March 30, 2025

Daily Log Digest – Week 12, 2025

2025-03-23

Career Advice in 2025

Career advice in 2025. | Irrational Exuberance #career #software #jobs

Very relatable for me atm.

If you pull all those things together, you’re essentially in a market where profit and pace are fixed, and you have to figure out how you personally want to optimize between people, prestige and learning. Whereas a few years ago, I think these variables were much more decoupled, that is not what I hear from folks today, even if their jobs were quite cozy a few years ago.

Going a bit further, I know folks who are good at their jobs, and have been struggling to find something meaningful for six-plus months. I know folks who are exceptionally strong candidates, who can find reasonably good jobs, but even they are finding that the sorts of jobs they want simply don’t exist right now. I know folks who are strong candidates but with some oddities in their profile, maybe too many short stints, who are now being filtered out because hiring managers need some way to filter through the higher volume of candidates.

I can’t give advice on what you should do, but if you’re finding this job market difficult, it’s certainly not personal. My sense is that’s basically the experience that everyone is having when searching for new roles right now. If you are in a role today that’s frustrating you, my advice is to try harder than usual to find a way to make it a rewarding experience, even if it’s not perfect. I also wouldn’t personally try to sit this cycle out unless you’re comfortable with a small risk that reentry is quite difficult: I think it’s more likely that the ecosystem is meaningfully different in five years than that it’s largely unchanged.

Scribbling with Pencils

Issue 113: The Reading Life of... Michael Rance #blackwing #pencils #scribbling #reading

There is nothing perhaps more beautiful to me in one's reading life than marginalia. I love going through a friend's copy of a book and attempting to decipher their scribbles. Same goes for reading the book notes from a person one is dating: 'why did they underline this passage? Were they thinking of me?'. I am a prolific proponent of writing in one's books. Note-taking directly on the page transforms a white, almost-cold object into a well-worn and colorful extension of thought.

The only thing that I write my notes with are pencils. I am annoyingly specific about what pencils I must be working with: the Palomino Blackwings, ideally the black model, and they must be sharpened. The blackwings are perfect. They create a crisp, dark line, and they float across the page. They are a modern reproduction of the pencils that John Steinbeck (among others) wrote with. I like knowing that I am holding a similar instrument as the one that Steinbeck held as he furiously wrote The Grapes of Wrath. I am romantic and foolish sometimes!

I have a fairly intricate note-taking process. In my books I underline passages that are of some interest to me, and in the margin nearest the spine I will jot down asterisks to note how essential the passage is for my brain.

Sometimes I will underline specific words, and write letters in the margin that correspond to what I want to do with the words.

• 'R' means that i want to read the thing in question. '

• 'r' means that I want to do further research.

• 'def' means that I need to define the word, if I don't have it in my vocabulary.

• 'mem.' means that I want to memorize the passage.

• 'ST' means that I want to actively study the passage. I use this when I am smitten by something about the prose style, or the construction of the narrative, and want to learn from it to use in my own writing practice.

Outside of the margins I will write brief notes, questions, reflections. Same goes for the top of the page. If the book is especially important or for a project that I am doing, I will go through after finishing the book and place multi-colored stickers so that they hang from the outside of the book. Below is an example from Halldór Laxness’ Independent People, which I read for a newsletter piece that I wrote (shameless plug, sorry!).

Game of Life

What Can We Learn about Engineering and Innovation from Half a Century of the Game of Life Cellular Automaton?—Stephen Wolfram Writings #engineering #innovation #conway

I recently wrote a CSS grid based Game of Life animation, that served as a background for a webpage. Had a lot of fun writing it. When I showed the webpage to a bunch of my dev friends, everyone was impressed with the animation, but I was a bit surprised how few of them were able to recognize the original inspiration from Conway's Game of Life. Next time, I will send this article to them.

