickly I hit the keys (90 words a minute, baby).

By and large, though, people with little technology are asked to fill the gap with skill. People with plenty of technology, not so much.

and another one about concrete being one reason to necessiate diapers

Recalling Heying and Weinstein’s notion from A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century that the benefits of new technologies are obvious but the hazards are not, I would argue that one of the overlooked hazards of concrete has been to render the modern environment inimical to quick and mindless elimination.6 The benefits of concrete are much more apparent—providing a consistent, level surface for people and vehicles to move on. Before cities were doused with cement and asphalt, floods were less predictable, roads were less permanent, shoes tracked more muck inside, and so on. In fact, because city surfaces were once more forgiving toward pee and poop, people and their animals likely peed and pooped on them more often, which obviously wasn’t ideal.

So, why do diapers exist? In a word, concrete. In three words, the built environment. Diapers aren’t an intrinsically easier way of doing things; they are an easier way given the built environment. The built environment includes concrete, clothes, vast indoor spaces, hygiene norms, and so on. Really, anything that humans have “made,” as opposed to what evolution, geology, and so forth have provided.

Granted, the need for diapers is the sort of small to medium effect that most people don’t notice or care about. Ditto for the necessity of wearing shoes, maintaining a lawn, and showering daily. However, I hope through my writing to uncover more taxes of the built environment—and make people as incensed about them as they are their income tax.11

In the end, what is the broad impact of the built environment? Over and over the organism goes to act, to impulsively behave, and has its wrist slapped. You can’t walk there. You can’t touch that. You can’t sleep now. You can’t just do anything.

The built environment is increasingly like a diaper, smothering our natural responses often before we even have a chance to acknowledge them.

The rich, the ultra-rich and America’s shifting political landscape

The rich, the ultra-rich and America’s shifting political landscape #wealth #inequality #class

“Class,” Williams writes, “shapes everything from how you define a good cup of coffee to what you see as the purpose of life.”

Indeed. The book is filled with wonderful details about the things elites simply don’t understand about working people, like the fact that hunting might well be about keeping the fridge full rather than toxic masculinity, or that patriotism is attached to the fact that the military is one of the few ways up the socio-economic ladder for working-class Americans.

While liberal elites tend to congratulate themselves on their “enlightened” political views and hyper-individualism, working people often see them as selfish, entitled and overprotective of their children.

Class certainly shapes politics in America, something that the Democratic party has, in recent years, ignored. Williams, like me, believes that progressives have focused far too much on race as opposed to class, leading to a fatal loss of “middle-status” voters to Donald Trump. While some of Trump’s base is racist, or at least xenophobic, there is, according to research cited by Williams, a good 19 per cent that are simply anti-elite. Democrats, she believes, should be “laser-focused” on recapturing this group by better understanding them.

Anti-elites hold “moderate views on immigration, gay marriage and the environment” but are typically non-college grads. They are mostly but not solely white and see their future economic prospects as worse than their past. They sit outside the country’s white-collar meritocracy and are more interested in community and traditional institutions (church, unions, the military) than individualism and achievement.

Many elites who wouldn’t dream of putting down an immigrant or an LGBT+ person are happy to speak about these people in punitive ways (which says something about the psychology of entitlement). But their condescension has come at a great electoral cost.

The big takeaway is that the super-rich are as anxious as anyone else, if not more so. Osnos builds on his infamous 2017 essay “Survival of the Richest”, in which he examined the luxury end of the world of bunkers being built in places like New Zealand by wealthy dotcom survivalists. “How did a preoccupation with the apocalypse come to flourish in Silicon Valley, a place known, to the point of cliché, for unstinting confidence in its ability to change the world for the better?” he asks. One reason is that technology “rewards the ability to imagine wildly different futures”, be they utopian or dystopian.

But my favourite chapter is “The Floating World”, in which Osnos sets sail aboard a half-billion-dollar superyacht docked in Monte Carlo harbour.

“Inside my cabin, I quickly came to understand that I would never be fully satisfied anywhere else again,” he writes.

As behavioural economics tells us, happiness is relative, even for the 0.1 per cent.

Banality of the algorithm

banality of the algorithm - by Adam Aleksic #hannah #arendt #banality #bureaucracy

Humans are also very susceptible to stigmergy. When I’m making my way down a crowded sidewalk, I’m always struck by how people naturally sort themselves into fluid columns, following others going in the same direction. It’s easier, of course, than trying to fight someone headed the opposite way—but then we also make it easier for the person behind us to move forward.

Beyond motion, this affects almost all of our social behaviors, especially in how we spread memes and language. It simply takes less mental effort and social risk to follow what others do, so we perpetuate trends—often reaping social benefits that reinforce our behavior. It feels good to place a pen by an author’s grave, so we do that, and then others follow in our example.

This particular trend is an especially apt way to honor Hannah Arendt, whose most famous work focused on the stigmergy of bureaucracy. To her, much of the Holocaust was perpetrated not out of sociopathic malice, but out of a banality of evil—an institutional complacency, resulting from political structures, that made it easier to perpetuate terrible actions. Even many top Nazi officials, at the end of the day, acted not out of monstrous intent, but out of mechanical complicity—ants following pheromones pointing to professional promotion or social prestige.

The Holocaust is an extreme, tragic example, but banality is responsible for so many of our collective actions, because institutions are always the path of least resistance. It’s simply easier to mold ourselves to social structures, in the same way that it’s easier to go with the flow of the crowd instead of against it.

Upon interviewing the creators behind viral racist videos, for example, I was surprised to discover that none of them seemed to be generating those videos out of actual racist intent. Yes, the racism was there, but their primary motivations were more banal factors like “views,” “virality,” and “followers.” Many were also taking cues from other edgy content creators, who were all taking cues from Meta’s recent decision to significantly loosen AI guardrails. In short, these Reels got millions of views because some Instagram executive decided that slop is better for their profit margins, and that eventually trickled downstream into our feeds.

The more I study cultural trends online, the more I see this cycle replicate, even for the most insignificant memes. As soon as a new idea becomes popular, creators hop onto the trend, indirectly coordinating to kill the meme in pursuit of clicks. Since words are memes, the same is true of language, which is why I think our “brainrot” vocabulary emerged from the over-commodification of speech.

Financial Shenanigans in tech startups

Bankruptcy Was Good for 23andMe - Bloomberg #startups #revenue #profitability

The great arbitrage is that nobody cares about a hot startup’s profits, but everybody cares about its revenue. If you sell $5 billion of artificial intelligence widgets, that’s amazing: It means that you have found product-market fit, that people love your AI widgets, that you will be able to scale and achieve a leading position in the AI widget space. If you have $6 billion of research and marketing costs, that’s fine, that’s great, venture capitalists will love you, they will understand that you have to invest a lot now to build the business; the profits can wait.

Whereas if you sell $10 million of AI widgets and have $5 million of costs, that is a higher net income, but not as exciting to investors looking for a home run.

And so if you are in the business of selling AI widgets, you might go to your mom and say “hey mom would you buy $1 billion of AI widgets from me,” and she would say “I’d love to honey but I don’t have $1 billion,” and you would say “that’s okay I’ll just buy $1 billion of cookies from you, which will give you the money to buy the widgets,” and she would say “but I’d have to bake a lot of cookies,” and you would say “no just bake one, the cookies are so good that I’ll pay a billion dollars for one,” and she would say “okay but do you have $1 billion,” and you would say “no but it’s fine we’ll just net the transactions.” Or variations on that theme. We have discussed some of those variations, which play a crucial role in a lot of tech market bubbles. As long as investors are investing on revenue rather than profitability, someone will find a way to pay for revenue.

It would be very weird if there was none of this in the AI boom. Here’s the Financial Times on Builder.ai:

and in the same newsletter, something I would never understand

As I often write around here, right now the US stock market will pay $2 for $1 worth of Bitcoin. This is most famously demonstrated by MicroStrategy Inc. (or just Strategy), a company with a $60 billion pot of Bitcoins and a $118 billion equity market capitalization,

Psychedelics in America

A new psychedelic era dawns in America #psychedelics #mushrooms #tech

The most vocal psychedelic proponents say their focus is healing, not getting high. They claim the hallucinations psilocybin produces calm anxiety and tap into a lasting sense of peace. Author Michael Pollan, who co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP), once wrote that it can relieve “existential distress”.

Clinical trials show that psilocybin increases brain entropy (a measure of brain activity complexity), disrupting existing patterns. In other words, it can help you to think in different ways. (You can see why this might be popular with people in the tech sector who pride themselves on new ideas.)

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan

The ‘wild’ writer who told the truth about work in China #work #china #books #author

Some eminently quotable lines here but the whole article was just really heartwarming so I recommend reading through the whole thing.

For more than two decades Hu was one of the 300 million internal migrant workers who are the lifeblood of the world’s second-biggest economy. After leaving school he worked 19 different jobs in six different cities. Sometimes the work was desk-bound, boring and pointless, but there were years of gruelling manual labour too, weathering an otherwise youthful complexion. What all these jobs had in common was poor pay and scant social protection or opportunity for progression. And as each one drew to an unremarkable, inevitable end, Hu would founder through the exhaustion and indignity.

With no children to support and his parents in Guangzhou provided for by the state, every few years Hu would emerge from his latest failure with a little money to keep him going without work for a few months at a time, sometimes longer. An avid reader of Russian and other western literature, he started writing himself, though without any serious ambition. Setting down his thoughts in earnest he described the insomnia that followed graveyard shifts in a packaging warehouse on the outskirts of Foshan, sweating in the tropical heat of southern China, sipping from four-litre bottles of knock-off baijiu, averaging just four hours sleep before returning to work.

He noted that the prime selling point for a 72-hour-a-week job as a convenience store clerk in Shanghai was that you were free to eat unsold stodgy dumplings, mini hotpots, fish cakes and boiled eggs after their use-by dates. He wrote about delivering parcels in Beijing, where his fellow delivery drivers battled each other to secure good neighbourhoods as their small fiefdoms: “a zero-sum game” where someone won and the rest lost, condemned to longer hours and lower pay. There was the plight of the driver who, after a customer complained that he’d shown a “foul attitude”, was ordered to read aloud a letter of self-criticism at neighbouring depots.

He captured the cathartic gallows humour and subtle criticisms of officialdom that are commonplace in China. Responding to a manager who said “the customer is God”, Hu instinctively retorted: “There should be only one God, but I have to serve many every day.” For nearly 10 years he recorded his observations on a second-hand Huawei phone, an early Chinese-made rival to the first generation of iPhones, with a clunky Android operating system and a screen resolution about one-fifth of the quality of today’s devices. On that brick-like phone he attempted — and abandoned — longer pieces of fiction too, but his output was mostly a series of disjointed journal entries, documenting the minutiae of his working life, how his body and psyche evolved in response.

It helped that Hu was among a new wave of yesheng zuojia, or wild writers, a group which stands out in China for being distinct from the established clique of highly educated authors, some former journalists, who are connected via formal writer collectives and state-affiliated institutions. One, Chen Nianxi, a miner from the north-western Shaanxi province, became a well-known name in 2015 after featuring among a group of working-class poets in a documentary and has gone on to publish six collections. In 2017 a domestic helper on the outskirts of Beijing had a similarly rapid rise to fame after her eponymously titled essay “I am Fan Yusu” went viral online in a matter of hours. Fan’s story, of leaving a village in central China to travel to Beijing to look after other people’s children in the Chinese capital, drew so much media attention that within three days after its publication she had essentially gone into hiding, refusing interviews.

Hu’s honest self-analysis had turned him into an everyman for modern China. Readers from all walks of life found parallels with the relentless grind of their own working lives. They were moved by his assessment that the pursuit of freedom, away from work, was a matter of consciousness. “In a sense, there is no essential difference between white-collar workers or blue-collar workers, working in a cubicle or on a construction site . . . I hope everyone can be freer,” wrote a user called Lottie.

“This kind of person with a strong sense of morality, a low sense of worthiness, and a high sensitivity, the world usually hurts him more severely than others,” wrote another Douban user. “The pain must be unbearable, but he endured.”

In November 2023, eight months after I Deliver Parcels in Beijing was released, the party’s official newspaper, The People’s Daily, wrote that hangye xiezuo (workers’ writing) was a “fine tradition of Chinese literature” and declared the book was a “must-read” for all Chinese citizens. Hu’s work, the paper added, “clearly describes those ordinary and meaningful moments, the self-control and self-reflection of ordinary people in labour and tempering, and the precious pursuit of the meaning of life”. The endorsement was placed on the front cover of later editions.

Reviewing I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, Lu Yanjuan, a professor at the Institute of Marxist Literary Theory of the Chinese Academy of Arts, praised the book’s “very important” literary significance. “I feel that the author is very close to me and I must have brushed my shoulders and nodded to him many times . . . ,” she wrote. “If ordinary people cannot see their own lives [in literature] and cannot empathise with the joys and sorrows of ordinary people in the world, then what is the point?”

But in August 2023, when he won a prize from Sanlian Lifeweek, an influential news magazine, he said: “I have been repeatedly asked what I think about the labels that have been attached to this book. I usually answer: if it is valuable, time will wash away the labels on it; if it is not valuable, then it doesn’t matter if it is labelled.”

In his book Hu broke down the “time-cost” of his life as a courier in Beijing. To earn an acceptable 7,000 yuan (around £700) for 26 days a month, he needed to make 270 yuan in an 11-hour day, 30 yuan an hour, or 0.5 yuan (around 5p) each minute. This meant completing, on average, a 2-yuan delivery every four minutes. Racing between deliveries there was, therefore, no time to find a toilet and pee — assuming a two-minute urination had a time-cost of 1 yuan. The impossible deadlines wore him down, changed him. “Little by little”, he wrote, he became irritable, prone to anger. And yet his underlying reflex was acquiescence. He was always trying to please people.

The Trauma of Porn

The Mass Trauma of Porn - by Freya India - After Babel #trauma #porn

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2025-06-05

Relationship Anarchy

Is ‘relationship anarchy’ the solution to the loneliness crisis? | Dazed #dating #anarchy

I dunno why I am so addicted to modern dating discourse. Send help.

