Daily Log Digest – Week 13, 2025
2025-03-30
Vibe Coding Manifesto
Vibe Coding Manifesto #ai #coding #vibe
💜Flow over friction – Ride the wave, don't fight it.
💜Iteration over perfection – Perfection is obsolete if you can always reroll.
💜Augmentation over automation – AI is a collaborator, not a replacement.
💜Product thinking over code crafting – What matters is what you build, not how you write it.
💜Rerolling over debugging – If fixing takes too long, regenerate.
💜Human taste over technical constraints – The best tech serves great taste, not the other way around.
2025-03-31
Stationary
Inspired by a friend, I invested in some stationary today
- Clairefontaine Triomphe paper
- Kum pencil sharpener
- Tombow Mono mechanical pencil
2025-04-01
Travel day. Digital nomadding for at least a month.
Mumbai Recs
A lovely friend sent along some very hyperlocal food recs for Mumbai #food
Chembur - my most fav vadapav in front of post office opens 4 or 5pm
Matunga - Classic pav bhaji or DPs Pav bhaji if you’re interested to try South Indian: Ramashray or madras cafe, there’s a soya chaap wala near madras cafe that’s also v good. Gupta pani puri near the matunga station. Too many Guptas check for the right one haha
Sion : gurukripa samosa. Very famous supplies to most theatres and schools in Mumbai
Dadar : Ashok Vada pav, sandwich also might be good in most places Bombay veg toast here.
Near marine drive : panini at Raju sandwich in front of KC college and K rustoms icecream is famous for the nostalgia value. I like the walnut crunch flavour there tho hahah
2025-04-02
Means of Production vs Means of Connecting
The Algorithmic Holiday - by Brett Scott #capitalism #gig #economy
The Gig Economy platforms, by contrast, run a lean version of this. A company like Uber knows that it doesn’t actually need to own tens of thousands of cars - the Means of Production - provided that it owns an information and management architecture that stands between those productive assets and society: Uber owns the Means of Connecting, rather than the Means of Production, which means they can still be a gatekeeper between workers and consumers, while outsourcing finance costs to the individual workers.
Choosing Next.js
Build Times - You should know this before choosing Next.js #nextjs #next #javascript
A breakdown of how Next.js seems to be tied to Vercel in many ways, who don't seem to care about being good open source stewards.
- Lack of adapters
- No official serverless support
- Vercel-Specific, Undocumented Code Paths
- Poor Security Incident Handling
- Lack of transparency in governance
Beauty and Relationships
Does beauty make people good partners? | Dazed #beauty #relationship #love #feminism
So much of romantic relationships is about pressing yourself into a shape you do not recognise, as Faye so accurately puts it. We are told that women are meant to be hyper-feminine and that the right man will put you in your “feminine energy”, as divine feminine con-influencers incessantly express online. But this isn’t a natural state of being as we are so often told, but a naturalised one. We act this way because we are told to and because it gets the best reception from both our desired partners and from the public.
Nobody knows what Leclerc and Mleux’s relationship is like, and yet they assume it’s good because she is beautiful and feminine and adheres to her gender correctly. Conversely, so does he – Leclerc is seen as being good-looking and is immersed in the hyper-masculine and perilous world of motor racing. We praise certain relationships and those within them for their ability to keep up with appearances.
This is not surprising. As beauty critic, Jessica DeFino wrote in her newsletter last year, as a society, we tend to have the moral code of Disney cartoons. We superficially believe that beauty is good; thus, a beautiful couple must have a healthy relationship (look at the contrast with how people talk about and aspire to Dua Lipa and Callum Turner’s relationship). When we see people we perceive as “ugly” (ie who sit outside narrow European beauty standards), we are quick to assume the worst. That their relationship must be bad, that something must be wrong, that they are not really in love. This is exactly why people feel the need to change and transform themselves beyond recognition. It seems contrary to what we ask of people when we are looking for love in the first place. We ask that people genuinely love us for who we are, but the world repeatedly proves that we will only be rewarded for looking a certain way, for not being or looking like ourselves.
In her book Right Wing Women, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin writes that “the tragedy is that women so committed to survival cannot recognise that they are committing suicide.” Dworkin was making a specific reference here to right-wing women who make accommodations to male domination for their own survival. But when I read that quote, I immediately thought about beauty and relationships and the ways we transform ourselves entirely for love and survival. But we deserve to do way more in this life than just survive.
We “survive” by adhering to our gender roles, with their own built-in violence that often result in tragedy. We “survive” by adhering to beauty standards, where people go under the knife and sometimes do not wake up or have lifelong complications due to surgeries. We “survive” by changing ourselves, making ourselves smaller and more easily digestible, to the point where we look in the mirror and can no longer recognise who is staring back at us. It may seem like survival, but as Dworkin would put it, it is a type of death.
