Daily log archive for Aug 2025. Go to the current daily log, or browse the archive index.
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2025-08-21
Stop talking about AI
Stop talking about AI: Financial Times #ai #hype
So, be doubtful when someone likens AI to the industrial revolution in importance. It will do well to match even the telephone and the incandescent lightbulb. (Incomes really surged as 1900 approached.) Perhaps the test of AI isn’t economic, though. Perhaps the test is quality of life. Well, before the phonograph, your favourite piece of music was something you only ever heard a few times, when an orchestra passed through town and fancied playing it. Before air travel, crossing an ocean was a Homeric saga. Now it is easy. AI will be as life-enhancing as these inventions, will it?
I so want to side with the AI sceptics. But look at their (my) own intellectual howlers. The two paragraphs above are too “inductive”: too reliant on the past as a guide to the future. There is also no technical detail because, unlike most of those who talk up AI, I don’t work in or around the field. And there are even worse AI-sceptic arguments. At least I didn’t lapse into anecdote, of the “ChatGPT told me to take heroin as a cold cure” variety.
As for the sensible line on AI, “wait and see”, that could be said about anything. It doesn’t tell investors what to do, or citizens how to prepare for the future.
In the end, there is just nothing very interesting to say about AI. There is lots of superb reporting. The major companies, the national strategies, the tech itself: keep abreast of it all. But when it comes to rumination and prognostication — the world of columnists and panel events — has there ever been a discourse so weak relative to its overall scale?
I have found there to be just one useful feature of the AI discourse. It reveals a person’s existing temperament. The people I know who think AI will be seismic and disastrous are the most highly strung anyway. The ones who think it will be seismic and life-improving are the most chipper and prone to believing in things. (Tony Blair.) Those who doubt it will be seismic at all are people like me, who are even-keeled to the point of complacency. The AI hubbub goes on and rancorously on because it is, in the end, about us.
Populism and the median voter
A median voter theory of right-wing populism - Marginal REVOLUTION #democracy #voter #populism
Quote of a quote:
Populists are often defined as those who claim that they fill “political representation gaps” -differences between the policymaking by established parties and the “popular will.” Research has largely neglected to what extent this claim is correct. I study descriptively whether representation gaps exist and their relationship with populism. To this end, I analyze the responses of citizens and parliamentarians from 27 European countries to identical survey policy questions, which I compile and verify to be indicative of voting in referendums. I find that policymaking represents the economic attitudes of citizens well. However, I document that the average parliamentarian is about 1SD more culturally liberal than the national mean voter. This cultural representation gap is systematic in four ways: i) it arises on nearly all cultural issues, ii) in nearly all countries, iii) nearly all established parties are more culturally liberal than the national mean voter, and iv) all major demographic groups tend to be more conservative than their parliamentarians. Moreover, I find that demographic differences between voters and parliamentarians or lack of political knowledge cannot fully account for representation gaps. Finally, I show that right-wing populists fill the cultural representation gap.
2025-08-20
Alternative to Silicon Valley's Hegemony on Tech
This podcast with Wendy Liu was a very inspiring listen.
Wendy wrote a biography in which she covers her disillusionment with the Silicon Valley dream which led her from being a failed startup founder to studying inequality at LSE, and then coming back to SF and working as a bartender while pursuing a writing career on the side.
Her book: Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism
There is also a reference to another book about abolishing rent: Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis
2025-08-16
Evolution and Irrationality
Flat Earthers on a Cruise: How evolution wired us to act against our own best interests | The MIT Press Reader #evolution #rationality
All of these behaviors illustrate our evolutionary inertia. We are descended from animals that had to make fast decisions — about food, threats, and reproduction. There was no time for deliberation; quick but flawed judgment meant survival. Thus, irrationality, or at least a limited and pragmatic rationality, has made it possible for us to survive (which does not implicitly mean that it is justified today). This compromise between speed and accuracy generates a cascade of imperfections and snap judgments.
As psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer argues, from our evolutionary past, we have inherited an adaptive, contextual form of reasoning that is neither logical nor probabilistic, but good enough to keep us alive. We’re wired to scan for threats, anticipate others’ behavior, and infer meaning, even when none exists. This explains why we tend to attribute cause-and-effect relationships between totally unrelated phenomena, such as stepping under a ladder and failing an exam, and draw broad conclusions from anecdotes. A great deal of the data from developmental psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience confirms that, for adaptive reasons that no longer exist, our minds have evolved a strong tendency to distinguish between inert entities, such as physical objects, and entities of a psychological nature, like animate agents. We thus are dualists and animists by nature. As a result, we attribute purposes and intentions to things, even when none exist, and imagine hidden motives and conspiracies where there are none. For us, stories always have a purpose, which can be evident or hidden.
We are, in short, belief machines, and we manufacture a lot of those beliefs. And when belief comforts us or helps us make sense of a chaotic world, we cling to it, no matter how irrational. We’re even willing to endure ridicule, as in the case of flat-earthers who set out on a cruise to reach the ends of the earth. They never reached it, but afterward, many found ways to explain why.
Levi saw technical and narrative invention as forms of tinkering, building on existing materials and constraints, just like evolution itself. For Levi, humanity is capable of both sublime achievement and unimaginable horror. In his appendix to “If This Is a Man,” he writes that the extermination camps are nonhuman, even counter-human inventions. But there can be no return to Arcadia; we must forge ahead as our own blacksmiths. The only true antidote to falling back into “inhumanism,” according to Levi, is critical and self-critical rationalism. Not a perfect logic, but a skeptical and methodical approach, whose first lesson is simple: Distrust all the prophets that manipulate the imperfections of the human mind.
The Performative Man
Social media is obsessed with ‘performative men’ – also known as men
The contestants at the “Performative Male Contest,” dozens of young men, milled around the park conspicuously but nonchalantly, waiting to be noticed and judged by an audience of several hundred onlookers.
To encourage this attention, they donned T-shirts with feminist slogans, baggy jeans and pink Nikes. They buried their noses in the first few pages of noticeably uncreased copies of “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom” by Christiane Northrup, “Period Power” by Maisie Hill and “Becoming” by Michelle Obama. In their requisite canvas totes, they toted disposable cameras, albums by pop chanteuse Clairo (on vinyl of course) and, if room remained, their ukuleles (employed to deploy unsolicited and aggressively twee covers of Beyoncé songs). Almost uniformly, they sipped bright green iced matcha oat milk lattes from clear plastic cups.
This freshly minted archetype is the amalgamation of a trove of tropes, precisely selected and arranged by men to convey an air of progressively enlightened, nontoxic masculinity. This can be signaled through fashion choices (a little shirt, somewhat large pants, a ludicrously capacious bag), ostensibly non-sartorial accessories (the matcha, the book of essays by bell hooks) and strategic public displays of existence (the table for one at a crowded cafe).
If the dating coach and the gymfluencer count as relatively rare birds, the podcast bros are the pigeons. The rise of “The Joe Rogan Experience” has spawned an epidemic of young men with large microphones, sitting in cramped home studios and holding meandering, unedited conversations about dating (or not), lifting (or not) and how wokeness is eroding the very possibility of living authentically as a man (it’s not).