Toxic Preconditions

The Imperfectionist: Toxic preconditions #burkeman

From Oliver Burkeman's latest newsletter

A more wide-reaching form of toxic precondition is what Anne-Laure Le Cunff, in her brilliant just-published book Tiny Experiments, calls “the tyranny of purpose” – the oppressive idea that the activities with which we fill our days must be leading up to something, to some final and finished state of having arrived at our destination in life, if they’re to be worth doing in the first place. Her book is a practical guide to living experimentally and with curiosity in the deepest sense of those terms – ie., not just as a cleverer way of putting your five-year vision into action, but because living experimentally and with curiosity is an inherently fulfilling way to live. Imagine the projects you could launch, the hobbies you could explore, the ways you could conduct your social life or parenting, and much else besides, if you needed no reassurance that the new way of doing things was every going to become a permanent feature of your life! Wouldn’t you suddenly feel much, much freer to act?

Which brings us, I think, to the fundamental toxic precondition lurking behind every other toxic precondition: the strong desire we have for some kind of guarantee – before we embark on a new activity, or even just allow ourselves to relax into life – that it’ll all unfold safely and securely, that we’ll retain the feeling of being in control. That’s what you’re surrendering, in a small way, when you go ahead and write a few hundred words of your novel, with no certainty they’ll be any good. Or when you move forward with the day’s projects despite not having carried out your morning routine to the letter. It’s also what you’re surrendering when you decide to cut yourself a bit more slack in life – because who knows what chaos might unfold if you stopped yelling internally at yourself to work harder or do better, if you stopped watching yourself like a hawk for signs of backsliding? In other words: we don’t erect toxic preconditions simply because we’re irrational, self-defeating idiots. We do it because we want to feel secure, and to avoid the risk of experiencing emotions we’re unsure we’d be able to handle.

You never had control; all you had was anxiety. And when you let go of that, even a little bit, what you’re left with is one of the most powerful reasons imaginable for taking any action that feels as though it might make life more meaningful or vibrant, which is that frankly, at the end of the day, you might as well.

Musk Discovers Magic Money Printers

Elon Musk Discovers the "Magic" of Modern Money #mmt #money

In which Elon Musk discovers MMT

These “magic money computers”, as Musk calls them, “can just make money out of thin air.” Daddy DOGE seemed genuinely gobsmacked. “It just issues payments.” “They just send money out of nothing.”

I guess Elon missed the MEMO from various central bankers—Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Jerome Powell, Neel Kashkari, Mario Draghi—all of whom have acknowledged that this is how modern money works. I guess he also missed thousands of articles, books, chapters, working papers, etc. that MMT scholars (alone or in collaboration with others) have written or recorded over many decades.

The point is, there’s no “bombshell” in what Musk told Senator Cruz.

Stephanie Kelton then follows this up with a whirlwind history of "money-printing" which makes for fascinating reading

No one who read Warren Mosler’s Soft Currency Economics almost thirty years ago would be the least bit surprised to learn that present-day governments “spend money out of nothing.” And if you’ve read Randy Wray’s Understanding Modern Money, Michael Hudson’s Temples of Enterprise, or David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, then you know that governments have created “money out of nothing” from the very beginning.

You might even say that the ancient Mesopotamians invented blockchain technology some 4,000 years ago. Instead of a network of computers, these ancient societies used clay tablets to securely record transactions that were transparent, immutable, and resistant to tampering. You find the same kind of early blockchain technology throughout the Middle Ages, when English kings issued hazelwood tally sticks as a form of tamper-resistant currency with its own embedded record-keeping technology.

In fact, Mesopotamian clay tablets were so ubiquitous that scientists are still discovering them today. Just last week, The Guardian ran this terrific article about an impeccable new discovery.