Not all people feel forced to look a certain type of way in their relationships; but many of us can relate to feeling pressured within these dynamics to keep up with appearances. Love and the pursuit of it (albeit challenging) are supposed to be fun, exhilarating, and life-affirming, but rarely ever feel that way. So, what really makes a good partner? Maybe once we deprioritise the importance of physical appearance from our lives (and gender), we will genuinely know the answer to that question.
2025-04-03
Matt Levine on Stablecoins
Stablecoins Are Growing Up - Bloomberg #stablecoin #money #finance #crypto
I have always thought of stablecoins as basically unregulated non-interest-paying crypto banks. The idea of a stablecoin is that there is a company, the stablecoin issuer, and you send the company dollars, and it gives you back tokens (“stablecoins”). Each token is supposed to be worth a dollar, and if you hand the issuer back a token it will hand you back a dollar.1 But mostly you hold onto the stablecoins and the issuer holds onto your dollars. You both arguably benefit from this:
- You can use the tokens like dollars on in crypto applications, where actual dollars are hard to use: The stablecoins live natively on various crypto blockchains, can be sent over the blockchain, can be used in smart contracts, etc., in ways that don’t really work with dollars held in bank accounts.
- The issuer has the dollars, which it can invest in super-safe short-dated US Treasury bills, or anything else, to make money. It doesn’t pay you any interest; any profit it makes from its investing is the issuer’s to keep.
But yesterday Circle Internet Group Inc., the big US-based issuer of the USDC stablecoin, filed publicly for an initial public offering. It has previously filed confidentially, but its prospectus is available now. It is an interesting read, and it has caused me to update my model of stablecoins in two respects:
- Circle is not an unregulated bank; it is a tech front-end for US banks and asset managers.2
- I am not as sure as I once was about “non-interest-paying.”
AI Ambivalence
Great articulation of how it is like to use AI for software development.
Imagine you’re a Studio Ghibli artist. You’ve spent years perfecting your craft, you love the feeling of the brush/pencil in your hand, and your life’s joy is to make beautiful artwork to share with the world. And then someone tells you gen-AI can just spit out My Neighbor Totoro for you. Would you feel grateful? Would you rush to drop your art supplies and jump head-first into the role of AI babysitter?
This is how I feel using gen-AI: like a babysitter. It spits out reams of code, I read through it and try to spot the bugs, and then we repeat. Although of course, as Cory Doctorow points out, the temptation is to not even try to spot the bugs, and instead just let your eyes glaze over and let the machine do the thinking for you – the full dream of vibe coding.
I do believe that this is the end state of this kind of development: “giving into the vibes,” not even trying to use your feeble primate brain to understand the code that the AI is barfing out, and instead to let other barf-generating “agents” evaluate its output for you. I’ll accept that maybe, maybe, if you have the right orchestra of agents that you’re conducting, then maybe you can cut down on the bugs, hallucinations, and repetitive boilerplate that gen-AI seems prone to. But whatever you’re doing at that point, it’s not software development, at least not the kind that I’ve known for the past ~20 years.
The entire conclusion section is worth reading as well. Here is the last couple of paragraphs
So there’s my overwhelming feeling at the end of this post: ambivalence. I feel besieged and horrified by what gen-AI has wrought on my industry, but I can no longer keep my ears plugged while the tsunami roars outside. Maybe, like a lot of other middle-aged professionals suddenly finding their careers upended at the peak of their creative power, I will have to adapt or face replacement. Or maybe my best bet is to continue to zig while others are zagging, and to try to keep my coding skills sharp while everyone else is “vibe coding” a monstrosity that I will have to debug when it crashes in production someday.
I honestly don’t know, and I find that terrifying. But there is some comfort in the fact that I don’t think anyone else knows what’s going to happen either.
Hamish Mckenzie on Chaos Media
From the temple to the garden - by Hamish McKenzie #media #chaos
Today, we live in the age of chaos media.
Traditional media’s rigid order has been replaced by mayhem. Conflict supersedes consideration. Speed overwhelms verification. This system is, in many senses, a marvel, with massive democratization potential. Anyone can have a voice, and your idea, if the winds blow just right, can reach billions of people in an instant. One of its great virtues is that it demands that everyone—even the powers that be—speak to each other directly, and others can talk back. Now the savviest politicians sit down for long interviews in nontraditional formats and show their thinking.
Hamish (as the founder of Substack) has a vested interest in the shift away from traditional media. So understandably, this piece is a bit tepid when it comes to outlining a clear alternative. He just seems to just gloss over the corrosive effects of chaos media.
The chaos of our current media moment cannot last, but no one knows exactly what the new landscape will look like when it stabilizes. That’s precisely why your choices today matter so much. Every subscription, every share, every minute of your attention is a vote for the culture you want to see flourish. You can choose to invest in a system that values deep relationships over the flimsy validation that chaos media offers. You can reclaim your attention from the doomscroll feeds and pour it like water onto the seedlings of a better future. These actions aren’t just about getting better content or contributing to a healthier media economy—they cultivate a richer, more thoughtful culture capable of addressing the complex challenges of our time. It’s a culture worth subscribing to.