Despite what the name might suggest, relationship anarchy (RA) – a term coined by writer Andie Nordgren in a 2012 Tumblr essay – is not a style of nonmonogamy where there are no rules, no commitment and you can do whatever you want at all times. You don’t even need to live in Portland or make your own kimchi to practice it. Instead, RA is a relationship style centred on the very reasonable belief that “no relationship should be bound by any rules not entirely agreed upon by the involved parties”, as Feeld puts it.

Unlike Relationship Stalinism, its arch-rival, RA promotes a non-hierarchical approach to relationships, so that romantic and sexual partners aren’t ranked more highly than each other, than platonic friends or family members. So if your besties are as important to you as your love life, you might just be a budding relationship anarchist. If, on the other hand, you veer wildly between insisting that your friends are everything and chucking them off a bridge the second someone hot slides in your DMs, it might not be for you.

Link to original Feeld report: https://feeld.co/news/state-of-dating-vol-3

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2025-06-04

AI is not a technology, it's an ideology

Toolmen | A Working Library #ai #ideology #technology

“Artificial intelligence” is not a technology. A chef’s knife is a technology, as are the practices around its use in the kitchen. A tank is a technology, as are the ways a tank is deployed in war. Both can kill, but one cannot meaningfully talk about a technology that encompasses both Sherman and santoku; the affordances, practices, and intentions are far too different to be brought into useful conversation. Likewise, in the hysterical gold rush to hoover up whatever money they can, the technocrats have labeled any and all manner of engineering practices as “AI” and riddled their products with sparkle emojis, to the extent that what we mean when we say AI is, from a technology standpoint, no longer meaningful. AI seems to be, at every moment, everything from an algorithm of the kind that has been in use for half a century, to bullshit generators that clutter up our information systems, to the promised arrival of a new consciousness—a prophesied god who will either savage us or save us or, somehow, both at the same time. There exists no coherent notion of what AI is or could be, and no meaningful effort to coalesce around a set of practices, because to do so would be to reduce the opportunity for grift.

What AI is is an ideology—a system of ideas that has swept up not only the tech industry but huge parts of government on both sides of the aisle, a supermajority of everyone with assets in the millions and up, and a seemingly growing sector of the journalism class. The ideology itself is nothing new—it is the age-old system of supremacy, granting care and comfort to some while relegating others to servitude and penury—but the wrappings have been updated for the late capital, late digital age, a gaudy new cloak for today’s would-be emperors. Engaging with AI as a technology is to play the fool—it’s to observe the reflective surface of the thing without taking note of the way it sends roots deep down into the ground, breaking up bedrock, poisoning the soil, reaching far and wide to capture, uproot, strangle, and steal everything within its reach. It’s to stand aboveground and pontificate about the marvels of this bright new magic, to be dazzled by all its flickering, glittering glory, its smooth mirages and six-fingered messiahs, its apparent obsequiousness in response to all your commands, right up until the point when a sinkhole opens up and swallows you whole.

When is Insurance Worth It

When Is Insurance Worth It? #insurance #finance

These are the things I would say in response.

• It is not a philosophical question, it is a mathematical one.
• Technically, some insurance is worth its price, even when the insurance company makes a profit.
• Whether or not to get insurance should have nothing to do with what makes one sleep – again, it is a mathematical decision with a correct answer.
• Saving up the premium instead of getting insurance is making the mistake of conflating an ensemble average with a time average.
• Love does not make insurance a mathematically appropriate decision. Running the numbers does.

The purpose if insurance is not only to help us pay for things that we literally do not have enough money to pay for. It does help in that situation, but the purpose of insurance is much broader than that. What insurance does is help us avoid large drawndowns on our accumulated wealth, in order for our wealth to gather compound interest faster.

Think about that. Even though insurance is an expected loss for the insured, it helps us earn more money in the long run. This comes back to the Kelly criterion, which teaches us that the compounding effects on wealth can make it worth paying a little up front to avoid a potential large loss later.33 The typical example is how it takes as long to go from $2,000 to $10,000 as it does from $10,000 to $50,000. This means that if we are forced to pay $8,000 out of our $10,000 wealth, we will end up with $10,000 again at the same time as we would have ended up with $50,000 if we had not been forced to pay. Losing $8,000 at one point is equal to a $40,000 loss later on, once compounding is taken into account. No wonder Einstein coined compounding the eighth wonder of the world. This effect is huge. Having to shell out 20 % of our wealth for an unexpected accident is so bad – even if the accident is improbable – that we may want to chuck out a guaranteed 0.5 % of our wealth to get out of that risk.

This is the hidden purpose of insurance. It’s great at protecting us against losses which we literally cannot cover with our own money, but it also protects us against losses which set our wealth back far enough that we lose out on significant compounding effects.

To determine where the threshold for large enough losses is, we need to calculate.

AI Assisted Programming

My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts · The Fly Blog #ai #software #programming

I like the fact that the term "vibe-coding" has been used (and in an appropriate context) all of two times in the entire post. I also like the use of the term "AI-assisted programming" which is what I do most of the time.

Important caveat: I’m discussing only the implications of LLMs for software development. For art, music, and writing? I got nothing. I’m inclined to believe the skeptics in those fields. I just don’t believe them about mine.

Read your AI-generated code line-by-line before merging.

Are you a vibe coding Youtuber? Can you not read code? If so: astute point. Otherwise: what the fuck is wrong with you?

You’ve always been responsible for what you merge to main. You were five years go. And you are tomorrow, whether or not you use an LLM.

If you build something with an LLM that people will depend on, read the code. In fact, you’ll probably do more than that. You’ll spend 5-10 minutes knocking it back into your own style. LLMs are showing signs of adapting to local idiom, but we’re not there yet.

People complain about LLM-generated code being “probabilistic”. No it isn’t. It’s code. It’s not Yacc output. It’s knowable. The LLM might be stochastic. But the LLM doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you can make sense of the result, and whether your guardrails hold.

Reading other people’s code is part of the job. If you can’t metabolize the boring, repetitive code an LLM generates: skills issue! How are you handling the chaos human developers turn out on a deadline?

† (because it can hold 50-70kloc in its context window)

For the last month or so, Gemini 2.5 has been my go-to †. Almost nothing it spits out for me merges without edits. I’m sure there’s a skill to getting a SOTA model to one-shot a feature-plus-merge! But I don’t care. I like moving the code around and chuckling to myself while I delete all the stupid comments. I have to read the code line-by-line anyways.

on "craft":

Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed. If anything we build endures, it won’t be because the codebase was beautiful.

Besides, that’s not really what happens. If you’re taking time carefully golfing functions down into graceful, fluent, minimal functional expressions, alarm bells should ring. You’re yak-shaving. The real work has depleted your focus. You’re not building: you’re self-soothing.

Which, wait for it, is something LLMs are good for. They devour schlep, and clear a path to the important stuff, where your judgement and values really matter.

on mediocrity

As a mid-late career coder, I’ve come to appreciate mediocrity. You should be so lucky as to have it flowing almost effortlessly from a tap.

We all write mediocre code. Mediocre code: often fine. Not all code is equally important. Some code should be mediocre. Maximum effort on a random unit test? You’re doing something wrong. Your team lead should correct you.

Developers all love to preen about code. They worry LLMs lower the “ceiling” for quality. Maybe. But they also raise the “floor”.

hear! hear!

To the consternation of many of my friends, I’m not a radical or a futurist. I’m a statist. I believe in the haphazard perseverance of complex systems, of institutions, of reversions to the mean. I write Go and Python code. I’m not a Kool-aid drinker.

New Yorker profile on Curtis Yavin

Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America | The New Yorker

The German academic Hans-Hermann Hoppe is sometimes described as an intellectual gateway to the far right. A retired economics professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Hoppe argues that universal suffrage has supplanted rule by a “natural élite”; advocates for breaking nations into smaller, homogenous communities; and calls for communists, homosexuals, and others who oppose this rigid social order to be “physically removed.” (Some white nationalists have made memes pairing Hoppe’s face with a helicopter—an allusion to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of executing opponents by throwing them from aircraft.) Though Hoppe favors a minimal state, he believes that freedom is better preserved by monarchy than by democracy.

Yarvin nearly ended up a libertarian. As a Bay Area coder and a devotee of Austrian-school economists in his late twenties, he exhibited all the risk factors. Then he discovered Hoppe’s book “Democracy: The God That Failed” (2001) and changed his mind. Yarvin soon adopted Hoppe’s imago of a benevolent strongman—someone who would govern efficiently, avoid senseless wars, and prioritize the well-being of his subjects. “It’s not copy-and-pasted, but it is such a direct influence that it’s kind of obscene,” Julian Waller, a scholar of authoritarianism at George Washington University, said. (Over e-mail, Hoppe recalled that he met Yarvin once at an exclusive gathering at Peter Thiel’s home, where Hoppe had been invited to speak. He acknowledged his influence on Yarvin, but added, “For my taste his writing has always been a bit too flowery and rambling.”) Hoppe argues that, unlike democratically elected officials, a monarch has a long-term incentive to safeguard his subjects and the state, because both belong to him. Anyone familiar with the history of dictatorships might find this idea disingenuous. Not Yarvin.

It wasn’t until he reached the end of his speech, ten minutes later, that I realized he was, in his own way, addressing my initial question. “Unless we can totally reëngineer DNA to change what a human being is, there are many people who should not live in a modern way but in a traditional way,” he concluded. “And that is a level of revolution that is so far beyond anything the Trump-Vance regime is doing.”

…On his travels, he often hosted “office hours”—informal, freewheeling discussions with readers, many of them thoughtful young men, alienated by liberal guilt and groupthink. What wins Yarvin converts is less the soundness of his arguments than the transgressive energy they exude: he makes his listeners feel that he is granting them access to forbidden knowledge—about racial hierarchy, historical conspiracies, and the perfidy of democratic rule—that progressive culture is at pains to suppress. His approach seizes on the reality that most Americans have never learned how to defend democracy; they were simply brought up to believe in it.

Yarvin advises his followers to avoid culture-war battles over issues like D.E.I. and abortion. It is wiser, he argues, to let the democratic system collapse on its own. In the meantime, dissidents should focus on becoming “fashionable” by building a reactionary subculture—a counter-Cathedral. Sam Kriss, a left-wing writer who has debated Yarvin, said of his work, “It flatters people who believe they can change the world simply by having weird ideas on the Internet and decadent parties in Manhattan.”

Such people have come to be known as the “dissident right,” a loose constellation of artists and strivers clustered around the Bay Area, Miami, and the Lower East Side micro-neighborhood Dimes Square. The milieu was drawn together by a frustration with electoral politics, Covid lockdowns, and the strictures of “wokeness.” Vice signalling has been central to the scene’s countercultural allure: instead of sharing pronouns and employing the approved nomenclature (“unhoused,” “Latinx,” “justice-involved person”), its members have revived insults like “gay” and “retarded.”

In the past decade, liberalism has taken a beating from both sides of the political spectrum. Its critics to the left view its measured gradualism as incommensurate to the present’s multiple emergencies: climate change, inequality, the rise of an ethno-nationalist right. Conservatives, by contrast, paint liberalism as a cultural leviathan that has trampled traditional values underfoot. In “Why Liberalism Failed” (2018), the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen argues that the contemporary American emphasis on individual freedom has come at the expense of family, faith, and community, turning us into “increasingly separate, autonomous, non-relational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” Other post-liberal theorists, including Adrian Vermeule, have proposed that the state curtail certain rights in the service of an explicitly Catholic “common good.”

Yarvin is calling for something simpler and more libidinally satisfying: to burn it all down and start again from scratch. Since the advent of neoliberalism in the late seventies, political leaders have increasingly treated governance like corporate management, turning citizens into customers and privatizing services. The result has been greater inequality, a weakened social safety net, and the widespread perception that democracy itself is to blame for these ills, creating an appetite for exactly the kind of autocratic efficiency Yarvin now extolls. “A Yarvin program might seem seductive during a period of neoliberal rule, where efforts to change things, whether it is global warming or the war machine, feel futile,” the historian Suzanne Schneider told me. “You can sit back, not give a fuck, and let someone else run the show.” Yarvin has little to say on the question of human flourishing, or about humans in general, who appear in his work as sheep to be herded, idiots to be corrected, or marionettes controlled by leftist puppeteers.

Dwarkesh on AI Progress

Why I have slightly longer timelines than some of my guests #ai #learning

But the fundamental problem is that LLMs don’t get better over time the way a human would. The lack of continual learning is a huge huge problem. The LLM baseline at many tasks might be higher than an average human's. But there’s no way to give a model high level feedback. You’re stuck with the abilities you get out of the box. You can keep messing around with the system prompt. In practice this just doesn’t produce anything even close to the kind of learning and improvement that human employees experience.

While this makes me bearish on transformative AI in the next few years, it makes me especially bullish on AI over the next decades. When we do solve continuous learning, we’ll see a huge discontinuity in the value of the models. Even if there isn’t a software only singularity (with models rapidly building smarter and smarter successor systems), we might still see something that looks like a broadly deployed intelligence explosion. AIs will be getting broadly deployed through the economy, doing different jobs and learning while doing them in the way humans can. But unlike humans, these models can amalgamate their learnings across all their copies. So one AI is basically learning how to do every single job in the world. An AI that is capable of online learning might functionally become a superintelligence quite rapidly without any further algorithmic progrss

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2025-06-03

Relationships and Independence

This is lowkey profound #relationships #independence

Extravagant Weddings as a Costly Signal

Why Extravagant Weddings Are On The Rise At The Same Time Marital Rates Are In Decline

Marriage itself used to be a costly signal of commitment. Today, extravagant weddings serve this purpose.

Recall that costly signaling theory states that if you want to show you’re serious about something—your strength, your loyalty, your commitment—you have to incur a cost that’s hard to fake.

In other words, costly weddings have come to signal what marriage itself used to convey—that you're in it for the long haul.

People no longer trust the institution of marriage to signal commitment on its own, so they feel the need to stage it. In the past, marriage came with clear expectations—social, religious, and legal—that gave it weight and a common understanding of permanence. That’s no longer the case. So now, couples turn to performance. The wedding isn’t just a celebration. It’s a production. Outfits, lighting, music, a curated guest list. The whole thing is designed to prove, to everyone watching, that this is real. This is serious.