…

Money was invented for the purpose of moving real resources into the public domain. From the very beginning, it was conjured into existence to build armies, temples, palaces, navigable waterways, granaries, roadways, bridges and more. Whether they used “imprints on Mesopotamian clay tablets, notches on sticks, writing in chalk on slate or, later, fountain pen on parchment paper, stamped and milled coins, inked paper notes, [or] today’s electronic entries store on computer hard drives,” powerful collectives have issued payments out of nothing to maintain the functioning of their societies and further their broader ambitions.

The DOGE “bombshell” is tantamount to a team of archeologists declaring, "I found 14 magic money tablets that send money out of nothing." Nothing new under the sun.

2025-03-24

Back from travels. Settling in.

The Economist on Longevity Research

Dreams of improving the human race are no longer science fiction #longevity #anti-aging

The lack of data is no accident. Medical research has, to a very large extent, focused on treating debilitating afflictions, rather than on improving the capabilities of people who are already healthy. Regulators have developed systems to test whether drugs prevent or alleviate known ailments, but these are typically not well suited to assess whether a treatment has a positive effect on those who are already well. Since such enhancements might be considered less urgent, it is anyway less clear how risks and rewards should be balanced. What is more, naturally occurring substances cannot be patented, so there is little incentive for pharmaceutical firms to pour money into research on their effects.

Charles Brenner, a biochemist at the City of Hope, an American medical-research centre, has suggested that Mr Johnson’s “polypharmacy” is likely to be harmful and dismissed his claimed immortality as “delusional”. Without proper clinical trials of his various treatments, it is impossible to judge with any certainty. That is why the world of enhancement is excited about a study called TAME, which is the first clinical trial that targets ageing specifically to be approved by America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

2025-03-25

Assembled my Nuphy Air60 V2 keyboard with a custom keycap set. I really like the fact that I can just place it over my laptop keyboard and it just works without any disruption.

Final result

Build a Team that Ships

Build a Team that Ships #software #best-practises

I started my first company 15 years go, and I still can’t manage. I suspect that very few people can. With AngelList, we want a team of self-managing people who ship code.

Here’s what we do:

• Keep the team small. All doers, no talkers. Absolutely no middle managers. All BD via APIs.
• Outsource everything that isn’t core. Resist the urge to pick up that last dollar. Founders do Customer Service.
• People choose what to work on. Better they ship what they want than not ship what you want.
• No tasks longer than one week. You have to ship something into live production every week – worst case, two weeks. If you just joined, ship something.
• Peer-management. Promise what you’ll do in the coming week on internal Yammer. Deliver – or publicly break your promise – next week.
• One person per project. Get help from others, but you and you alone are accountable.

If they can’t ship, release them. Our environment is wrong for them. They should go find someplace where they can thrive. There’s someplace for everyone.

Economic Policy of the Trump Administration

The Parallel Economy and the New Rules of American Power

We have a few forces at work - (1) bot-driven information warfare has distorted our perception of economic reality and (2) seemingly deliberate policy volatility creates conditions for an economic downturn (3) and a Trump 'parallel economy' is positioned is emerging to capitalize on the resulting confusion - perhaps, reducing Trump’s market concerns. Understanding all of this requires unpacking four interconnected phenomena:

1. Bots: Automated (and hijacked) information flows have created an environment where most people don't know what's factually true anymore

2. Recession: The administration appears to be intentionally engineering economic volatility as a "necessary detox” as I wrote about last week, with JP Morgan placing recession odds this year rising to 40% and Goldman Sachs to 20%.

3. Parallel Economy: The parallel economy built by Donald Trump Jr. is a reason why President Trump might not care too much about the market selloff.1

4. Fried Brains: We have ‘temporal dysphoria’. There is a profound mismatch between the pace of information cycles and the ability of humans to adapt to the change in said pace.

We're living in a reality shaped by automated outrage machines, while facing an economic downturn engineered through deliberate trade policy chaos. As this volatility harms everyday Americans, the Trump family could be positioning itself to profit from a parallel economy. Meanwhile, social media has so thoroughly warped our perception of time that we can no longer process events in a coherent timeline - there’s even a chart for it!

