2026-03-29

ADHD and the "Liked Songs" playlist

This is a so relatable, I almost cried 😂. My "Liked Songs" list in YouTube is unmanagably big at this point, and I use Shazam to add songs to it wherever I am, or from whatever I am matching. #music

Every person with ADHD has a favorite playlist. It’s called “Liked Songs”.

Why Fun Tech Jobs Went Extinct

I almost feel like I lived this transition. I have included an AI generated summary of the video below.

Key Takeaways

• Silicon Valley's tech culture has shifted from relaxed, amenity-filled workplaces to a hardcore, grueling work ethic driven by competition and AI anxiety.

• Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter marked a cultural turning point toward more demanding, 'hardcore' work environments, influencing other companies to follow suit.

• The rise of AI and fears of widespread job loss are pushing young tech workers into extreme work schedules (commonly 996 or worse), often motivated by the hope to escape economic underclass.

Theme Wise Breakdown

Introduction: The Changing Tech Culture

The narrator introduces Silicon Valley's culture as it used to be: whimsical and amenity-rich, with perks like ping pong tables, nap pods, and quirky office designs. However, recently, there's been a noticeable swing toward a much more intense and demanding work ethic. Younger tech workers frequently brag about excessive hours and constant grind online.

The Shift from "OpenOffice" to Hardcore Grind

The video contrasts the past decade’s open, playful office culture epitomized by companies like Facebook and Google, featuring gaming rooms, nap pods, and creative spaces, with today’s push for hard work and extended hours. The shift corresponds with a "get real" attitude from management about focusing on product development and shipping, often requiring 12+ hour days, six to seven days a week.

The Elon Musk Effect

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X) is described as a key turning point. Musk’s public declarations promoting extreme work dedication have given permission for other companies to adopt harsher, "hardo" cultures. This move away from “kinder, gentler capitalism” signals a competition-driven environment demanding relentless effort.

AI Anxiety and the "Permanent Underclass"

A major driver of this shift is anxiety over artificial intelligence displacing many jobs. Many young tech workers fear AI will create a small elite super-rich class controlling AI, while most others become a permanent economic underclass. This fear fuels a desperate need to "grind" hard now to secure a place among the winners before AI disrupts the job market completely.

The 996 Work Culture Imported from China

The 996 schedule (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week), popularized by Chinese tech giants like Alibaba, has been adopted by many Silicon Valley startups despite its harshness. Some of the extreme work bragging online is performative—to impress venture capitalists and open doors to funding—though many do actually work these punishing hours.

Venture Capital and the Culture of Grind

Part of the performative grind culture is driven by startup founders and employees showing off on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter to attract venture capital investment. VCs set the tone by mentoring founders in a hard-driving work ethic rooted in Silicon Valley's early history, particularly the legacy of semiconductor companies in the 60s and 70s, which had a notoriously intense workplace culture.

The Return to Silicon Valley's Hardcore Roots

The video draws historical parallels to the early days of Silicon Valley’s semiconductor industry, where long hours and tough workplace conditions were the norm. Today’s culture is described as a blend of that hard-driving genesis combined with a new techno-punk and hyper-masculine ethos emphasizing physical fitness, intense discipline, and competitive drive.

The New Tech Worker Lifestyle

The lifestyle reflected is austere and serious: no drugs, rigorous work schedules (996), heavy physical exercise, strict diet, early marriage, sleep tracking, and overall high self-discipline. The culture is markedly less about leisure and more about relentless productivity and competition.

Conclusion: The End of an Era and the New Reality

The comfortable, playful office culture of the past decade is deemed over. If startups want to succeed and attract VC funding today, they must embody a serious, hardcore, high-performance culture—even if that means losing perks like slides, beanbags, sushi buffets, and recreational amenities. The new generation of engineers is deeply motivated by fear of AI-driven obsolescence and willing to endure extreme work conditions to become part of the technological elite.

Closing Remarks and Tribute

The video ends with a nostalgic nod to the 2010 Silicon Valley office amenities now largely gone—giant slides, free bikes, arcade games, and even more bizarre perks like office dentists and chiropractors—symbolizing how the culture has dramatically transformed from playfulness to grind.

