Happy New Year! Readers paying attention will have noticed there is no Week 52, 2025 newsletter. That was due to a bug in the numbering system. I made some tweaks to the newsletter publishing system to fix the week numbering. So this is correctly numbered as the newsletter for the first week of 2026.

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

Pedagogy Recommendations

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.

2025-12-31

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.

2026-01-02

Common People

“I wanna live like common people
I wanna do whatever common people do
Wanna sleep with common people
I wanna sleep with common people like you”
Well,​ what else could I do?
I said “I’ll, I’ll see what I can do”

– Pulp, Common People

Found here: The Watching Menace: Crowds, Voyeurism and Photography - Flashbak

Hope is a discipline

Pluralistic: The Post-American Internet (01 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow #ccc #ai #law

Like I said at the start of this talk, I have been doing this work for 24 years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, throwing myself at a door that was double-locked and deadbolted, and now that door is open a crack and goddammit, I am hopeful.

Not optimistic. Fuck optimism! Optimism is the idea that things will get better no matter what we do. I know that what we do matters. Hope is the belief that if we can improve things, even in small ways, we can ascend the gradient toward the world we want, and attain higher vantage points from which new courses of action, invisible to us here at our lower elevation, will be revealed.

Hope is a discipline. It requires that you not give in to despair. So I'm here to tell you: don't despair.

NB: Hope is a discipline is a quote originally attributed to Mariame Kaba. I recently came across it and since then I have been seeing it everywhere. I think it's a pretty powerful statement.