Interestingly, this ends up punishing the very people most in need of the stability that marriage can offer. Not because they don’t want to get married, but because the cost of looking committed keeps rising.

oh well, imo it's just another reason to move beyond marriage tbh 🤷🏽‍♂️!

The Recurring Cycle of 'Developer Replacement' Hype

The Recurring Cycle of 'Developer Replacement' Hype #ai #software #jobs

The cycles so far

• The NoCode/LowCode Revolution
• The Cloud Revolution
• The Offshore Development Wave
• The AI Coding Assistant Revolution

Here's what the "AI will replace developers" crowd fundamentally misunderstands: code is not an asset—it's a liability. Every line must be maintained, debugged, secured, and eventually replaced. The real asset is the business capability that code enables.

If AI makes writing code faster and cheaper, it's really making it easier to create liability. When you can generate liability at unprecedented speed, the ability to manage and minimize that liability strategically becomes exponentially more valuable.

This is particularly true because AI excels at local optimization but fails at global design. It can optimize individual functions but can't determine whether a service should exist in the first place, or how it should interact with the broader system. When implementation speed increases dramatically, architectural mistakes get baked in before you realize they're mistakes.

For agency work building disposable marketing sites, this doesn't matter. For systems that need to evolve over years, it's catastrophic.

The pattern of technological transformation remains consistent—sysadmins became DevOps engineers, backend developers became cloud architects—but AI accelerates everything. The skill that survives and thrives isn't writing code.

It's architecting systems. And that's the one thing AI can't do.

a couple of Ask HN - How Do I Learn threads

These threads showed up at the same time on my HN feed and they are adjacent to some of the hobbies I wanna pursue, so just recording them here #learn #robotics #electronics

• Robotics: Ask HN: How do I learn robotics in 2025? | Hacker News
• Practical Electronics Repair: Ask HN: How do I learn practical electronic repair? | Hacker News

GenAI is our polyester

GenAI is Our Polyester #genai #ai #slop

Everyone knows happened next: There was a massive cultural backlash against polyester, which led to the triumphant revaluation of natural fibers such as cotton and linen. The stigma against polyester persists even now. The backlash is often explained as a rejection of its weaknesses as a fiber: polyester's poor aeration makes it feel sticky.

But there was also a massive aesthetic backlash to polyester, and this can't be separated from the fabric's social position. From the 1980s, cotton growers ran a massive advertising campaign to raise its profile among wealthy Americans and re-establish the fiber as luxurious. The Official Preppy Handbook arrived at the same time with the guidance: "Wool, cotton, and the odd bits of silk and cashmere are the only acceptable materials for Prep clothes." The book's editor Lisa Birnbach warned that a "small percentage of polyester" can ruin a shirt, and pointed to the fraying collar of over-washed cotton shirt as a status symbol. By this point, the connotation of polyester was no longer “high-tech” but low-class. This class bias imbued polyester with a negative status value that made it ultimately look ugly.

…

Today manufacturers continue to use polyester-cotton blends to create “wrinkle-free” garments, but the stigmas remain. A “beautiful” shirt from a high-end brand comes in real cotton or linen, despite all the inefficiencies involved.

I rehash the rise and fall of polyester because I believe it presages what will happen to generative AI art.

…

While polyester took a few decades to lose its appeal, GenAI is already feeling a bit cheesy. We're only a few years into the AI Revolution, and Facebook and X are filled to the brim with “AI slop.” Everyone around the world has near-equal access to these tools, and low-skilled South and Southeast Asian content farmers are the most active creators because their wages are low enough for the platforms' economic incentives to be attractive.

Humans have no universal faculty to judge aesthetics: Our appreciation of beauty is highly-contextual and depends on factors other than the raw visual stimulus. Most tech-workers are unaware of this fact, and for them, the fact that AI-art resembles human-art means it must be pretty damn good. But AI art is already in very poor taste: not just because it recycles existing conventions in a way that looks outmoded, but because it's already overly associated with less-than-prestigious institutions. GenAI art has already reached polyester status, and this is just the beginning. Despite all the techno-utopian promises, our brains see it as ersatz.

Software Engineering and Manufacturing

Why GUIs are built at least 2.5 times | Patricia Aas #software #engineering #manufacturing

That being said, when you strip away all the theoretical jargon of postmodernism, its theorists were simply describing an extinction-level destruction of cultural value. Our era's particular neoliberal hyper-connected, hyper-capitalist economy is creating a lot of profit for a few people, but it’s absolutely devastating for the creation of deep meaning. This is the main conclusion of Status and Culture: artifacts and styles take on their full value within a social context, and less value is created when all cultural artifacts are procurable with enough money, can be made anywhere by anyone, and offer no useful social distinctions between philistine and aesthete. AI is simply the latest step in this long process of devaluation — auguring a future where the entire fabric of our lives, from top to bottom, becomes polyester.

But the historical rejection of polyester gives me hope. Humans ultimately are built to pursue value, and create it where it doesn’t exist. When small groups invent new sources of value, others notice and want in. The more that the economy embraces synthetic culture, the more we'll be primed for a revival of non-synthetic culture. But this is where you come in: We have to be ready to fully embrace this return of human-made art. Our generation's polyester salespeople are not deep thinkers and they don't care about the externalities of what they're doing. They’re here to sell us polyester. We don’t have to buy it, but more importantly, we don't have to feel bad about not buying it.

Software development has a weird attribute, making 1 app locally on your machine that you deploy locally to your phone as a hobby, can take days/months/years. But once it is “done” you can put it in an app store or online, and all subsequent copies are “free to produce”. This is not how manufacturing works. Making item 2 and 3 has cost, in materials and labour. But in software all of, or the overwhelming amount of, cost is in making the first one (maybe you have some per user infrastructure etc).

So the perspective is wrong. Developers don’t produce code. Developers are trying to design a solution to a problem, and that is not done in isolation, and more “stuff” isn’t necessarily better.

Like imagine you like a minimalistic style, putting more and more stuff into your house doesn’t make it better, it makes it worse.

The goal isn’t to write code faster, it’s to make something that is valuable to someone.

…

The manufacturing perspective just doesn’t fit: we have no material cost (copies are free), we have no labour cost for manufacturing (copies are free), we don’t need a factory (copies can be made on a laptop). This is a very different thing than the manufacturing of physical things. It’s even different from the design process for manufacturing of physical things, because you can design a bridge, but building the bridge still costs money. And so does the next bridge from that same design. That’s not software.

Another weird thing about software is that we can fundamentally change it after it’s “done”. Even after the customer has it. We can continue to change it, for decades and decades.

Christophe Nuyens on whether artistic ability can be taught

Cinematography of “Andor” – interview with Christophe Nuyens · Pushing Pixels

Kirill: Do you feel that you can teach the technical part, but the artistic part comes from within a person, and if one doesn’t have it, it can’t be learned?

Christophe: No, I think you can teach both. When I was growing up, I didn’t have a lot of cultural influences in my life, at home or at school. It is something that I grew over the years. When I started at the film school, I noticed that I needed to catch up on it. I spent a lot of evenings around that time watching movies with my friends, and it grew on me.

You can cultivate it the same way you cultivate the technical skills. There are also people who are more artistic than technical. Maybe I am more naturally inclined to be better at the technical side, but I grew and worked on my creative side over the years. I really believe you can grow the creative part of your brain.

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2025-06-01

A Complete Unknown

Finally got around to watching this and feeling pumped!

It occurred to me that Bob Dylan's iconic song The Times They Are A-Changin' might also be relevant to the current times.

The stay-at-home son

The New Dream Job for Young Men: Stay-at-Home Son - WSJ #culture #genz #jobs

You’ve mocked them as mooches and mom’s basement dwellers. They prefer the term “stay-at-home sons,” and have a new hero in “Jeopardy” champion Brendan Liaw.

This graduation season is likely to produce a whole lot of stay-at-home sons. The overall unemployment rate is 4.2%, but 8.2% of 20- to 24-year-olds are jobless. The unemployment rate for men in that age range is even worse, 9.6%.

On Rhyming and Poetry

Rhyme, once in its prime, is in decline #poetry #rhyme #literature

In the 20th century, many artforms became “more abstruse, inaccessible and difficult to appreciate”, says Steven Pinker, a professor at Harvard University, “possibly as a way of differentiating elites from the hoi polloi”. Any fool can enjoy an enjoyable thing, but only a committed intellectual can enjoy an unenjoyable one. By the mid-century, rhyming lines had fallen by half.

Modernist verse is thus the peacock’s tail of poetry: something that evolved to be clearly hard to bear, but impressive if you can. Consider the epigraph of T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece “The Waste Land”. It begins, forbiddingly, in Latin, then ends in ancient Greek with the words apothanein thelo (“I want to die”). Eliot can make everyone feel a bit like that.

Look at a list of recent winners of any of the big poetry prizes and most will share three characteristics: you will not have heard of them; their poems will not rhyme; and they will have worked as poets in universities, peddling poetry as (partially) state-subsidised muses. This is poetry less as a paid-for product than as a literary utility: something that—like road surfacing or sewage disposal—is widely considered necessary for a civilised society but that no one wants to fork out for.

The poetry that does sell is produced by a new generation of social-media poets such as Donna Ashworth and Rupi Kaur. This is to the distress of intellectuals, for Instapoets’ verse is not the gas-works and cemetery kind. It is designed to be shared online, meaning that it is anodyne and often accompanied by line drawings of birds.

Young Voters and Donald Trump

How young voters helped to put Trump in the White House #elections #trump #genz #millenial

Pretty detailed analysis of voting patterns of GenZ and millenial voters in 2024.

THE 2024 election unfolded like a political thriller, replete with a last-minute candidate change, a cover-up, assassination attempts and ultimately the triumphant return of a convicted felon. But amid the spectacle, a quieter transformation took place. For the first time, millennials and Gen Z, people born between 1981 and 2006, comprised a plurality of the electorate. Their drift towards Donald Trump shaped the outcome.

Millennials and Gen Z are the most diverse and educated generations in American history, traits long thought to favour the Democratic Party. Yet a new report from Catalist, a left-leaning political-data firm, shows that although Democrats still won a majority of young voters, their long-standing advantage over the Republican Party was reduced by nearly two-thirds. In 2024 Kamala Harris’s margin of victory among these voters was 12 points smaller than was Joe Biden’s in 2020, a bigger swing than for any other cohort (see chart 1). The exodus was caused in large part by non-whites and helped propel Mr Trump back into the White House. But many of these voters lack firm partisan loyalties. They are still up for grabs.

Research by Columbia University found that events in voters’ early adulthood have an outsize effect on their long-term partisanship. Older millennials aged into the electorate against the backdrop of the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street. But for the youngest voters formative political events have been more diverse and disruptive. They have come of age during covid-19 lockdowns, cost-of-living shocks and the rise of and backlash against wokeness. How they will make ideological sense of the whiplash is difficult to predict.

AI and Job Loss

Why AI hasn’t taken your job #ai #jobs #unemployment

Returning to a measure we introduced in 2023, we examine American data on employment by occupation, singling out workers that are believed to be vulnerable to AI. These are white-collar employees, including people in back-office support, financial operations, sales and much more besides. There is a similar pattern here: we find no evidence of an AI hit (see chart 2). Quite the opposite, in fact. Over the past year the share of employment in white-collar work has risen very slightly.

Across the board, American unemployment remains low, at 4.2%. Wage growth is still reasonably strong, which is difficult to square with the notion that AI is causing demand for labour to fall. Trends outside America point in a similar direction. Earnings growth in much of the rich world, including Britain, the euro area and Japan, is strong. In 2024 the employment rate of the OECD club of rich countries, describing the share of working-age people who are actually in a job, hit an all-time high.

There are two competing explanations for these trends. The first is that, despite the endless announcements about how firms are ushering AI into their operations, few make much use of the technology for serious work. An official measure suggests that less than 10% of American companies employ it to produce goods and services. The second is that even when companies do adopt the tech, they do not let people go. AI may simply help workers do their jobs faster, rather than making them redundant. Whatever the explanation, for now there is no need to panic.

Ed Zitron on actually useful AI stuff

The Better Offline Mailbag - Better Offline (podcast) | Listen Notes #ai #skepticism

Below is a badly (AI) transcribed quote from Ed Zitron, the (in)famous AI skeptic from the Better Offline podcast answering a question about AI stuff he finds useful. There is a shoutout to Simon Willison and Max Woolf.

Question: A question from Garrett Smart. Do you think AI is actually useful and any capacity even as an assistant in the areas of art or programming?

Ed Zitron: If so, why so? When it comes to art, I think that there are new functions like slightly better clone tools as well that I've heard people use. But really this is just a bridge from photoshop. I will say, for the most part, art is a not a great one because usually it's just getting rid of the creative side. Programming is a more complex ones. So there's an excellent video link to in the episode Notes from the Internet of Bucks that Carle Brown I think his name is. I really want him on the show, Carle if you're listening, please come on where he kind of said that generative AI code is different to what software engineering is. Like software engineering, he is solving a murder or an investigation far more than generative AI is just creating code, because software engineering isn't just spooting out code and saying here we go, we're done. We now have software. Software is a manifold series of different things you have to do, and on top of that, things break when you plug me into other things, and our internet and most software products are built in a patchwork of different things, so software development. The best I've heard is that it can be used in very controlled situations for very specific things. If you're really interested in learning what it can actually do. I recommend Max Wolf and Simon Wilson. I'll link them in the notes as well, but those two are no AI guys. I also really recommend the Internet Bugs, which again i'll link as well. There are software developers who use this stuff. I don't know about it, and actually the Internet of Bug videos really good as well, because it breaks the whole myth of oh Microsoft and Google saying twenty to thirty percent of their code is written by AI. It's kind of bullshit, as you'd expect, because you can't just hand off code like this. There's also vibe coding. Vibe coding in and of itself has so many problems in that. Yeah, when you create something that works in a way that you literally don't understand by definition, yeah, it's probably going to fucking break. I mean it will break at some point and you won't know how to fix it other than to poke the machine that build it and say, fix the problem. I don't understand.

I posted this for a time when folks who hate AI skeptics like Ed Zitron claim that these people are not capable of believing that AI can be useful in any form at all.