Website Tweaks

Commits · deepakjois/debugjois.dev · GitHub

In a frenzied bout of Sunday vibe coding (with breaks to grab an amazing Banh Mi sandwich and watch an observational documentary at the Greek Film Festival in Babylon), I managed to overhaul my website to be able to sync cleanly, and edit it from both my Obsidian Vault on the desktop, and a web based UI on my mobile phone.

2026-03-30

How Elon Must tried to gamify government

What was Doge? How Elon Musk tried to gamify government | Elon Musk | The Guardian

Reading this piece felt like I was up-to-date on all the new terminology surrounding MAGA, livestreaming platforms, gamer culture and the rightwing Silicon Valley tech elite.

The logic of deletion was clearest in zero-based budgeting (ZBB), the method that Musk embraced at both Twitter and Doge. Invented in the 1960s, ZBB forced every department to justify each expense anew rather than carrying budgets forward. Long dismissed as unworkable, by 2024, Silicon Valley firms were claiming that new technology had finally made ZBB feasible. Manually analysing and justifying each budget item was terribly time-intensive. But with large language models (LLMs) and AI accounting tools, this process could be performed automatically. Budgets could be rebuilt by bot. According to Wired, Musk captured the computer systems of the US Treasury’s Bureau of Fiscal Service in Doge’s first month in the hopes of creating “a ‘delete’ button he could wield against any agency by cutting off its funding at the source”. Some agencies, such as USAID, were effectively dissolved, fed into “the wood chipper”, as Musk put it in a tweet.

Treating life like a game had its own ethos and its own philosophers. In a theory often cited by Musk, Nick Bostrom speculates that we may be living in a simulation running on a mainframe in the future. Further, many of the people around us may not be human beings but computer programs: what Bostrom calls “shadow-people”, convincing imitations that lack interiority. The ethical consequences are significant. If we are surrounded by shadow people, then appeals to empathy are not moral imperatives but manipulative code. The rational response is to steel yourself against humanitarian sentiment. The economist Robin Hanson came to this conclusion in 2001 in a famous article called How to Live in a Simulation. “If you might be living in a simulation,” he wrote, “then all else equal it seems that you should care less about others.”

Citizenship

Is Citizenship a ‘Blood Aristocracy’ in Disguise? | The MIT Press Reader

On some level, life can be understood as a series of lotteries: genetic, familial, economic, and so on. These contingencies shape everything from our educational and professional opportunities to our freedom of movement and even life expectancies.

Dimitry Kochenov is the author of “Citizenship.”

But few are as brutally determinative as the country in which we are born, argues Dimitry Kochenov. In his “Essential Knowledge” book, “Citizenship,” the Soviet-born Dutch legal scholar interrogates how the modern citizenship regime operates not merely as a legal framework but as an engine of global inequality that preserves a kind of “blood aristocracy.” International rules governing citizenship, he contends, constrain the potential of billions of people in the Global South by trapping them in their circumstances of birth, all while citizens of Western nations enjoy privileged access to healthcare, jobs, and international mobility. “Citizenship,” the author writes, “is never and has never been neutral.”

In the following interview, edited for length and clarity, Kochenov unpacks the debate around “open borders,” the murky realities of statelessness, and how citizenship has been weaponized in U.S. immigration policy. “If regular people don’t actually see the arbitrariness, the outrageousness, the inhumanity” of immigration enforcement, he says, “then they cannot have an open and informed conversation about the actual values of this society.” Increasingly, Kochenov adds, “Americans are learning about those values the hard way.”

Of course, you could say the E.U. consists merely of the richest countries, etc., and that’s true. But it’s also not true because, for example, Bulgaria’s GDP per capita is more than six times smaller than Ireland’s — it is a bigger discrepancy than that of Mexico and the U.S. So, to pretend that borders are meaningful and that opening them is dangerous, at least in the context of the E.U., is absolutely baseless.

If you suddenly start treating people as human beings based on the data they submit, you might discover that, actually, you can open the border for plenty of people and fine-tune the system along the way. They will not be overstaying. They will not be violating the objectives that states set for themselves. In fact, many states already review personal data beyond passports to determine who should be able to cross their borders, as more and more countries — the U.S., Australia, the U.K., and the Schengen Zone members now require pre-travel authorizations from all foreign travellers. Broader deployment of modern information technology could turn such screening into a much more effective tool than the good old passport color test.

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.