Daily Log Digest – Week 2 2025

2025-01-05

Are you really okay being this incurious?

Are you really okay being this incurious? - by Bhuvan #curiosity #reading

Somebody recommended this Substack to me, and as soon I discovered it, I had this instant bolt of relatability and a deep urge to read every single post in the archives. This guy lives in the same city as I am in currently and writes so brilliantly, I would love to meet him sometime and pick his brain.

I've been thinking about this because, for some reason, I started noticing that a lot of people around me are ok, not knowing a lot of things. In fact, they've deliberately made the choice not to explore. This was bothering me because I don't know what that feels like. I'm more or less talking about reading. Not just books but all forms of reading.

Why would people be okay not knowing something?

I don't get it. What's the point of life if it doesn't involve a deep desire to discover weird and wonderful things? Is that life even worth living?

I especially like this frenzied rant in which he drops a load of interesting references one after the other in quick succession.

What's the whole fucking point of life if you don't look forward to discovering The Lord of The Rings and marveling at how the fuck Tolkien imagined such a rich world of fantasy, or staring awkwardly at people's toes for clues after reading Sherlock Holmes, or discovering some German dude called Hegel for the first time and thinking was he high on cheap skunk weed when he wrote whatever the fuck he wrote, or feeling that existential gut-punch when you discover Byung-Chul Han, or feeling that righteous anger and urge to start a fucking revolution after reading an introduction to Marx, or losing yourself in the maddening delights and oneiric reveries of Gaston Bachelard, or learning about the backstory of our fractured world in Adam Tooze's Crashed, or trying to grasp what Tracy Smith means when she says poetry is about expressing "the feelings that defy language", or feeling a deep ache in your heart when you translate Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's “A Brook of the Scarpe”?

What's the whole fucking point of life if you don't look forward to discovering the magical world that's waiting for us in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Books of Earthsea, or the madness in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or the feeling of reading Mario Puzo's The Godfather for the second time, or wondering why Amartya Sen titled his book Home in the World, or slouching as you read Brad DeLong's Slouching Toward Utopia, or learning about the great booms and busts that William Quinn wants to tell us about?

What's the whole fucking point of life if you don't laugh out loud at the endless sexual escapades and divinely human follies of the gods in Stephen Fry's Mythos series, or feel the pain of the homeless Uyghurs through their poems, or marvel at the lyrical beauty of the French poets and be startled at their weird French...ness, or wrestle with the "conflict of dharma" that Kaushik Basu reveals in his translation of the epic Mahabharata, or feel a sense of reverence wash over you and fill you with awe as you read Carl Sagan's Cosmos, or look forward to raging against the machine after reading Yann Moulier-Boutang's Cognitive Capitalism, or get incandescent with anger after reading Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, or go on a galactic journey with Asimov's Foundation?

2025-01-06

Category Theory

On getting started with Category Theory | Ludwig #maths #programming

For me, Category Theory has been one of these things where, once you learn about it, you can literally see it everywhere. Everything starts looking like morphisms between objects and functors between categories. I have found the overwhelming majority of the ideas in it to be truly, deeply intuitive. It's still a work in progress to have a real sense of how immensely powerful they are, and my definition of the "essence of category theory" is still getting new shades every week.

Overall, it did help me sank in two immensely important things, that were previously only intuitions: the power of abstraction and composition

Coffee Shops

Are "bad" coffee shops damaging specialty coffee's reputation? - Coffee Intelligence

THERE is no shortage of coffee shops that label themselves as “specialty” – but the number of coffee shops that serve a cup of coffee that would meet James Hoffmann’s expectations are few and far between.  

Not all establishments live up to the promise of quality that the label implies. Many cafés invest in high-end equipment, for example. La Marzocco espresso machines and Mahlkönig premium electric burr coffee grinders have become increasingly common in coffee shops in recent years – but have the baristas been trained in proper brewing techniques? More often than not, the answer is no.

Others charge premium prices for coffee made from lower-grade coffees that fall short of specialty-grade standards, or serve otherwise excellent coffee using poorly maintained equipment.

2025-01-07

Locked in, working on something.

2025-01-08

Dubai Itinerary

36 Hours in Dubai: Things to Do and See - The New York Times #dubai #travel

How to spend 36 hours in Dubai: Beyond the over-the-top luxury and futuristic towers, discover bustling souks, a contemporary art district and desert cycling trails.