2025-03-26

Amplifier NYT - Up-tempo songs

6 (Up-tempo) New Songs You Should Hear Now - The New York Times #amplifier #nyt #playlist #music

YouTube Music playlist

Social Media and Health Awareness

Are you actually as unhealthy as you think? | Dazed

This comes through in the marketing where words like “essential” make taking a supplement like sea moss, a red seaweed being promoted for its “92 essential minerals”, seem vital for full body regeneration. In reality, however, there are actually only 13 consumable minerals necessary for human functions, not 92. If you don’t know at least some of the minerals you’re taking, what they do, or if you’re even deficient in any of them, is gagging down a spoonful before breakfast every morning really the epitome of health? And worse, does not taking it make you think you’re less healthy than you are?

Orthorexia nervosa, a disorder defined by the NIH as an attempt to attain optimum health through attention to diet, was first coined in 1997 by Steven Bratman, MD, American physician and author. Over the last few years, eating-disorder treatment centers have been reporting a rise in cases, with studies finding that higher Instagram use was associated with a greater tendency towards orthorexia nervosa. It can be difficult to notice and easy to hide, especially since obsessively healthy eating is seen as a superior habit, hidden behind moralistic and virtuous adjectives related to “cleanliness”.

The truth is, you’re probably not as unhealthy as social media makes you think. No, you don’t have to choke down a spoonful of sea moss to earn a healthier life, go on a meat-only diet to cure assumed deficiencies, or feed into a $700 handful of pre-breakfast supplements to “balance hormones”. “While it’s great that people are paying attention to their health, the wellness industry tends to exaggerate problems, making people feel like they’re more unwell than they are,” Crum says. “The fundamentals of good health –adequate protein, fibre, hydration, sleep, and stress management – are far more effective than any single supplement.”

Simon Willison on using LLMs to code

Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code #llm #coding

Nothing new here, just a good reference to point to in case anybody asks me.

An elegy to a pencil

an elegy for the pencil - by Adam Aleksic #pencil #writing #tools

Indeed, the experience of writing by hand is increasingly on its way out. Schoolchildren are no longer learning cursive, as computers are integrated ever earlier into the classroom. White-collar jobs are revolving more around screens than printed paper. At a certain point in the future, the pencil is going to feel as obsolete as the stone and chisel. That’s just the way technological change works.

Faulkner, Steinbeck, Atwood, Nabokov, and Morrison have all expressed a preference for pencil and notebook—preferences which surely shaped their ultimate contributions to our collective identity. There’s nothing “childish” about that.

Bubblegum Dystopia

Why do we feel like we can afford more things while being stressed about the cost of living? - YouTube #economics #cost #luxuries

Claude Summary:

The Shift in Value Between Necessities and Luxuries

The core insight is about a fundamental economic shift in the relative cost of necessities versus luxuries over the past several decades:

In the 1970s:

• A TV cost about $500 (10% of a house down payment)
• A house down payment was around $532
• One TV = approximately 10% of a house down payment

Today:

• A TV still costs about $500 (0.5% of a house down payment)
• A house down payment is around $102,000
• One TV = approximately 0.5% of a house down payment

This explains why:

1. Older generations view younger people as "financially irresponsible" for buying luxuries - they're applying outdated economic ratios
2. People today can simultaneously have many consumer goods while struggling with basic living expenses
3. Necessities (housing, healthcare, food) have increased dramatically in price while consumer goods have become relatively cheaper
4. This creates a "bubblegum dystopia" where people live with economic uncertainty and housing insecurity while surrounded by affordable entertainment and technology

The shift occurred because:

• Necessities have inelastic demand (people must pay regardless of price increases)
• Companies selling non-necessities had to drive down costs through commodification to compete for the shrinking pool of disposable income
• This results in more affordable luxuries but lower-quality, mass-produced items with "no soul"

More vs Extra

Always do Extra - Ben Northrop #self-improvement

But aren't More and Extra the same thing? No! They sound similar, but they're actually very different. Here's a simple example:

Say for this sprint you're assigned two form screens that take user input and then persist it to the database. Pretty straight-forward. This is your Normal Work - the default expectation of what you need to get done to be in good standing on your project.

