Daily log archive for Aug 2026. Go to the current daily log, or browse the archive index.
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2026-08-31
Silicon Valley AI inspired slang
Why Is Everyone in Silicon Valley Talking Like That?
Silicon Valley has long had its own dialect. Venture capitalists are always talking about the value of being “high agency” and making “orthogonal bets.” But lately, tech vernacular has taken a peculiar turn—people have started describing themselves as if they were chatbots. If you misspeak, maybe you’re “hallucinating.” Don’t know the answer to a question? That’s because it’s not in your “training data.” Feeling forgetful? Perhaps you have a case of “context rot,” a phrase that refers to the degradation of a bot’s responses over a long conversation. “I’ve been telling my wife I have context rot for months,” Conor Bronsdon, the host of an AI-focused podcast, told me.
Where I live, in San Francisco, such comparisons are inescapable. “I’ve described myself as high temperature,” a friend recently told me; in AI-speak, this means he is prone to randomness. AI experts now talk about updating their “weights” when they learn something new and training on “synthetic data” when going over internal thoughts. “Humans have a huge base model trained over billions of years of evolution,” one software engineer wrote on a popular tech forum. “It’s impressive how quickly we learn, but it’s arguably comparable to fine tuning.”
Solving the fertility crisis
This is a pretty wild abstract (emphasis mine)
The cross-national correlation between gender equality and lower fertility is exceptionally strong (r ≈ 0.81). After the 1960s, a unique mating regime spread across parts of the world—with female emancipation, individual mate choice, and effective birth control—followed by a continuing rise in singlehood and declining fertility. Almost all women still want to reproduce, but many struggle to find a good-enough partner. This article argues from an evolutionary perspective that many men’s utility to “free women” has been so diminished that solving the fertility crisis by increasing pair-bonding rates seems unfeasible. A viable means for aiding the survival of low-fertility nations could be to provide women with the economic and social resources necessary for them to conclude that having children alone makes for a better life than remaining childless. Such policies would likely exacerbate male marginalization, but new technologies are on the horizon that could offer men reproductive equality.
I actually find the idea very fascinating and compelling, but the author of the blog I found a link to this paper from seems pretty livid about it, which is understandable because he sounds most times like a right wing nut 🤷🏽♂️.
When Men Become Optional, Babies Disappear
So far the analysis is sober and largely persuasive. Then the paper takes a turn. If pair bonding can’t be restored, the authors argue, the answer is to help women have children without men. Governments should “consider experiments” offering single women enough money and support to make solo motherhood appealing, with “24/7 nearby childcare.”
The researchers concede this would further reduce men’s value to women and aggravate male marginalization. They argue the stakes justify it. They suggest that “perhaps men should not have to pay child support, particularly if experiments show that women are mostly interested in having children with the most compelling men.”
This is where the paper collapses into fantasy. Take the two-parent family, an institution that the social science literature consistently indicates is one of the most reliable predictors of child well-being we have, and replace it with a state-funded apparatus of cash, communal housing and shift-worker child care. Tell men that their economic role is obsolete and their parental role is optional.
The children in this scheme are an afterthought, as are the men. So, eventually, are the women, who are being told that the right response to a romantic market they find frustrating is to accept a permanent arrangement with the government in place of a husband.
If the problem is that fewer couples are forming, we should ask why. Economics explains some of it. So does culture. Some of it is the slow erosion of norms—religious, civic, familial—that once nudged young people toward marriage before their fertile years ran out. None of that is easy to rebuild. But difficulty isn’t a reason to give up on the family and hand the job to the government.
The fertility crisis is downstream of a pair-bonding crisis. The researchers are correct that the standard explanations miss it. They’re wrong that the way out is to accelerate what the crisis started. A civilization that can’t persuade men and women to form families won’t be saved by subsidizing fatherlessness.
This guy seems a bit too fixated on pair-bonding!
2026-08-27
Material Stress - The Hidden Cost of Ownership
This hiding-in-plain-sight problem is what I’m calling material stress: the stress created by having and managing material things.