Sarah Miller's Ayahuasca Experience

Pirates of the Ayahuasca | Issue 50 | n+1 | Sarah Miller #psychedelics

Honestly the article felt like a whole lot of nothing. That might be a tad unfair. Maybe there is something in it if one invests enough time and focus reading it.

My one and only ayahuasca experience was actually quite wonderful, and it did not have any of the drama around it, which constitutes the majority of the article. I came away confident in recommending psychedelics to most folks, as long as they were cautious and did enough research and introspection before taking the step.

The Rise of Substack

Substack Has Changed in the Last 30 Days - by Ted Gioia

This is a nice overview of how substack came to dominate the media landscape.

1. Stage 1: People ignored Substack as it was small and unfamiliar, leading to blank stares when mentioned.
2. Stage 2: Substack became a target for mockery, treated as a joke by established media and perceived as a circus.
3. Stage 3: Powerful figures began attacking Substack for its independence, but these efforts ultimately backfired and fueled its growth.
4. Stage 4: The establishment is now rushing to join Substack, marking a significant shift in perception and acceptance of the platform.

Male Loneliness

Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?

Yet another article in what it seems like a deluge of articles about male loneliness. But this one is worth read. I skimmed it and was a bit lazy to extract quotes though, except this one which looked interesting but isnt directly related to the subject matter

There was a particular episode that I devoured with rapt fascination. The guest was a man named David Goggins. He was hawking his book “Can’t Hurt Me,” a harrowing saga of being brutally beaten by his father when he was a child, getting called the N-word at his predominantly white high school in small-town Indiana, drowning his sorrows in doughnuts and eventually becoming a depressed 300-pound man. But then, after a particularly bad night at his job killing cockroaches, he comes home, sees a TV show about the Navy SEALs and soon after decides to lose 100 pounds in three months so he can qualify for active service and try out for the SEALs. Not only does he shed the weight in that preposterously tiny window of time, he then survives the SEALs’ infamous “Hell Week,” enduring an unrelenting barrage of excruciating physical trials bordering on torture (and which have led to several actual deaths) despite his injuries and congenital health issues. He becomes a SEAL, and after serving in Iraq, quickly transforms himself into one of the world’s premiere ultramarathoners, completing more than 70 endurance races, many of them in excess of 100 miles.

Goggins — who, in the wake of that “Rogan” appearance, became a mega-best-selling author with nearly 13 million Instagram followers — professes to absolutely despise running. And yet he laces up his shoes and hits the road every day, because he hates it. This is his message: Deliberately suffer. Do something you hate to do, every single day, no matter what. If you feel like a victim, victimize your own body. Callous the mind, keep going and stay hard.

Cure for Individualism

What is the cure for the West’s individualist worldview? | Aeon Essays #individualism #western #philosophy #confucianism

Yet even people living in individualist societies can recognise that the worldview leads to problems when taken to its extreme. At the broadest level, it encourages a mindset of seeing others either as competitors or as means to our own satisfaction. In politics, it undercuts attempts at social justice or building safer and healthier communities, holding that any restriction on individual rights is either ‘communism’ or ‘fascism’. A number of our books begin with a litany of global problems that the individualist worldview seems powerless to solve: climate change, wealth inequality, political polarisation. While individualism encourages an ethic of personal responsibility in relation to our own choices and actions, it doesn’t ask much of us in connection to issues that we did not directly cause.

The Confucian alternative begins from a notion of what contemporary scholars call the ‘relational self’ – that a person cannot be understood in isolation from their connections with those around them. What is most relevant about me is not that I am a free and autonomous agent, but rather that I am so-and-so’s son or daughter, grandchild or sibling; someone’s teacher, colleague or mentor; a member of such-and-such neighbourhood and community. In its conception of the person as inseparable from their relationships, the role-bearing self poses a challenge to the social contract view of humans as pristine individuals who participate in society only voluntarily.

If it is impossible for people living in modern, Western societies to ever get rid of individualism in its entirety, the only cure is to develop more balanced and humane forms of individualism. If we see hyper-individualism as a problem, then studying traditions such as Confucianism can help us keep in view the broader range of things that ought to matter in a good human life. For those forms of individualism that we find worthy of our allegiance and protection, the Confucian relational perspective can deepen our perspective on what it means to be an individual among others, along with a set of daily practices that can aid in our self-realisation.

The ideal of interconnectedness is not limited to Chinese or East Asian philosophy. It is also found in Western political philosophers such as Aristotle; in contemporary communitarians and virtue ethicists; and in versions of care ethics that have been developed by feminist thinkers. Cross-cultural philosophers have used concepts from other non-Western traditions – such as ubuntu from African philosophy, or the no-self from Buddhism – to launch similar challenges to the predominance of individualism in modern life. Seen in the context of these other traditions both inside and outside of Western philosophy, individualism appears as less of an inevitability.

Since individualist philosophy is so deeply embedded in the cultures of much of North America and Europe, the study of non-Western traditions can be helpful in providing an alternative vision of the good life. One thing that crosscultural philosophy teaches us is that stepping back from our cultural norms is often far more difficult than we think. Even when they attempt to provide alternatives to individualism, philosophers working exclusively in Western traditions can remain mired in individualist assumptions. Philosophical traditions from Asia and Africa give us fully worked-out conceptual schemes that have developed in relative isolation from the Western individualist ethos. These traditions can help us figure out what we might be missing in modern societies, while at the same time showing us some of the things that we may have gotten right. In developing a better version of ourselves, we need all the help we can get.

Blackout Poetry

TIL Blackout Poetry. Love the concept!

The Experience of Being Single

Is being single a happier experience for women or men? | Psyche Ideas #gender #relationships #love

One potential reason why single women might tend to experience a happier singlehood has to do with their social support system, including their friends and family. It’s well established that strong social ties are an important factor in happiness, and they even seem to be one protective factor against an early death. Single people are no exception to the reality that social connections are a valuable part of a full life; singles often report that their relationships with friends, family, neighbours and acquaintances are important to their happiness.

Women having a better time in singlehood might also reflect that, for many of them, being single seems preferable to the alternative. One perspective advanced by sexuality researchers proposes that women in heterosexual relationships are often expected to take on most of the household work and management in a way that leaves them feeling more like ‘mothers’ than lovers to their romantic partners. Add to this that women’s sexual pleasure often comes second (at best), and you can start to see why some women feel like relationships are a net loss.

The bargain might have seemed more worthwhile to some of these women in a time when men dominated the workplace, so that a relationship was the most viable path to having money in the bank. But as women have continued to make strides in the workplace and many societies have gradually moved toward greater pay equity, more women may be choosing ‘no deal’ when it comes to having a spouse. It could be that many of the single women we surveyed see singlehood as a space where there is less work, less hassle and more room for a life that addresses their needs.

If our data are telling us that this happy story applies more to women than men, on average, what can single men take away from it? In light of the growing concern about male loneliness, perhaps men can learn from women’s approach to singlehood. While social norms around masculinity might encourage them to focus more of their time and energy on pursuing financial success and climbing the career ladder, men, and particularly single men, may need to make sure they are directing enough attention towards building and maintaining social connections and taking care of themselves. This might include things like initiating more coffee chats or other hangouts to catch up with friends, or speaking with a therapist to work on their mental health. For single men who want to partner up eventually, a stronger social circle might have the benefit of making them more attractive to potential partners. But more importantly, it might bring men greater joy in singlehood as well.

Research Behind Bloomberg Travel Guides

Want to Be a Travel Writer? How the Job Actually Works - Bloomberg

This is a great in-depth look into how Bloomberg produces its two-night guides for cities around the world as part of its travel section. If not anything, this makes me take their guides more seriously next time I am doing my travel research.

And this photograph appealed to the notetaker in me

US Drug Prices

How America Built the World's Most Successful Market for Generic Drugs - Marginal REVOLUTION #pharma #drugs #generics

Not a statement I thought I would encounter

The United States has some of the lowest prices in the world for most drugs. The U.S. generic drug market is competitive and robust—but its success is not accidental. It is the result of a series of deliberate, well-designed policy interventions.

to clarify from the linked post

The US has high prices for branded drugs but it has some of the lowest prices for generic drugs in the world and generic drugs are 90% of prescriptions.

The AI Jobs 'Apocalypse'

The "AI jobs apocalypse" is for the bosses #ai #jobs

I guess it depends on how you define “AI jobs apocalypse.” The way that AI executives and business leaders want you to define it is something like ‘an unstoppable phenomenon in which consumer technology itself inexorably transforms the economy in a way that forces everyone to be more productive, for them’.

As such, perhaps we should maybe pump the brakes here and look at what’s actually going on, which is more like ‘large technology firms are selling automation software to Fortune 500 companies, executives, and managers who are then deciding to use that automation technology to fire their workers or reduce their hours.’ There is nothing elemental or preordained about this. The “AI jobs apocalypse” is bosses like Barbara Peng deciding to lay off reporters and copywriters and highlighting her commitment to AI while she is doing so.

But of course there is no AI jobs _apocalypse—_an apocalypse is catastrophic, terminal, predetermined—but there are bosses with great new incentives/justifications for firing people, for cutting costs, for speeding up work. There is, to split hairs for a minute, a real AI jobs crisis, but that crisis is born of executives like Peng, CEOs like Duolingo’s Louis von Ahn and Klarna’s Sebastian Siemiatkowski all buying what Amodei (and Sam Altman, and the rest of the new AI enthusetariat) is selling. Amodei and the rest are pushing not just automation tools, but an entire new permission structure for enacting that job automation—and a framework that presents the whole phenomenon as outside their control.

Incel Bots on ChatGPT

OpenAI featured chatbot is pushing extreme surgeries to “subhuman” men #incel #chatgpt #ai #manosphere

This type of content is particularly concerning given where this language originated. The incel and manosphere forums that coined the terms used by the bot, including the “Looksmaxxing” name assigned to the GPT, regularly feature conversations in which men express their desire for revenge against women and anyone who’s sexually active, with rhetoric celebrating violence against women and openly praising mass killers. Multiple mass killings have been linked to these online spaces, or to men who have self-identified as members of these online subcultures. The communities’ core beliefs — that feminism and women’s rights have destroyed society and “rigged” the dating world against men — can serve as stepping stones toward more extreme and violent viewpoints. Other members of these communities turn their hatred inwards, and are met with posters who encourage them to “lie down and rot”, or even kill themselves.

OpenAI is not just hosting but prominently featuring chatbots that suggest dangerous medical interventions as crucial to men’s sexual and romantic success. They parrot extreme ideology around gender dynamics, sex, and dating; promote pseudoscientific beliefs; and potentially drive vulnerable or young users toward extremist communities.

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2025-05-30

The Lost Art of Deep Reading

The Humility of the Page: The Lost Ethics of Deep Reading #reading

This is not just a private loss. It is a civic one. Without the capacity to dwell in difference, to engage with arguments we do not agree with, or to follow a thread longer than 280 characters, we become intellectually and morally brittle. We lose the very qualities that democratic life depends upon: empathy, nuance, deliberation.

Deep reading, particularly of literature, philosophy, and reflective prose, offers not just insight, but rehearsal. It trains us in the moral dispositions that public life requires: attention, imagination, restraint. To give ourselves to a complex text is to practice the patience we need for one another. It is a rehearsal in understanding before judging, listening before reacting. This is not merely a virtue. It is a survival skill for pluralistic, tolerant society.

Beauty is Pain

Beauty is pain: The increasing masochism of self-optimisation | Dazed #beauty #feminism #culture

By now we’re all too familiar with the old adage ‘beauty is pain’. Traced back to at least 1800s France (‘il faut souffrir pour être belle’, or ‘one must suffer to be beautiful’), the phrase has been used for generations to justify the physical suffering many women endure to maintain society’s beauty standards. “If suffering is beauty and beauty is love, she cannot be sure she will be loved if she does not suffer”, as Naomi Wolf wrote in The Beauty Myth back in 1990, unpicking the ways a modern patriarchal society leverages beauty standards as a way to oppress women – even while gender equality grew in the eyes of the law.

We’ve seen this truth play out throughout history, through extreme grooming acts such as wearing corsets and fontanges, hairline plucking and foot binding, disordered eating, and surgeries. But it’s also embedded into the very standards themselves. Today’s trends for thinness – whether via Ozempic or #SkinnyTok – come with the same message as 00s heroin-chic, or the Victorian obsession with the aesthetics of tuberculosis. A malnourished body, a controlled and surveilled body, an addicted or diseased body – i.e. a body in pain – is an intrinsically feminine body, and a beautiful one at that.

Also learned a new term - mewing.

What if modern beauty standards aren’t so much a war between genders, but a symptom of a system that preys on human weaknesses? It was philosopher Michel Foucault’s 1975 essay “Discipline and Punish” that famously illuminated the state of the human body under capitalism. “The new discipline invades the body and seeks to regulate its very forces and operation, the economy and efficiency of its movements… to increase the utility of the body, to augment its forces,” he wrote. Today, the same rings true. In a recent interview on Joshua Citarella’s Doomscroll, Professor Quinn Slobodian explains how we live under neoliberal power that upholds a capitalist economy by prioritising marketability at all costs. To survive in such a climate, it’s necessary that we, as members of this society, consider ourselves as marketable goods too. Ones that are as strong, healthy, beautiful, and optimised as possible.

Under capitalism, the idea that we need to suffer at work to both achieve success and enjoy our lives is one that is driven home constantly, and the same is true for aesthetics; the more committed we are and the more we suffer to achieve them, the more we deserve them. Think of how we might believe that the more a skin treatment stings and burns, the more effective it must be. Labour is a good thing, under this view, and required of all of us to take part in the economy.

AI Browsers

The AI browser wars are about to begin #ai #browser

At this point after fully moving over to Arc, the biggest thing I want in a browser is the concept of Spaces.

Here are the AI browsers mentioned in the article: • Comet (by Perplexity) • Arc (by the Browser Company) • Neon (by Opera) • OpenAI's browser (in development)

The State of IaC

Screaming in the Cloud | The Latest State of IaC with Ido Neeman #iac #terraform

Hypernormalization

Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues. The dissonance is real | Well actually | The Guardian #hypernormalization #institutions

“Hypernormalization” is a heady, $10 word, but it captures the weird, dire atmosphere of the US in 2025.