Seems like a slightly off-beat itinerary.

2025-01-09

yt-dlp hacks

Found here: q and qv zsh functions for asking questions of websites and YouTube videos with LLM #ytdlp #youtube #hacks #llm

yt-dlp -q --skip-download --convert-subs srt --write-sub --sub-langs "en" --write-auto-sub --print "requested_subtitles.en.url" "$url"

In plain English, this command will:

1. Find a video at the specified URL
2. Look for English subtitles (both manual and auto-generated)
3. Convert them to SRT format
4. Print out the URL where these subtitles can be found
5. Do all this quietly (minimal output) and without downloading the actual video

The placebo effect in therapy

The Placebo Effect in Therapy (Part 1/2) - by Josh Zlatkus #therapy #mentalhealth

Yet another article from living fossils which reinforces my beliefs about the efficacy of therapy (or the lack thereof)

Despite these difficulties, thousands of studies have attempted to compare the effectiveness of various therapeutic techniques. Clinical psychology has asked no other question—which therapy is best?—with such fervor. And despite ongoing demands for better research, I think it is fair to say that if there were significant and reliable differences in therapeutic approaches, researchers would have found them by now. They haven’t.8

Research has, however, established therapy as a moderately effective solution to a wide range of mental problems. Perhaps a better question to ask at this point, then, is why does therapy work at all? If all or most techniques deliver some benefit, then clearly something they share is responsible—for example, a safe environment, a collaborative relationship with a supposed expert, the structure of weekly or biweekly sessions, and, of course, the expectation that therapy will work. I.e., placebo.

They also point out that despite the moderately net-positive effects of therapy, the drawbacks are worth noting as well

In A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, Heying and Weinstein note that “The benefits (of new technologies) are obvious, but the hazards aren’t.” Freud’s introduction of the “talking cure,” and the proliferation of various techniques since, has probably been net-positive for the average person’s mental health. But there have been negatives, too. Mental health is increasingly behind a paywall, dispensed by experts, and accompanied by medication. The costs of these developments loom larger when a person recognizes that, well, therapy is not penicillin.

Another subtle but potentially pivotal change has taken place in the treatment of mental distress: it has become a scientific enterprise. While the benefits of this are obvious, the hazards—such as the dismissal of social, cultural, religious, personal, natural, creative, and even magical forms of healing—are not. Under the guidance of a field desperate to be scientific, clients of the mental industry rarely perceive alternate approaches to healing, which nevertheless predominated throughout most of human history. The therapist’s office is indeed constructed from the remnants of the family home, the church, the rotary club, and the proverbial bowling alley.

Property Rights

Property Rights Are All in Your Head – Part I #property #rights

The article argues that property rights are not objective facts but rather psychological constructs based on shared beliefs and conventions. Unlike physical properties (such as the number of protons in an element), property rights exist only in people's minds and are enforced through social and moral agreements.

Abbamania

Podcast: Chal Ravens and Thomas Jones · Abbamania #abba #music

Absolutely fantastic podcast covering the history of the band Abba. Loved listening to every second of it. It was accompanied by this article which reviews two Abba books: Chal Ravens · Twinge of Saudade: Abbamania

2025-01-10

Flaking

‘People feel they don’t owe anyone anything’: the rise in ‘flaking’ out of social plans | Social etiquette | The Guardian

Many dozens of respondents on the receiving end of flaking ascribed the phenomenon to growing levels of social fragmentation because of social media and smartphones, a general sense of apathy in the population and an increasing normalisation of inconsiderate behaviour in the interest of personal needs and desires.

Being able to just send a quick text to cancel, various people said, meant people did not have to face those they stood up and incentivised late cancellations.

“Increasingly with gen Z and millennials there is a fetishisation of introversion,” said Andrew, 23, from Brisbane who works in telecoms sales. “Web comics and memes make a moral comparison to extroverts, who are supposedly loud, obnoxious people. Introverts are [depicted as] moral people who own cats and crochet. But our generation is also experiencing record high loneliness, so I think we shouldn’t praise choosing loneliness or celebrate [extreme levels of] introversion.”