I am coming to realize that a substantial portion of my clients’ psychological distress can be attributed to problems like this. Much of their misery consists of thousands of small demands on their time and energy that they do not recognize as belonging to the same general category. A Ring camera alert, busted pair of shoes, expiring license, HVAC filter replacement, and dress return all seem like unrelated little annoyances. Taken together, they resemble death by a thousand cuts.
Plus, even if we acknowledged material stress as a bona fide problem, doesn’t it have an easy solution? If you’re struggling with how much you own, just own less.
…
Owning less, however, is easier said than done.
So why do we keep acquiring more? The simplest big-picture answer is that humans evolved in a world of scarcity and remain strongly inclined to accumulate anything that might be valuable, whether energy stored as body fat, money stored in bank accounts, or material possessions stored in our basements.
A more proximate answer is that we consumers tend to consider the price of acquiring things but not the price of having them. We evaluate a possession at precisely the moment when its benefits are most vivid and its future costs least visible. We understand what the thing will do for us now and typically factor in only the money required to acquire it; we rarely account for the rest of its life cycle, from setting it up and maintaining it to repairing and eventually replacing it.
This point about vacations is sooo trueee! 🤌🏽
…Vacation clarifies our relationship to our possessions from the opposite direction: instead of confronting everything we own, we temporarily escape almost all of it. If moving exposes the burden, vacation reveals the relief.
I mean, doesn’t a hotel room feel so liberating in large part because there’s so little in it that we’re responsible for? If an appliance breaks, it’s not our problem. There’s no expiring cream cheese to use up, no dishes to wash or laundry to do. Our guitar isn’t hanging from the wall, silently plucking our strings of guilt. There’s no package by the door waiting to be returned. No nick in the wall we’ve been meaning for months to patch.
Vacation is usually thought of as a form of abundance: more food and drink, more leisure, more novelty. But part of what feels luxurious to me is the deprivation. For a few days, I have only a fraction of my possessions.
Our response to material stress, to the extent we acknowledge it, is to tell ourselves that we’ll get to the important stuff once the tedium is cleared away. The problem is how much of life we spend clearing it away.
2026-08-26
Depression plays for the draw
Depression plays for the draw #mentalhealth #depression
This is a surprisingly good article about depression.
I’m sensitive to this, perhaps more than is rational. I have routinely experienced profound depression in my life, sometimes for months at a time. (Honestly, I have been in the midst of one such period for several months, though it’s getting better.) During these periods, nothing can make me happy or give me hope. I feel constantly on the brink of tears, though one feature of my depression is that it makes it nearly impossible to cry. It makes it difficult to work and difficult to read and difficult to be around my family and difficult to be alone. Even when things are objectively going well, as they are currently, I can’t feel joy. Sometimes this manifests as passive ideation, which is a polite and clinical way of saying that the idea of suicide presents itself to me. The idea of ending my own life seems to drift along in my mental haze, eventually making its way to the front of my mind, and I am confronted by the fact that this is a possible action I could take.
To be clear: I have never planned my own death, and I don’t want to commit suicide. It’s hard to write honestly about this because I worry that others will worry. If I say too little in the way of reassurance, people will worry. If I say too much, people will worry even more. All I can say is that I have spoken to people, including my wife and a mental health professional, about the fact that I’ve experienced passive ideation, and I plan to be in this world for a very long time.
Hope is not a feeling—it’s an attitude you must adopt if you want to make any sort of difference in the world, a defiant stance against a system that would like you to give up. It’s a way of saying ‘I refuse to make no difference.’ It’s not the irrational belief that the future will be better simply because it is the future but rather the commitment that you’ll do your damnedest to make it better, whether the rest of the world is helping you or not.
How our Leisure Time Got Monetized
How Our Leisure Time Got Monetized #leisure
For most of the last two thousand years, party songs were censored—so almost none of them have survived. But I can make one claim with absolute assurance: While our ancestors were enjoying these feast days, they didn’t make money for huge corporations.
Life is different now. People use up their leisure time scrolling through web ‘content’ saturated with advertisements—teens especially, who devote 4-5 hours per day on these platforms. Or they binge on Netflix. Or pay to play video games.
Most of the world’s free time has now been monetized by tech companies. In fact, the monetization of leisure time is how Silicon Valley execs make their billions. Our fun is their gravy train.