First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.

The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.

“What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working … and yet the institutions and the people in power just are, like, ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has,” Harfoush says in her video.

Hypernormalization captures this juxtaposition of the dysfunctional and mundane.

Naming an experience can be a form of psychological relief. “The worst thing in the world is to feel that you’re the only one who feels this way and that you are going quietly mad and everyone else is in denial,” says Caroline Hickman, a psychotherapist and instructor at the University of Bath specializing in climate anxiety. “That terrifies people. It traumatizes people.”

People who feel the “wrongness” of current conditions acutely may be experiencing some depression and anxiety, but those feelings can be quite rational – not a symptom of poor mental health, alarmism or a lack of proper perspective, Hickman says.

“People don’t shut down because they don’t feel anything,” says Hickman. “They shut down because they feel too much.” Understanding this overwhelm is an important first step in resisting inaction – it helps us see fear as a trap.

Curtis points out that governments may intentionally keep their citizens in a vulnerable state of dread and confusion as “a brilliant way of managing a highly febrile and anxious society”, he says.

In 2014, Ursula Le Guin accepted the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, saying: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

Harfoush reflects on this quote often. It underscores the fact that “this world we’ve created is ultimately a choice”, she says. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

We have the research, technologies and wisdom to create better, more sustainable systems.

“But meaningful change requires collective awakening and decisive action,” says Harfoush. “And we need to start now.”

Longevity

How ‘longevity’ became the new buzzword in health #ageing

Hawkins says: “Those two things open up an interesting split in the longevity conversation. On the one hand you have this high-tech, science-driven approach where someone is actively throwing quite a lot of money and technology at understanding and optimising their own ageing process; and on the other, with the Blue Zones, it’s a radically back to basics approach to health. A lot of the reasons that we see people living longer in Blue Zones are really foundational things: like having strong community ties and eating relatively unprocessed diets.”

Where once people would brag about being “crazy busy” or pulling an all-nighter at work, now logging eight hours of sleep on your Oura ring score carries more cachet. There’s been such a culture shift that it seems extraordinary now that live fast, die young was ever considered a cool rock’n’roll mantra.

Hawkins says the Future Laboratory report was exploring “this idea that you and your quality of life are ultimately your greatest investment. It’s definitely a status symbol in that way. Perhaps in the future it won’t be so much about the designer hand bag, it’s more what treatments do you have access to, what means do you have to take control over your ageing.”

Anthropic and their focus on Coding AIs

Claude-powered coding tools are poised to transform programming #claude #code #ai #coding

An underrated AI story over the last year has been Anthropic’s success in the market for coding tools.

“We believe coding is extremely important,” said Anthropic engineer Sholto Douglas in an interview last week. “We care a lot about coding. We care a lot about measuring progress on coding. We think it’s the most important leading indicator of model capabilities.”

This focus has paid off. The company’s models have excelled at software engineering since last June’s release of Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Over the last year, a number of Claude-powered coding tools—including Cursor, Windsurf, Bolt.new, and Lovable—have enjoyed explosive growth. In February, Anthropic released a coding assistant called Claude Code that has become popular among programmers.

In media interviews, Anthropic employees have touted the extreme efficiency gains Claude has enabled for its own programmers.

For some reason they never mentioned Amp below.

Anthropic’s success in the coding market has gotten the attention of both OpenAI and Google:

• In early May, OpenAI announced it was acquiring Windsurf, an AI-powered code editing tool that had been powered by Anthropic models.
• The next week, OpenAI announced Codex, a coding agent designed to compete with Anthropic’s Claude Code.
• Last week Google announced its own coding agent called Jules.

The Four Phases of Institutional Collapse in the Age of AI

The Four Phases of Institutional Collapse in the Age of AI

I think it’s happening like this -

This isn’t a linear story arc or a roadmap of change etc, just a rough progression. These phases overlap, feed into each other, contradict themselves. But they help explain what’s going on right now. Why everything feels like it’s… eroding.

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2025-05-29

The Inverse Catfish Method

What's The Opposite Of Catfishing? #beauty #gender #relationships

Allow me to introduce my signature online dating move: the Inverse Catfish Method.

Back when I was on the apps, I’d upload slightly _un_flattering photos of myself — an up-close, no-makeup selfie; a wide shot in a muumuu the size of a small circus tent — in an effort to meet men who weren’t primarily interested in looks. Bonus: In person, I exceeded all expectations! I’ve found love two, maybe even three times this way (the last one stuck) despite the fact that my skin, like yours, is marked by acne scars, visible pores and a smattering of old chicken pox pits (plus the burgeoning wrinkles of a woman ten years your senior).

If this makes me seem like I have some neurotic need to diminish myself before a man does it first, well… guilty as charged. After reading your question, Not A Catfish, I’d say we have this in common.

AI and Automation

Pluralistic: AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers (27 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow #ai #automation

Honestly the whole piece is worth reading -- it goes into the history of the Luddite movement, AI assisted coding, worker's rights etc

This is what makes investors and bosses slobber so hard for AI – a "productivity" boost that arises from taking away the bargaining power of workers so that they can be made to labor under worse conditions for less money. The efficiency gains of automation aren't just about using fewer workers to achieve the same output – it's about the fact that the workers you fire in this process can be used as a threat against the remaining workers: "Do your job and shut up or I'll fire you and give your job to one of your former colleagues who's now on the breadline."

So there are two stories about automation and labor: in the dominant narrative, workers are afraid of the automation that delivers benefits to all of us, stand in the way of progress, and get steamrollered for their own good, as well as ours. In the other narrative, workers are glad to have boring and dangerous parts of their work automated away and happy to produce more high-quality goods and services, and stand ready to assess and plan the rollout of new tools, and when workers object to automation, it's because they see automation being used to crush them and worsen the outputs they care about, at the expense of the customers they care for.

As has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, the project of automation isn't just about increasing productivity, it's about weakening labor power as a prelude to lowering quality. Take what's happened to the news industry, where mass layoffs are being offset by AI tools.

…consumers and workers are class allies in the automation wars. The point of using automation to weaken labor isn't just cheaper products – it's cheaper, defective products, inflicted on the unsuspecting and defenseless public who are no longer protected by workers' professionalism and pride in their jobs.

Love the description of centaurs vs reverse-centaur

In modern automation/labor theory, this debate is framed in terms of "centaurs" (humans who are assisted by technology) and "reverse-centaurs" (humans who are conscripted to assist technology):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

There are plenty of workers who are excited at the thought of using AI tools to relieve them of some drudgework. To the extent that these workers have power over their bosses and their working conditions, that excitement might well be justified. I hear a lot from programmers who work on their own projects about how nice it is to have a kind of hypertrophied macro system that can generate and tweak little automated tools on the fly so the humans can focus on the real, chewy challenges. Those workers are the centaurs, and it's no wonder that they're excited about improved tooling.

But the reverse-centaur version is a lot darker. The reverse-centaur coder is an assistant to the AI, charged with being a "human in the loop" who reviews the material that the AI produces. This is a pretty terrible job to have.

and an astute observation on the potentially waning power of the tech worker

Tech bosses tormented these workers but pampered their coders. That wasn't out of any sentimental attachment to tech workers. Rather, tech bosses were afraid of tech workers, because tech workers possess a rare set of skills that can be harnessed by tech firms to produce gigantic returns. Tech workers have historically been princes of labor, able to command high salaries and deferential treatment from their bosses (think of the amazing tech "campus" perks), because their scarcity gave them power.

It's easy to predict how tech bosses would treat tech workers if they could get away with it – just look how they treat workers they aren't afraid of. Just like the textile mill owners of the Industrial Revolution, the thing that excites tech bosses about AI is the possibility of cutting off a group of powerful workers at the knees. After all, it took more than a century for strong labor unions to match the power that the pre-Industrial Revolution guilds had. If AI can crush the power of tech workers, it might buy tech bosses a century of free rein to shift value from their workforce to their investors, while also doing away with pesky Tron-pilled workers who believe they have a moral obligation to "fight for the user."

…

When techies describe their experience of AI, it sometimes sounds like they're describing two completely different realities – and that's because they are. For workers with power and control, automation turns them into centaurs, who get to use AI tools to improve their work-lives. For workers whose power is waning, AI is a tool for reverse-centaurism, an electronic whip that pushes them to work at superhuman speeds. And when they fail, these workers become "moral crumple zones," absorbing the blame for the defective products their bosses pushed out in order to goose profits.

As ever, what a technology does pales in comparison to who it does it for and who it does it to.

On the Origin of Wealth

On the Origin of Wealth - by Rob Kurzban - Living Fossils #wealth #beliefs

We reset to the pre-fire days. A traveling guru arrives. Both charismatic and mischievous, he convinces the village that a comet will destroy the world in one week. Panic sets in. No one wants seed corn, let alone shovels anymore—what’s the point of planting if there’s no future? The farmer with the seed corn can’t get anyone to trade with him, making his seed useless. In fact, he stops bothering to protect his corn. Same for the shovel-maker. He can’t even give them away. Some people in the village who happened to have food around can still eat, but many people in the village have nothing left of value to trade. They are poorer. Now, the comet isn’t real. But the value—the wealth—disappears anyway. Even though the stuff is still there.

Now imagine the opposite: the comet is real. Hurtling toward Earth. But this time, no one knows. People go about their lives, bartering, farming, planning next year’s harvest. The value stays intact—right up to the fiery end.

From these hypotheticals, we see that while stuff matters, just as in the cases of power, property rights, and groups, the real hard candy shell of wealth is beliefs. The actual comet doesn’t destroy wealth until it arrives, but beliefs about the fictional comet blew up the economy.

AI Hype

Don’t Believe the AI Hype by Daron Acemoglu - Project Syndicate

First the AI Snake Oil guys and now this.

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2025-05-28

The Who Cares Era | dansinker.com

In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.

In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.

At a time where the government's uncaring boot is pressing down on all of our necks, the best way to fight back is to care. Care loudly. Tell others. Get going.

As the culture of the Who Cares Era grinds towards the lowest common denominator, support those that are making real things. Listen to something with your full attention. Watch something with your phone in the other room. Read an actual paper magazine or a book.

Be yourself.

Be imperfect.

Be human.

Care.

Personal Software

RedwoodSDK is a React framework for Cloudflare #software #programming #hipster

We believe software can be personal again. Not just technically, but philosophically. Owned. Forkable. Shareable. Local. Beautiful. Built for use, not for scale. Built with love, not venture funding. Built for yourself - and maybe a few others. If this resonates with you, come join us. We're not just building a framework. We're building a future where software is yours again.

Adolescence

What “Adolescence” Gets Wrong About Incels, Crime, and Class #tv #incel

Despite its emotional impact, though, “Adolescence” is fiction widely misinterpreted as fact. The very aspects praised as realistic are, indeed, statistically improbable and misleading.

Shortly after watching the show, I spoke with William Costello, a PhD student at the University of Texas who is among the few researchers seriously studying the incel subculture. His findings complicate the simplistic narrative many viewers seem to believe “Adolescence” affirms.

The creators of “Adolescence” may have intentionally crafted an atypical narrative to highlight how rage and violence can appear unexpectedly. Ironically, some of the series’s admirers miss this nuance, mistaking a fictional tragedy for a representative one.

In doing so, they overlook uncomfortable truths about the causes of most violent crime, which are rooted less in online radicalization than in fractured families and offline peer dynamics.

“Adolescence” is a superb work of art. It should not be mistaken for reality.

The Copilot Delusion

The Copilot Delusion #copilot #ai #software #programming

The thing I hate the most about AI and it's ease of access; the slow, painful death of the hacker soul... Brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By buttons. By bots.

The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs. It’s that it will entice people who never wanted the job to begin with. People who don't care for quality. It'll remove the already tiny barrier to entry that at-least required people to try and comprehend control flow. Vampires with SaaS dreams and Web3 in their LinkedIn bio. Empty husks who see the terminal not as a frontier, but as a shovel for digging up VC money. They’ll drool over their GitHub Copilot like it’s the holy spirit of productivity, pumping out React CRUD like it’s oxygen. They'll fork VS Code yet again, just to sell the same dream to a similarly deluded kid.

There was once magic here. There was once madness.

Kids would stay up all night on IRC with bloodshot eyes, trying to render a cube in OpenGL without segfaulting their future. They cared. They would install Gentoo on a toaster just to see if it’d boot. They knew the smell of burnt voltage regulators and the exact line of assembly where Doom hit 10 FPS on their calculator. These were artists. They wrote code like jazz musicians - full of rage, precision, and divine chaos.

Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard, born to be great, is going to get told to "review this AI-generated patchset" for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin.

Because you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s the cruel joke. We’ll fill this industry with people who think they’re good, because their bot passed CI. They'll float through, confident, while the real ones - the hungry ones - get chewed up by a system that doesn’t value understanding anymore. Just output. Just tokens per second.

And what’s worse, we’ll normalize this mediocrity. Cement it in tooling. Turn it into a best practice. We'll enshrine this current bloated, sluggish, over-abstracted hellscape as the pinnacle of software. The idea that building something lean and wild and precise, or even squeezing every last drop of performance out of a system, will sound like folklore.

If that happens? If the last real programmers are drowned in a sea of button-clicking career-chasers - then I pity the smart outsider kids to come after me.

Defer your thinking to the bot, and we all rot.

How to be a great thinker

How to be a great thinker #intelligence

Most people are getting dumber. Largely because of the smartphone, we’re in an era of declining attention spans, reading skills, numeracy and verbal reasoning. How to buck the trend? I’ve charted seven intellectual habits of the best thinkers. True, these people exist in a different league from the rest of us. To use an analogy from computing, their high processing power allows them to crunch vast amounts of data from multiple domains. In other words, they have intellectual overcapacity. Still, we can learn from their methods. These can sound obvious, but few people live by them.

1. Read books: Books convey the nuanced complexity of the world.
2. Don’t use screens much: This frees time for books and allows the mind to roam.
3. Do your own work, not the world’s: Focus on personal intellectual freedom rather than maximizing income.
4. Be multidisciplinary: Break down barriers between disciplines to foster innovative thinking.
5. Be an empiricist who values ideas: Prioritize empirical observations and insights.
6. Always assume you might be wrong: Challenge your own assumptions to reach deeper insights.
7. Keep learning from everyone: Embrace lifelong learning and insights from all individuals, regardless of status.