Self-termination
‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and future of societal collapse | Environment | The Guardian #history #collapse
I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.
Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.
Collapses in the past were at a regional level and often beneficial for most people, but collapse today would be global and disastrous for all. “Today, we don’t have regional empires so much as we have one single, interconnected global Goliath. All our societies act within one single global economic system – capitalism,” Kemp says.
He cites three reasons why the collapse of the global Goliath would be far worse than previous events. First is that collapses are accompanied by surges in violence as elites try to reassert their dominance. “In the past, those battles were waged with swords or muskets. Today we have nuclear weapons,” he says.
Second, people in the past were not heavily reliant on empires or states for services and, unlike today, could easily go back to farming or hunting and gathering. “Today, most of us are specialised, and we’re dependent upon global infrastructure. If that falls away, we too will fall,” he says.
“Last but not least is that, unfortunately, all the threats we face today are far worse than in the past,” he says. Past climatic changes that precipitated collapses, for example, usually involved a temperature change of 1C at a regional level. Today, we face 3C globally. There are also about 10,000 nuclear weapons, technologies such as artificial intelligence and killer robots and engineered pandemics, all sources of catastrophic global risk.
If citizens’ juries and wealth caps seem wildly optimistic, Kemp says we have been long brainwashed by rulers justifying their dominance, from the self-declared god-pharaohs of Egypt and priests claiming to control the weather to autocrats claiming to defend people from foreign threats and tech titans selling us their techno-utopias. “It’s always been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Goliaths. That’s because these are stories that have been hammered into us over the space of 5,000 years,” he says.
“Today, people find it easier to imagine that we can build intelligence on silicon than we can do democracy at scale, or that we can escape arms races. It’s complete bullshit. Of course we can do democracy at scale. We’re a naturally social, altruistic, democratic species and we all have an anti-dominance intuition. This is what we’re built for.”
Kemp rejects the suggestion that he is simply presenting a politically leftwing take on history. “There is nothing inherently left wing about democracy,” he says. “Nor does the left have a monopoly on fighting corruption, holding power accountable and making sure companies pay for the social and environmental damages they cause. That’s just making our economy more honest.”
He also has a message for individuals: “Collapse isn’t just caused by structures, but also people. If you want to save the world then the first step is to stop destroying it. In other words: don’t be a dick. Don’t work for big tech, arms manufacturers or the fossil fuel industry. Don’t accept relationships based on domination and share power whenever you can.”
Raw and selvedge jeans
We Recommend These $250 Raw Selvedge Denim Jeans. Here’s Why. | Reviews by Wirecutter #jeans #raw #selvedge
Selvedge denim and raw denim are often conflated and considered interchangeable, but they are two different things. If you recall APC jeans from the mid-aughts, you’re probably picturing a stiff, raw jean. “Raw” is a term used to describe denim that has not been washed or notably pretreated prior to its landing in the buyer’s hands, with the fabric arriving in what is usually a rich indigo color that will fade over time. Part of the appeal of raw denim is the initial stiffness that then breaks in as the jeans are worn, as well as the fading that develops as indigo dye flakes away from the cotton yarns.
Raw denim isn’t necessarily selvedge denim, and “selvedge” doesn’t even necessarily need to be denim — instead, the term refers to the way in which the fabric is manufactured. Selvedge is a type of fabric with a finished edge that doesn’t unravel, and it doesn’t fray at the ends. The word itself comes from the term “self-edge,” which is still a good way to identify it.
Most denim fabric comes off the loom with an unfinished edge, leaving the individual yarns exposed; to turn that fabric into pants, manufacturers simply sew up the edge. When a panel of selvedge fabric is woven, however, it comes off the loom with a narrow strip at the very edge of the cloth so that there are no exposed yarns. On a pair of selvedge jeans, manufacturers join two of those finished edges at the outer leg seam of the pants. As it pertains to denim, this type of finished edge usually requires specialized looms that produce fabrics in low quantities — a process that drives up the cost of a pair of jeans from the start.
You can easily learn to spot a pair of selvedge jeans from the self-edge on the cuff of the trouser legs — typically a white strip with a single red stripe. This edge, unlike a seam covered in stitches, delivers a much tidier overall look.
Raw and selvedge are often paired together. This is because both raw (which describes the fabric treatment) and selvedge (which describes the way the fabric was manufactured) are components of a slow, antique process that can yield results that differ from industrial-scale denim, such as desirable irregularities in the feel and in the visual texture of the cloth.
Although neither necessarily denotes high quality, the use of selvedge in jeans — whether on raw or treated denim — is often a sign that a designer was purposeful in their fabric selection and is likely to have been thoughtful about a lot of other aspects of those jeans too. That, plus selvedge’s association with high-end jeans, means that most prized denim fabrics are selvedge.
In short, the coolest and most interesting jeans are probably going to be made with raw, selvedge denim.
Mankeeping
Why ‘Mankeeping’ Is Turning Women Off - The New York Times #masculinity #relationships
Much of the time, Mr. Lioi said, his straight male clients tell him that they rarely open up to anyone but their girlfriends or wives. Their partners have become their unofficial therapists, he said, “doing all the emotional labor.”
That particular role now has a name: “mankeeping.” The term, coined by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, has taken off online. It describes the work women do to meet the social and emotional needs of the men in their lives, from supporting their partners through daily challenges and inner turmoil, to encouraging them to meet up with their friends.
Rather than viewing “mankeeping” as an internet-approved bit of therapy-speak used to dump on straight men, experts said they see it as a term that can help sound the alarm about the need for men to invest emotionally in friendships.
“The reality is, no one person can meet all of another’s emotional needs,” said Tracy Dalgleish, a psychologist and couples therapist based in Ottawa. “Men need those outlets as well. Men need social connection. Men need to be vulnerable with other men.”
Chopped
What Does It Mean When Gen Alpha Says Chopped? - The New York Times #genz #slang #language
Today's GenZ slang of the day is Chopped.
First came ate, served and cooked. Now chopped has found its way from the kitchen to the vernacular of Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
Before you start using it, one thing should be made clear: It’s not a very nice thing to say.
Simply put, chopped has been adopted by many as a synonym for ugly or unattractive, said Morgan Ugoagwu, who posted a video on TikTok on the “six signs you’re a chopped woman.” It has been viewed more than 1.5 million times.
“There’s mid and that’s like someone who’s maybe like a 5, like average looking,” she said in an interview. “Chopped is like, it’s worse than being what’s considered mid.”
“Chopped is like maybe you’re like a 1 or 2, just straight ugly,” she added.
7 Books To Read When It Feels Like The World Is Falling Apart
Books To Read When The World Is Falling Apart – The Painted Porch Bookshop
• Montaigne by Stefan Zweig
• Gifts From The Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent And Start Making A Difference by Rutger Bergman
• How To Keep Your Cool by Seneca
• Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot by James B. Stockdale
• On Character: Choices that Define a Life by Stanley McChrystal
• Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
• The Girls Who Would Be Free (children’s book)
• Her Right Foot (children’s book)
2025-08-15
Rationalist Cults
Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?—Asterisk
Great article which makes the movie Mountainhead seem very team in comparision.