Doing More would be completing those two screens and then taking on a third screen that's just like it. Yes, this would help move the project along faster and make your manager happy, and that's great, but in the long-run, More doesn't give you much.

Extra is different than More. Extra is finishing those two screens, but then researching a new library for form validation that might reduce the boilerplate code. Or it's learning ways to protect against common security vulnerabilities from data entry. These little off-ramps from the main highway of Normal Work could be dead-ends and not have any practical value to the project. But they might also be important contributions. And that's the thing with Extra. While the tangible value to the project is uncertain (it could be nothing this time or it could be something), the value to you is real.

Evolutionary Stability: Revolution vs Renovation

https://www.newsblur.com/newsletters/story/8083317:79711f #revolution #renovation #stability

“Renovation is the point of equilibrium between creation and destruction, saving what is valuable and discarding what is outmoded or dysfunctional. It entails a long march through society’s institutions at a pace of change our incremental natures can absorb. Renovation shepherds the new into the old, buffering the damage of dislocation which at first outweighs longer-term benefits … Its aim is transition through evolutionary stability, within societies and in relations among nation-states and global networks.”

In short, evolutionary stability is the better bet for making change than the confident ineptitude of shock and awe tactics that impede it by arousing reactive resistance and rejection before any new approach to governance can take hold.

AI Blindspots

AI Blindspots | AI Blindspots #ai #coding #llms

A good set of pointers by Edward Yang (ezyang)

Blindspots in LLMs I’ve noticed while AI coding. Sonnet family emphasis. Maybe I will eventually suggest Cursor rules for these problems.

Self Study ML

Indian Woman and The Patrilocal Trap

Why is Indian Women's Welfare Devalued? - by Alice Evans

Through my interviews with men and women from across six Indian states, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Morocco and Turkey, I’ve developed the concept of “The Patrilocal Trap”. Historically across Eurasia, sons inherited family assets and cared for elderly parents. Families maintained trusted networks through strategic marriages, socialising daughters to marry, please their in-laws, and stay put. Divorce is heavily stigmatised.

If women are raised for loyalty and unable to credibly threaten exit, they may not necessarily challenge men’s patriarchal entitlements. Instead, she may quietly comply. These films brilliantly capture what quantitative research often misses: the systematic subordination of women's time, preferences, and wellbeing to men’s comfort and convenience.

Violence among hunter gathererers

For the first 290,000 years of our species’ approximately 300,000 year history, everyone was a hunter gatherer. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker argued that hunter gatherers were extremely violent. Better Angels claims that at least 14 percent of prehistoric hunter gatherers died violently. This equates to a violent death rate of at least 420 per 100,000 people per year, using data on typical hunter gatherer mortality rates.

This is a much higher rate of violence than almost anywhere in the modern world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To put it in perspective, global deaths from all types of violence between 2004–21 were around 8 per 100,000 people per year. Even the most violent cities in the world today, in Northern Brazil, South Africa, and on the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border, have murder rates of only around 100 per 100,000 per year.

The implication in Better Angels is that the human mind evolved and developed in a world plagued by constant, endemic violence. 

Our 2022 study examined both the ethnographic data – contemporary studies of groups that existed until some modern contact – and archeological data on hunter gatherer violence, much of which comes from data gathered after the publication of Better Angels. We reviewed quantitative estimates of rates of violence in ethnographies, filtering for groups that are most representative of our pre-agricultural ancestors. Our archeological estimates are based on reanalyzing a dataset developed by Gomez et al. (which was released after Better Angels was published and has dozens of extra samples), which attempts to measure rates of violent death by looking for evidence of trauma to skeletal remains. Our study produced estimates for lethal violence around four times lower than Pinker’s figures.