Also loved this story about Isaiah Berlin

In March 1944, Isaiah Berlin returned from Washington to London on a bomber plane. He had to wear an oxygen mask all flight, wasn’t allowed to sleep for fear he would suffocate, and couldn’t read as there was no light. “One was therefore reduced to a most terrible thing,” he recalled, “to having to think — and I had to think for about seven or eight hours in this bomber.” During this long interstitial moment, Berlin decided to become an historian of ideas. He ended up writing the classic essays The Hedgehog and the Fox and Two Concepts of Liberty.

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2025-05-25

Entry-level tech hiring

Entry-level tech hiring is down 50%. So much for that diploma #tech #software #hiring

Not sure how long this will endure, but it makes for grim reading.

(Also I can't quote from it for some reason)

Silicon Valley Used to Idolize Youth. AI Is Changing That. - Business Insider

This isn't just an economic or technical evolution, it's a cultural one. Where Silicon Valley once idolized youth, today's market prizes proven execution. Risk tolerance has dropped across the startup ecosystem, and with venture capital funding tightening, founders are hesitant to invest in long-term potential over short-term impact.

Interestingly, this has opened the door for more seasoned professionals. While C-suite hiring has also slowed, companies are increasingly turning to "fractional" roles — part-time CTOs, CMOs, and advisors — to access senior talent without inflating their burn rate, according to SignalFire.

Dumb Phones

Is America Headed for an Age of Dumb Phones? - Business Insider #tech #dumb

Matt Thurmond seems like a poster child for tech-forward millennials. He runs an AI-assisted platform for mortgage professionals. He leads a nonprofit that connects longevity researchers, investors, and startups. He was the copresident of a technology conference at Harvard, where he got his MBA.

So it's a little surprising that Thurmond is almost never on his phone.

Count him among the "appstinent" — one of a growing number of Americans, mostly millennials and Zoomers, vowing to live a life free of endless scrolling. "Screen time was just crowding out other things," says Thurmond, who's 41. "That's not where I want to get my entertainment, and it's not really where I want to have any substantive conversation. I prefer to do that kind of stuff in the analog world."

"Appstinence," a play on abstinence, was coined by Gabriela Nguyen, a 24-year-old graduate student at Harvard. Nguyen, who grew up in Silicon Valley and got her first iPod Touch when she was 9, came to view her addiction to phones and social media as the enemy of productivity and living in the moment. She found her calling in encouraging people to wean themselves off their phones. Last year, she started a club called APPstinence at Harvard and launched a website of the same name.

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2025-05-22

The Era of the Business Idiot

The Era Of The Business Idiot #neoliberalism #manager #workers #shareholder #value

This looong 13000 piece is worth reading in full. But this quote stood out for me

We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work. Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don't experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.

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2025-05-21

Preferences on Dating Apps

‘Swipe left if you’re under 6ft’: Why are we so obsessed with height? | Dazed #dating #height

Plus, there’s often a gap between people’s self-reported preferences and their actual desires. Or, in other words, there’s a difference between what people say they want on dating apps and what really attracts them in real life. “Dating apps encourage trait-based decisions: users rely on profile details and photos, making choices based on abstract concepts. By contrast, offline attraction is holistic and dynamic, involving nonverbal cues, synchrony, and how someone makes you feel,” Dr Jackson explains.

“In real life, we’re drawn to things like how someone moves, how they listen or make us laugh, their energy, presence, and charisma,” he continues. “These are what we call ‘affective cues’ – these cues play a big role in forming real-world attraction, but they’re almost entirely absent online, where we judge people from a few photos. In person, we also tend to become more forgiving and open once we’ve formed a sense of someone’s warmth, humour, or kindness.” He adds that research shows physical appearance matters less and less over time in ongoing relationships, once deeper emotional bonds have begun to form.

This is one of the myriad issues with online dating: apps inhibit our ability to be curious and imaginative about what we might want. They expect us to possess an unrealistic level of self-knowledge about all of our desires, as if desire is fixed and immutable rather than fluid and ever-changing. But we don’t have to play by apps’ rules – disengaging from rigid ideas about physical ‘types’ and fostering open-mindedness remains our best bet when it comes to finding lasting love.

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2025-05-19

What is HDR

What is HDR, anyway?

Your modern phone's camera first captures a series of photos at various brightness levels, like we showed a moment ago. From this burst of photos, the app calculates an HDR image, but unlike that commercial software from earlier, it uses complex logic and AI to make the tone mapping choices for you.

Apple and Google called this stuff "HDR" because "HDR Construction Followed By Automatic Tone Mapping" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. But just to be clear, the HDR added to the iPhone in 2010 was not HDR. The final JPEG was an SDR image that tries to replicate what you saw with your eyes. Maybe they should have called it "Fake HDR Mode."

In the age of film negatives, photography was a three step process.

1. Capture a scene on film
2. Develop the film in a lab
3. Transfer the film to paper

It's important to break down these steps because— plot twist— film is actually a high dynamic range medium. You just lose the dynamic range when you transfer your photo from a negative to paper. So in the age before Photoshop, master photographers would "dodge and burn" photos to preserve details during the transfer.

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2025-05-18

The good times in tech are over | sean goedecke #tech #programming #software #jobs

In the 2010s, interest rates were zero or close to zero2. Investors could thus borrow a lot of money. Much of that money was spent on tech companies in the hope of outsized returns. Tech companies were thus incentivized to (a) hire like crazy, and (b) do a lot of low-risk high-reward things, even if that ends up wasting money. Tech companies definitely did not have to be profitable. In fact, they didn’t even need to make money - they just had to acquire users, or at least hype, to drive up the valuation of the company itself. In that environment, throwing money at their software engineers (in the form of paid trips, in-house chefs, and huge comp packages) was a sensible business decision.

In 2023, this underlying economic situation reversed: interest rates went up to around 5%3. Tech company incentives completely flipped: now it’s suddenly important to be profitable, or at least to make lots of money. That means it’s not wise for most companies to hire like crazy, or to continue throwing near-unlimited amounts of money at their software engineers.

The biggest thing to internalize is that companies now are actually trying to focus. In 2015, there was a lot of appetite to do everything at the same time: building out new product lines, transitioning from a product to a platform, making significant open-source contributions, working on a top-tier developer experience, and so on. In 2025, most of these initiatives have been abruptly defunded in order to put more resources into a handful of bets that the company executives actually care about.

During the 2010s, it was as if companies were their software engineers, and were interested in the same things as their engineers were. A lot of engineers were fooled by this into identifying strongly with their employer. But this was a mirage: in part caused by companies’ desire to attract and retain talent, and in part by there being no real pressure on companies to say no to anything. Now the mirage has vanished. Companies are their executive leadership, and their executive leadership are interested in a much smaller set of things.

If I had to choose, I’d definitely choose to return to the job market of the 2010s, so I can be paid more to work less and have more job security. I’m not an idiot. But the silver lining to actually having to ship is that you’re no longer living in a dream. If you’re realistic about how things work, the job of software engineering becomes much easier to understand:

1. Providing value to the company gets you rewarded
2. Not providing value to the company gets you punished
3. “Value to the company” means furthering the explicit plans of your company’s executives

It’s not much of a mission statement! Certainly nothing on “making the world a better place”. But it has the comforting solidity of the truth. The good thing about the music finally stopping is that you don’t have to worry about when it’s going to stop.

Liquid Content

The Dawn of Liquid Content - by Ryan Khurana

In our world, AI is obliterating the boundaries between forms altogether.

Welcome to the age of Liquid Content—where information flows seamlessly between mediums, transforming its shape while preserving its essence. What was once fixed—text, audio, video—now exists in a state of perpetual potential, ready to materialize in whatever form serves the moment. To understand where Liquid Content will take us, we need only to look at how it has already transformed how we comprehend information.

On TikTok, a video’s format – short, vertical, often overlaid with text – is key to its addictive appeal. A striking example is the prevalence of AI-enabled dynamic transcript overlays (auto-captions and text snippets that appear in sync with speech). By presenting spoken words as on-screen text, TikTok videos manage to grip viewers even with the sound off – something traditional digital media formats failed to do. The result? Higher engagement and retention. In fact, surveys have found that 80% of viewers are more likely to watch an entire video when captions are on, and 37% say captions actually encourage them to turn the sound on out of increased interest.

If TikTok and Spotify show medium shifts in action, AI-powered multimodality represents something far more radical: the complete liberation of content from form. We're not just talking about converting text to speech—we're entering an era where content exists as pure information potential, ready to materialize in whatever medium best serves the moment.

This isn't just flexible content; it's Liquid Content—a paradigm where information flows into the vessel most appropriate for context, user, and purpose.

Breathwork

I was sceptical about breathwork so I did my own research | Psyche Ideas #health #wellness

It all started when I heard about a landmark scientific paper that involved the ‘Ice Man’ Wim Hof training a group of volunteers in a specific breathing technique, and comparing their outcomes with a control group. Earlier, all the volunteers had been injected with a bacterial endotoxin; the results of the breathwork experiment suggested that the Hof group had been able to use controlled breathing to influence their autonomic nervous system, and subsequently their immune response to the toxin.

breathwork techniques

Breathwork is both ancient and contemporary. ‘Breath’ translates as spirit in Latin: spiritus. Derived from practices such as yogic pranayama (prana = life-giving force; ayama = extension or expansion) and Tibetan tummo (‘inner fire’) meditation, it encompasses diverse techniques that regulate breathing patterns to influence physical, mental and emotional states. Techniques range from slow, meditative-like breathing (such as coherent breathing, and nadi shodhana, which is alternate nostril breathing) to faster, high-ventilation styles (such as Hof’s hyperventilation with breath holds, and Stanislav Grof’s holotropic breathwork, which involves engaging in very deep breathing for up to three hours at a time).

Other notable techniques include ujjayi breathing and kapalabhati. Ujjayi or ‘ocean breath’ is a soft, whispering breath that can enhance and complement both focus and steadiness, especially while practising movement/yoga. It involves breathing with a slight constriction in your throat, creating a sound like gentle ocean waves. Kapalabhati or ‘skull shining breath’ is a cleansing, high-ventilation practice that involves pumping the navel to produce forceful exhales, with passive inhales due to recoil of the lungs. It may improve mental clarity.

Unlike many wellness trends that come and go, breathwork – similar to meditation and yoga – is grounded in millennia of human experience. However, breathwork’s claims often outpace rigorous scientific validation, so I completely understand the scepticism. Early in my journey, I too questioned whether controlled breathing could truly influence wellbeing. In fact, it’s part of what motivated me to begin my doctoral research, titled Does Breathwork Work? An Empirical Evaluation of the Hype (2008).

Living without a higher purpose

We can live well, even though we don’t have a higher purpose | Psyche Ideas #purpose #life #self-improvement

In her fiction and theory, Le Guin rejects both nihilism and optimism on the grounds that both defer to a ‘higher purpose’. For her, living without a higher purpose means assuming a few things:

• There is no deity or force in the Universe with a specific plan for our life.
• How society is currently organised is not inevitable; the hierarchies we are born into can be changed.
• We have no specific biological nature that has preprogrammed what it is to be human.
• The people who raised us and the things we’ve been subjected to do not dictate our life’s path.

The Anti-Tech Canon - Books

The Anti-Tech Canon: 30 Books - by Ted Gioia #books #humanities

Back in 2024, I felt an urgent need to challenge the new doctrine of techno-optimism. This ideology told people to shut up and keep scrolling.

Silicon Valley would build utopia for us. We just needed to stare into those tiny screens 24/7, download all the apps, and upload all our private information.

They would do all the rest.

Around that time, some tech leaders started sharing reading lists. These were mostly filled with garbage books—banal pop psychology, sycophantic tech bro bios, and padded ‘big idea’ screeds churned out by Gladwell-ish gladhanders.

I found this alarming. I don’t tell these people what to code. Why were they telling me what to read?

Let me be blunt: You won’t learn about those better books from tech CEOs. Many of them are very smart—I spent 25 years in Silicon Valley and know that from firsthand experience. But right now the tech world needs an infusion of humanistic thinking and a larger cultural perspective.

And that’s not something that Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Tim Cook can deliver.

You need to go outside the tech echo chamber to find this larger wisdom. I’m talking about the real thing—holistic and healing and with the deepest of roots.

There is no app for this.

I have now updated and expanded that reading list. And I’ve also removed it from behind the paywall where it has been hidden from view.

• Shakespeare's final play: A celebration of imagination, harmony, and reconciliation.
• Dr. Frankenstein: The responsibilities of the technocrat and the price of innovation.
• Ruskin's The Nature of Gothic: A critique of organizations from a human standpoint.
• Ruskin's Unto This Last: An ethical perspective on economics.
• Dickens' Hard Times: Compassionate reform in the face of industrialization.
• Thoreau's Walden: A contemplative life in nature.
• Mann's The Magic Mountain: The limitations of the technocrat worldview.
• Ortega's The Dehumanization of Art: The relevance of human elements in art.
• Huxley's Brave New World: The dangers of addiction and distraction.
• Huizinga's Homo Ludens: The importance of playfulness in human life.
• Orwell's 1984: A critique of surveillance and authoritarianism.
• Weil's The Need for Roots: The implications of uprootedness in society.
• Heidegger's The Question Concerning Technology: A philosophical critique of technology.
• Arendt's The Human Condition: A playbook for a creative, purposeful life.
• Leavis and Snow's debate: The value of tech versus humanities.
• Herbert's Dune: Themes of power and ecological exploitation.
• Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: Dystopian views on human and machine boundaries.
• Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Insights on technology and society.
• Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: Flourishing in nature without digital interfaces.
• Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The evolution of power and surveillance.
• Gaddis' JR: A postmodernist view on reality and business.
• Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation: The critique of hyperreality.
• Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: The dangers of screen-driven culture.
• Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go: Nurturing empathy in a tech-driven world.
• McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary: The risks of a left-brain dominated worldview.
• Feyerabend's Against Method: A plea for a pluralistic approach to science.
• Han's The Burnout Society: The impact of multitasking on mental health.
• Wulf's The Invention of Nature: The Romantic movement's influence on culture.
• Taylor's Philosopher of the Arts: The importance of arts in realizing a fulfilling life.