The rationalist community as a whole is remarkably functional. Like any subculture, it is rife with gossip, personality conflicts, and drama that is utterly incomprehensible to outsiders. But overall, the community’s activities are less drinking the Kool-Aid and more mutual support and vegan-inclusive summer barbeques.
Nevertheless, some groups within the community have wound up wildly _dys_functional–a term I’m using to sidestep definitional arguments about what is and isn’t a cult. And some of the blame can be put on the rationalist community’s marketing.
The Sequences make certain implicit promises. There is an art of thinking better, and we’ve figured it out. If you learn it, you can solve all your problems, become brilliant and hardworking and successful and happy, and be one of the small elite shaping not only society but the entire future of humanity.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, not true.
Migraines
Why Hasn’t Medical Science Cured Chronic Headaches? | The New Yorker #headache #migraine
Why are migraines such a common part of human experience? Zeller notes that animals do not seem to suffer chronic headaches. “I’ve never seen one of my pets lie in its bed with its paw over its head,” an Australian pharmacologist tells him. This may indicate that migraines are produced by the interaction of the most primitive parts of our brain and the cortical structures that have evolved more recently. Zeller suggests that evolutionary biology may hold an explanation for chronic headaches. “It’s not hard to imagine that an acutely sensitive nervous system, attuned and highly responsive to sounds, sights, smells, and threats, would be valuable to our primitive forebears on the predatory savannah,” he writes. “Maybe the desirability of these triggerable, keenly attentive senses meant that our internal wiring would evolve to a razor’s edge, forever spring-loaded, but prone, in some of us, to errant firing under the wrong conditions.”
Despite our limited understanding of the biology of chronic headaches, there have been recent advances in identifying molecules in the brain which mediate pain. The discovery of a neurotransmitter called calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) has markedly advanced the understanding and the treatment of migraine. This discovery came about when researchers inserted cannulas around patients’ fifth cranial nerve to sample the release of proteins during migraine and found CGRP in abundance. It was released from trigeminal nerve endings surrounding cranial blood vessels. Subsequent experiments found that intravenous infusions of CGRP invariably produced migraines.
GenZ and their love life
What unrestricted internet access did to Gen Z’s love life #genz #love #relationships
Welcome to life at the sharp end of the romantic recession, where today’s under-30s are more likely to be single than either their parents or grandparents were at their age. On TikTok, Nashville-based creator Jordy makes videos explaining what it’s like to go through your twenties without a partner. “This era of dating is actually HORRIFYING,” commiserates one of her followers. “No boyfriends no talking stage no situationships no NOTHING.”
Every generation is supposed to rebel against the ones that came before — making choices that baffle their elders. But who could have predicted that Gen Z’s rebellion would be one of abstinence?
The potential culprits for this romantic estrangement span high house prices (which force young people to live at home), pandemic social-distancing, overly protective parents and a growing political divide driving a wedge between liberal young women and more conservative young men.
But the real villain is the internet. Growing up with access to an online content free-for-all appears to have produced a generation with progressive attitudes and puritanical habits, who are increasingly likely to be teetotal, prefer not to see nudity in films and opt out of relationships. Dr Amanda Gesselman, research scientist at the Kinsey Institute, has described the change as a shift towards “self-sourced intimacy”.
As for the tech sector, its response has been to double down. Accused of creating the circumstances that have increased societal isolation, it has found a way to monetise the situation. In the past year, generative AI companies have released new tools marketed more as friends than productivity aids. At the tame end of the spectrum is Microsoft’s Copilot Appearance — a cute, squishy cartoon cloud. Talk to the AI chatbot in voice mode and the cloud will spin and jump and react with facial expressions as it talks back to you. (Sample chat: “I can’t WAIT to learn more about you.”)
2025-08-08
affinity
The idea that affinity can free you is simple. But people have complicated relationships with knowing what they actually like. Yesterday at dinner J used a metaphor for having the wrong job that went, Sometimes people think they should play basketball because they like dribbling. Which I interpret as, It’s very easy to think something is right for you because parts of it are pretty awesome. But what about the other parts? And what’s the main part, the crux of it all? Do you like that? You can like dribbling and shooting and passing and not actually like basketball.
the power of immediacy
The Imperfectionist: The power of immediacy #burkeman
In collecting all those articles and bookmarks, I’d been engaging in what the Substacker Harjas Sandhu, in an insightful post, calls “hoarding-type scrolling”. The hallmark of this behaviour, he writes, is “saving good posts for later instead of reading them now… I feel like a squirrel looking for fat nuts to stash in my little tree hole. The strangest part of it all? I have more saved content than I could possibly consume in the entire next year… thousands of hours of thought-provoking pieces to read and videos that might actually change how I see the world.”
The most obvious problem here, of course, is that you far less frequently get around to actually reading or watching – and thus letting yourself be changed by – the ideas you encounter. But the other problem is that it generates a huge backlog to slog through – so that even if you do get around to reading or watching, you’re no longer responding from the place of aliveness and excitement that first drew you in, but from a duller sense of obligation to clear the backlog, extract the important bits, and move on to something else.
This makes sense, because I think the reason we engage in all this hoarding behaviour is that it’s a more comfortable alternative to the uncomfortable intensity of actually living. To take an action is to risk that it might fail, or that it might succeed; that it might lead to big changes, or no changes at all. And it means using up a chunk of your finite time, and maybe also money, instead of just continuing to add to the list of things you potentially could do — which stretches off into the infinite future, where mortality doesn’t apply.
beauty as an average
My scar makes beach outings an ordeal. How can I care less about it? | Well actually | The Guardian #beauty #standard
Averageness is “the most important aspect” of one’s understanding of beauty, said Dr Neelam Vashi, an associate professor of dermatology at Boston University’s medical school, on the Apple News in Conversation podcast. It refers to how closely any given face or body matches that of the average person within their population. “Our population could be me looking at 1,000 images,” Dr Vashi explained. “What my brain does is looks at all of them, and then it makes a prototype [of beauty] in my head.”
Thanks to the prevalence of filters, photo-editing technology and AI-generated imagery, people’s prototypes now reference digitally altered inputs, said Vashi. This means scarred, middle-aged skin might not fit your brain’s idea of attractiveness, or even normality.
The good news: brains are malleable! Vashi cited a 2009 study in which researchers squished and stretched the faces of storybook characters and found that, after viewing altered images, children’s sense of what was beautiful subtly shifted toward the distortions.
So start with some amateur exposure therapy. Go to the beach! Go to the pool! Go to a communal spa or a nude spa (Korean spas, known as jjimjilbangs, are my personal happy place). Notice different bodies, faces, skin types, textures – not to compare, judge or objectify, but to observe.
Doing versus Delegating
Doing versus Delegating - by Matt Basta - Basta’s Notes
When we frame our successes and failures not in terms of the code but on the outcomes of the project, delegating gets more intuitive. If you’re evaluated on outcomes, you’re being measured on literally anything that goes into that project, not just time spent writing code.
Maybe you wrote some specs. Maybe you met with people about requirements and constraints. Maybe you talked with stakeholders to address details that don’t make sense. Perhaps you updated the roadmap to avoid extra work caused by a parallel project. All of these things matter just as much as the time spent coding, if not more. If your coding output is the bottleneck for your projects being successful, it’ll be valued more highly than the other skills. But if you’re a Senior engineer working towards Staff+, it’s understood that your coding skills are essentially at a point of diminishing returns.