To repeat the key point: Our study produced estimates for lethal violence around four times lower than Pinker’s figures.

Although we think that our study advances the state of knowledge, it must be said that both the archaeological and anthropological (ethnographic) evidence are unusually shaky. The archaeological record for the pre-agricultural period is extremely sparse, and the anthropological evidence is limited and geographically biased.

The defining characteristic that drives high rates of violent death in our species is not our proclivity for lethal violence but rather our capacity for it. Human beings are unusually vulnerable to violence. We have massive heads, thin skin, puny muscles, little to no protective fur; we can’t fly, swim, or burrow away, and we’re not even very good at running away. Our children are even more fragile, particularly as babies, and take ages to mature. 

At the same time, our offensive abilities make us the most lethal species on the planet. Violent attacks in a hunter gatherer context are essentially undefendable. We have abilities to collectively organize, plan, and deceive far in advance of any other species. Even lions are afraid of us. Our stone-tipped tools, poisons, and projectile technology appear to have killed off almost all of the planet’s megafauna, like mastodons, giant kangaroos, and saber-tooth tigers.

When we think about how violent psychologically typical people are, it is important to remember that an outsize proportion of violence is committed by psychologically atypical people.

This has parallels with modern society. In Sweden, 1 percent of the population commits 63 percent of all violent crime. Comparably high-quality data does not exist for every Western country, but the tidbits we have suggest that this pattern is normal. It has also been established that sociopathy is highly heritable and has a strong genetic component. However, there is a long-standing debate as to whether it should best be understood as a mental disorder or an evolutionary adaptation. If our interpretation of the dynamics of hunter gatherer violence is correct, it lends support to the idea that sociopathy is an adaptation.

In a modern context, sociopathy can be interpreted as a high-risk, high-return behavioral strategy, with sociopaths overrepresented both in high status professions and people with large numbers of sexual partners but also in incarceration, drug abuse, accidental death and other undesirable outcomes. In a prehistoric hunter gatherer context, a similar dynamic may have been at play, with some sociopaths benefitting by acquiring multiple wives or achieving some degree of group dominance (as Gau did), while others suffered social rejection and early death (like Twi).

The idea that some people are simply bullies by nature might be difficult to accept in cultures with deep commitments to liberal values and personal freedoms, but we shouldn’t shy away from the deep implications it has for our society. If it is true, it suggests that we should heed the example set by our prehistoric ancestors and deal with them by working collectively to restrain them rather than blaming society for their existence and attempting to treat them as if they were the same as everyone else. 

This has obvious implications in the area of crime and incarceration, but also in other areas like education where protecting people from bullies could be prioritized.

The most important implications are for political institutions. The wars, genocides, and democides of the twentieth century are a warning of what happens when the worst people get their hands on the instruments of power in modern states.

Evolution of violence from hunter gatherer societies to agricultural societies

Nevertheless, the elevated rates of violence among agriculturalists can only partially be attributed to the influence of sociopathic leaders. The fact is that the invention of agriculture fundamentally changed the dynamics and incentives for violence in our species.

We hypothesize that agriculturalists were more warlike than nomadic hunter gatherers for three main reasons:

1. They stored food, had more possessions, and lived at high population densities. This made it easier to monopolize resources through the use of force and harder to avoid conflict by running away. It also means that the rewards of attacking other groups of agriculturalists are larger. Moreover these denser, sedentary populations exhibit greater disparities in size and technology, creating power imbalances that incentivize violence by reducing the risks for powerful attackers and making total annihilation of opposing groups viable. 
2. Their hierarchical and inegalitarian social organization made it easier to organize collective violence and coordinate on violations of non-violent norms. Leaders could coerce group violence for selfish reasons. Women had lower social status and so were less able to curb the more aggressive tendencies of men. For the same reason, it was much easier for individual men to monopolize women and slaves as part of the spoils of war.
3. Small-scale farmers tend to be more self-sufficient and less inter-connected with other groups than hunter gatherers, who typically exhibit more fluid group affiliations and widespread trading networks. This means that small-scale farmers are less incentivized to cooperate with other groups and also lack the family and cultural ties that would stop them from fighting if it were in their interests.