2025-04-04
Stop expecting your partner to fulfil all your needs | Dazed #dating #relationships #expectations
But what if we’ve now swung to the other extreme? Many of us now expect our partners to be everything: our best friends, sexual playmates, therapists, running buddies, cheerleaders, and more. We don’t accept any traits that jar with our own or a single conflicting value – and it’s likely this is making dating harder for us all.
But by approaching dating as nothing more than a tick-box exercise, we drive away possible moments of intimacy and connection. Contrasts in personalities, temperaments, and interests provide the push-and-pull needed to allow relationships to thrive. This doesn’t mean settling for someone who treats you poorly or forcing yourself to persevere with dating someone who doesn’t excite you. But if you like wild Friday nights and your partner prefers Netflix marathons, go party with your friends. If you love Sunday morning hikes and they don’t, go solo or find a buddy. A partner doesn’t have to be your everything.
I’ve been single for a while (aside from a minor situationship detour), and when people ask if I miss dating, I can honestly say I don’t. I get everything I need from my friends, sisters, mum, dogs, and – ahem – vibrational support. But most importantly, I’ve learned to rely on myself. If I want to see a play or catch a comedy show, I go solo. I can still grab lunch at that cute café I’ve been eyeing or curl up somewhere with a coffee and a good book. I stopped expecting one person to be my whole world, romantic or otherwise.
2025-04-05
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman - Cosmic Insignificance Therapy
This is my second time reading the book. Actually, it is the first because the first time I listened to it as an audio book. I am also reading this book right now as I slowly embark on a reset of long held belief and patterns of behavior around productivity and achievement.
These excerpts from the chapter titled Cosmic Insignifance Therapy really hit home.
The hazard in any such discussion of “what matters most” in life, though, is that it tends to give rise to a kind of paralyzing grandiosity. It starts to feel as though it’s your duty to find something truly consequential to do with your time—to quit your office job to become an aid worker or start a space flight company—or else, if you’re in no position to make such a grand gesture, to conclude that a deeply meaningful life isn’t an option for you. On the level of politics and social change, it becomes tempting to conclude that only the most revolutionary, world-transforming causes are worth fighting for—that it would be meaningless to spend your time, say, caring for an elderly relative with dementia or volunteering at the local community garden while the problems of global warming and income inequality remain unsolved. Among New Age types, this same grandiosity takes the form of the belief that each of us has some cosmically significant Life Purpose, which the universe is longing for us to uncover and then to fulfill.
Which is why it’s useful to begin this last stage of our journey with a blunt but unexpectedly liberating truth: that what you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much—and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.
It’s natural to find such thoughts terrifying. To contemplate “the massive indifference of the universe,” writes Richard Holloway, the former bishop of Edinburgh, can feel “as disorienting as being lost in a dense wood, or as frightening as falling overboard into the sea with no-one to know we have gone.” But there’s another angle from which it’s oddly consoling. You might think of it as “cosmic insignificance therapy”: When things all seem too much, what better solace than a reminder that they are, provided you’re willing to zoom out a bit, indistinguishable from nothing at all? The anxieties that clutter the average life—relationship troubles, status rivalries, money worries—shrink instantly down to irrelevance. So do pandemics and presidencies, for that matter: the cosmos carries on regardless, calm and imperturbable. Or to quote the title of a book I once reviewed: The Universe Doesn’t Give a Flying Fuck About You. To remember how little you matter, on a cosmic timescale, can feel like putting down a heavy burden that most of us didn’t realize we were carrying in the first place.
The evolutionary angle here is interesting
These self-centered judgments are part of what psychologists call the “egocentricity bias,” and they make good sense from an evolutionary standpoint. If you had a more realistic sense of your own sheer irrelevance, considered on the timescale of the universe, you’d probably be less motivated to struggle to survive, and thereby to propagate your genes.
Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely—and often enough, marvelously—really is.
Goya Journal - MTR in Bengaluru and Iftar in Lucknow
The latest edition of the Goya Journal newsletter landed in my inbox and a couple of article caught my eye - one about Lucknow, a city I grew up in and about MTR in Bengaluru.
- From Sehri to Iftaar in the Streets of Lucknow — GOYA
- The Story of Bengaluru's Iconic MTR, the Original Udupi Hotel — GOYA
Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Started reading this book on a whim because I saw Oliver Burkeman recommended it. I didn't expect much, and it turned out to be not that different from a typical book in the self-help genre. But skimming it does yield some nice gems, like this quote from Ron Finley
When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them I breathe - I'm a professional breather. We create those false transitions, we make it all look like it's separate, just like we separate a garden, from a state, from a country, and ourselves from nature.