You can instead spend your time doing things that help other people spend more time coding, and writing that code faster:
- Offering domain expertise to other engineers
- Making sure folks aren’t blocked
- effectively communicating project details and context
- code reviews
- answering questions
- connecting people across the company to address mismatches
- pointing out drawbacks
- Avoid problems (and avoiding time sinks)
- making sure everyone is working in the same direction
- making sure the output of the project is well-understood by stakeholders
- making sure the project sufficiently addresses the problems it intends to solve
- Tracking other projects with similar requirements or shared work
- avoiding duplicated effort
- avoiding conflicts between the projects
- Effectively spinning up other engineers on a project and distributing work (multiplying efficiency)
- Ensuring prerequisites are met
- …endless other items…
You can be the fastest coder in the west, but if these things aren’t done well, the project is probably going to go poorly. And if they are done well, the project will be done faster with others than if you did it yourself.
Tacit knowledge in programming
On bad advice #programming #software
Programming practices are mostly tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge isn't easy to share. An expert will relate some simple-sounding rule of thumb, but then grilling them on specific cases will quickly uncover a huge collection of exceptions and caveats that vary depending on the specific details of the situation. These are generated from many many past experiences and don't generalize well outside of the context of that body of experience.
Trying to apply the rule of thumb without knowing all those details tends to result in failure. Phrases like "don't repeat yourself", "you aren't going to need it", "separation of concerns", "test-driven development" etc were originally produced from some body of valid experience, but then wildly over-generalized and over-applied without any of the original nuance.
The way to convey tacit knowledge, if at all, is via the body of experiences that generated the rule. For this reason I find much more value in specific experience reports or in watching people actually working, as opposed to writing about general principles.
2025-08-06
What the heck is ADHD
What the heck is ADHD? #adhd #mentalhealth
A good article summarizing the latest research
As a result, the field began to fracture into specialized theories. You can roughly place these theories of ADHD into four buckets :
1. Executive dysfunction. One of the earliest and most enduring views. ADHD involves difficulty managing internal control systems like planning, remembering what to do next, or stopping an automatic response. This explains impulsivity and disorganization, but not motivation issues or mood swings.
2. Delay aversion. This view proposes that some symptoms of ADHD arise not just from difficulties with cognitive control, but from how people react emotionally to waiting. Delays don’t just feel boring but can be unbearable. This can lead to choices that prioritize immediate relief, like quitting a task early or avoiding anything that involves waiting.
3. Default mode interference. The brain has a default mode network that becomes active when we’re not focused on the outside world. In ADHD, this system seems to stay active even during tasks, creating interference – like background noise interrupting a conversation. This might help explain those mid-sentence lapses or zoning out during simple tasks.
4. Dopamine models. ADHD has been linked to how the brain handles dopamine, a chemical involved in reward and motivation. In many people with ADHD, the brain appears less able to anticipate rewards or maintain interest over time. This can make long-term goals feel flat and distant.
And to complicate things further, theories of ADHD operate at different levels of explanation:
Genetic: ADHD has a strong inherited component. No single gene causes it, but many genes each with small effects seem to contribute to it.
Neurobiological: Brain networks involved in attention, timing, and reward seem to behave differently in ADHD, sometimes more variable, less connected, or slower to mature.
Cognitive-behavioral: ADHD traits affect how people think, learn, respond to feedback, and regulate effort.
Environmental: Stress, trauma, classroom and work demands, sleep, and parenting style might all interact with ADHD traits.
Evolutionary: ADHD traits such as hyperfocus, hypervigilance and hypercuriosity might have once been adaptive in nomadic, high-stimulus environments, and might have become mismatched to modern life.
Today, most researchers agree that ADHD isn’t explained by any single mechanism. Instead, we see integrative frameworks that suggest ADHD arises from multiple interacting systems, shaped by genetics, brain development, and environment.
So... is ADHD a thing? Yes and no.
So yes, ADHD is a thing. But it’s likely not one thing. It’s currently a useful label for multiple, interacting processes that vary from person to person, giving clinicians a way to support patients, educators a lens to support students, and researchers a map to explore.
The explosion of theories isn’t a failure of science but a sign of a complicated, deeply human condition we’re still working to understand.
The real question isn’t whether ADHD is “real.” The question is: can we get comfortable with that complexity so people can find what actually works for them?
2025-08-05
stay on your phone
stay on your phone - by Adam Aleksic - The Etymology Nerd #social-media #phones #dumb
The No Phone Person is an elusive creature. They tend to be educated, upper-to-upper middle class, and endearingly pretentious. They’re off social media, will answer emails a few times a week, and usually have a “dumb phone” that can only take calls and texts. When they’re not at “phone free parties,” they’re probably frolicking in a meadow or something. Good luck finding them.
As much as I hate to agree with a Silicon Valley billionaire, though, I think the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is correct in identifying this as a form of “reality privilege.” A blue-collar single mother working two jobs is not going to have the time or energy to seek out in-person events or alternative forms of media. She’s going to put her kids to sleep and have thirty minutes to scroll TikTok before going to bed and then returning to work the next day.
This disconnect is turning non-algorithmic time into an upper-class status symbol, which I find highly concerning.
For one, it’s the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand and pretending like the algorithm doesn’t exist. Whether you like it or not, our culture is still being shaped by these platforms, and they won’t go away by themselves. All of our music and fashion aesthetics are either defined by or against the algorithm, which means that even the “countercultural” tastes of the No Phone People are necessarily influenced by it. Engaging with algorithmic media—in a limited, deliberate manner—is thus important to understanding your experience in society as a whole.
Not engaging, meanwhile, makes you vulnerable to being blindsided by sudden social or political shifts. Each Reddit argument and YouTube comment war is an epistemic basis for understanding the current state of cultural discourse. If you ignore those, you lose touch with reality as most people experience it.
If you have “reality privilege,” and you care about society, don’t just disengage; use your privilege. Educate yourself, and stay online strategically. Broaden your being-in-the-world so we can eventually fight back. And then you should totally go listen to that new record you just bought.
Cory Doctorow on AI Assistants
Pluralistic: AI software assistants make the hardest kinds of bugs to spot (04 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow #ai #assistant
on automation blindness
It's not like people are very good at supervising machines to begin with. "Automation blindness" is what happens when you're asked to repeatedly examine the output of a generally correct machine for a long time, and somehow remain vigilant for its errors. Humans aren't really capable of remaining vigilant for things that don't ever happen – whatever attention and neuronal capacity you initially devote to this never-come eventuality is hijacked by the things that happen all the time. This is why the TSA is so fucking amazing at spotting water-bottles on X-rays, but consistently fails to spot the bombs and guns that red team testers smuggle into checkpoints. The median TSA screener spots a hundred water bottles a day, and is (statistically) never called upon to spot something genuinely dangerous to a flight. They have put in their 10,000 hours, and then some, on spotting water bottles, and approximately zero hours on spotting stuff that we really, really don't want to see on planes.