These factors made the incentives for conflict much greater and made it much harder to overcome the Hobbesian Trap, even though agriculturalists were descended from hunter gatherers who, for hundreds of thousands of years, faced strong evolutionary pressures against violence.

2025-03-27

Trippy Art

Comets, Orbits, and the Mystery We Are: The Enchanted Celestial Mechanics of Australian Artist Shane Drinkwater – The Marginalian #art #trippy

Trippy art partly inspired by Tibetan Buddhist art.

Nature vs Nurture

"Is it nature or is it nurture?" is a damn good question #nature #nurture

Case for not watching Streaming TV shows

The Case Against Streaming TV Shows - by Trungphan2 #tv #streaming

Anyway, let me firm up my case against watching new TV streaming shows with a few additional thoughts:

• How streaming changed TV economics and incentives
• Matt Stone on how streaming distorts the art of TV
• Quentin Tarantino on why TV isn’t memorable

Awesome read.

Non Monogamy

Countering the Monogamy-Superiority Myth: A Meta-Analysis of the Differences in Relationship Satisfaction and Sexual Satisfaction as a Function of Relationship Orientation

Found this paper in this Dazed article: Non-monogamous relationships are ‘just as happy’ as monogamous ones | Dazed

I LOLed at this paragraph in the article:

The flipside is that the research doesn’t find any consistent benefits to opting out of monogamy either: perhaps surprisingly, people in non-monogamous relationships do not experience “significantly” higher levels of sexual satisfaction. Could this revelation dampen the envy and resentment which some monogamous people clearly feel towards people they assume to be having more sex than them? Could it be the beginning of a detente between two warring factions, who clearly have more in common than they realise? Maybe all relationships trend towards sibling-like companionship punctured by perfunctory bouts of missionary, regardless of how many partners you happen to have. Maybe the non-monogamous aren’t all sex-crazed libertines who live in communes and spend their time having drug-fuelled orgies and making their own kimchi, but human beings with ordinary desires and disappointments, just like you and me.

Complements in Tech

What are Complements?

Complementarity matters a lot in tech. One of the drivers of growth at the sector level is that many products complement one another at the product level: if there are smarter phones, there will be more apps; if there are more apps, there will be even smarter phones. This was also a driver of the more recent runup in AI: R&D budgets for designing chips and capex budgets for building them only make sense in light of demand from companies building AI models, and that demand is reasonable because there are so many more consumer use cases.

Conway's Game of Life

Conway’s Game of Life is an example of emergence and self-organisation.

When we surround ourselves with abundant, diverse ideas, complex ideas emerge. These ideas are unique and do not resemble the ideas from which they emerged. Even if the initial set of ideas seem simple and disconnected, spontaneous order can emerge, leading to brilliant ideas.

Emergence and self-organisation are all around us. In the sciences, society, art and in nature.

from: How to live an intellectually rich life - by Utsav Mamoria

2025-03-28

AI and the software industry

How will AI affect the software industry? | Alex Hyett #ai #coding #software #programming

AI is definitely going to cause more people to create software in the same way that Instagram caused more people to take photos. However, not everyone taking photos is a photographer, and not everyone creating software is a software developer.

Anyone can take a photo with their phone, but a photographer understands things like lighting and composition (can you tell I'm not a photographer!) to capture a memory or tell a story that not everyone is capable of.

The same is true for software development. Yes, AI is capable of writing code, but unless you are capable of fully understanding the requirements and the code that it has written, it won't be as good as what a professional developer could do.