As recently as a hundred years ago, leisure time existed in a media-free zone. Nobody expected you to make money for wealthy elites on your day off.
I was reminded of this years later, when I learned about anthropologist Andrea Migliano’s survey of 300 members of a hunter-gatherer tribe in the Philippines. She asked each respondent to pick five people they would want as companions if they were setting up a new community.
She expected that whey would choose the best hunters. Or maybe the strongest or the best at building. Or perhaps the best healer or the smartest leader.
Instead they preferred the best storytellers.
Beyond Paleo: A Culinary History of Humanity
Full transcript of podcast: On Humans - Beyond Paleo: A Culinary History of Humanity ~ Daniel Lieberman | Transcript Reader #food #evolution
Daniel Lieberman's book Fed Up: Fed Up #books
I think people I think there's been exaggeration of how far farming changed people's diets, frankly, because the 1st hunter gatherers just started growing what they hunted and gathered. I mean, it's not that complicated. They couldn't domesticate all the animals that they were hunting, but they certainly started domesticating and growing a lot of the plants that they were gathering. Yes, there was a shift in diet. There's a decrease in diversity.
But when we talk a lot about the problems with modern diets, we blame farming. But I think actually we should blame industrialization more than farming because, for example, early farmers, when they were growing, say, various grains like rye or oats or wheat, example like that, they're not refining them. They're having whole grain cereals, right? They're getting a lot of nutrition from those things. Pretty much every farming culture around the planet figured out how to come up with reasonably nutritious diets.
til maltodextrin
There are all these chemicals in the food, and we have no clue what a lot of them do. Some of them, we do have a clue and we know that they're problematic. 1 that bothers me or concerns me a lot is maltodextrin, which is a kind of stabilizer and emulsifier that they put in a lot of processed foods. It's a form of sugar. It quickly becomes glucose and raises your blood sugar levels, but you can't taste it.
You have actually no taste sensation from this stuff, but it's ruinous for your metabolism. It causes spikes in your blood sugar level, which aren't really good. When I see maltodextrin in a food, I just put it back. For me, that's like the canary in the coal mine, and it means that this is a crap food that I have no interest in buying because I have no idea what it's going do to my digestive system. So, you combine all the added sugars and fats in the salt, you combine the addictive nature of these foods, and you combine the additives, you've got a triple whammy of bad things.
And if you think exercise is difficult, well, we never evolved to do unnecessary, unrewarding exercise. When you go to a supermarket or an airport or whatever and there's an escalator next to a stairway, everybody takes the escalator. Even though there were no escalators in the Paleolithic, it's because we evolved to take it easy whenever possible. And then we tell people they're lazy because they don't want to exercise. Well, nobody exercised until recently.
Nobody got on treadmills or went to a gym and lifted weights because they had to work very hard and otherwise, they took it easy because they were struggling to get enough energy. So, we've created a modern world that makes it hard for us to choose our food and hard for us to stay physically active. And then we blame people because they make the wrong choices and we blame people because they struggle to do unnecessary, unrewarding physical activity. It's totally unfair. An evolutionary perspective, I think, helps us recognize that most of us, the reason that people struggle is it's through no fault of their own.
It's because the environment that they're in has had forced them to do things that they never evolved to do in the 1st place and that require serious willpower that's very hard to overcome.
2026-08-25
Anger at work and Marxist Alienation
I dislike engineers in general because most of them think like this. they have g... | Hacker News #tech #work #marx
hard relate (although that does not mean I advocate being angry at work!)
I dislike engineers in general because most of them think like this. they have gone all in on embracing alienation in the marxist sense from their own work product and dont understand people who feel a sense of personal craft and ownership in something.
Imagine if you are making a painting and someone comes along and starts doodling in the corner, or squirting different colors onto your palette. it really f-s up what you are trying to do as an artist and craftsperson.
engineers who are craftspeople cannot tolerate this. but in modern corporate it is expected. engineers who are NOT craftspeople dont care. they are perfect, formless globs of soullness grey goo.
oh management randomly cancelled the project you were working on for three years? shrugs. ok, what other toilet do you want me to clean.