So automation blindness is already going to be a problem for any "human in the loop," from a radiologist asked to sign off on an AI's interpretation of your chest X-ray to a low-paid overseas worker remote-monitoring your Waymo…to a programmer doing endless, high-speed code-review for a chatbot.
on the economic and labor implications of AI assistants
The AI bubble is driven by the promise of firing workers and replacing them with automation. Investors and AI companies are tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) betting that bosses who can fire a worker and replace them with a chatbot will pay the chatbot's maker an appreciable slice of that former worker's salary for an AI that takes them off the payroll.
The people who find AI fun or useful or surprising are centaurs. They're making automation choices based on their own assessment of their needs and the AIs' capabilities.
They are not the customers for AI. AI exists to replace workers, not empower them. Even if AI can make you more productive, there is no business model in increasing your pay and decreasing your hours.
AI is about disciplining labor to decrease its share of an AI-using company's profits. AI exists to lower a company's wage-bill, at your expense, with the savings split between the your boss and an AI company. When Getty or the NYT or another media company sues an AI company for copyright infringement, that doesn't mean they are opposed to using AI to replace creative workers – they just want a larger slice of the creative workers' salaries in the form of a copyright license from the AI company that sells them the worker-displacing tool.
AI companies are not pitching a future of AI-enabled centaurs. They're colluding with bosses to build a world of AI-shackled reverse centaurs. Some people are using AI tools (often standalone tools derived from open models, running on their own computers) to do some fun and exciting centaur stuff. But for the AI companies, these centaurs are a bug, not a feature – and they're the kind of bug that's far easier to spot and crush than the bugs that AI code-bots churn out in volumes no human can catalog, let alone understand.
The New Yorker on Longevity Science
How to Live Forever and Get Rich Doing It | The New Yorker #longevity #anti-aging
This is a good overview of the current landscape of longevity science and its proponents.
Our bodies, technically speaking, are just really fucking complicated. The Buck’s Eric Verdin told me, “Peter Diamandis says we’re thinking linearly in an exponential world, and we’ll be able to solve all these problems. But the biological problems to solve also get exponentially harder as you go deeper.” Even the indicators are baffling. Hearing loss has been linked to dementia, as has failing to floss. An impaired sense of smell is more strongly predictive of all-cause mortality than heart disease. And the mysteries do multiply the deeper you go. People who have four organs that are “youthful” for their age are much less likely to experience kidney disease or arthritis, yet those with seven youthful organs—which must be even better, right?—have a greatly heightened risk of diabetes and Parkinson’s.
In trying to live longer, we’re fighting our own imperfection: every time a cell divides, a few thousand mistakes can be introduced into its DNA. We’re also fighting the entropic forces—time, gravity, and oxygen—that ravage pretty much everything. The authors of a seminal paper in Cell distinguished twelve hallmarks of aging: such signs of impaired self-regulation as DNA instability, mitochondrial dysfunction, chronic inflammation, cellular senescence (when burned-out cells start oozing toxic sludge), and stem-cell exhaustion. Though the authors noted that all twelve hallmarks “are strongly related,” they could not establish whether the indicators were diverse expressions of one fundamental process or whether they evolved independently.
2025-08-04
Are we in an AI Bubble
The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now) #ai #bubble #economy
I’ll just repeat that. Over the last six months, capital expenditures on AI—counting just information processing equipment and software, by the way—added more to the growth of the US economy than all consumer spending combined. You can just pull any of those quotes out—spending on IT for AI is so big it might be making up for economic losses from the tariffs, serving as a private sector stimulus program.
To me, this is just screaming bubble. I’m sure I’m not alone. In fact I know I’m not alone. I’m thinking especially of Ed Zitron’s impassioned and thorough guide to the AI bubble; a rundown of how much money is being poured into and spent on AI vs how much money these products are making, and surprise, the situation as it stands is not sustainable. Worrying signs abound, and not least that so far, the companies benefitting most from AI are those selling the tools to simply build more of it (Nvidia, Microsoft), or who have monopolies through which they can force AI tools onto users en masse with limited repercussions (Google, Meta). Consumers routinely evince negative sentiment towards AI and AI products in polls, outweighing enthusiasm. And meanwhile, what I’d say is the only truly runaway, organically popular AI product category, chatbots, largely remain big money losers due to the resources they take to run.
As such, these massive valuations feel fishy. I asked Ed for his thoughts on Microsoft’s $4 trillion earnings report. He said:
Microsoft broke out Azure revenue for the first time in history, yet has not updated their annualized revenue for AI since January 29 2025. If things were going so well with AI, why are they not providing these numbers? It's because things aren't going well at all, and they're trying to play funny games with numbers to confuse and excite investors.
Also, $10bn+ of that Azure revenue is OpenAI's compute costs, paid at-cost, meaning no profit (and maybe even loss!) for Microsoft.
Look, I’m no prophet, clearly. I’ve predicted that we were probably witnessing the peak of the AI boom nearly a year ago, and while I think I was right with regard to genuine consumer and pop cultural interest, obviously the investment and expansion has kept right on flowing. It’s to the point that we’re well past dot com boom levels of investment, and, as Kedrosky points out, approaching railroad-levels of investment, last seen in the days of the robber barons.
I have no idea what’s going to happen next. But if AI investment is so massive that it’s quite actually helping to prop up the US economy in a time of growing stress, what happens if the AI stool does get kicked out from under it all?****
2025-08-03
How to travel
How to travel #travel #tips
Janan Ganesh has a nice set of tips for travel
First, the journey itself. Carry-on is a mistake. The time saved in baggage claim at the other end isn’t worth the stress of finding overhead storage space. Even for business class passengers, with their dedicated lockers, it is still better to move around an airport unencumbered. This is meant to be a break, not arm day.
Beware the “authentic” experience. This is the ultimate intellectual trap. At least in countries with a decent-sized middle class, “real” life will be less distinctive than the visitor hopes or imagines. In much of south-east Asia, it is authentic behaviour to spend time in malls. First, because these are air conditioned. Second, because countries with fresh memories of being poor tend not to regard material consumption with ennui or distaste. By all means, in Bangkok, ride the canal boat. But don’t kid yourself that it is truer to local experience than taking mass transit from a suburban new-build to a nine-hour office shift. In a Gulf city, do visit the “old town”. But remember that it is the old town precisely because it is divorced from how lives are lived now.
If an Asian visitor cycled through Paris in a striped top and an onion necklace, saying “ooh là là” at intervals, we wouldn’t think, “There goes someone who has mastered the local culture.” We’d know that real Parisians are doing banal things. But westerners, especially the educated ones, can make the same error of over-romanticisation in other places. It is the supposed suckers in the tourist traps who are often clearer-headed about what they want and are getting out of their trip.
It is a point that flows into the largest of all lessons about travel. Don’t expect it to be educational. At worst, it can go the other way, in that you over-index what you happen to see in person. (“I went to Russia and it was sweetness itself,” was a widely heard sentiment between the 2018 World Cup and the war in Ukraine.) It is better to be merely ignorant of a place than confidently wrong about it. If you travel a fair bit, those who don’t can go all sheepish and deferent around you. This advantage is unwarranted, which isn’t to say I make no use of it.