Doomerism

The Imperfectionist: Three ideas for turbulent times

From Oliver Burkeman's latest

But “if we can recognise that change and uncertainty are basic principles,” as the futurist and environmentalist Hazel Henderson put it, “we can greet the future… with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.” You can take a crisis very seriously indeed without fooling yourself that you know the worst outcome is certain. In fact, I’d say that to assume the worst is to fail to take it seriously. All of which is worth bearing in mind before you next let some alarmist commentator’s efforts at emotional self-management, masquerading as objective analysis, completely derail your day.

As Eliason notes, this isn’t merely a matter of a mistaken mindset; powerful cultural and economic forces have shaped things this way. Work and physical exercise used to overlap far more than they do, and the shift to work-from-home has eliminated much socialising with colleagues. Plus it’s much easier for corporations to sell “exercise”– in the form of gym memberships, stationary bikes and so forth – than somehow to turn “a physically active social life spent largely outdoors” into a marketable product. Still, most of us probably do have some individual scope to “de-atomise” our lives, finding multiple forms of benefit in the same activity, so that we’re no longer trying to cram things like parenting, exercise and household chores into separate stretches of our all-too-finite time.

Also found this amazing piece from the newsletter: De-Atomization is the Secret to Happiness #exercise #atomization

Things that go wrong with disk IO

Things that go wrong with disk IO | notes.eatonphil.com #disk #io

This is a great article. I encountered the different ways that disk IO can go wrong for the first time when I worked on Badger, a key value database in Go. At that time I remember being puzzled by the number of things to deal with when trying to recover from a disk crash.

There are a few interesting scenarios to keep in mind when writing applications (not just databases!) that read and write files, particularly in transactional contexts where you actually care about the integrity of the data and when you are editing data in place (versus copy-on-write for example).

We'll go into a few scenarios where the following can happen:

• Data you write never actually makes it to disk
• Data you write get sent to the wrong location on disk
• Data you read is read from the wrong location on disk
• Data gets corrupted on disk

And how real-world data systems think about these scenarios. (They don't always think of them at all!)

Containers from scratch in shell

great talk. it has double audio till about 3:20 but that gets fixed after that. this is a great resource to understand container basics by building one from first principles.

Criticisms of the Ghiblification Meme

This is a great articulation of the problematic nature of the latest Ghiblification trend. I don't care so much about other critiques along the lines of copyright infringement so much, but this hits home.

Curious vs Humble

Doing Things You Love

How I Choose What to Work On - Tynan.com #life #goals

Despite being a lifelong entrepreneur and being relatively successful at it, I don’t write a lot about it because I routinely make decisions that trade money for other things (freedom, autonomy, quality of life, stubborn insistence on what I want a product to be, etc). I suspect that most people who want entrepreneurial advice are more interested in making money than the things I prioritize.

I don’t really even know if I’d suggest my method for other people, since it’s pretty tailored to me and my preferences, but I’m happy to share it in case it gives anyone anything to think about.

If there were a core principle of my method, it would be that life is amazing and my goal is to maximize experiencing life. You need a certain amount of money to do that, and increasing amounts of money make even more things possible, but often these come at the cost of increased stress, reduced time with loved ones, or doing work that doesn’t matter to you.

With that in mind, I will only ever work on things I want to work on. I would rather be poor than make a lot of money doing something I hate, and I think my history of actions (readable on the 15+ years of blog posts I’ve written) prove that. If I were giving advice I’d probably encourage someone to choose the most profitable thing out of all of the things they want to do, but that’s not necessarily advice I’d follow.

If you do something you love, you will become good at it much faster than something you don’t love, and when you are good at something you will have some opportunity to commercialize it.

on money

Part of the reason I’ve been able to do this is because I’ve always designed my life such that it can benefit from having money (pinball arcade rooms and all that…) but is also compatible with having no money.