Tariff Drama as Kayfabe

WWEconomics: Kayfabe and the Trade War - by kyla scanlon

We’re increasingly watching a simulacrum of politics, a simulation where the real consequences of a trade deal or a policy shift are overshadowed by the perceived drama. Because of this, the true effects of the trade deal, the policy changes, and the corporate maneuvers are obscured by the illusion of political engagement. The focus on tariffs keeps the spotlight on symbolic victories, while deeper, structural issues like worker retraining and investment in future industries remain sidelined.

In professional wrestling, everyone knows the outcomes are predetermined. The championship belts change hands according to storylines written in advance.

The show will continue because the incentives align: politicians get attention, corporations get deals, and algorithms get engagement, whatever. As Barthes pointed out, wrestling is about symbolic conflict - not real violence. The same could be said for the trade war. The real fight is happening behind the scenes, where the deals are made. In the end, both wrestlers leave the ring richer, the audience leaves poorer, and the kayfabe continues.

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2025-05-17

Tehran's Cafe Culture

Tehran adopts modern café society #tehran #iran #cafe #culture

Cafe culture is the best.

At the heart of the transformation is the rise of trendy new cafés, driven by the demands of a young, educated population that may not have significant wealth but has an undeniable passion for socialising in different spaces and feeling connected to global trends.

In Tehran and other major cities here, café culture has exploded. Although there’s still much ground to cover and quality to improve, this culinary upheaval is as much about reclaiming identity as it is about embracing the rest of the world.

“Everybody is creating cracks in the wall of fanaticism, even those linked to the political system, whether they’re aware of it or not,” said one person in the sector. “Look at how alive the city is at a very difficult time. And this is thanks to these cafés, theatres and art galleries.”

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2025-05-16

Navigating by aliveness

The Imperfectionist: Navigating by aliveness

from Oliver Burkeman's latest

The concept that sits right at the heart of a sane and meaningful life, I’m increasingly convinced, is something like aliveness. It goes by other names, too, none of which quite nail it – but it’s the one thing that, so long as you navigate by it, you’ll never go too far wrong. Sometimes it feels like a subtle electrical charge behind what’s happening, or a mildly heightened sense of clarity, or sometimes like nothing I can put into words at all. I freely concede it’s a hopelessly unscientific idea. But I’m pretty sure it’s what Joseph Campbell meant when he said that most of us aren’t really seeking the meaning of life, but rather “an experience of being alive… so that we actually feel the rapture” – although personally I don’t think it’s always rapturous, per se – “of being alive.”

feeling better vs feeling better.

Crucially, aliveness isn’t the same as happiness. As the Zen teacher Christian Dillo explains in his engrossing book The Path of Aliveness, you can absolutely feel alive in the midst of intense sadness. Aliveness, he writes, “isn’t about feeling better; it’s about feeling better.” When I feel aliveness in my work, it’s not because every task is an unadulterated pleasure; and when I feel it in my close relationships, it’s not because I’ve transcended the capacity to get annoyed by other people – because believe me, I haven’t.

I love how this newsletter managed to squeeze in commentary about large language models

Most obviously, aliveness is what generally feels absent from the written and visual outputs of ChatGPT and its ilk, even when they’re otherwise of high quality. I’m not claiming I couldn’t be fooled into thinking AI writing or art was made by a human (I’m sure I already have been); but that when I realise something’s AI, either because it’s blindingly obvious or when I find out, it no longer feels so alive to me. And that this change in my feelings about it isn’t irrelevant: that it means something.

Meanwhile, aliveness is certainly missing from the future envisioned recently by Mark Zuckerberg, in which the loneliness epidemic will be somehow alleviated by artificial friends – a gang of pals who are always there for you, in every respect, except for the fact that they lack the capacity to know that you even exist.

More subtly, it feels like our own aliveness is what’s at stake when we’re urged to get better at prompting LLMs to provide the most useful responses. Maybe that’s a necessary modern skill; but still, the fact is that we’re being asked to think less like ourselves and more like our tools. It makes you wonder if Wendell Berry had it right when he wrote: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

The Global Matcha Boom

Matcha TikTok Craze Has Japan Facing Tea Shortage, Raising Prices - Bloomberg #matcha #economics

Matcha’s delicate supply chain is partly culpable for the shortage. The powder is made from ground-up shade-grown tea leaves, known as tencha, that are usually harvested once a year. Although tencha production is on the rise, Japan's tea industry as a whole is grappling with an aging population and a lack of successors willing to take over. To meet global demand, the government is considering measures to encourage more farmers to shift production toward tencha away from other forms of green tea.

Also form this podcast transcript: Japan Matcha Shortage: TikTok Craze, Tourism Boom Drive Demand - Bloomberg

Ha: While Japanese have been drinking less green tea over the years – outside of Japan, the appetite for matcha is expanding. Cafes and tea stores as far as Sydney in Australia, have seen sales skyrocket, forcing owners to limit customer purchases because they’re unable to source more of the tea powder from Japan. After the break, why can’t Japanese tea producers just… make more matcha?

Ha: Growing fine quality matcha has a lot to do with the land and the climate. The plant needs to be shaded. The soil needs to drain well, but also retain a decent amount of water. And while matcha is produced in a variety of regions in Japan, there’s one particular place renowned for this highly-prized tea.

Glass: So the most famous region is Uji, which is on the southeast border of Kyoto. And that's where matcha farmers have mastered techniques of growing and harvesting the best matcha, and they've been doing this for centuries.

Ha: So that does sound like a long and arduous process – but certainly not impossible, right? Why can’t supply just keep up with the demand?

Glass: Yeah, so the whole process that I just described, it only happens once a year for the most premium types of matcha, so farmers can't harvest more on demand. The annual supply is usually determined well in advance. And it's obviously a really slow, precise process as well. So the traditional stone mills only grind about 40 grams of matcha per hour. And specialized matcha processing machines are super limited in number. So increasing production speed would definitely compromise the quality of the matcha. And also a lot of these types of produce are pretty much made by family-run businesses in Japan, and obviously Japan has a declining population, it's aging, and there's not enough people to take over those farms in the future, so there's really just a decline in supply for that reason as well.

Levered 401(k)

Mortgage Your 401(k) - Bloomberg #finance #investment

From the latest Money Stuff newsletter by Matt Levine

A levered 401(k) is 👨🏽‍🍳😘

What percentage of her net worth should a 30-year-old professional have in the stock market? I am not going to give you investment advice, and there is a wide range of plausible answers. “Zero, put it all in Bitcoin” is I guess on the list. A popular rule of thumb would say 70% in stocks, with the other 30% in bonds and cash. There is, however, a good theoretical case that the right answer is really 200%, or 500%: Most of a young professional’s economic wealth is the present value of her future employment income, and borrowing money to buy more stocks is a good way to diversify away from that one risky asset. Also many 30-year-old professionals buy houses for considerably more than 200% of their net worth, and putting 200% of their net worth into the stock market could again be useful diversification.

But it is not easy to put 200% of your net worth into the stock market, because where will you get the money? A mortgage on a house is a pretty standard product in the US, but a mortgage on a retirement account is not. Bloomberg’s Suzanne Woolley reports on someone trying to change that:

The Biggest Dating App Faux Pas for Gen Z? Being Cringe

The Biggest Dating App Faux Pas for Gen Z? Being Cringe | WIRED

When it comes to online dating, Giovanni Wolfram, a 25-year-old living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, isn’t all too worried about whether his fellow dating app users will find him attractive. Rather, his biggest fear is that he might come off as “cringey.”

“You can get away with being ugly,” Wolfram says. “But being cringey is just like—that's a character that's imprinted on you.” Since he first joined Hinge at 18, he has worked hard to scrub his profile of sincerity. He’s kept his responses to Hinge’s prompts sarcastic and ironic, sort of as a litmus test. Some people take his snark seriously, but those people don’t get a response from him.

“Intellectually, I’m really all about sincerity and earnestness,” says Wolfram, but he worries about “being perceived as one of those guys who is too earnest and too sincere.”

Sincerity, earnestness, irony-free declarations of contentment—these are all things many young adults edit out of their online personas. Much of what Gen Z considers “cringe” might strike others simply as directness and honesty, but one generation’s authenticity is another’s red flag. Young adults’ tendencies toward lightheartedness and jokes in their online self-presentation may point to the way many of them are dealing with feelings of vulnerability and disillusionment.

Wolfram finds millennials’ sincerity “revolting.” He points to how they respond to dating app prompts in the way they’re intended to be responded to. If the prompt asks the user to share their likes, for example, he often sees millennials “write two paragraphs of lists of everything that they actually like,” he says. “It’s very confusing.”

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2025-05-15

The Economy A User's Guide No 2

The Economy: A User's Guide | No.2: Human Natures - YouTube

Here's a comprehensive, section-by-section summary of Part 2 of Brett Scott’s podcast series (co-produced with Lanley Chase). This installment examines human nature and its influence on economic ideologies, contrasting the narrow economic conception of humans with a broader, multifaceted perspective. It also introduces key frameworks from economic anthropology.

1. Introduction

• Host: Brett Scott, author of Cloud Money and The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance.
• Series overview: A 7-part exploration of the modern economy and capitalism.
• This episode (Part 2): Focuses on human nature and how narrow views of it shape economic systems.

2. The Debate Around Human Nature

• Philosophers and economists have long debated whether humans are selfish, altruistic, rational, etc.

• Economics' dominant model: Homo economicus — a portrayal of humans as rational, self-interested, optimization-driven agents.

• Critics argue this model is:

  • Inaccurate.
  • Self-fulfilling: people may begin acting selfishly if they’re told that’s “human nature.”
  • Used to justify exploitation.

Quote: “Rather than us trying to disprove homo economicus, it's actually much more effective to... argue that we as human beings are in fact multifaceted.”

3. A Spectrum of Human Natures

Scott introduces a spectrum of human archetypes to challenge the singular focus on homo economicus. These represent different facets of the human experience:

• Homo economicus – Maximizes, optimizes, accumulates.
• Homo adventurous – Seeks adventure and thrill.
• Homo comunus – Desires connection and love.
• Homo cogitans – Reflects, analyzes.
• Homo absurdum – Enjoys playfulness and absurdity.
• Homo reverens – Approaches life with seriousness and awe.
• Homo meditari – Craves emptiness and simplicity.
• Homo ecologicus – Feels connected to nature.
• Homo expressio – Desires creative expression.
• Homo shamanicus – Yearns for mystical, non-rational experiences.
• Homo eroticus – Explores intimacy and relational dynamics.
• Homo fusion – Wants to dissolve into group identity.
• Homo inandi – Seeks dominance and control.
• Homo protectorus – Protects others from harm or domination.
• Homo activusmos – Feels injustice and seeks to right it.

Quote: “We are a whole spectrum of human natures at once... but we're seldom ever taught to think of ourselves like this.”

4. How Ideologies Cherry-Pick Human Traits

Different political and economic ideologies isolate one facet of human nature and treat it as the whole truth:

• Hippie culture → Love-centered human nature → Eco-villages, communes.
• Far-right culture → Domination and fear → Nationalism, protectionism, libertarianism.
• Communism → Cooperative nature → Collective ownership and central planning.

These simplified identities shape corresponding economic visions.

5. Neoliberalism and Homo Economicus

• Neoliberalism (post-1980s) elevates homo economicus through deregulation, free markets, and corporate capitalism.
• Common cultural imagery: Thatcher, Reagan, Wall Street, and the ethos of “greed is good.”
• While economists acknowledge competitive traits, they wrongly treat them as definitive.
• Even cooperation is sometimes re-explained through self-interest.

Quote: “Much like we have five senses... economic life has multiple different logics that coexist.”

6. Economic Anthropology: A Broader Lens

Scott introduces anthropologist David Graeber’s work (Debt: The First 5000 Years) to explain that real economies operate under multiple moral principles simultaneously, not just market exchange.

#The Three Moral Principles in Economies:

1. Everyday Communism

   • Helping others based on need and capacity, without expecting anything in return.
   • Examples: Giving directions, helping someone in distress.

2. Reciprocity

   • Equal relationships balanced through mutual exchange.
   • Examples: Trading goods, friends cooking for each other.

3. Hierarchy

   • Power/status determines who gives and receives, without expectation of reciprocity.
   • Examples: Kings distributing gifts, bosses treating employees to dinner.

These principles often intersect in complex ways.

7. Real-Life Examples of Moral Principles Intersecting

• Narco gangs: Distribute groceries (everyday communism), build loyalty and status (hierarchy), funded by exchange-based drug trade (reciprocity).

• Helping a homeless person with food: Everyday communism.

• Friend makes you dinner: Reciprocity.

• Boss buys team dinner: Hierarchy.

• Airport queue scenarios:

  • If you're not in a rush, you might let a late passenger go ahead → Everyday communism.
  • If you’re equally stressed, their cutting ahead feels unjust → Reciprocity.
  • If a guard tells everyone to let a disabled person pass → Hierarchy + Communism.

Quote: “Capitalist economies foreground reciprocal exchange... but hierarchy and everyday communism abound in the cracks.”

8. Conclusion and Transition

• Modern capitalism is complex and mixes these moral principles.
• Most people struggle to define capitalism clearly because they are immersed in it.
• Economic anthropology helps us understand what came before capitalism and how alternatives once operated.
• Next episode: A look at pre-capitalist systems and how capitalism emerged by displacing them.

Quote: “Much like a fish cannot get enough distance from water to see it clearly... we often can't get enough distance from our system to observe it properly.”

Actionable Takeaways

• Question singular views of human nature in economics and politics.
• Reflect on your own interactions: Are they governed by exchange, generosity, or hierarchy?
• Explore anthropological works (e.g., Graeber’s Debt) to understand diverse economic systems.
• Be cautious of ideologies that simplify humanity to one trait or motive.

Let me know if you'd like a visual reference sheet of the different "homo" archetypes or the three economic moral principles.