Power and Heirarchy
Pt4: Power Hierarchies #power #heirarchy
Loved this article, even though I only read the ChatGPT summary, which I am reproducing below
This article explores the nature of power hierarchies, emphasizing that rulers depend on key supporters whose loyalty must be maintained through resource distribution. It discusses how status and identity are deeply intertwined with navigating multiple overlapping hierarchies and how toxic power dynamics, such as those in cults, isolate individuals by cutting off other sources of status and identity.
Key Takeaways
• Power depends on maintaining loyalty of key supporters by distributing resources strategically.
• Status is relative and context-dependent, shaped by multiple overlapping hierarchies.
• Toxic power, like in cults, isolates individuals by restricting access to alternative hierarchies, causing trauma upon exit.
Theme Wise Breakdown
Misconceptions About Historical Power
The author reflects on their initial naive belief that kings ruled absolutely, only to learn that historical rulers had precarious positions dependent on keeping their councils and armies loyal. Using the example of Roman emperors, the author highlights the constant threat of being overthrown or assassinated if key supporters were dissatisfied.
Rules for Rulers: The Role of Keys in Power
Summarizing CGP Grey’s "Rules for Rulers," the article explains that rulers cannot govern alone and must rely on "keys" — people controlling military, finances, etc. The ruler’s primary job is managing treasure flow to keep these keys loyal, as keys can defect if rivals offer better rewards. This creates an incentive to minimize the number of keys to maximize loyalty, explaining why dictators purge former allies after gaining power.
The Fractal Nature of Hierarchies
Power dynamics repeat at every level: each key manages their own subordinates similarly, balancing resources to maintain loyalty. If a key fails to satisfy their subordinates, they risk being overthrown themselves, creating a fractal pattern of power maintenance.
Benedict Arnold: A Case Study in Key Loyalty and Betrayal
Benedict Arnold’s story illustrates the consequences of a key feeling undervalued. Despite his heroism, Arnold was repeatedly denied deserved promotions and recognition, leading him to consider defecting to the opposing side. This exemplifies how keys may overthrow or abandon leaders who do not reward them properly.
Status as Hierarchy Competition
Status is not absolute but depends on which hierarchy one is competing in. People gain status by possessing what others in their relevant social group value. The author notes that status is more visible when gaps between ranks are large (e.g., celebrities) but often subtle and overlapping in everyday life, leading to plausible deniability about rank differences.
Navigating Multiple Overlapping Hierarchies
Individuals simultaneously compete in many hierarchies, some large and some niche. People tend to care about status in hierarchies relevant to their social circles. The author shares personal examples from polyamory, where jealousy arises when others encroach on one’s status in specific hierarchies, but comfort is found in having unique advantages in others.
Identity as a Product of Hierarchy Competition
The author reflects on how much of personal identity is shaped by social positioning within hierarchies. Preferences and self-concepts often serve as strategies to secure social safety and status. Even seeming immune to status is itself a high-status position. The author acknowledges that identity is largely strategic but hints at some genuine aspects to be discussed later.
Formative Years and Hierarchy Selection
During development, people explore which hierarchies they can succeed in and gravitate toward those that fit their traits. For example, athletic ability might lead to joining a sports team, while personality traits might align with certain social groups. This process shapes social identity and status.
Status Competition in Everyday Life
Social interactions often involve subtle battles over which hierarchies to prioritize. People try to pull others into hierarchies where they rank higher by emphasizing their expertise or values. Avoiding low status in unfamiliar hierarchies explains why people stick to familiar social groups or niches.
Toxic Power and Cults
The author discusses cults as extreme examples of toxic power, where leaders isolate followers by cutting off access to all other hierarchies. This monopolization of loyalty prevents subordinates from gaining alternative sources of status or identity, making them more exploitable. Cults justify isolation as a gift or sacrifice for a greater goal.
Trauma of Leaving Cults
Leaving a cult is traumatic because individuals transition from a narrow, controlled hierarchy to a vast world of many hierarchies where they lack status or skills. Betrayal by trusted leaders compounds this trauma, as does the loss of identity and social support.
Frame Control and Hierarchy Manipulation
Cults use frame control to keep followers within their hierarchy by denying legitimacy to outside influences. This control is a form of power that prevents followers from recognizing or accessing alternative sources of value and status.
Final Reflections on Status, Anxiety, and Identity
The author connects social anxiety to low status, noting that rising in status reduces anxiety and increases confidence. They also question how much of the self is constructed through social strategies versus genuine preference, concluding that identity is mostly strategic but not entirely so.
Dating Like a Savarna
Dating Like a Savarna | The Swaddle
I found a reference to this article in the book Meet The Savarnas, which I began reading last week. The book is wonderful and a must read, especially for folks who are oblivious to caste (due to their privilege) or haven't been exposed to anti-caste literature.
One of the most hallmark features of Savarna culture is its distinctive sameness, which is exemplified in the world of online dating.
A certain aesthetic language and cultural sensibility have come to be positioned as markers of taste and refinement – to the exclusion of people who don’t or can’t adhere. It’s unrecognizable as particularly Savarna culture because of its ubiquity: whether it be the lanky boy with a head full of curly hair who busks at Church Street in Bangalore, the spoken poetess who is perennially in a bindi and a saree handed down from her grandmother (which she never fails to mention), or the Djembe-carrying shayar sahab who runs his own drum circle in Pune and quotes Juan Elia in Urdu (because Faiz is too mainstream after the CAA/NRC protests) – it’s an aspirational aesthetic. One that draws heavily from US popular culture and White, Western social imaginations and that, through unspoken codes, belongs exclusively to Savarnas.
These archetypes gather on the servers of Hinge, Bumble, and Tinder, where romance, belonging, sex, and intimacy are all wrapped up in the neoliberal technocratic promise of an app that can deliver it all – especially if you pay the extra money for a premium upgrade. But in a caste-segregated society, technology is no match for what a thousand generations of social conditioning have normalized.
Decades of half-hearted reservation implementation has nonetheless, against all odds, created a very small class of SC/ST/OBC youth who have had a similar quality of education and exposure to pop culture as most urban elite Savarnas. Although these micro-communities also end up in the dragnet of dating apps – because there is no caste-based filter on the apps yet (something that is sure to come as more Dalit and Bahujans get on it) – their experiences on these apps are still different. Ultimately, speaking the same pop culture language and smooth English gets you only so far and no further.
I remember a few years ago, a close friend had matched with a Brahmin girl. Their conversation had organic chemistry and she decided to come to his place. The first thing she noticed upon entering his flat was a portrait of Babasaheb near the doorway. “Ey, why do you have this? Bhimtas have this in their homes” was her immediate reaction. He froze at the slur but somehow managed to tell her that she was correct about why the picture was there. It then dawned upon the girl that he was not Savarna. She exploded with anger and accused him of trying to “trick” her into a relationship, of not being fully “honest.” As she poured her derision and fury upon him, he stood there silently, with his head hung and burning with a shame familiar to all marginalized caste folks. Traditional patriarchal power tropes in reverse, she threatened that she would call her brothers and they would come to beat him up. He begged for her forgiveness. She softened and then patronizingly counseled him to not try and dupe Brahmin girls like this. He agreed cringing inside, but hoping to avoid any further untoward scene. She made him book her an Uber to take her home. He stayed off dating apps for years after that out of internalized trauma that he did not dare unpack.