Cognitive Load in Software Projects

Cognitive load is what matters #software #complexity

Sometimes we feel confusion going through the code. Confusion costs time and money. Confusion is caused by high cognitive load. It's not some fancy abstract concept, but rather a fundamental human constraint. It's not imagined, it's there and we can feel it.

When reading code, you put things like values of variables, control flow logic and call sequences into your head. The average person can hold roughly four such chunks in working memory. Once the cognitive load reaches this threshold, it becomes much harder to understand things.

Great breakdown of how cognitive load can creep into a software project and how it's important to keep it to a minimum when writing code. Also love the references back to John Ousterhout's book

self-authorship

character - by Elaine - manners & mystery #self-help #purpose

In adolescence, we develop a psychological makeup shaped by cultural norms and expectations, which is what Robert Kegan calls the “socialized mind,” the third order of consciousness in his theory of adult development. This is when parents feel like their job is done because their kids have gone from acting like selfish brats to becoming responsible adults. About 35% of adults undergo a further transformation later, which is the shift from the socialized mind of adolescence and early adulthood to the “self-authoring mind.” This is where people develop “an inner seat of judgement” to evaluate external expectations. Instead of letting their culture dictate their beliefs, they author their own identity, their own set of beliefs, and develop personal authority.

You go through life doing what’s expected of you—first in school, then in your first job, your first serious relationship—until one day you wake up and ask, “Do I really have to do this?” Do I have to work at this company? Do I have to hang out with this person? Do I have to go to this party? And the answer is no. We are freer than we give ourselves permission to believe.

…

So why do we spend so much of our limited time doing things we don’t actually want to do? I think the problem isn’t that we don’t know what we want. It’s that pursuing the things we want necessitates giving up on what we think we should want, thereby renouncing an identity that made us feel safe for 20+ years, and it’s hard not to view that relinquishing as a threat to our sense of belonging, rather than an evolution toward a higher purpose. Kegan observes that the departure from the socialized mind toward the self-authoring mind is fraught with “terror and anticipated loss.”

Japanese clutter

The life-changing magic of Japanese clutter | Aeon Essays

Tsuzuki dismissed the West’s obsession with Japanese minimalism as ‘some Japanophile’s dream’ in the introduction to the English translation of Tokyo: A Certain Style (1999). ‘Our lifestyles are a lot more ordinary,’ he explained. ‘We live in cozy wood-framed apartments or mini-condos crammed to the gills with things.’ Yet more than three decades after Tsuzuki tried to wake the dreaming Japanophile, the outside world still worships Japan for its supposed simplicity, minimalism and restraint. You can see it in the global spread of meticulously curated Japanese cuisine, the deliberately unadorned concrete of modernist architects like Tadao Andō, and even through minimalist brands like Muji – whose very name translates into ‘the absence of a brand’ in Japanese.

Millions around the world continue to turn to Japanese gurus for help in purging their diets, closets and living spaces of all but the most essential items. Books like Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2011) and Fumio Sasaki’s Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism (2015) reframe clutter as a dire threat to mental health and spiritual growth. They have become colossal hits in the United States and other countries. However, as the world turns to Japan to tidy up, it’s important to remember that these books were originally intended for Japanese readers; they weren’t written for the world outside. If Japan truly were a minimalist paradise, why would it need Kondos and Sasakis in the first place?

Website to Markdown

My Favorite Website to Markdown Tools For LLMs #markdown #website #converter

Testing Go Iterators

Writing & Testing a Paginated API Iterator in Go #golang #iterator #testing

Some interesting code to test the iterators.

Lists of interesting people and their blogs

Somebody asked about tech blogs to follow in a group. I had a few lists in my working memory that some folks on the internet made, so I figured let me just put them all here for recall later. #lists #blogs #blogroll

• Ask HN: Favorite blog in 2024? | Hacker News
• People · Patrick Collison
• People who are going to change the world - Alexey Guzey

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

The Fannie and Freddie Trade Is Back - Bloomberg

This link is behind a paywall, but you should have it in your inbox if you subscribe to Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter (which is free to subscribe here)

It contains a great basic explainer of the structure of the US home loan market and the key players Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Classic Money Stuff stuff, I guess 😀!

The Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac saga has been going on for, depending how you count, 16 years, or perhaps many decades. There are strong feelings and a lot of lore. It’s back in the news now, and I thought it might be nice to start with the basics.

