Daily log archive for Dec 2025. Go to the current daily log, or browse the archive index.
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2025-12-31
Raw Denim Tiers
Three Tiers Raw Denim #jeans #clothes
Since September, the only two pieces of bottomwear I have been wearing are a pair of raw denim Nudie jeans, and a pair of Japanese raw denim jeans custom stitched by Monks of Method in Bengaluru. I haven't even washed them yet, getting by with occasional application of a denim refresher.
Andrej Karpathy does a 180
This is from year-end AI newsletter by The Information, and it made me chuckle.
2025-12-30
eSIM annoyance
I switched to eSIM in 2025, and I am full of regret - Ars Technica #phones #mobile
Most people won’t need to move their phone number very often, but the risk that your eSIM goes up in smoke when you do is very real. Compare that to a physical SIM card, which will virtually never fail unless you damage the card. Swapping that tiny bit of plastic takes a few seconds, and it never requires you to sit on hold with your carrier’s support agents or drive to a store. In short, a physical SIM is essentially foolproof, and eSIM is not.
Obviously, the solution is not to remove multifactor authentication—your phone number is, unfortunately, too important to be unguarded. However, carriers’ use of SMS to control account access is self-defeating and virtually guarantees people are going to have bad experiences in the era of eSIM. Enshittification has truly come for SIM cards.
This hits home as somebody who has three numbers I have to maintain across the three different countries I have bases in.
This bit in the end summarizes my feelings about technology enshittification nicely
We gave up the headphone jack. We gave up the microSD card. Is all this worthwhile to boost battery capacity by 8 percent? That’s a tough sell.
Book Recommendations on Learning Philosophies
The readings section here is interesting
Over the years I’ve accumulated a small list of books that I like to recommend:
- The ABCs of How We Learn by Daniel L. Schwartz, Jessica M. Tsang, Kristen P. Blair. The “ABC” is a gimmick and wears thin in predictable ways, but it also forces the authors to limit how many entries to have. Don’t let this get in the way of high-quality advice from experts.
- How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice by Paul A. Kirschner, Carl Hendrick. This book wears the research even more explicitly on its sleeve, but every paper is distilled into actionable content.
- Understanding How we Learn: a Visual Guide by Yana Weinstein, Megan Sumeracki. A third way to organize similar ideas. Also combines cognitive science and education.
Each one has the following important charactersitics:
- Its content is research-based, not just opinion.
- It is written in an accessible style, suitable for non-experts.
- It provides actionable advice.
- It’s fairly small.
Simply implementing a handful of key ideas (that are new to you) from these books will make you a much more effective educator.
In addition, I’ve also found these very useful and thought-provoking, though they are not as immediately actionable:
How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School from The National Academies Press. This is a significant summary of the research on learning.
The Teaching Gap by James W. Stigler and James Hiebert. An important book about what goes wrong specifically in American schools.
Books others have recommended:
- How Learning Works: Eight Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching came recommended by Adam Shostack. I have read the first edition, which had seven principles. I thought it was both full of good research and had a lot of actionable feedback. I found some chapters weaker, and was annoyed by its boosterism for analogy without recognizing its problems. But these are minor issues; if this book appeals to you, go ahead!
and for computer scientists
Specifically for computer scientists, I have some very specific things you should read to gain perspective:
- Justin Reich’s Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education, which traces and shows the follies of a certain mindset that is pervasive in computing’s view of education. Odds are, even after you read this, you’ll still tell yourself, this time it will be different. In doing so, you will fail to understand that these are issues about humans, not about technology. Well, what can I say: I tried.
- Morgan Ames’s The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child is an excellent deconstruction of the OLPC project, which was an apotheosis of technological solutionism. Most of these issues could be, and were, predicted at the outset, but computing valorizes sunny optimism over knowledge and experience.
- Morgan Ames also wrote Hackers, Computers, and Cooperation: A Critical History of Logo and Constructionist Learning. This deconstructs a pervasive mindset in computing education for its strengths and (many) weaknesses. If you don’t have the energy to read Ames’s book, at least read this article, because OLPC is the product of this mindset combined with lots of resources.
- Audrey Watters’s The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade. It’s easy to imagine these as ZIRP phenomena, and many are, but (a) the underlying mindset is pervasive in computing and (b) every decade spawns a new set of technologies and views that can spawn a new one of these articles.