2025-08-02
ARR as an often abused metric
How Much Money Do OpenAI And Anthropic Actually Make? #arr #ai #startups #revenue
If you're an avid reader of the business and tech media, you'd be forgiven for thinking that OpenAI has made (or will make) in excess of $10 billion this year, and Anthropic in excess of $4 billion.
Why? Because both companies have intentionally reported or leaked their "annualized recurring revenue" – a month's revenue multiplied by 12…
…
These do not, however, mean that their previous months were this high, nor do they mean that they've "made" anything close to these numbers. Annualized recurring revenue is one of the most regularly-abused statistics in the startup world, and can mean everything from "[actual month]x12" to "[30 day period of revenue]x12" and in most cases it's a number that doesn't factor in churn. Some companies even move around the start dates for contracts as a means of gaming this number.
ARR, also, doesn’t factor seasonality of revenue into the calculations. For example, you’d expect ChatGPT to have peaks and troughs that correspond with the academic year, with students cancelling their subscriptions during the summer break. If you use ARR, you’re essentially taking one month and treating it as representative of the entire calendar year, when it isn’t.
Sidenote: I want to make one thing especially obvious. When I described ARR as “one of the most regularly-abused statistics in the startup world,” I meant it. ARR is only really used by startups (and other non-public companies). It’s not considered a GAAP-standard accounting practice, and public companies (those traded on the stock market) generally don’t use it because they have to report actual figures, and so there’s no point. You can’t really obfuscate something that you have to, by law, state publicly and explicitly for all to see with crafty trickery.
These companies are sharing (or leaking) their annualized revenues for a few reasons:
- So that the tech press reports them in a way that makes it sound like they'll make that much in a year.
- So that the tech press reports a number that sounds bigger and better than the monthly amount. For example, calling a startup a "$100 million ARR" company (like vibe-coding platform Lovable) sounds way better than calling them an "$8.3 million a month company," in part because the number is smaller, and in part because, I imagine, it might mislead a reader into believing that's what they've made every month. Yes, saying the ARR figure does that already.
- So that investors will believe the company looks bigger and more successful than it is.
In any case, I want to be clear this is a standard metric in non-public Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses. Nothing is inherently wrong with the metric, save for its use and what's being interpreted from it.
2025-08-01
High Agency and Owning the Outcome
Impact, agency, and taste | benkuhn.net
I think of finding high-leverage work as having two interrelated components:
- Agency: i.e. some combination of the initiative/proactiveness to try to make things happen, and relentlessness and resourcefulness to make sure you’ll succeed.
- Taste: you need a good intuition for what things will and won’t work well to try. Taste is important both “in the large” (picking important problems) and “in the small” (picking approaches to solving those problems that will work well); I usually see people first become great at the latter, then the former.
A common trait of high-agency people is that they take accountability for achieving a goal, not just doing some work.
There’s a huge difference between the following two operating modes:
- My goal is to ship this project by the end of the month, so I’m going to get people started working on it ASAP.
- My goal is to ship this project by the end of the month, so I’m going to list out everything that needs to get done by then, draw up a schedule working backwards from the ship date, make sure the critical path is short enough, make sure we have enough staffing to do anything, figure out what we’ll cut if the schedule slips, be honest about how much slop we need, track progress against the schedule and surface any slippage as soon as I see it, pull in people from elsewhere if I need them…
Found this on another blog which has some good commentary on the original essay
Striving for “inevitability”, as Kuhn frames it, isn’t about achieving perfection or eliminating all risk. That’s clearly impossible in most nontrivial areas of human endeavor. Instead, I think the real value lies in cultivating the mindset itself.
Adopting this agentic mindset takes conscious effort, especially initially. It means spending more time up-front planning, anticipating, and communicating, which can sometimes feel less immediately productive than jumping into writing code, or whatever the immediate “work” may be. However, investing time in up-front strategic thinking consistently pays off later. Having a strategy results in less frantic firefighting, fewer deadline slips, and a generally calmer, more predictable process for delivering impact.
The benefits of cultivating personal agency are beyond “merely” delivering reliable outcomes to achieve some abstract team/company/personal OKR. There’s a certain confidence and personal satisfaction that comes from knowing you’ve done the work to truly understand the problem, anticipate hurdles, and steer yourself toward success, rather than hoping things work out or leaning on someone else to keep the project unblocked. Agency also generalizes well across different domains of life. Developing agency in a professional context usually results in a higher ability1 to exercise agency in other contexts (e.g. personal, social, relational). Professional contexts are a good environment for developing agency too: in healthy workplaces, there is a clear feedback loop and ample opportunity to exercise agency.
Newsletters and RSS
Curate your own newspaper with RSS #rss
RSS solved the distribution problem a long time ago. It is really sad that it's been sidelined now, and we have to depend on email to bypass the enshittification of distribution platforms. But at least these outlets are realising the issue with giving up control over their own distribution.
These intermediary platforms between news organizations and readers are undergoing a type of predictable decay Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”: rip off others’ work while expecting high-quality journalism to magically continue to appear, even as journalists are starved of audience and revenue.
The newsletter strategy aims to bypass these rapidly enshittifying intermediaries and instead establish more direct relationships with subscribers. “I don’t intend to ever rely on someone else’s distribution ever again,” wrote Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel on Bluesky.3 Although email has undergone some enshittification of its own,b its fundamental nature as a protocol rather than a platform has provided one essential prophylactic to enshittification: the escape hatch. If your email provider suddenly inserted ads two sentences into every email, you could easily switch providersc and still receive emails from everyone you previously emailed. As a result, email has become a go-to refuge for news outlets fleeing their abusive relationships with deeply enshittified platforms they grew reliant upon.
But the surge in newsletters has been overwhelming. Whether it’s writers like me who’ve never worked in a traditional newsroom, journalists who’ve left or been laid off from traditional jobs, or established newsrooms entering the newsletter business, there’s a newsletter around every corner. Instead of subscribing to a single newspaper for columns and articles by a dozen journalists, now you have a dozen separate newsletter subscriptions, with articles appearing haphazardly in your email inbox amid bills, business communications, marketing spam, order confirmations, and two-factor authentication codes.
Male Anxiety and the morning routine
How male anxiety built the hyper-optimised morning routine | British GQ
This article has a hilarious beginning.
It’s 3.30 a.m. Besides a few night-shift workers, insomniacs and ravers, the world is unconscious. Not Mark Wahlberg. His alarm has just gone off, jolting him into life for a long morning of eating, praying, working out, and sitting in his cryo recovery chamber. Not far behind him is Apple CEO Tim Cook, whose eyelids flicker open at 3.45, so he can tackle some of the hundreds of customer feedback emails in his inbox before starting the meat of his day. At 3.52 exactly, the fitness coach and influencer Ashton Hall – whose elaborate, Patrick Bateman-esque morning routine has recently gone obscenely viral – is up and at it, ready for several hours of fitness, dunking his face in iced Saratoga mineral water, and rubbing said face with banana peel.