The Best Advice I’ve Ever Heard for How to Be Happy

The Best Advice I’ve Ever Heard for How to Be Happy - The New York Times #happiness #self-help

• Start a weird ritual
• Hang out with younger people
• Spread “positive gossip.”
• Do a “mini version” of your favorite vacation activity.
• Cherish the everyday.
• Set up an “emotional first-aid kit.”
• Savor life like an astronaut.
• Listen to Cher.

Database School: Cloudflare Durable Objects

How Durable Objects and D1 Work: A Deep Dive with Cloudflare’s Josh Howard - YouTube #cloudflare #storage #durable

I have been coming across Durable Objects a lot, especially in the context of AI agents. They do seem like great primitives to design a storage abstraction around. It's also great that they integrate with a Typescript API, which makes sense because Typescript (or more precisely Javascript) is a first class citizen in the V8-Isolate system that Durable Objects run inside of. I really wish the abstraction was as clean in other programming languages. Maybe WASM will solve that in the future.

I asked Claude to generate a visualization from the podcast and I thought it did a pretty good job: Durable Objects Visualization

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2025-05-13

Passport Nation

Citizenship as a Service #passport #citizenship

But there’s something special about Saint Kitts. Its government relies on passport sales as a primary contributor to revenue; in a way, passports are the country’s largest export. Between 2015 and 2022, the Saint Kitts government naturalized some 35,000 citizens through its investment program—meaning in a matter of years, their nation will likely have more economic citizens abroad than it does residents at home. Saint Kitts is a passport island: its prosperity is now intricately linked with the precarious marketplace of global mobility.

The Economy: A User's Guide No. 1

I have decided to watch one of this every day and summarise it here with the help of ChatGPT.

Introduction

• Host: Brett Scott, author of Cloud Money and The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance.
• Series: This is part 1 of a 7-part series exploring the structure of the global economy.
• Goal: To guide listeners from ground-level realities up to global corporate capitalism.

1. Challenging Economic Complexity

• Common belief: The economy is too complex for non-experts.
• Reality: The economic system is messy, human-made, and deeply politicized.
• Most people are conditioned from childhood to enter this system through jobs and money.
• While some thrive, many experience oppression, inequality, and environmental destruction.
• There's a growing sense of meaninglessness due to consumerist culture.
• To change the system, we must first understand and orient ourselves within it.

2. Five Fundamental Anchors of Economic Reality

Scott introduces five “anchors” that help ground our understanding of the economy:

Anchor 1: The Foundation

• We live on Earth, powered by the sun—these are the ultimate sources of economic life.
• Sunlight and air are free, foundational resources; without them, no economy could exist.

Anchor 2: Human Energy Applied to Earth

• Economic value originates from humans using energy to interact with natural resources.
• Applies equally to ancient hunter-gatherers and modern professionals (e.g., software engineers).

Anchor 3: Interdependence, Not Independence

• Humans are born into social networks and shaped by others.
• No one survives or develops entirely alone; society is a mesh of mutual dependence.

Anchor 4: Economy as Interdependent Provisioning

• The economy is the process of people working together to meet needs/desires.
• Forms range from small hunter-gatherer groups to global supply chains.
• Modern capitalism often obscures these interdependencies and inflates perceived needs.

Anchor 5: Economic Life is Embedded in Broader Life

• Economic activity is interconnected with cultural, political, spiritual, and familial life.
• Without non-economic aspects (e.g., love, community), economic activity has no real purpose.
• Mainstream economics often ignores this, presenting the environment and people as external or isolated units.

3. Metaphor: The Economy as a Superorganism

• Just as the body’s cells form a coordinated system, so too do individuals in society.
• No cell can survive alone—same with people in an economy.
• The economy consists of these invisible collaborations among individuals and groups.
• E.g., the production of breakfast cereal involves countless unseen contributors globally.

4. Economic Superorganisms and Power Structures

• Different economic systems (e.g., hunter-gatherers vs. modern market economies) have different structures and power dynamics.
• Removing an individual from these structures (e.g., poverty) is akin to removing a cell from the body—survival becomes difficult.

5. Four Modes of Economic Interdependence

Scott describes four overlapping forms of interdependence:

1. Reproduction

• Creating and nurturing people (e.g., parenting, caregiving).

2. Production

• Collaboratively creating goods/services using physical, mental, and emotional labor.

3. Distribution

• Moving goods/labor through methods like gifting, patronage, trade, or money.

4. Consumption

• Using what others have produced; often overlaps with production.

• Example: A man drawing with a pencil is participating in all four modes:

  • The pencil (production & distribution).
  • His upbringing (reproduction).
  • The drawing process (consumption and production).

• Everyone, even retail workers, operates within these interconnected flows of economic activity.

• Tracing any object (like a pencil) reveals networks involving millions or billions of people—including the listener.

Conclusion

• The economy is a deeply interconnected superorganism, not a collection of isolated individuals.
• Understanding this reality challenges mainstream economic narratives.
• Next episode will explore human nature within this interconnected system.

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2025-05-12

The Evolution of Psychiatry

The evolution of psychiatry - by Adam Hunt #evo-psych #evolution #psychology #psychiatry

Why do psychiatric conditions exist?

…The framework in question is evolutionary psychiatry, and its principle thinking is simple: if we use evolutionary theory to explain biology, then we should be using evolutionary theory to explain psychiatric disorder. If evolution was given proper attention and integrated into mainstream psychiatry, we would usher in a new era of understanding and treatment of psychiatric conditions.

Psychiatric therapies have never been atheoretical – psychiatrists have always justified their treatments with some school of thought: Freudian psychodynamic theories placed blame on early childhood and subconscious urges; behaviorism justified the application of pain to try and train people out of wrongthink; and more recently, chemical imbalance theories were used to advertise pharmaceuticals, despite the narrative of simple dopamine and serotonin dysfunctions having been long dismissed in academic circles. Recent advances in genetics and neuroscience have provided more evidence and complexity, but no promising new theories. Psychiatry today can be considered a discipline in crisis, surviving only because psychological and pharmaceutical treatments are effective for some people, some of the time, and so we still need them. The way is open for a new paradigm in psychiatric theorizing.

Darwin’s prophecy manifested itself in psychology around 100 years after his writing. Now, evolutionary psychology has become a common reference point for public discussion and academic research. Evolutionary psychiatry is a late follower, arising in the last years of the twentieth century alongside evolutionary medicine, its foundational work owing to Randolph Nesse, George Williams, John Price, and others.

This unique theoretical strength has been followed up by work in evolutionary medicine and psychiatry identifying six reasons why conditions we define as disorder or disease (of body or mind) persist in evolved creatures:

1. Constraints on biological design, because evolution can only make alterations within a certain range.
2. Pathogens evolve, so we cannot evolve perfect immunity against them.
3. Design trade-offs and byproducts make perfection impossible.
4. Evolved defenses against disease and danger often induce harmful symptoms.
5. Selection is for reproductive success, not health, so we can evolve in ways which are debilitating if they allow us to reproduce more successfully.
6. Mismatch between evolved systems and modern environments lead to novel, harmful, reactions.

Of these six reasons, it’s important to note that the last four are the modern result of functioning rather than dysfunctioning processes. The idea that natural selection would only encourage perfect health is mistaken. It’s entirely possible for evolution to lead our bodies and minds into states which we now diagnose and treat as disorders or diseases.

For instance, some are mismatched psychological systems which are exposed to over-stimulation in the modern environment, becoming the biggest causes of abuse, ruination and early death in developed countries. Alcoholism and drug abuse manipulate natural chemical pathways which exist for evolutionarily advantageous reasons; obesity by overeating is caused by natural desires for sweet and fatty foods; and gambling addiction is likely linked to a history of continuously searching for scarce high-calorie food and other risky but rewarding endeavors.

This bit on autism is really insightful.

Investigating the most severely disabled autistic individuals you almost always discover damaging genetic mutations or early life trauma, such as foetal alcohol syndrome. These are clear cases of biological dysfunction. On the other hand, the less severely disabled individuals (who would once have been called Asperger’s or “high-functioning”) show none of those biological signs of dysfunction, instead showing evidence we expect from functional adaptations: the associated genes are common and complex, brain differences are subtle, the characteristics appear early in life when they are guaranteed to affect reproduction, and the prevalence is high enough that at least one person per Dunbar-sized hunter-gatherer social group of one hundred and fifty would show the same traits – in which case, every one of our ancestors would have known an autistic person. These biological signs are those we expect to see from adaptations, not dysfunction. The question we are led to ask is what autism’s function could have been.

Psychologically, autistics often show unusual abilities in intelligence, memory, and perception, especially in their areas of special interest or obsession. An anthropologist once stumbled upon a reindeer herder in Siberia who camped alone, ate alone and chose to keep away from the rest of their small nomadic group, but who could list the names, medical history, parentage and more of a group of 2,600 reindeer. Researchers have identified this as a possible case of an autistic mind playing a crucial role in a group’s survival. Technologies which played crucial roles in human civilization’s birth such as oil lamps, multi-component tools, star maps, grinding stones and fire hearths have also all been suggested as the sorts of things which autistic people gravitate towards. Social oddities could be forgiven when your mind is spectacularly useful, so this ability profile explains why these cases of autism evolved. Autistic minds sacrificed social nuance as trade-offs in becoming the object and system specialists amongst our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Those same individuals can excel in technological and scientific endeavors in the modern world.

“the alteration of stigma”

Theoretical clarity does not necessarily make for treatment improvements, but one way in which explanations from evolutionary psychiatry could instantly improve lives, essentially free of financial cost, is through the alteration of stigma. The causal explanation of a disorder affects its stigmatization. People believing chemical imbalance theories of depression feel more hopeless when diagnosed as depressed; people believing in genetic and neurological causes of psychosis are more stigmatizing of psychotic individuals than people who believe psychosis results from stress. In turn, an evolutionary explanation of a disorder inevitably changes that disorder’s perception. The full effects of this shift in perception are yet to be seen, and will of course depend on the condition and specific explanation. Psychopathy, for example, may not be destigmatized by an explanation as a cheating strategy which is game theoretically optimal for some portion of a group.

René Girard's influence on the US far right

How a little-known French literary critic became a bellwether for the US right #girard #memetic

on memetic desire

Girard is best known for his theory of “mimetic desire”, the idea that humans don’t desire things in and of themselves, but out of a wish to imitate and compete with others. On the back of this insight, the writer built a distinctive anthropology, borrowing from and contest-ing the theories of Nietzsche and Freud. He also came up with a set of ideas about scapegoating that have been taken up by rightwing readers in recent years in their critiques of so-called cancel culture. While Girard described himself as a centrist, his ideas are now celebrated by a movement that, while not unilaterally rightwing, incubated the policies of the Trump administration.

The idea is set out in Girard’s first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (published in French in 1961), which describes how Don Quixote, Madame Bovary and characters from Stendhal, Proust and Dostoyevsky come to desire things because others already want them. “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind,” he wrote. The fact that desires are borrowed means they are necessarily competitive. If you desire your neighbour’s husband, you have to contend with your neighbour in order to get what you want — or what you think you want. Mimetic desire leads to fruitless competition, unhappiness and even violence.

on Girard's role in the shift from structuralism to post-modernism, thanks to Derrida

Girard’s early work was informed by “structuralism” — the study of language and society as a closed system of interrelated signs, which was then dominant in French universities. But he was present at the birth of a new movement. In 1966, Johns Hopkins hosted a conference devoted to structuralism with the unprepossessing title, “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man”, that didn’t hint at the controversy it would cause. Girard and his colleagues invited a group of pre-eminent French thinkers, including the philosopher Michel Foucault, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to attend. It was the last speaker to be invited who proved the most disruptive. After Lévi-Strauss and Foucault dropped out, Girard extended an invitation to a young Algerian-born philosopher, still little known in France: Jacques Derrida. In the final paper of the conference, Derrida attacked the basic assumptions of structuralism. This was the point of departure for his philosophical method, deconstruction, which sought to undo binary distinctions — raw/cooked, light/dark, sane/insane etc — in order to reveal the social forces that upheld them. Some conservatives today consider Derrida’s thought (or “postmodernism”, as they usually call it) to be the source of modern society’s ills. Girard later joked that, by inviting Derrida, he and his fellow conference organisers had let the plague into America.

on scapegoat theory

As post-structuralism spread through American universities, Girard pursued the implications of mimetic desire. His second book, Violence and the Sacred, published in 1972 and perhaps the most influential of all his work, describes how human societies enter into periods of crisis in which competition becomes unbearable. The solution, Girard claimed, is a violent act of scapegoating. The scapegoat has certain recurrent features: they are a foreigner, someone with a disability or a person in a position of authority. Such acts are then commemorated in the founding myths of cultures, myths in which the scapegoat becomes deified.

on Vance being influenced by scapegoat theory

Reading the French thinker prompted Vance to reconsider his faith, but it was the scapegoat mechanism that really struck a chord. “It captured so well the psychology of my generation, especially its most privileged inhabitants,” Vance writes. “Mired in the swamp of social media, we identified a scapegoat and digitally pounced. We were keyboard warriors, unloading on people via Facebook and Twitter, blind to our own problems.”

The truth is more complicated. In his 1999 book, I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard describes how globalisation had led to “the rise of victim power”. He praised this development, referring to international aid and universal healthcare as expressions of a genuine concern for the most vulnerable. But it could be taken too far. “This concern sometimes is so exaggerated and in a fashion so subject to caricature that it arouses laughter, but we should guard against seeing it as only one thing.”

What would Girard say about the politics of today, America’s new immigration policies or the escalating trade war between the US and China? I asked his friend and biographer, Cynthia Haven. “I think he would enjoin us to turn to powers even higher than Trump, even more powerful than Xi Jinping. When he urged us to desist from escalation, he meant it for peace. When he beseeched us to forgive one another, his position was absolute.”

Many of Girard’s new interpreters seem strangely indifferent to this injunction, ignoring the scapegoats of today’s world, unless they are the victims of leftwing cancel culture — a phenomenon that has largely disappeared since Musk’s purchase of Twitter. In September 2024, Vance made the false claim that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbours’ pets. He later claimed that such stories were necessary so that “the media pays attention to the suffering of the American people”. In an article shortly afterwards for Politico, journalist Ian Ward claimed Vance had used Girard as his scapegoating playbook. More likely, the anti-political thinker had been abandoned altogether, sacrificed at the very moment he’d been deified.

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