May 11, 2025

Daily Log Digest – Week 18, 2025

2025-05-03

Jujutsu Version Control

zerowidth positive lookahead | What I've learned from jj

I have taken baby steps with jujutsu so far. This seems like a good article

I recently started using the Jujutsu version control system, and it’s changed how I think about working with code. As someone who’s been using git for nearly two decades, it’s refreshing to gain new perspectives on my daily work and get a sense of what might be possible in the future.

Working with git has been great, especially in contrast to what came before. But despite years of development, it still has sharp edges and presents a steep learning curve. Jujutsu doesn’t fix that, exactly, but it sands off some rough edges and makes some different decisions that result in a much safer and far more flexible workflow.

Psychedelics and Indigenous Communities

The ancient psychedelics myth: ‘People tell tourists the stories they think are interesting for them’ | Drugs | The Guardian #psychedelics #history

This article upends notions I had held about psychedelics that were informed by the usual sources mentioned in the article (like Pollan). It's good to read a good critique informed by sources.

Based on this and other evidence, Brabec de Mori argues that ayahuasca diffused through the Peruvian Amazon in the past 300 years. It is likely older among Tukanoan peoples further north, who, he suspects, transmitted the practice to populations missionised early in the lowlands. Yet in the regions most frequented by tourists, it seems to be a relative novelty. Brabec de Mori isn’t the first to make the argument – the anthropologist Peter Gow proposed something similar in 1994 – but he, more than anyone else, has found the anthropological data to support it.

Brabec de Mori’s findings represent one of many cracks in the stories we tell about the history of psychedelics. As these substances become the mainstream, so do narratives about their role in human societies, narratives that often bind them to shamanism. Just look at the media coverage. In 2020, a journalist for the Washington Post wrote that consciousness-altering substances “have been used by Indigenous cultures for physical and psychological healing for thousands of years”. Michael Pollan endorsed a similar narrative throughout his bestselling 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind, writing that “elements of shamanism might have a role to play in psychedelic therapy – as indeed it has probably done for several thousand years”.

These quotes all subscribe to what I call the global archaic psychedelic shamanism (Gaps) hypothesis. It consists of three claims. First, that psychedelics have long been widespread. Second, that use of psychedelics goes back to the ancient past. Third, that psychedelics have long been used by shamans for therapeutic healing.

Like so many of the stories we tell about human history, the Gaps hypothesis is rooted in glimmers of truth. Yet much of what passes as psychedelic history has been distorted by a seductive mixture of flimsy archaeological evidence, outdated anthropological approaches and economically expedient ideology. “It’s a romantic image that Indigenous people have been using everything they do for thousands of years,” Brabec de Mori said. “If we change the picture, it’s kind of unromantic, and it seems that people like romanticism.”

For Erika Dyck, who has studied the history of attitudes about psychedelics, stories about traditional psychedelic use are rooted in financial and ideological goals. “A lot of the enthusiasm for investing in psychedelic drugs,” she said, stems from an expectation that they will bring “a paradigm shift in the way we think about mental disorders.” Our stories reflect that goal. We portray shamans around the world as psychotherapists and psychopharmacologists. We imagine how we want to use psychedelics and then project those imaginings on to cultures we know little about.

2025-05-04

Field Guide to AI Assisted Communication

You Sent the Message. But Did You Write It? #ai #communication #slang

Last week, I got a message from someone I’ve known for ten years. It was articulate, thoughtful…and definitely not written by him.

It’s one example of what has increasingly unsettled me about the way people interact - myself included - as we all participate in this vast, unprecedented, AI-enhanced communication experiment.

That’s when it dawned on me: we don’t have a vocabulary for this.

We’re surrounded by AI-shaped communication—but we’re still talking about it like everything is normal.

So I started writing down the weirdness. And it turned into a glossary.

Here are ten terms offered to help name, diagnose, and spark reflection on the strange new ways we communicate in the age of AI:

The terms listed are: 1. Chatjacking 2. Prasting 3. Prompt ponging 4. AI’m a Writer Now (aka Sudden Scribe Syndrome) 5. Promptosis 6. Subpromptual 7. GPTMI 8. Chatcident 9. GPTune 10. Syntherity

Why are big companies so slow

Why are big tech companies so slow? | sean goedecke

Big tech companies spend a lot of time and money building things that a single, motivated engineer could build in a weekend. This fact puzzles a lot of people who don’t work in big tech. Often those people share theories about why this is true:

1. Big tech engineers are incompetent and unproductive, and big tech routinely wastes billions of dollars in salary on bad hires
2. Big tech companies use processes, like Agile, that are so inherently inefficient as to slow down work by 100x for no good reason
3. Big tech engineers are lazy and are stealing time from their employers
4. Big tech companies are dominated by coordination problems that sap much of the value of each extra engineer
5. Big tech operates at web scale, so comparing weekend features to big tech features is like comparing a diecast toy car to a Ferrari

Why are big tech companies slow? Because they’ve packed in as many features as possible in order to make more money, and the interaction of existing features adds an unimaginable amount of cognitive load. Some hackers are revolted by this, because they love simple tools that do one thing well. That’s a fair reaction. But don’t let your revulsion fool you into thinking that big tech companies are full of stupid people.

Capturing value at the margin is really difficult to do well. That’s why big tech pays big tech salaries for it!

2025-05-05

AI and the Humanities

Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? | The New Yorker #ai #humanities

But factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities. The real project was always us: the work of understanding, and not the accumulation of facts. Not “knowledge,” in the sense of yet another sandwich of true statements about the world. That stuff is great—and where science and engineering are concerned it’s pretty much the whole point. But no amount of peer-reviewed scholarship, no data set, can resolve the central questions that confront every human being: How to live? What to do? How to face death?

The answers to those questions aren’t out there in the world, waiting to be discovered. They aren’t resolved by “knowledge production.” They are the work of being, not knowing—and knowing alone is utterly unequal to the task.

For the past seventy years or so, the university humanities have largely lost sight of this core truth. Seduced by the rising prestige of the sciences—on campus and in the culture—humanists reshaped their work to mimic scientific inquiry. We have produced abundant knowledge about texts and artifacts, but in doing so mostly abandoned the deeper questions of being which give such work its meaning.

Now everything must change. That kind of knowledge production has, in effect, been automated. As a result, the “scientistic” humanities—the production of fact-based knowledge about humanistic things—are rapidly being absorbed by the very sciences that created the A.I. systems now doing the work. We’ll go to them for the “answers.”

But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions—and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever.

The 80-hour myth

The 80-Hour Myth (Why We're Addicted To Being Busy) - Dan Koe #productivity #hustle #culture

The usual productivity spiel but I thought this section was interesting

Work Like A Lion, Not A Cow

There are two approaches to work.

First, is like a cow who grazes the fields:

• Consistent long hours every day
• Steady and predictable output
• Trading time for money in a linear fashion
• Showing up regularly regardless of energy
• Often leads to burnout and diminishing returns

Second, is like a lion, which we share a similar psychological wiring in that we are hunters (at least when it comes to work).

Our brain craves the novelty and dopamine that comes along with discovering resources (like ideas) that aid in our survival:

• Intense bursts of focused, high-energy work
• Long periods of rest and recovery between hunts
• Work according to energy and creativity cycles
• Prioritize impact over number of hours logged
• Aim for leverage where results aren’t tied to time

A lion, by today’s perception, is a massive procrastinator, and people discourage that. They make you feel guilty for taking your time. They tell you that you lack discipline and you should take things more seriously.

If you’re bad at texting people back, or you tend to put your work (or homework) off until the last second, it’s not a character flaw, it’s how many people are wired.

If that sounds like you, what you need to understand is that intensity is better than duration, rest is the most productive form of work, and results matter more than hours.

But there are a few moving pieces here.

First, is leveraging your unique strengths that give you an asymmetric advantage.

Second, is choosing to pursue work that allows you to put lifestyle first.

That way, you can work according to your energy cycles and make a conscious choice as to what you should be working on. Some creatives worked late into the night while others preferred the morning.

If someone tells you what to work on, you can’t really change that, and your first priority must be to leave that work.

The Seven-Year Rule

The Seven-Year Rule - MacSparky

Years ago, I encountered a fascinating concept in a book by the Dalai Lama: every seven years, human beings transform into entirely new versions of themselves. This idea stems from the biological principle that our bodies replace virtually all their cells over a seven-year cycle. The person you are today doesn’t share a single cell with the version of you from seven years ago. (This is, of course, a generalization as some cells regenerate much faster and others a little slower.)

There’s something profoundly liberating about this constant state of transformation. We often become fixated on our past: mistakes we’ve made, opportunities we’ve missed, harms inflicted upon us (and by us), or wounds we’ve suffered. But what if we truly internalized that the person who experienced those things no longer exists in a physical sense?

I recently spoke with a friend who was still dwelling on something that happened thirty years ago. “Why do you care?” I asked him. “That was four versions of you ago. That person doesn’t exist anymore. Move on.”

This perspective applies equally to our future selves. The version of you that will exist seven years from now hasn’t formed yet. So why not focus your energy and attention on the present moment?

As you read these words, you are uniquely yourself, different from who you were a moment ago and who you’ll become in the next. By embracing this present version of yourself, you release yourself from the bonds of history while simultaneously doing the greatest possible favor to your future self.

We exist in a perpetual state of transformation: cellular, psychological, and spiritual. When we recognize and honor this constant evolution, we free ourselves to live more fully in the eternal now. Adopt the Seven-Year Rule. You’ll be doing yourself a favor.

Minimalift program by Matt D'Avella

I cut my training by 70% (and got better results) - YouTube #fitness #workout #lifting

ChatGPT Summary: ChatGPT - Minimalist Strength Training Overview

There is too much workout/lifting content out there. But this one caught my eye because of its minimalist approach. Some materials available for sale include options to do workouts at home using just barbells and bodyweight exercises.

This is mainly to motivate myself to resume my workouts.

Recipes from a Tech Bro

Recipes #recipes #food

I stumbled upon these recipes accidentally when I visited the site to check out another technical blog post. I found the recipes to be simple and to the point.

Experts and Elites Play Fundamentally Different Games

Experts and Elites Play Fundamentally Different Games #status #hierarchy #experts #elites #power

Experts are people who know things. They’re judged by other experts—people who speak the same language, use the same methods, and know the same details. You can spot experts by their credentials, their technical precision, or just the way they argue. They care about being right. They’re evaluated on whether their work holds up—whether it can be tested, measured, replicated, or defended under scrutiny. They debate each other, go deep into the weeds, and let the details decide who’s correct.

Elites are different. They’re not judged on technical knowledge but on being impressive across a broader range: wealth, looks, taste, social fluency, connections, charisma, and cultural feel. Elite institutions tend to screen for such qualities, which is why educational pedigree is also often important. This is why you can major in anything at Harvard and still get an elite job. No need for narrow expertise in, say, engineering or mathematics.

There is some interesting exploration of the idea of the expert-elite spectrum.

2025-05-06

Ava on Friendships

always on your side - by Ava - bookbear express #friendship #love

Some beautiful thoughts on friendship by Ava. Really needed this today.

At the party the topic came up: can men and women be friends? P said that she didn’t think they could, that male/female friendships could never be as unboundaried as her friendship was with me. Which is probably true: we went to Japan for a week and shared the same hotel room, which is not something I can imagine doing with any male friend. But everyone else in the conversation pointed out that the presence of boundaries didn’t mean a friendship wasn’t real.

Some of my best friends are guys, and at this point I’ve known them for about 10 years. I have matching tattoos with a couple, C and B. At this point they feel like family, as in: I couldn’t imagine us breaking up for any reason. We drift, and we go through different seasons, but the relationship has proven so extremely durable. In friendships you don’t often explicitly talk about values, but we have the same values. The same orientation towards work and love. And also a thousand subtler things. We understand each other’s dreams, big and small, and we can really talk. I think that’s what it comes down to: I can really talk to my friends, and I can talk to them through everything.

Friendship brings out the best in me, and sometimes I fear that romantic relationships bring out the worst. As a friend, I’m steady, warm, receptive. As a partner, I’m only sometimes that. At my most difficult, I fear that I couldn’t possibly be lovable. But that’s too simplistic of a narrative, so let me try again.

Here we go: over the years I’ve sometimes called my friends, crying, anxious, and let them be my anchor to reality. The unconditional acceptance they model to me is how I would like to show up in every moment of my life, in each important relationship. In reality, there are plenty of times I don’t show up like that, when I crack under stress, when I am not patient and kind. It’s easier to be generous to your friends, because you have some level of remove from them—they are usually not pressed up against you in your worst moments, privy to your most destructive tendencies. But friends are still our first and sometimes best model of someone who chooses to be always on your side.

We don’t have many good theories about friendship, or a lot of scripts. It’s so different from dating, which is so scripted it can feel stifling, where so much of the possibility space is prescribed or proscribed. The guy should pay on the date. The girl shouldn’t make the first move. You should respond to a text in this amount of time. Since I started matchmaking, a ton of people have told me: I prefer to get to know someone as a friend first. Dating apps feel so unnatural and stilted. I think this is because everything feels more organic when there’s not a script. When I’m not playing a role, when I can be just who I am and you love me anyway, everything feels more real.

At a holiday party last year, a guy told me that he believed friendship should be easy. He was close to his family, and he had a partner he loved very much. Those were the relationships in his life that he had the capacity to be challenged by. He wanted his friendships to be light, loose, simple.

For many people, friendship’s appeal lies in its relative lack of complications. No taxes or laundry, no sex, no fighting. People are allowed to walk away and no one gets mad. You get to choose how much you opt in. When contrasted with romantic relationships, which at their worst can resemble a merry-go-round in Hell, they seem all upside.

2025-05-07

Alternate Coffee Varieties

The resilient coffee discovery that could save our morning brew #coffee #stenophylla

While one solution is to shift production geographically as the climate changes, people like Davis, head of coffee research at Kew, and longtime collaborator Jeremy Haggar of the University of Greenwich, think a more sustainable answer is to diversify into climate-resilient choices among the 131 coffee species identified so far.

The two most exciting new species on the block, Davis told me, are excelsa and stenophylla. Excelsa has a deeper root system, allowing access to water in drought conditions, and is also resistant to heat, pests and disease. The first coffee from a Ugandan excelsa project that he has been involved in will come to the UK market this year (he reports the smooth taste to be comparable to a speciality arabica).

Stenophylla is at a more experimental stage. In 2018, Davis and Haggar managed to track down the plant in Sierra Leone with the help of Daniel Sarmu, a coffee specialist in the country. Together with the coffee company Sucafina, the NGO Welthungerhilfe and the co-operation of local communities, the trio have planted wild varieties in trial plots across Sierra Leone with a view to reviving it as a coffee crop (its prospects withered in the mid-20th century as local farmers turned to robusta). The first harvest is expected this year.

Podcast Bros and Brain Rot

Podcast Bros and Brain Rot - Nathan Cofnas’s Newsletter #brainrot #podcasts #social-media

People who don’t trust “experts” now look to podcasters and other alt-media figures—many of whom (including Rogan and Brand) are comedians—to decide what to believe about everything from WWII to vaccines to Ukraine to tariffs. The result has been a proliferation of ignorance with disastrous consequences for our culture and public policy.

Uneducated podcast bros have not found a magic shortcut to knowledge. Even on Covid, they have not outperformed actual experts. However, it’s true that many so-called experts are fake and/or corrupt. Blind obedience to credentialed authority (associated with the left) or trust in a “marketplace of ideas” that rewards brain-rotting infotainment (associated with the right) are both failed strategies.

Matt Levine on Memecoins

OpenAI Will Get A Bit More Normal - Bloomberg #memecoin #crypto

The point of a memecoin is that for 15 minutes everyone in crypto coordinates to (1) pay attention to some person and (2) turn that attention into money by buying a token. And then they move on. I don’t know why this is a fun game for anyone to play, but apparently it is. In this game, somebody is going to make money by buying the token at the beginning of the 15 minutes, and somebody else is going to lose money by buying it at the end of the 15 minutes. There is not a different thing that can happen; the memecoin is not going to build enduring value and steady cash flows. It is going to go up while people are briefly paying attention, and then it is going to go down when they stop. Perhaps you can get people to pay attention more than once, but that is just repeating the same process; it’s not building enduring value.

Oh now obviously if people buy the coin before its public announcement, they will do even better than the people who buy it right after the public announcement. And one can guess that those people are insiders who are connected with the promoters of the memecoin. But of course those are the people who will make money! It’s their meme! You are paying money to buy a token representing “I paid attention to Melania Trump today.” Who should get that money, if not Melania Trump or whoever set up the coin for her?

The enshittification of tech jobs

Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow #tech #jobs #enshittification

Cory Doctorow is a really gifted writer. Love the concept of Vocational Awe in the paragraph

Tech workers are a weird choice for "princes of labor," but for decades they've enjoyed unparalleled labor power, expressed in high wages, lavish stock grants, and whimsical campuses with free laundry and dry-cleaning, gourmet cafeterias, and kombucha on tap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhUtdgVZ7MY

All of this, despite the fact that tech union density is so low it can barely be charted. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. When you're getting five new recruiter emails every day, you don't need a shop steward to tell your boss to go fuck themselves at the morning scrum. You can do it yourself, secure in the knowledge that there's a company across the road who'll give you a better job by lunchtime.

Tech bosses sucked up to their workers because tech workers are insanely productive. Even with sky-high salaries, every hour a tech worker puts in on the job translates into massive profits. Which created a conundrum for tech bosses: if tech workers produce incalculable value for the company every time they touch their keyboards, and if there aren't enough tech workers to go around, how do you get whichever tech workers you can hire to put in as many hours as possible?

The answer is a tactic that Fobazi Ettarh called "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

"Vocational awe" describes the feeling that your work matters so much that you should accept all manner of tradeoffs and calamities to get the job done. Ettarh uses the term to describe the pathology of librarians, teachers, nurses and other underpaid, easily exploited workers in "caring professions." Tech workers are weird candidates for vocational awe, given how well-paid they are, but never let it be said that tech bosses don't know how to innovate – they successfully transposed an exploitation tactic from the most precarious professionals to the least precarious.

As farcical as all the engineer-pampering tech bosses got up to for the first couple decades of this century was, it certainly paid off. Tech workers stayed at the office for every hour that god sent, skipping their parents' funerals and their kids' graduations to ship on time. Snark all you like about empty platitudes like "organize the world's information and make it useful" or "bring the world closer together," but you can't argue with results: workers who could – and did – bargain for anything from their bosses…except a 40-hour work-week.

But for tech bosses, this vocational awe wheeze had a fatal flaw: if you convince your workforce that they are monk-warriors engaged in the holy labor of bringing forth a new, better technological age, they aren't going to be very happy when you order them to enshittify the products they ruined their lives to ship. "I fight for the user" has been lurking in the hindbrains of so many tech workers since the Tron years, somehow nestling comfortably alongside of the idea that "I don't need a union, I'm a temporarily embarrassed founder."

About the narrative of AI vs reality of AI

Bindley spoke to David Markley, an Amazon veteran turned executive coach, who attributed the worsening conditions (for example, managers being given 30 direct reports) to the "narrative" of AI. Not, you'll note, the actual reality of AI, but rather, the story that AI lets you "collapse the organization," slash headcount and salaries, and pauperize the (former) princes of labor.

The point of AI isn't to make workers more productive, it's to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses. Another of Bindley's sources went through eight rounds of interviews with a company, received an offer, countered with a request for 12% more than the offer, and had the job withdrawn, because "the company didn’t want to move ahead anymore based on the way the compensation conversation had gone."

Arvind Narayanan on Avoiding Risks with Generative AI

https://x.com/random_walker/status/1919359709062033850 #ai #risks

When we use generative AI for work, there are two ever-present risks: hallucinations/confabulations and deskilling. For each of my AI use cases, I try to make sure I know how I'm avoiding those risks. Specifically:

• AI is helpful despite being error-prone if it is faster to verify the output than it is to do the work yourself. For example, if you're using it to find a product that matches a given set of specifications, verification may be a lot faster than search.

• There are many uses where errors don't matter, like using it to enhance creativity by suggesting or critiquing ideas.

• At a meta level, if you use AI without a plan and simply turn to AI tools when you feel like it, then you're unlikely to be able to think through risks and mitigations. It is better to identify concrete ways to integrate AI into your workflows, with known benefits and risks, that you can employ repeatedly.

• Turning to deskilling, in some cases the worries are overblown. We should distinguish between essential skills and incidental skills for each job. Incidental skills are those that it's okay to delegate to automation as long as people understand the underlying principles. For example, back in the day when programming languages and compilers were developed, there were worries about people losing the ability to directly write machine code, but that proved unfounded.

• On the other hand, if a junior developer relies too much on vibe coding and hence can't program at all by themselves, in any language, and doesn't understand the principles of programming, that definitely feels like a problem.

• Deskilling is usually discussed in the context of junior workers but I think it's a problem at any career stage. Even setting aside AI, there are many senior people who stop learning and have an ossified set of skills.

• Deskilling is a much more insidious problem than errors, because it happens gradually over years, so you may never notice.

• I think the way to address it is structural, and not even AI-specific. If you're always scrambling to meet a deadline, there will be too much temptation to take shortcuts (including, but not limited to, overuse of AI), and your skills will atrophy.

• My own strategy is to set aside about one day a week, sometimes more, for activities that are more about learning and growth than about productivity. This comes at a huge short-term cost but I think it is necessary in the long run.

• Depending on the job and task, there are other potential risks from AI. Having a plan to address errors and deskilling is necessary, but not sufficient, to ensure a beneficial approach to AI.

The Solution Problem

A great series of essays which in a long-winded but very thoughtful and insightful way tries to explain why the mental health landscape is pretty bad nowadays.

• The Solution Problem (Part 1/3) - by Josh Zlatkus
• The Solution Problem (Part 2/3) - by Josh Zlatkus
• The Solution Problem (Part 3/3) - by Josh Zlatkus

In Part I, I reviewed three answers to the question: “Why are diagnoses of mental illness on the rise?” These answers were: because of progress, because of evolutionary mismatch, and because of the solution problem. I threw my weight behind the final two and promised to bust the first like a piñata.

Next, I divided problems into three types—unknown, tolerable, and regular—as part of my argument that in order to judge a solution, we need to ask what kind of problem it solves, whether it improves experience, and what it costs. The milder the problem, and the less its solution enhances quality of life, the harder it becomes to justify the solution’s costs.

The fifth cost of solutions, which I am most interested in, is the tendency of solutions to create problems. A.k.a. the solution problem. We already saw an example above. When my neighbor has a heated steering wheel, my hands feel colder. Indeed, the very existence of a solution “escalates” the problem from unknown or tolerable to regular—because all of a sudden, something can be done. The opposite is true, too. If you want to make something more tolerable, ensure that everyone has to deal with it. That nothing can be done.

In part 3:

By the way, I am sure that my many criticisms of the mental health field have given some readers the impression that I dislike my job. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the only person who loves their job more than I do is my friend, who is also a therapist but sees more clients.

The simplest way I can put it is this: I love my job because it lets me build meaningful relationships with my clients. In fact, I often find myself wishing the rest of my life matched the intimacy of a good therapy session. And when my clients improve, it's typically because of the relationship. (Turns out—newsflash!—a deep social bond is pretty healing for a deeply social species.) But the rest? The DSM diagnoses, the medications, the ever-multiplying therapeutic orientations, the canon of mental health theorists from Freud and Jung to Beck and Satir, the saturation of mental health thinking into every corner of life—most of that is nonsense, and I can’t be asked to support it.