This author is that - a robot. A replaceable machined part. management and capitalism love this guy and people like him. they can interview someone else and relace him tomorrow with another grey goo hire that will not complain.
im not for it.
Slow Life and Boredom
Do you really want a “slow life?”
Slowing down sounds admirable until you realize that most of slowness is just being bored and alone in your thoughts and rituals. Letting boredom in is transformative, yes, and being alone with your thoughts is a necessary daily practice for self-growth, indeed—but these can be uncomfortable states. Boredom was extremely uncomfortable for me when I first got rid of my phone. I felt that boredom was a failure, that my mind should either be productive all of the time, when engaged, or when not engaged, immediately enter a flow state of total zen. I started to see boredom as a gray area that I waded through as I oscillated between the two ideals.
Now boredom feels as inevitable a part of my day as sitting on the toilet or closing my eyes to fall asleep. The way to make states of boredom and loneliness less uncomfortable is to practice, and not to resist with shallow endeavors to mask them. Not photographing every angle of your morning coffee with the caption “slow mornings”1 or filling your spare time with scrolling—this only gives the illusion of slowness without any of the benefit.
The boredom is where you can benefit, the boredom is when your mind flourishes, blooms in interesting directions. Being alone without the panopticon of social media or your 290 unread group chat messages is when you have to really face comfort with solitude. Maybe it’s just getting older, but I feel much more comfortable being alone these days. I don’t judge myself for having nothing to do, for wasting time, for wandering about the garden slowly picking weeds or spending a half hour laying down listening to the birds outside the window. There’s no resistance in that, because any time spent being present feels like time well spent.
2026-08-23
Hyrox and Germany
How Germany's Hyrox became a global fitness craze
til Hyrox was created in Germany
The format was developed by event organizer Christian Toetzke, communications expert Michael Trautmann, and Moritz Fürste, a former member of the German national field hockey team that won gold at the 2008 and 2012 Summer Olympics.
Their basic idea was very simple: to create a competition that combines the atmosphere of a running event with the intensity of functional strength training that many people know from time in the gym. Hyrox consists of eight functional stations interspersed by eight 1-kilometer (0.62 miles) runs.
2026-08-21
Neo-etiquette
Neo-Etiquette Basics: The New Rules of Being Human #culture
- Write to the people you love in your own voice, not OpenAI’s.
- Remove your headphones when another person enters the interaction.
- Don’t make your convenience somebody else’s administration.
- Keep your private soundtrack private.
- Ask before adding someone to a group chat.
- A read receipt isn’t a subpoena.
- When you’re with someone, stay with them.
- If people can’t see the camera, don’t use it.
- Other people’s children aren’t your content.
- Don’t screenshot the group chat.
- Don’t film strangers at their worst.
- On the subject of disclosure by the way…make it your guiding light for AI, too.
- Aim your surveillance at your own property.
- Don’t let a screen remove your body from the world.
- Don’t join in a punishment because it has attracted a crowd.
- Give credit as a matter of honesty.
- Do the small work of civilization.
- Don’t announce a life that isn’t yours.
- Answer human effort with human effort.
- Allow people to leave their former selves behind.
- Never forget the nervous system.
2026-08-19
Finally resuming my daily logs
The Law of Jante
The Law of Jante by Michael Booth
I seem to keep coming across articles about Janteloven randomly. Have logged other articles about it twice already, I think.
Sandemose’s works are little read these days, except, that is, for a small fragment of one novel, A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, published in 1933. The book is a thinly veiled roman à clef about the people of Nykøbing, which in the book is renamed “Jante.” It caused a storm of controversy, satirizing life in small-town Denmark as being ruled by pettiness, envy, backbiting, gossip, inverted snobbery, and small-mindedness. Naturally, the book generated some especially indignant spluttering in Nykøbing, exposing as it did the mean-spirited behavior of its residents, many of whom were easily identifiable.
The fragment of A Fugitive that has come both to define and to torment the Danes is a list of rules by which the residents of the fictional town of Jante were said to abide. These rules set out the Law of Jante (Janteloven), a kind of Danish Ten Commandments, the influence and infamy of which have spread beyond their home country throughout the Nordic region.