2025-12-27
AI and Programming - Hot Takes by Karpathy and Cherny
Andrej Karpathy broke AI Twitter the day after Christmas by tweeting that “never felt this much behind as a programmer.”
Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code piled on to say - “I feel this way most weeks tbh.” and went on - “The last month was my first month as an engineer that I didn’t open an IDE at all. Opus 4.5 wrote around 200 PRs, every single line. Software engineering is radically changing, and the hardest part even for early adopters and practitioners like us is to continue to re-adjust our expectations. And this is still just the beginning.”
The one redeeming thing about Boris Cherny's tweet was that it kicked off a thread where he gave out a lot of very specific tips in the thread on how the Claude Code team uses Claude Code to write code. Folks might miss it because it branches off the main thread from Karpathy. But there is some absolute gold stuff in there.
I had a bout of insomnia last night (for reasons unrelated to AI taking my job, I will add!) when I came across these tweets. I managed to get off my bed and opened Claude Code to hack on my side project, but mainly it was an excuse to try out some of the tips and techniques mentioned in the thread. I guess the hustle is real! 🙃
2025-12-25
Coffee Omakase
Coffee omakase is Japan’s love letter to caffeine
Italy brought us cappuccinos. Australia introduced the flat white. Cuba created the cafecito, and the Middle East, the qahwa.
Japan is bringing us coffee omakase.
In Japan, there are a number of cafes specializing in coffee omakase. Over the course of three days, I sampled four of them in a highly caffeinated journey through Tokyo and Kyoto. It evoked the dining experience associated with high-end sushi, placing you in the hands of an expert to curate and overwhelm your senses. (Omakase translates to “I’ll leave it up to you.”)
2025-12-22
Comfort Food for the Thinking Class
Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation #media
Wander into any bookstore (I dare you.)
The non-fiction table will be all but dominated by the usual suspects: Malcolm Gladwell's latest exploration of how some counterintuitive thing is actually the opposite of what you'd expect, a David Brooks meditation on character and virtue, something by Michael Lewis about how one weird guy in an office somewhere figured out a thing that nobody else noticed. And you might find yourself thinking: these are the same books. Spiritually, structurally, thematically identical to the books these same men were writing in 2008. In 2003. In some cases, in 1997.
The Gladwell formula, if you haven't encountered it, goes something like this: take a subject that seems simple, complicate it with research that seems to undermine common sense, then resolve the tension with a tidy insight that flatters the reader's intelligence while confirming something they sort of already believed. The ten thousand hours rule. The tipping point. The power of snap judgments, except actually you should think more carefully, except actually your gut is right. It's intellectual comfort food, and there's nothing inherently wrong with comfort food, but we've been eating the same meal for two decades now and the chef keeps insisting he's serving something new.
This isn't about Malcolm Gladwell specifically, though he'll appear as a recurring character.
It’s a broader problem.
Our collective intellectual culture seems to have calcified around a cohort of thinkers who achieved prominence roughly ten+ years ago and have been coasting ever since.
But I am uncomfortable with Substack as the default standard-bearer for independent thought.
The platform is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most powerful and connected venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. A16z's partners are as establishment as establishment gets: they sit on the boards of major tech companies, they socialize with senators and moguls and Donald Trump and his clan, they're regularly cited as visionary thinkers in the same airports bookstores where you find the Gladwell and Brooks titles. The idea that a platform funded by these people represents some kind of intellectual insurgency is, at minimum, in tension with the actual power dynamics at play.
I'm not suggesting there's some conspiracy here, that a16z is using Substack to promote certain viewpoints or suppress others. I don't think that's how it works, or at least it’s not how it works yet. The influence is more structural and subtle. Substack's investors want the platform to succeed, and success in the current media environment means attracting the kind of writers who can build large audiences. Large audiences, in the current environment, tend to come from a certain kind of content: culture war commentary, contrarianism that flatters particular demographics, lifestyle content for the professional class, and yes, the occasional original thinker who happens to be accessible enough to go viral.
The result is that Substack's version of independent thought looks suspiciously like the establishment thought it's supposed to be replacing, just with different political valences. Where the old establishment was center-left liberal, the Substack counter-establishment leans toward heterodox centrism that's critical of progressive excesses while being very careful not to threaten the tech industry or the investor class. Bari Weiss, one of Substack's highest-profile writers, is a perfect example. She positions herself as a brave truth-teller taking on the illiberal left, but her actual analysis rarely if ever questions the structural arrangements that benefit people in her social position. She's David Brooks in different packaging: iconoclasm that poses no threat to power, courage that risks nothing.
Indian coffee shops
India’s coffee shops are leveraging craft pastries - Coffee Intelligence #india #cafe
It's a bit nostalgic to read about Indian coffee shops where I spent a significant portion of my time before moving to Berlin.
India’s coffee market is forecast to double by 2030, with revenues from coffee shops rising at nearly twice the pace of their American counterparts – a sign of both growing affluence and an evolving urban palate. If coffee is the reason customers walk in, pastries are now the reason they stay and spend.
In wealthy economies, cafés once relied on their core product, anything ranging from a great cappuccino to an ethical supply chain or even a knack for latte art. Like in other emerging coffee markets – China for example – India skipped that era. As specialty – or at least premium – coffee leapfrogged from novelty to mainstream in major cities and even in small north Indian towns and cities, standing out required more than fresh-roasted beans and a V60 bar.
Chains like Blue Tokai helped build consumer literacy. But once a critical mass of urban Indians knew what a flat white was, the category became crowded and price-sensitive. Recent rising coffee prices also meant the premium and specialty coffee segment ran the risk of becoming too inaccessible. If everyone could serve decent coffee, differentiation had to come from elsewhere.
Enter the pastry revolution.
In a country that has leapt from instant coffee to specialty culture in a single generational stride, it is perhaps fitting that its cafés are no longer just places to drink coffee – but third spaces built to impress, taste and post.
It makes me a bit sad reading this, because it implies a cafe that exclusively focuses on providing top class coffee is not gonna make it in India. This also explains why it is extremely rare to find Indian coffee shops that serve international coffees, i.e. coffee brewed from beans across the world.
Performative Reading
The Curious Notoriety of “Performative Reading” | The New Yorker
Such an absolutist vision of individualism, however, undermines the systemic conditions that inform our relationship with the world, and ourselves. If we are to believe that the purpose of our lives is to unearth and express an authentic version of our true natures, we risk ignoring the myriad associations and forces that determine how we conceive of these premises in the first place. The philosopher Michel Foucault questioned this abiding belief that self-expression leads to liberation, advocating instead for an end to “all these forms of individuality, of subjectivity, of consciousness, of the ego, on which we have built and from which we have tried to build and to constitute knowledge.” Foucault argued that such idealism distracts the individual from grappling with, and critiquing, the power structures that lay claim to their actual freedoms—health care, reproductive rights, education, gender identity, and economic equality among them—which remain under the direction of a “biopower,” a term Foucault used to denote state and social institutions that organize and control a population.
In this view, the performative-reading phenomenon appears less like a newfangled way of calling people pretentious and more like an odious reflection of society’s increasing deprioritization of the written word. Reading a book is antithetical to scrolling; online platforms cannot replicate the slow, patient, and complex experience of reading a weighty novel. This is especially revealing because social media can replicate other art-consuming experiences for users: one could exclusively listen to music, look at visual art, or watch film clips via TikTok or Instagram and reasonably (if not depressingly) claim to have a relationship with these mediums—authentic relationships, fostered with the help of an app. The only way that an internet mind can understand a person reading a certain kind of book in public is through the prism of how it would appear on a feed: as a grotesquely performative posture, a false and self-flattering manipulation, or a desperate attempt to attract a romantic partner.
“Reading requires sitting alone, by yourself, in a quiet room,” he said in a 2003 interview. “I have friends, intelligent friends, who don’t like to read because they get—it’s not just bored. There’s an almost dread that comes up.” If our screens are adept at anything, it’s allaying this dread, convincing us to scroll until the loneliness goes away. Perhaps the performative reader is doing just that—performing, wielding a book for a perpetual, undying audience. Or maybe they’re leaning into the dread that Wallace spoke of, hoping to discover who they really are once the curtains close.
2025-12-18
The performative male
When did everything (and everyone) become so ‘performative’? | Dazed
This article is about "performativity" in general, but imo the best parts of it are a slick breakdown of the performative male.
The word “performative” has been thrown around in 2025, mostly to describe the “performative male”. The archetype of a performative male is a tote-bag-carrying, matcha-drinking, All About Love-reading man who curates his behaviours to attract women, using more “feminine” interests to lure them into a false sense of security. Appearing to look “not like other guys” while simultaneously acting exactly like other guys is an unfortunately common occurrence in heterosexual dating. Online, the idea of performative men took on a life of its own – there are performative male final boss starter packs, videos of men “performatively” reading and even performative male lookalike contests.
…
To understand how everything and everyone became “performative”, let us first track the emergence of the performative man. Dr Rauchberg says the performative male trend was a splintering of last year’s celebrity look-alike contests. Most of these look-alike contests centred around male celebrities, like Timothee Chalamet. As these contests grew in popularity and were replicated, they sparked a larger conversation around how masculinity is enacted. She calls performative men the “Gen Z hipsters”, sipping matcha lattes and reading dog-eared feminist paperbacks instead of falling into the violent confines of the manosphere. “When the only media representations you see either fault you (men are bad!) or push you into warped misogyny, the performative male is an ironic, playful response that pushes back at weaponised misogyny in media,” she says.
Thin and Thick Desires
Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life
The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package.
Social media gives you the feeling of social connection without the obligations of actual friendship.
Pornography gives you sexual satisfaction without the vulnerability of partnership.
Productivity apps give you the feeling of accomplishment without anything being accomplished.
In each case, the thin version is easier to deliver at scale, easier to monetize, and easier to make addictive.
The result is a diet of pure sensation.
And none of it seems to be making anyone happier.
The thick life doesn't scale.
That's the whole point.
So: bake bread.
The yeast doesn't care about your schedule.
The dough will rise when it rises, indifferent to your optimization.
You'll spend an afternoon doing something that cannot be made faster, producing something that you could have bought for four dollars, and in the process you'll recover some capacity for patience that the attention economy has been methodically stripping away.
Write a letter, by hand, on paper.
Send it through the mail.
The letter will take days to arrive and you won't be able to unsend it or edit it or track whether it was opened.
You're creating a communication that exists outside the logic of engagement metrics, a small artifact that refuses to be optimized.
Code a tool for exactly one person.
Solve your friend's specific problem with their specific workflow.
Build something that will never scale, never be monetized, never attract users.
The entire economy of software assumes that code should serve millions to justify its existence.
Making something for an audience of one is a beautiful heresy.
None of this will reverse the great thinning.
But I've started to suspect that the thick life might be worth pursuing anyway, on its own terms, without needing to become a movement.
2025-12-15
M.F. Husain Museum in Qatar
India’s best-known artist gets his own museum—in Qatar
Although he died 14 years ago, aged 95, M.F. Husain is India’s best-known modern artist. He recently became its most expensive, too: earlier this year one of his works sold at auction for $13.8m, a new record for an Indian painter. The opening of Lawh wa Qalam (The Canvas and the Pen) in Qatar adds one more item to Husain’s list of achievements, for it is the first museum outside India dedicated to a single Indian artist.
Why is the museum in Doha and not, say, Pandharpur, the town of Husain’s birth? The artist, who was Muslim, fell foul of Hindu nationalists, who claimed to be offended by his frequent depiction of Hindu goddesses in the nude. By the mid-2000s the harassment had become intolerable: death threats, vandalism of his artwork, an attack on his home by Hindu militants and an estimated 900 legal cases registered against him. He left India in 2006 and never returned, living between Dubai, Doha and London. “It is a sad day for India,” the editor of the Hindu, a newspaper, wrote at the time.
Mubi Podcast with creator of Jiro Dreams of Sushi
JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI... and David Gelb changes how people eat it
David Gelb changed how the world looked at food documentaries. I watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi not too long after it first came out. Over the years, I have also followed the numerous food documentaries (including Gelb's Chef's Table and it's various spinoffs and knockoffs) define an entire genre of documentary film-making.
This podcast was a nostalgic trip down memory lane and had some interesting insights on how the whole phenomenon began.
2025-12-12
Gyms in airports
The first study quoted in this post had 12 participants. They were all in their 20s.
Enough said! 🤷🏽♂️
#gym #airport
2025-12-11
Berluti Knot
Recently switched to this knot from the Parisian knot, and I am super happy with it 😊!
2025-12-10
MCP donated to Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF under the Linux Foundation
Donating the Model Context Protocol and establishing the Agentic AI Foundation \ Anthropic
The comments on the HN Post are brutal, and I suspect accurate.
Anthropic wants to ditch MCP and not be on the hook for it in the future -- but lots of enterprises haven't realized its a dumb, vibe coded standard that is missing so much. They need to hand the hot potato off to someone else.
MCP is overly complicated. I'd rather use something like https://utcp.io/
This sounds more like anthropic giving up on mcp than it does a good faith donation to open source.
Anthropic will move onto bigger projects and other teams/companies will be stuck with sunk cost fallacy to try and get mcp to work for them.
Good luck to everyone.
tbf I do believe MCP has its uses. It just hasnt lived up to its hype yet and it's complicated to implement in a remote scenario. Moreover, for local MCPs using stdio, you might as well use regular tool calls instead
The Best Philosophy Lectures
The Best Philosophy Lectures on YouTube
Great to see Ellie Anderson on there. She is one of my favorite philosophy YouTubers.
On Brainrot
On Brainrot #europe #twitter #misinformation
The conservative commentator Erick-Woods Erickson observed on his Substack this week that Twitter has now convinced large swaths of the American right that Europe has been completely overrun by Muslims, that the United Kingdom is on the verge of becoming an Islamic nation, and that Sweden has fallen.
But reality tells an entirely different story. Muslims make up less than eight percent of Sweden's population. Non-natives account for less than thirteen percent of Germany. There are problems, certainly, real ones that deserve serious attention, but the online discourse had inflated them into an existential civilizational collapse that simply isn't happening at the imagined (and much tweeted about) scale.
Erickson's broader point is about what - precisely - has happened to our discourse and our decision-making. The Trump administration, he argues, has been captured by people whose entire education, whose entire worldview, whose entire paradigm of reality itself has been gleaned from Twitter.
Erickson and I would likely disagree on 90% of the issues that come up on his podcast. But I think he's 100% on the money when it comes to this - our current epistemic disaster. He is quite accurately describing a phenomenon that has metastasized across the entire information ecosystem, across all political orientations, across geographic boundaries and cultural contexts.
We've entered the era of "brainrot" - though the term itself feels almost too glib // flippant for the scale of our cognitive and cultural crash out. Somewhere in the last decade and a half, something fundamental broke in how human beings process information, form beliefs, and engage with reality. We became a global fragmentation of doom scrolling, context-lacking, uncurious, blindly accepting, regurgitating masses.
2025-12-04
The 2025 archetype gift guide
Dazed has a very interesting set of gift guides - broken down by archetypes. Here are my personal favorites
- The 2025 archetype gift guide: The Performative Male | Dazed (their Matcha starter kit and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stickers make this my top pick! 🙃)
- The 2025 archetype gift guide: The Offline Luddite | Dazed
- The 2025 archetype gift guide: The Protein Guerilla | Dazed
2025-12-02
The Cost of Living
I was sitting in a Copenhagen cafe (Original Coffee Istegade to be exact) and they had a stack of Kinfolk magazines. I wanted to stay off any screens so I just started reading all the back issues one by one and stayed for the entire day.
This article especially caught my attention: The Cost of Living - Kinfolk
It's paywalled online and not availble in full. But here is a lovely quote from it.
The essential problem is much the same now as it was then: What we think we want, and what actually makes us happy are, in the end, not the same things. Thoreau’s solution is surprisingly practical and has the tone of an economics lecture rather than the pulpit. “The cost of a thing,” he writes, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
When we devote ourselves to our jobs and push ourselves to acquire the outward signs of success, we often vastly under-estimate the amount of “life-cost” we will pay to attain our goals. Once awoken to this cost, Thoreau saw it everywhere: the effort made to dress elegantly, curry favor among neighbors and business associates, the fear of insolvency. At one point he notes that most of his neighbors would rather appear in public with a broken leg than with patched trousers (“distressed” garments had yet to come into fashion).
"life-cost" is such an amazing concept.
The Philosophical Stance Against Having Children
The Growing Anti-Natalist Movement in Japan – SAPIENS
Many critics paint anti-natalism as a movement rejecting generational continuity and its followers as selfish, short-sighted, and nihilistic. Critiques of childlessness in general have only grown in tandem with rising pronatalist policies across the globe. Current U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, in a 2019 speech at a The American Conservative gala, implied the childless are “sociopaths” unmoored from the well-being of their “communities,” “families,” and “country.” Others have described them as “hedonists” chasing a life of pleasure. Philosopher Ben Ware compared anti-natalism to the folly of techno-utopianism for believing that it has found the solution to worldly suffering.
These critiques are unfair and either wholly inaccurate or overly simplified. Anti-natalists have a wide range of motivations, often related to the broader social, political, and economic circumstances that shape their understandings of reproductive choice, parenthood, and the future. Anti-natalist movements around the globe do not always agree with one another or share the same concerns.