Daily log archive for Apr 2026. Go to the current daily log, or browse the archive index.
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2026-04-15
Shitty Flow and Zombie Flow
Wu says it's a mistake to attribute the regretted hours of scrolling to addiction or a failure of self-control. Rather, the user is falling into "passive flow," a condition arising from three factors:
I. Engagement without a clear goal;
II. A loss of self-awareness – of your body and your mental state;
III. Losing track of time.
I instantly recognize II. and III. – they're the hallmarks of the flow states that abstract me away from my own pain when I'm working. The big difference here is I. – I go to work with the clearest of goals, while "passive flow" is undirected (Thompson also cites psychologist Paul Bloom, who calls the scroll-trance "shitty flow." In shitty flow, you lose track of the world and its sensations – but in a way that you later regret.)
Thompson has his own name for this phenomenon of algorithmically induced, regret-inducing flow: he calls it "zombie flow." It's flow that "recapitulates the goal of flow while evacuating the purpose."
Zombie flow is "progress without pleasure" – it's frictionless, and so it gives us nothing except that sense of the world going away, and when it stops, the world is still there. The trick is to find a way of compartmentalizing that rewards attention with some kind of productive residue that you can look back on with pride and pleasure.
Books on Loneliness
Why loneliness, a recurring theme in literature, is difficult to comprehend
Books covered:
- The Lonely City by Olivia Laing
- The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
- Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
The philosophical and personal narrative by British author Olivia Laing in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone draws from the time she lived in New York. She writes, “Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person.” We immediately get a sense of what to expect — an analysis of where loneliness stems from and its consequences, which linger in one’s mental health and very existence.
Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny explores the many layers of loneliness through fictional characters. The Booker-shortlisted novel traces the journeys of two individuals, Sonia and Sunny, negotiating distance, displacement, and belonging. Yet, this is not an entirely bleak story. Desai, who won the Man Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss, weaves in moments of hope as her character Sonia embarks on a path of self-reflection and discovery.
While some narratives trace loneliness with philosophical distance, others plunge into its most unsettling depths, as Gail Honeyman does in Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.
Loneliness is not always contemplative — sometimes it is isolating, corrosive, and dangerously silent. The novel begins on a bleak note. Eleanor Oliphant, a socially awkward and isolated woman living in Glasgow and working a routine office job, insists she is “completely fine.”
Yet beneath the rigid routines and solitary weekends lies a deep, unaddressed loneliness. Over time, she slowly finds her footing. As the author reminds us, “It is never too late, for any of us.” It is a poignant and joyful message.
The Other Bennett Sister
The Other Bennet Sister TV review — a sweet-hearted sideways take on Pride and Prejudice
The Other Bennet Sister offers up the legendary romance of Pride and Prejudice through the eyes of a peripheral character. Indeed, it largely dispenses with the events of Austen’s most famous novel by the end of the second episode, when it catapults off into Mary’s new life in London, away from the domineering and casually cruel and narcissistic Mrs Bennet (a very good Ruth Jones). She is frequently nudged in the direction of suitors, through the not-so-subtle machinations of her mother and the more heartfelt guidance of her aunt, Mrs Gardiner (Indira Varma), but, in this very contemporary tale, Mary must discover her true value for herself.
It all works remarkably well. The half-hour episodes are neat and pithy, suggesting a confidence with both sets of source material. It is light and fun, with a lot of heart, basking in the warmth of its own candlelit glow.
I bingewatched this show in a couple of sitting and absolutely loved it!
2026-04-13
Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
Why do people resist the boring read? Melvin Lerner had a theory. He published a book in 1980 called The Belief in a Just World, and his argument was that most of us walk around with a bone-deep need to believe that people Get What They Deserve. If someone is rich, they must be smart. If they’re smart, their decisions must make sense. And if their decisions look dumb, well, you must be the one who’s missing something. It’s a warm blanket of a worldview. It just doesn’t survive contact with reality.
There’s something else going on, too, and it’s less intellectual // more animal. We see patterns everywhere. We see them when they’re not there. Kahneman built half his career on this - we are so desperate to find signal in the noise that we’ll construct entire narratives out of nothing, and a narrative where the powerful guy is playing 12 moves ahead is just a better story than one where he fucked up because that’s what people do.
Ube is the next matcha
The next matcha: coffee chains bet on ube’s viral appeal
Fun fact, I had ube ice cream at an NYC outlet in Chinatown like several years ago. Then, I found it in a late-night beverage truck in Bengaluru's HSR neighborhood a year ago.
UK café chains are betting on ube, the vibrant purple yam native to the Philippines, to replicate the viral success of matcha among younger, higher-spending consumers.
The ingredient’s purple hue has been critical to its adoption by mainstream brands seeking social media success, according to Kiti Soininen, a food and drink analyst at Mintel. “The unusual and vibrant colour is at the heart of it, just as it was in helping matcha and Dubai chocolate go viral,” she said.
The push into ube comes as brands are “constantly looking for the next matcha,” said Lisa Harris, co-founder of food consultancy Harris and Hayes. The Japanese green-tea-based drink has grown in popularity globally over the past decade but rapid increases in consumption and a bad harvest last year are putting pressure on supply and driving up prices.
The contradictions of wokeness
Full transcript: https://www.debugjois.dev/apps/transcript-reader#t=9696b6681f98cbd9
The tweet length answer is that these periods of awokening happen when there's a big crisis for elites, where they are expecting a certain life and it seems like they won't be able to live that life. one thread that cuts across all four awokenings is that they tend to occur during these periods of elite overproduction. So elite overproduction is a term that's taken from sociologist Jack Goldstone and historian Peter Turchin. And it refers to a condition where society is producing more people that have a reasonable expectation to be elites, then we have the capacity to actually give them the elite lifestyles and positions that they're expecting. So you have growing numbers of people who did everything right.
They got good grades, they went to college, they went to the right colleges, they studied the right majors. And they're expecting six figure salaries and to be able to have a house and to get married and settle down and have kids and a standard of living that's close to or better than what their parents experienced. And all of a sudden they're not able to do any of that. When you have growing numbers of people in that kind of a condition, what they tend to do is indict the social order that they think failed them and try to tear down some of the existing elites to make space for people like themselves. So that's at their core, what I argue is happening in awokenings.
The 2 factors that cut across all Awokenings are the elite overproduction and this other factor, popular immiseration. So elite overproduction, one reason why that's not enough to predict awokenings, why it's not sufficient, is because often when elites are having a tough time, it's hard to get anyone to care. And that's because there's this phenomenon where the fortunes of elites and non elites tend to operate countercyclically. When elites are having a tough time, it's hard to get anyone to care. No one's breaking out a tiny violin and going, Oh, poor elite guy.
He has to live a normal life and get a normal job like everyone else. Oh, let me play you a Sam song, right? So if times are pretty good for everyone else but bad for elites, no one cares. But there are these moments when the trajectories get collapsed, when things have been kind of bad and growing worse for ordinary people for a while, and all of a sudden they're bad for a lot of elites too, those are the moments when awoken things happen. Because the frustrated elite aspirants not only have a motive, but they also have a means to really mess with the system because there's this huge base of other people in society who are also really frustrated with the way things are going, who also have a bone to pick with the people who are kind of running the show.
And so they have more leverage. These frustrated elite aspirants have more leverage over the system than they otherwise might.
Host
Do you think the New York Times doesn't give a shit about George Floyd until he's been killed by the state? Or is it that the audience won't pay attention until that's the case?
Guest
I think it's kind of both. And part of the reason it's both, actually, I talk about this a bit in the book is that the people who produce and consume these narratives are increasingly the same people. It's the same slice of society that's producing almost all of this work in the symbolic professions. And they're almost the exact same as the audience that's consuming them in terms of where they live, the professions they work in, what their values are, the kinds of educational background they have, and so on. It's this really incestuous relationship increasingly between writers and audiences where they're virtually identical.
So I think it's the case that a lot of the writers don't really, and editors and stuff, don't really have their finger on the pulse of normies. But I think it's also true that the audience of The New York Times doesn't particularly care about normies and their problems either.
But that said, I also tried I think a lot of the anti woke kind of culture warriors are going to have a tough time really mobilizing the book the way they might hope, both because it has a lot of very critical things to say about the anti woke kind of people and the game that they're playing as well. I apply a very symmetrical lens to understanding them and their behaviors and actions. And the book also, the reality is a lot of work like in queer theory or critical race theory or feminist standpoint epistemology or postcolonial theory, these modes of scholarship deeply inform my own thinking, including on these questions about power and ideology and how they relate to each other. In a deep sense, what the book is doing is taking the arguments from these literatures to what I perceive to be their logical conclusions, which should lead us to ask of our own ostensibly emancipatory ideologies whether or not they might also reflect our class interests, whether or not they actually represent the values and interests of the people that we're trying to help. And whether or not, like like there's no reason to think that our own belief systems are exempt in a lot of these other related literatures and not to villainize them or mock them or demean them, but in fact, to show how they can be valuable.
And so in this and a lot of other ways, I think the book is not easily digestible into the culture wars and the ways that people might hope.
2026-04-12
The Art of Pooping
Podcast #1,112: You’ve Been Pooping Wrong — Here’s How to Do It Better | The Art of Manliness #bowel
Full transcript: The Art of Manliness - You’ve Been Pooping Wrong — Here’s How to Do It Better
Harvard gastroenterologist Dr. Trisha Pasricha is the author of You've Been Pooping All Wrong: How to Make Your Bowel Movements a Joy. Today on the show, Trisha and I have a fun and frank conversation about the art and science of bowel movements, including the color of healthy stools, how often you should be pooping, if laxatives are safe to use, the food to eat that's even better than prunes for getting things going, why you feel the urge to go poop at Barnes and Noble, the wonders of the bidet, the danger of using your smartphone on the toilet, how to get more comfortable pooping in a public restroom, and more.
I had not realised kiwis (which are a part of my daily diet here) have some great benefits to pooping.
But I will say there are a lot of ways that you can improve your bowel habits, become less constipated just by changing things about what you're eating and what you're doing, and even the position of how you're sitting on the toilet. I mean, it's very common that people don't wanna take medicines, but you can take things as natural as, like, kiwis. Right? Like in our grandparents' times, people were taking prunes, and prunes are incredibly effective.
But I have never successfully convinced a college student to take prunes. It's like 1 of those things that people just don't reach for anymore these days. But kiwis have been shown in multiple randomized controlled trials, 2 kiwis a day, that they are as effective as prunes, but they also don't cause bloating. Like a lot of these, like, fiber supplements and prunes can cause, kiwis don't seem to do that. So it's a pretty simple fix that's relatively effective, all things considered.
And and it's not really a laxative. It's actually just something that's high fiber, got a lot of nutrients, and is good for you in other ways.
Some of the explanations are really good and clear
Host
Gotcha. So what what happens to our stool whenever we get diarrheas? Why does the body decide this stuff needs to be liquid and get out fast? Like, what's happening there?
Guest
Yeah. There's lots of different causes. But in terms of your anatomy, your small bowel, which is that first part of the tube after your stomach, the main point of your small bowel is to absorb all the nutrients. And it's sucking out everything that it wants and breaking it down. And then the stuff that it can't break down, which is usually like the fiber, which we actually don't possess the enzymes to break down.
It makes its way to our microbiome in our colon. Well, the colon has several jobs. 1 of them is to suck water out of the stool as it passes through. And stool passes a little bit more slowly through the colon, so your colon has a lot of time to get that water up. But if something happens that triggers that poop to move forward, and sometimes it's stress, stress can cause our colon to suddenly start to contract.
That means we haven't had time to remove and absorb all the water out of it yet, so it's gonna gush out like diarrhea when we're stressed. Spicy food does that. Spicy food sends this signal down to say, okay. Evacuate everything we have. That too will make whatever comes out to be a little bit fiery, a little uncomfortable, and it'll also be pretty liquidy.
And then there's other things like infections or just depending on how things are going with with other aspects of your life, travel and exercise, those things can also help speed things up. But before, you've really had a chance to absorb all the water.
and this one about constipation
Host
Gotcha. And constipation is just the reverse. It's been in the colon too long, so all that water's been sucked out.
Guest
Yeah. Exactly. And there's a ton of different reasons why we things slow down and why we can get constipated. And and and you're right. The longer we sit there, the longer that stool is just your colon is gonna keep doing its job, and it's gonna keep making it harder and harder, which is why I sometimes think the most important thing people can do who are constipated is just as soon as they hear that call, feel that urge, respond because it's not gonna be the same poop later on.
Host
What causes constipation? You said there's lots of potential sources.
Guest
Yeah. Well, when someone comes into my clinic and they have constipation, I I try to explain the way the colon works in terms of trying to get toothpaste out of a toothpaste tube. So sometimes the issue is that we're not squeezing that toothpaste tube. And that means that maybe there's something that's stopping the colon from contracting so much. We need to do that.
We need to generate pressure in order to push the stool outwards. And maybe the problem is actually not that we're not squeezing the tube, but that the toothpaste itself is rock solid. And sometimes that happens because maybe we're not getting enough fiber. Maybe we're not drinking enough. Maybe there's something else that's making that stool really, really hard.
But then the third and I think most underappreciated part of the problem is that, yeah, we're squeezing hard enough. The toothpaste is super soft, but we forget to take the cap off the toothpaste tube. And then we're just pressing up against this pelvic floor that is not cooperating. And that is very common. That happens to about 1 in 3 people who have constipation and who have tried different laxatives and different things and they failed.
And basically what that means is that our pelvic floor, which is this set of more than a dozen muscles sitting there at the bottom of our rectums, and they need to coordinate in this really highly orchestrated dance. Some need to contract at the right time, some need to relax. And for a lot of people, the sphincters that are supposed to be relaxing actually contract when we bear down. If you think about it, we're like generating all this pressure to try to push our poop out, and people's sphincters contract. And and that's very paradoxical.
It's not supposed to do that. So sometimes when you've tried everything, the most obvious answer is actually something that doesn't involve anything related to your colon, but actually it's all the muscles in your pelvis that's the problem.
2026-04-10
Barista Judgemental Glare
Brooklyn Coffee Shop Episode 55: Kumail Nanjiani, Barista Training Expert 🪪☕️ - YouTube
I was at a coffee shop in Berlin today and the barista messed up my order by pouring somebody else's order into my reusable cup and handing it to them. When I pointed it out to the barista, he had this look about him as if it was my fault, which reminded me of this episode of Brooklyn Coffee Shop.
The transcript is reproduced in full below.
Hey guys, it's that time of the year again. I'm here for your hipster barista assessment.
No one says hipster anymore.
You've passed the first test. Nobody says the h word anymore.
I'm sorry. Who are you?
How do you not remember me? I'm Kumail Nanjiani, h word barista expert.
Wow, your aura is like completely different this year. I didn't even recognize you.
Yeah, something seems off. You seem very emotionally regulated.
Oh yeah, I've been on a healing journey. I started therapy.
Therapy? I thought it was a requirement for all Brooklyn baristas to be chaotic and unhinged.
I've been avoiding therapy for years for my craft.
Yeah, that's a big update we're doing to 2026. Now, we want all baristas to go through therapy so that your rudeness comes from a place of creativity rather than trauma. As you know, you need a high score to keep operating a coffee shop in Brooklyn. First, let's see your judgmental glare.
Okay, it's a little dead behind the eyes. I need a bit more boredom, a little more disdain. Like, you looked at me and you already know I'm the problem. More like Mhm. Mhm. Judgmental glare 8 out of 10.
Not. Seriously,we're known in Brooklyn for our judgmental glare.
You were there for a moment.
We have at least 10,000 negative Google reviews about it.
You think 10,000's a lot? All right, let's talk about reading. What are we perusing these days?
Only books on Marxism and existential thought.
Marxism is so played out. It's so old. I mean, look at your mayor. My mom is into Marxism. She's got a little Marx bumper sticker on her Subaru. Now all the cool baristas have circled back around to loving capitalism.
But I spent my entire adult life blaming all my problems on capitalism.
I would shift that blame right over to taxes.
As a fourth generation Gatsby, I can do that.
That's right. Rich is cool again, guys.
All right, let's hear your self-sabotage initiatives to keep customers away.
We've been playing with insults. Usually three to four per customer.
Sometimes we post to our Instagram story that we're suddenly closing and then we stay here just so that we can turn people away.
We never have what people order even though it's on the menu.
Oh god.
When we're in a bad mood, we triple our prices and that is often.
You guys are nailing it right there. All right, let's talk about what are your milk options right now.
Oh, so today we have cacti, water, buffalo, avocado seed, and potato milk.
Trick question. We're all post milk now. You haven't heard of milk fatigue?
The milk is getting fatigued?
We are tired of milk.
No milk made in the house.
How can milk get tired? Milk don't be alive. We're now in our post milk era. I always knew this day would come.
Okay, I have tallied up your scores. You're a B+. Dang it.
I promise next year we'll be even more unapproachable.
Yeah, we'll go to therapy so we can weaponize wellness even more.
B+ is actually the highest score you can get.
I knew it.
We do that just to keep people grounded.
All right, you guys can attend my new workshop. It's called Healing for Baristas. How to calm yourself while flustering others. I will save you two spots
2026-04-09
Did Wokeness Leave Us Worse Off?
Opinion | Did Wokeness Leave Us Worse Off? #linguistics
Spiegelman: “Woke” obviously has had a lot of different transitions as a word, and who uses it and how, and to mean what. And I would say that it seemed like a positive thing to be woke five years ago. And now it doesn’t feel that way anymore. Have you noticed a shift, and where are you noticing it?
Colyar: Yeah, when I’m trying to describe my politics to people, I often say that I have some “anti-woke” sensibilities. And by saying that, I think what I’m often trying to do is distance myself from the woke of five years ago — this way too earnest, super p.c. kind of cringe, resistance-y culture, whose politics I mostly support, but the way that it’s carried out is cringe to me. Yeah, I think “cringe” is the best word.
Spiegelman: What about you, Amina?
Sow: Yeah, “cringe” is a really good word. Thank you to the young people for that one. I do think that language moves very fast. And I think that sometimes, too, when I hear people use certain words, all it does is carbon-date them for me.
So, if somebody says “p.c.,” I’m like, got it. Like, you’re a 1990 and before person. We love that last century, you know? And if you’re a different kind of person and you say “woke,” I’m like, great. You’re a new century person. But do the words mean the same things to us? And that’s not always apparent.
What you were saying about the Biden years, I think the reason it feels like we’re having this kind of backlash to this culture right now is because of the institutionalization of it in our workplaces and on campuses. And I don’t think even good liberal people feel like the antiracist training that they’re doing in their office is helping anyone. Even people who respect people’s pronouns and believe in nonbinary identity or whatever, I don’t think that they think that putting it in their signature is helping anyone, and I think they’re rolling their eyes and laughing about it in private.
And so, when I find this wanton cruelty being the driving force — because, again, everything exists in a context — I think that what I find particularly grating about the “I want to be able to use the R-word, I want to call women [expletive], and I want to call people the N-word,” you know, whatever it is, I’m like, why do you want to do that? Why is it so important to you? What is so important about being able to say that to someone who is telling you they don’t want to hear that?
…
Colyar: But I will say, I do think that most people are willing to be polite, but so much of this has gotten so fraught, on the example of pronouns, because people do not allow people to learn. People do not give them the grace to try and figure out how to get these things right. I mean, people are militant about this stuff and will bite your head off, bite their professor’s head off over a misgendering situation, and that makes it really hard to move forward.
This one made me LOL, iykyk 😂
Sow: I want to ban straight people using “partner” when they mean husband or wife. I’m just like, I don’t like this signaling of your politics. I really hate it, because it’s very sinister, actually.
Colyar: They’re hiding. It’s like they’re doing some queer for clout ——
Sow: I’m like, you’re literally participating in the most heteronormative institution a person could participate in. And you don’t get to rebrand it.
I do wanna say though, participation is not necessarily an endorsement.
The Women Who Love the Manosphere
The Women Who Love the Manosphere - WSJ
Love the phrase manosphere-adjacent to describe Huberman (accurate imo)
Then there are others she loves that are better described as manosphere-adjacent: Andrew Huberman, the brawny neuroscientist and podcaster with a cult following, is a source Craig turns to for wellness advice. Following Huberman’s self-described “protocols,” Craig adheres to a rigid sleep schedule and workout routine, and never skips her morning dose of cryotherapy, collagen supplementation and sunlight exposure. She cites his guidance on her TikTok page, where she promotes a disciplinarian approach to physical fitness.
2026-04-08
Friendship Breakups
Why do friendship breakups hurt so much? | Dazed
Friendship breakups are incredibly common – studies show that around 70 per cent of close friendships end after seven years – and yet there is little guidance available on how to navigate them. It’s a stark contrast to the way breakdowns of romantic relationships are treated in culture; there are innumerable books, films, and TV shows dedicated to unpacking the pain of heartbreak (there’s probably a Sex and the City episode for every flavour of dating turmoil imaginable).
“Romantic relationships have long been a central focus of psychological research, popular culture, counselling, and self-help literature; they are widely recognised as a life transition with established language, rituals – such as break-up conversations – and social norms around grieving and recovery,” Dr Jenny van Hooff, a sociologist at Manchester Metropolitan University, tells Dazed. “By contrast, friendship breakups are often minimised or dismissed in both academic and everyday discourse, which means there is less culturally sanctioned language and fewer models for grieving them. As a result, people may struggle to validate their own pain.”
new word unlocked - amatonormative
Despite our culture being amatonormative – that is, romantic-relationship-centric – our friendships are central to our lives. “Close friends often provide ongoing support, shared history, mutual trust, identity affirmation and a sense of belonging,” says Dr van Hooff. “When a friendship ends, it is not only the loss of contact with another person that hurts, but also the loss of routines, companionship and emotional scaffolding that the relationship provided.”
Capitalism is Obsessed With Death
Is Employment Making You Ugly?
It's a quote of a quote that I found in one of my favorite newsletters.
RELATED: I wanted to fit this quote from Byung-Chul Han’s Capitalism and the Death Drive in my Guardian article on cadaver fat fillers, but I couldn’t, so I’ll just leave it here:
“Capitalism is obsessed with death … Performance zombies, fitness zombies, and Botox zombies: these are manifestations of undead life. The undead lack any vitality … Capitalism’s striving for life without death creates the necropolis — an antiseptic space of death, cleansed of human sounds and smells. [ED NOTE: I would add textures to this list!] Life processes are transformed into mechanical processes. The total adaptation of human life to mere functionality is already a culture of death. As a consequence of the performance principle, the human being ever more closely approximates a machine, and becomes alienated from itself.”
Great Books in 52 Weeks
How to Read the Great Books in 52 Weeks - by Ted Gioia
The original substack containing the program is behind a paywall. At some point I considered subscribing just to unlock that one post. Maybe some day!
A few weeks ago, reader Cheryl Drury reached out to me. She had been inspired by my 52-week humanities program. Not only had she completed the course, but documented her progress on a podcast.
2026-04-07
The Hacker News Tarpit
I like the formulation of sites like HN being a Schelling point problem. The secret sauce is not in the technology or the software at all.
A link aggregator is only as good as its community, and the community is only as good as the people in it, and the people are only there because the other people are there. This is a Schelling point problem; everybody needs to coordinate on the same place, and which place they coordinate on is partly arbitrary, and once they've coordinated it is very expensive to move.
There's a bar in your city where all the interesting people go on Thursday nights. The bar is not special. The drinks are mediocre, the lighting is bad, the bathrooms are questionable. But interesting people go there, which makes it interesting, which makes more interesting people go there. If you open an identical bar across the street with better drinks and better bathrooms, nobody is going to switch, because the interesting people are at the other bar. They all know they're at the other bar. There is no mechanism for coordinated switching.
I think the vibe coding discourse has a hole in it, and the hole is shaped like the question: "what is software for?"
If software is a thing you build, then vibe coding changes everything. Anyone can build. We have democratized building. Congratulations to building.
But software is mostly a thing people use, and getting people to use things is not a building problem. It never was. The reason most software fails is not that it was too hard to code. The reason most software fails is that nobody wanted it, or everybody wanted it but was already using something else, or the right people wanted it but couldn't find it, or they found it but didn't trust it, or they trusted it but couldn't get their team to switch.
Hacker News works because Paul Graham had an audience before he had a product, Y Combinator had a network that seeded the community, and dang has been doing the same moderating job every single day for over a decade with what I can only describe as an unreasonable level of dedication. The whole thing has been accumulating social capital for almost twenty years...
I built a Hacker News clone in six hours. To me, it's perfect and for everyone else it's empty and those two facts are going to remain true forever. If that doesn't tell you something about what software is and isn't, I don't know what will.
The Ten Commandments of Mental Health
10 Commandments of Mental Health - by Josh Zlatkus
with a sidenote that this was published on April 1st.
- Give me structure, or give me death!
- Rather than diagnosis, accommodation, or medication, give me sleep, movement, and sunlight.
- The not-so-curious paradox is that I only seem to change when I must.
- Man shall not grow by insight alone.
- Everything you experience happens for a reason—usually an evolutionary one.
- If at first you don’t succeed, try giving up.
- Thou shalt not acquire meaning from comfort.
- Know thy self’s insignificance.
- I regret that I have but myself and my happiness to live for.
- Forgive them, Father: they know not how to live with abundance.
Why Gen Z is taking up boomer hobbies
Why Gen Z is taking up boomer hobbies
Some are taking up knitting or crochet. Others are growing flowers or going fishing. These days, such hobbies are no longer old-fashioned. For Gen Z has decided that the pastimes of pensioners are rather pleasing.
…
“Grannycore”—as youngsters call the trend—is not limited to entertainment. Gen Zers respect their elders’ taste in homeware and fashion (think florals and cardigans).
…
As one fan of the old-timey trend recently put it: “Grandmas were onto something.”
2026-04-06
Bait - TV series
Just bingewatched this, and loved it! The last time I really liked Riz Ahmed was in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (esp the Urdu monologue in the Last Speech scene). Have been a huge fan since then.
2026-04-05
Walter Benjamin Biography
Walter Benjamin — Peter E Gordon’s vivid pearl of a biography
“Just to sit once more on the terrace of a café and twiddle my thumbs,” wrote the great German-Jewish critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin to a friend in 1939, “that’s all I wish for.”
Kyla Scanlon
This prelude from Kyla Scanlon's latest newsletter took me completely by surprise. I have often wondered about (and occasionally been envious) how people like and others that I admire can be so prolific. And then you come across the flip side of it
I have to go on an elimination diet because my gut is eating itself and that apparently is also destroying my thyroid because I am not absorbing any nutrients. In order to address this, I have to stop eating wheat, dairy, corn, egg, tomato, peanuts, coffee, soy, cacao, sugar and manyotherthings (this is not like a juice cleanse or something fun, it’s something I have to do to stop my body from attacking itself). I have to write down what I do eat and how I am feeling and then evaluate from there as to what I can eat in the future.
If there was a quick fix - say an injection - I would try to take it. I don’t KNOW what’s happening to me, I just know that I got lots of vials of blood drawn and the miracle of modern science has informed me that some things are not going very well.
But, funnily enough, part of the problem is that I took shortcuts. I traveled 40 out of the 52 weeks last year (a lot for me) and some days, I would just subsist on granola bars and about 14 cups of coffee. I would also run and work a lot and sleep very little because I was totally and completely invincible. After all, I was an optimization machine.
And for a time, I sure was. But then, I wasn’t. Turns out, I wasn’t really optimizing anything, I just was avoiding what I actually should have been doing like sleeping. What I needed was to stop adding things and start figuring out what was making me sick. That's the opposite of what we've been sold.
From: The Ozempicization of Everything - by kyla scanlon #health #overwork
Anyway back to the focus on the newsletter
Naturally, industries have formed to monetize this nihlism through promising solutions. But the solutions never arrive, because the nihilism, the giving up, must persist in order for these products to survive. It’s a version of Ivan Illich’s Limits to Medicine, where he argues that the medical establishment itself produces illness by making people dependent on professional intervention rather than building health. That effect carries across all these optimization tools, creating dependency on the fix rather than addressing the cause. The optimization economy can't deliver control, because the desperation is the market condition, and the pursuit of control through optimization is itself a loss of control.
The shift from railways to peptides is the shift from “we built this for everyone” to “you can buy this for yourself.”
What we have is the Ozempic optimization of everything - Ozempicization, if you will. We have a suite of magic shots now in the form of peptides and everything else that address effort and discomfort and complexity. Everything can be optimized. Everything can be controlled.
It’s revealing that Silicon Valley’s word of the moment is ‘agency’ as it dresses up that desire for control. Optimization is the process, control is the desite, and agency is the branding. It’s not clear what agency means in startup land (similar to other words often used, like taste) but it does hint at someone who will force the universe to bend to their will, one way or another3.
and the article I logged just over a month ago (2 Mar) makes an appearance again! 😊
Cluely is a company that embraced this wholeheartedly, the final boss of the hustler economy. Their original ethos was cheating (they have since pivoted into AI notetaking) and they have raised millions and millions of dollars4. For them, “scamming” was being “agentic” which is indeed the “hottest commodity in Silicon Valley” as Sam Kriss wrote in his piece Child’s Play:
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.
And they are just doing things, driven by (understandable) fears of the permanent underclass and becoming useless in the age of AI. Apparently, the way that you avoid both of those is by “constantly chasing attention online.”
Then there is a whole section on The Manosphere which is too long to quote, but worth reading in full.
and this bit makes me feel called out 😂 (although tbf I am not monitoring the daily news or vibe-coded dashboards.)
We tend to seek control in every facet of our lives, including information consumption. Amanda Mull wrote a brilliant article about “monitoring the situation” - people (clearly, like me) who get glued to their screens trying to piece things together. And there is a lot to sort through: war, a government partially shut down, erratic fiscal policy, weak labor market, high prices, etc. It’s soothing to go to places like Twitter and read the OSINT feeds and to feel like you’re… informed. As Mull searingly writes:
If you can dial in your feeds’ algorithms just right, maybe you can bear a type of witness so complete it feels like participation, or maybe even control. After all, there’s decent evidence that the people launching the bombs are monitoring some of the same feeds you are.
2026-04-04
everything i read in february & march 2026
truer words were never spoken.
In the last few years, I’ve written thousands and thousands of words about the same idea: that reading more (books, magazines, and essays) will change your life for the better. It will satisfy you more than the slop that is, supposedly, more entertaining and fun to consume. It will draw you closer to other people, closer to the world. It will disturb your pre-established understanding of the world and offer a subtler, richer, deeper experience of reality.
Brooklyn Coffee Shop
I stumbled upon this series while bedrotting and recovering from a wisdom tooth surgery this week.
It's kinda hard to locate a sequential playlist of all the episodes in this series (there are like 60+ so far afaict), but this is the official Instagram account: Brooklyn Coffee Shop (@bkcoffeeshop) • Instagram photos and videos
This article I found describes the show very well: Turmeric Lattes & Millennial Marxism: In Conversation With Pooja Tripathi Of Brooklyn Coffee Shop | Homegrown
Your coffee order says everything about who you are. Plain black without sugar screams old-school, efficient, and honestly, "Who hurt you?" The cappuccino with foam art is for the basic bitches (sorry!) and and the iced matcha latte with dairy-free milk and a scientific customisation speaks to a very Gen Z-coded sense of hyper-individualism. Cafés today have evolved into the wild wild West of curated identity — shaped by micro-trends and cultural semiotics, where taste is both aesthetic and ideology. These theatres of self-performance and the weird little niches they are comprised of, become the playground of the beloved Instagram & TikTok series Brooklyn Coffee Shop.
Created by Pooja Tripathi, a New York-based writer, producer, and performer, Brooklyn Coffee Shop is a satirical series that distills the internet’s most peculiar subcultures into tightly composed, hyperreal vignettes set in a fictional café. The series constructs a microcosm of the modern urban life in a digital age where aesthetics, belief systems, and social capital collide. With sharp worldbuilding, deadpan humour, and a precise understanding of internet folklore, it paints an incisive and chaotic picture of the zeitgeist.
The series delivers some heavy critique but through the lighthearted premise of sketches. Its tone comes from absurd comedies that Pooja has always been a huge fan of. She counts 'Portlandia' and Lena Dunham’s 'Girls' as formative influences, both of which combine observational wit with an irreverent lens on urban pretentiousness. Add 'My Favorite Shapes' and 'Fantasmas' by Julio Torres to the mix , and you begin to understand the show’s DNA. “Comedy always has a kernel of truth at the core,” Pooja notes. “Even if it’s exaggerated and heightened for a sketch, I think that core truth is what hooks people.”
Another article: The viral internet coffee shop where every order is a social critique | Vogue India
Forget about your basic black coffees and cappuccinos. Brooklyn Coffee Shop only serves intricate drinks with substitute milks: raw-avocado-pit, barley, flax, melon-seed, acorn and, of course, breast milk. (If their in-house goat Felicia isn’t too emotionally exhausted, goat milk is also an option.) Being a customer here is harrowing, but to be a barista, there is only one requirement: to have mastered “the glare of disgust”.
In 2021, Tripathi created her first skit set in a coffee shop. Shot in front of a green screen, she played both barista and customer. The video recognised something crucial: in cities around the world, coffee is not just a beverage but also a status symbol—each coffee order is a performance. Her friend, cinematographer Eyal Cohen, suggested they turn it into a professionally shot series and the switch was made from a green screen to Larry’s Cà Phê in Williamsburg. Since then, Tripathi confesses, she is always thinking about BCS.
I would love it if somebody already created a list of all the books featured on it.