Now it’s 4 a.m., and the ranks of the successful and productive are really getting going. Robin Sharma, the self-help guru and author of The 5 a.m. Club, is up — “4 a.m. is the new 5 a.m.”, he told GQ recently — for a “victory hour” of “meditation, visualisation and prayer”. Disney CEO Bob Iger is ready to begin his morning workout. At 5, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel is centring himself for 45 minutes of meditation, JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon is flicking through the first of five newspapers, and Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur turned longevity obsessive, is checking his inner ear temperature “to assess if anything is amiss” heath-wise.
This is funny, given how, historically, a marker of male success was being able to afford to do as little as possible, especially before noon. Glamorous aristocrats and playboys were more likely to be in the casino than the gym in the early hours of the morning. Sprezzatura, the Italian concept of effortless, nonchalant grace, was coined in the 16th century and has been invoked ever since. So why has one masculine ideal, of effortlessness and indulgence, been overtaken another, of ceaseless hustle culture?
but the reason cited doesn't seem like a good diagnosis
In a word: anxiety. Anxiety hums in the background of all these morning routine videos. Even the hyper-precise time stamps and jerky editing instil a baseline level of tension. This new age of male anxiety comes from male success being a rarer beast than it once was.
Arguably, all those popular morning videos are put up by folks who are arguably successful by most metrics. What exactly is making them anxious? I can understand the urge to consume this kind of content and aspiring to an ambitious and elaborate early morning routine, and that stemming from anxiety. But that doesn't seem to be the argument the author is making.
AI is a Floor Raiser, not a Ceiling Raiser
AI is a Floor Raiser, not a Ceiling Raiser - Elroy #ai #programming
Learning:
AI Assisted Learning:
Is fitness culture making us sad and boring?
Is fitness culture making us sad and boring? | Dazed #exercise #fitness #culture
Ethan was over-exercising before today’s social media fitness challenges, like 75 Hard, existed. Still, he exhibited a similarly regimented discipline: working out multiple times a day, sticking to a restrictive diet and swapping social events for “self-improvement” activities. While the broad consensus is that 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week (or half as much if it is intense) – which can equate to about 8,000 steps a day – is enough to lower the risk of premature death and many diseases, this is rarely the message we see plastered across gym inspiration posts online. As fitness influencers proudly proclaim their gym “addiction” causes them to work out twice a day every day and high schoolers gloat about skipping prom for a workout, getting sucked into extreme gym culture can pull your goals and aspirations away from being well-rounded, interesting and socially connected. So, is over-exercise culture making us sad and boring?
Over-exercising can also look like using the gym for mood modification, or even emotional avoidance. We see this when people talk about post-breakup “glow-ups” or post about fighting off “sad girl” season by going to the gym twice a day. “I live such a lonely and boring life that I just spend hours at the gym and go twice a day because I have nothing else better to do and no one to go home to. The gym is one of the only things that can distract me from this void,” exercise influencer @liftwithspooky wrote on TikTok. In the comments, there are hundreds of people who share the same routines, and perhaps even go to the same gyms, but never speak to each other. A large part of this has to do with many treating exercise as a means to an end, instead of a potentially enjoyable and connecting experience itself, downplaying rest days and the importance of rest and leisure.
The mainstream aesthetic-driven approach to going to the gym is, unfortunately, inextricably tied to wellness and diet culture. We often talk about what exercise can do for our bodies, before how it’s enriching our lives and energising us for other things. For this reason, over-exercising tendencies can easily slip through the cracks. “When you talk to a doctor, nobody complains to you about exercising, even though you're overexercising,” says Ethan. “You can hide the brutal reality of it in a self-serving way so that you get to have the aesthetic appeal that you want to develop.” In the midst of a beauty backslide, where we’re seeing a broader return to conservative, skinny ideals, there’s currently a hyper-focus on gaining and maintaining muscle. “This can lead people to make exercise have this really giant role in their life,” says Dr Ertl. “Poor body image continues to be a factor that's linked with exercise addiction and disordered eating generally.”
Competitive Exams in India
Would you pass the world’s toughest exam? | The Economist #exams #india #unemployment
This article explores the intense and highly competitive railway entrance exams in India, one of the many such exams in India for public sector jobs. The breadth of coverage is very extensive, and the stories are moving. It just left me sad and the desperation and absurdity of the situation.
Since India started liberalising its economy in the 1990s, its GDP per head has increased eightfold. The country now has the world’s fastest-growing large economy.
Yet many Indian graduates struggle to find work. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) nearly a third of them are jobless. Walk-in interviews draw massive crowds. At the start of this year a video went viral showing thousands of engineers queuing to apply for open positions at a firm in the western city of Pune (local media reported that only 100 were available).
This is partly an indictment of the education system, which has been criticised for its outdated curriculum and tendency to prioritise rote learning over critical thinking. But it also reflects the fact that the private sector is simply not creating enough jobs for the growing number of graduates, while public-sector jobs continue to be cut.
For all the buzz around India’s unleashed entrepreneurial spirit, government jobs remain stubbornly popular. They promise a position for life, regardless of competence – a sharp contrast with the precariousness of the private sector. They come with pensions and other benefits. Some offer the chance to augment income through corruption.
Indian society accords public-sector jobs a special respect. Grooms who have them are able to ask for higher dowries from their brides’ families. “If you are at a wedding and say you have a government job, people will look at you differently,” said Abhishek Singh, an exam tutor in Musallahpur.
The worldwide nursing crisis
The shocking hit film about overworked nurses that’s causing alarm across Europe | Film | The Guardian #nursing #unemployment #caregiving
This is ostensibly a movie review but I learned more about the nursing crisis than the movie itself.
The world could face a shortage of 13 million nurses by the end of this decade. For her new film, Swiss director Petra Volpe imagined the consequences of just one missed shift on a busy night at a hospital, and found herself making a disaster movie.
With Late Shift, Volpe aimed to shine a light on the frontlines of the looming healthcare catastrophe through the eyes of the dedicated, exhausted Floria. Played by German actor Leonie Benesch, the young nurse shows an initially acrobatic grace in her workday, whose first half resembles a particularly hectic episode of the restaurant kitchen series The Bear, but with life-and-death stakes.
Agentic AI and the new "semantic web"
Pluralistic: Delta's AI-based price-gouging (30 Jul 2025) #agents #ai #semantic #website
As an aside, this reminds me of one of the AI industry's most egregious hoaxes-du-jour: the pretense that "agentic AI" is just around the corner, and soon we will be able to ask a chatbot to (e.g.) comparison shop across multiple website for the best airfare and book us a ticket:
This absolutely totally does not work. You should not give your credit-card number to a chatbot and ask it to go out an buy you anything, lest you end up paying $30 for a dozen eggs and buying tickets to a baseball stadium in the middle of the ocean:
https://futurism.com/openai-new-ai-agent-food-stadium
AI agent demos are so dismal that AI companies are no longer claiming that "agentic AI" will involve chatbots that nagivate the web as is. Rather, they're claiming that every website will eventually re-tool so that it can be reliably and predictably addressed by an AI agent, with all of its user interface elements well-labeled and/or addressable programatically, via an API.
This is a remarkable sleight of hand! First of all, re-engineering every website to embrace a common set of labels and API fields is a gigantic engineering feat – formally called "the semantic web" – that has been attempted since 1999 without any meaningful progress:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
In fact, the first viral article I ever published online was "Metacrap," a critique of semantic web efforts. That essay is now 24 years old: