Daily log archive for Mar 2026. Go to the current daily log, or browse the archive index.
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2026-03-12
The market for marriage
The market for marriage - Works in Progress Magazine
Love the way it begins, and the reference to Pride and Prejudice
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good agricultural surplus, must be in want of a wife.
One thing became abundantly clear: most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans. Sometimes marriage is sanctified by religion or the state; other times, it is simply what happens when two people begin living together. For some it is chosen, while for others it is coerced. Some societies prize monogamy, others polygamy, yet neither is a clear predictor of fidelity. In some cultures, both sexes can divorce and remarry freely; in others, only men have that right.
For the most fascinating description was of hunter gatherer marraiges, which made me think how the advent of farming and all the cultural evolution that happened after ended up in some ways to a sort of regression
For around 280,000 years, roughly 95 percent of our history as Homo sapiens, we lived as hunter-gatherers. Today, a few such groups still exist, although these final echoes of a life we lived for millennia will soon disappear as well.
The BaYaka, who live deep in the Congolese rainforest, are one of these. Anthropologist Haneul Jang, who has worked with the BaYaka for over a decade, describes how marriages happen: an enamored adolescent couple will simply walk off into the forest and a few days later, they return and build a hut. There is no ceremony, no exchanging of vows, just a mutual understanding that they are now together. ‘There is something very romantic about it’, she says.
The young man may then do ‘bride service’, where he will live with his girlfriend’s family for a year, hunting and collecting honey with his father-in-law. At some point the relationship may dissolve. This can even happen while the couple still have small children. It will end much like it began, with one individual wandering off into the forest and building a hut with someone else.
This fluidity isn’t unique to the BaYaka but a product of hunter-gatherer societies. Groups are highly mobile, society is egalitarian – any meat from hunts is quickly shared – and there is an almost total absence of material wealth. Fathers look after their children, but they are not necessarily a primary carer. A review of over 45 studies, mostly looking at populations without medical fertility control, found that fathers have a surprisingly small effect on child survival. Other helpers, predominantly grandmothers and siblings, provide more substantial support for the mother.
While Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas classifies most hunter-gatherers as polygynous, this is not accurate. In practice, most men are unable to support more than one wife because there is no stored wealth. Divorce and remarriage happen frequently because helpful extended families give women certainty that they won’t be left raising children alone. The lack of inheritance prevents conflict developing over having children with multiple partners, and the residential mobility means one can literally just walk away from relationships one no longer wants to be in. Consequently, women will frequently have children with two or even three men during their lifetime.
and how in some ways we are back to the old ways again 😊
In contemporary Western settings, things seem to have changed once again. Many people are monogamous and have children with a single partner, much like our agricultural forbearers. But others divorce and remarry, similar to hunter-gatherers. Young couples often live together before deciding whether to commit, like the trial marriages of the Samoans. True polygamy is usually illegal, yet some rich divorced or widowed men can attract young second wives, who can bear them a new set of children. Ethical non-monogamists are a growing and vocal minority. To an outsider, it may seem like we have no marriage system at all.
Traditional controls over marriage have weakened. Couples now choose for themselves, usually for love. The disappearance of bridewealth, dowries, and kin-arranged unions has reduced family involvement. While this might feel like a long steady transition for the West, it’s unfolding rapidly in many parts of the world today.
As states expand schooling, boys and girls mix freely. Mobile phones let them talk privately. Rural-to-urban migration brings people from different ethnic groups together, and when they marry, neither tradition quite applies. Removing the involvement of third parties makes marriages easier to enter and leave.
Changes to website
i have been making a lot of changes to the website, thanks to the productivity benefits unlocked by Claude Code and OpenCode.
I wrote my own little mobile editor that I can log into and make edits to the daily log. In fact, this change is being made on my Android phone using the voice keyword.
The whole thing is a combination of AWS Lambda supported by some GitHub workflow glue. I'm glad I was able to pull this off without incurring any continuous costs on the backend.
2026-03-09
Books You Can Finish In One Sitting
Books You Can Finish In One Sitting – The Painted Porch Bookshop
Found this in Ryan Holiday's latest newsletter (which has nice blurbs for each book, but I can't link to it directly)
The books:
- Montaigne
- The Boy Who Would Be King
- On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long If You Know How to Use It
- War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
- Gift from the Sea: 50th Anniversary Edition
- Book of Five Rings: A Classic Text on the Japanese Way of the Sword
- Address Unknown
- Small Things Like These
- Zen in the Art of Archery
- 84, Charing Cross Road
- Ain't I a Woman?
- The Greatest Sentence Ever Written
America and Public Disorder
America and Public Disorder - Chris Arnade Walks the World
We are the world’s richest country, and yet our buses, parking lots, and city streets are filthy, chaotic, and threatening. Antisocial and abnormal behavior, open addiction, and mentally tortured people are common in almost every community regardless of size.
I’ve written about this many times before, because it is so striking, and it has widespread consequences, beyond the obvious moral judgement that a society should simply not be this way.
It’s a primary reason why we shy away from dense walkable spaces and instead move towards suburban sprawl. People in the U.S. don’t respect, trust, or want to be around other random citizens, out of fear and disgust. Japanese/European style urbanism—density, fantastic public transport, mixed-use zoning, that so many American tourists admire—can't happen here because there is a fine line between vibrant streets and squalid ones, and that line is public trust. The U.S. is on the wrong side of it. Simply put, nobody wants to be accosted by a stranger, no matter how infrequent, and until that risk is close to nil, people will continue edging towards isolated living.
It is why we “can’t have nice things” because we have to construct our infrastructure to be asshole-proof, and so we don’t build anything or build with a fortress mentality, stripping our public spaces down to the austere and utilitarian, emptying them of anything that can be vandalized.
2026-03-07
RSS
Yet another paean for RSS.
Like, there was once a time when an ever-increasing proportion of web users kept tabs on what was going on with RSS. RSS is a simple, powerful way for websites to publish "feeds" of their articles, and for readers to subscribe to those feeds and get notified when something new was posted, and even read that new material right there in your RSS reader tab or app.
RSS is simple and versatile. It's the backbone of podcasts (though Apple and Spotify have done their best to kill it, along with public broadcasters like the BBC, all of whom want you to switch to proprietary apps that spy on you and control you). It's how many automated processes communicate with one another, untouched by human hands. But above all, it's a way to find out when something new has been published on the web.
For more than a decade, RSS has lain dormant. Many, many websites still emit RSS feeds. It's a default behavior for WordPress sites, for Ghost and Substack sites, for Tumblr and Medium, for Bluesky and Mastodon. You can follow edits to Wikipedia pages by RSS, and also updates to parcels that have been shipped to you through major couriers. Web builders like Jason Kottke continue to surface RSS feeds for elaborate, delightful blogrolls:
There are many good RSS readers. I've been paying for Newsblur since 2011, and consider the $36 I send them every year to be a very good investment:
It's almost impossible to overstate how superior RSS is to the median web page. Imagine if the newsletters you followed were rendered with black, clear type on a plain white background (rather than the sadistically infinitesimal, greyed-out type that designers favor thanks to the unkillable urban legend that black type on a white screen causes eye-strain). Imagine reading the web without popups, without ads, without nag screens. Imagine reading the web without interruptors or "keep reading" links.
2026-03-06
Matcha Consumption Mismatch
The mismatch with matcha consumption & Gen Z - Coffee Intelligence
“What’s happening with matcha today is essentially the same playbook we’ve seen in specialty coffee: a culturally rich product gets repackaged for mass consumption, prioritizing visual appeal and customization over the craftsmanship that defines it,” she says.
In Japan, matcha is inseparable from the structure of the tea ceremony. The act of preparation – including whisking, serving and receiving – is not simply functional, but philosophical.
Darleen argues that when matcha becomes primarily a takeaway beverage, the loss is contextual as much as sensory.
“These values are foundational, not ornamental. The Japanese tea ceremony isn’t just a preparation method; it’s a philosophy of presence and intentionality that’s been refined over centuries,” she says. “When matcha becomes a grab-and-go beverage primarily, what’s lost isn’t just the ritual. It’s the entire framework that gave the product its cultural significance.”
The Modern Workplace
This point is very understated:
The modern workplace selects heavily for sustained attention to abstract tasks in static environments. This is evolutionarily unusual. Human cognition evolved for movement, social interaction, novelty, and immediate feedback.
2026-03-04
Brainrot is a radical act
brainrot is a radical act - by Adam Aleksic #language #social-media
I’m sitting in a Buddhist temple, listening to monks chant the Heart Sutra. Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. The words technically have a meaning, but I find myself carried away by the rhythm instead. The mantra washes over me, connecting me to the present moment.
I’m scrolling on Twitter, seeing the same words show up in every post. Clavicular. Jestermaxxing. Framemogging. Clavicular. Jestermaxxing. Framemogging. Clavicular. Jestermaxxing. Framemogging. These terms also have a definition, but in practice they’re only funny because they’re funny.
Incel brainrot might not be the path to enlightenment, but there is an important connection between these examples. Any time we repeat a word too much, we become desensitized to its meaning. This phenomenon, called semantic satiation, causes us to attend to form over content. All that matters is how we experience an utterance.
The Heart Sutra teaches that “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” There is no fixed interpretation of language, but it is precisely in its unfixedness that language reveals its meaning. The beauty of semantic satiation is that it destroys the “containers” of denotation. Instead of using words to connect to something else, we connect to the words themselves—revealing that it was all form, and none of it.
2026-03-03
LLMs as Index Funds
LLMs as Index Funds - by Venkatesh Rao - Contraptions
Love this analogy. Came across this post via Bhuvan's blog post
Foundation models like GPT and Claude now serve as the index funds of language. Trained on enormous corpora of human text, they do not try to innovate. Instead, they track the center of linguistic gravity: fluent, plausible, average-case language. They provide efficient, scalable access to verbal coherence, just as index funds offer broad exposure to market returns. For most users, most of the time, this is enough. LLMs automate fluency the way passive investing automates exposure. They flatten out risk and elevate reliability.
But they also suppress surprise. Like index funds, LLMs are excellent at covering known territory but incapable of charting new ground. The result is a linguistic landscape dominated by synthetic norms: smooth, predictable, uncontroversial. Writing with an LLM is increasingly like buying the market—safe, standardized, and inherently unoriginal.
2026-03-02
Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking
This article is ostensibly about Cluely's founder Roy Lee, but it does a good job eviscerating some of the Silicon Valley mythmaking.
What I discovered, though, is that behind all these small complaints, there’s something much more serious. Roy Lee is not like other people. He belongs to a new and possibly permanent overclass. One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event. Some people will do incredibly well in the new AI era. They will become rich and powerful beyond anything we can currently imagine. But other people—a lot of other people—will become useless. They will be consigned to the same miserable fate as the people currently muttering on the streets of San Francisco, cold and helpless in a world they no longer understand. The skills that could lift you out of the new permanent underclass are not the skills that mattered before. For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore. Even at big firms like Google, a quarter of the code is now written by AI. Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.
It's hard to read the paragraph below 👇🏽 and not consider it sarcasm. But I have sufficient anecdotal evidence to believe it's not that far from reality.
The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger. Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley. In tech interviews, it’s common for candidates to be asked whether they’re “mimetic” or “agentic.” You do not want to say mimetic. Once, San Francisco drew in runaway children, artists, and freaks; today it’s an enormous magnet for highly agentic young men. I set out to meet them.
It did not seem like a good idea to me that some of the richest people in the world were no longer rewarding people for having any particular skills, but simply for having agency, when agency essentially meant whatever it was that was afflicting Roy Lee. Unlike Eric Zhu or Donald Boat, Roy didn’t really seem to have anything in his life except his own sense of agency. Everything was a means to an end, a way of fortifying his ability to do whatever he wanted in the world. But there was a great sucking void where the end ought to be. All he wanted, he’d said, was to hang out with his friends. I believed him. He wanted not to be alone, the way he’d been alone for a year after having his offer of admission rescinded by Harvard. For people to pay attention to him. To exist for other people. But instead of making friends the normal way, he’d walked up to strangers and asked whether they wanted to start a company with him, and then he built the most despised startup in San Francisco.
Historic Cafes in Tangier
The Sprudge Guide To Historic Cafes In Tangier, Morocco | Sprudge Coffee #travel
I am totally loving the Sprudge guides, because they also contain some lesser known cities as well (for e.g. Kigali)
Martin Parr photos Rural Ireland
A Fair Day: Martin Parr's Photos of Rural Ireland In the Early 1980s - Flashbak #photography
One of my favorite photographers. Which reminds of this wonderful documentary of his that I matched a while ago
This might as well be a good time to mention that I am absolutely obsessed with photography museums and documentaries about photographers.