In the US, as a matter of policy for many decades now, the federal government wants it to be relatively easy to buy a house. Most people do not have enough money to buy a house, so this policy mostly means that the government wants someone to lend buyers the money on generous terms. In practice, “generous terms” means something like “a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage with an interest rate not that much higher than Treasury bond rates.”

…

Sally Rooney Intermezzo review

A Lover’s Theory of Marxism in Sally Rooney’s Romance Novels

Love the Marxist lens of the analysis in the article.

In his 1914 study The Theory of the Novel, the Marxist literary theorist György Lukács argues that the bourgeois novel as it emerged in modern Europe featured a critical split between the hero’s interior life, which contained their moral ideals and unspeakable desires, and the “world of convention,” a system of arbitrary rules that gave the hero’s life objective meaning but was itself inherently meaningless. It is not, after all, a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife; at best, this only happened to be true among the landed gentry of Regency-era England, whose irrational customs Austen so carefully reproduced. Everything that drives the Bennet sisters to marry in Pride and Prejudice — the etiquette of courtship, the laws of inheritance, class relations between landowners and tenant farmers — all of these are what Lukács calls “recognized but senseless necessities,” not organic expressions of human nature. It horrifies Elizabeth, for instance, when she learns that her prudent best friend intends to marry for “worldly advantage” rather than for love. “The more I see of the world the more am I dissatisfied with it,” Elizabeth laments, “and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters.”

What this theory suggests is that, by showing us people trying to reconcile themselves with an arbitrary system, the novel is constantly dramatizing its own struggle with the formal conventions that make it a novel. In Intermezzo, the first time Margaret sleeps with Ivan, the very inconceivability of the act fills her with a queasy elation. “Life has slipped free of its netting,” Rooney writes. “She can do very strange things now, she can find herself a very strange person.” Like Elizabeth Bennet, Margaret sees love as her best chance — maybe her only chance — to break free of the world of convention, to abscond from the collective fiction that is society and emerge into what Margaret, letting her young lover caress her hand at a restaurant outside of town, perceives as “the borderless all-enveloping reality of life.” Yet convention has a way of reasserting itself. In her more sober moments, Margaret reminds herself that “life is itself the netting, holding people in place, making sense of things. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence.” Sure enough, learning that Ivan has told his brother about their relationship, Margaret cannot help but imagine with horror the kind of person Peter must think she is: “a middle-aged woman taking advantage of a naive grieving boy, and for what, for her own gratification, her own pleasure.”

Lithub List of Lists

The Ultimate Best Books of 2024 List ‹ Literary Hub #lists

Dropping it here so that I don't forget Lithub has list of lists when I am looking for one in the future.

2025-01-11

Building Effective Agents

Building effective agents - Anthropic #ai #agents #workflows

Great article by Anthropic cutting through the bullshit and hype of AI agents.

"Agent" can be defined in several ways. Some customers define agents as fully autonomous systems that operate independently over extended periods, using various tools to accomplish complex tasks. Others use the term to describe more prescriptive implementations that follow predefined workflows. At Anthropic, we categorize all these variations as agentic systems, but draw an important architectural distinction between workflows and agents:

• Workflows are systems where LLMs and tools are orchestrated through predefined code paths.
• Agents, on the other hand, are systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, maintaining control over how they accomplish tasks.

NYT Amplifier: Bob Dylan Wasn’t the Only 1965 Newport Highlight. Hear 14 More

Bob Dylan Wasn’t the Only 1965 Newport Highlight. Hear 14 More. - The New York Times #music #playlist

Link to YouTube Music Playlist

Modern Internet Culture Seen Through The Lens of British Politics

What Elon Musk’s tweets about sex abuse reveal about British politics #internet #culture

In 2004, two years before the launch of X (then Twitter), Michael Goldhaber, an American thinker, published an essay arguing that the internet would produce a new type of human, just as printing had. Homo typographicus would be followed by Homo interneticus. His “mentality significantly altered” by the effects of intense internet use, interneticus would be unmoored from time and space, disrespectful of old sources of authority and facing a constant battle for his attention.

Found the original article: The mentality of Homo interneticus: Some Ongian postulates | First Monday

In this comparision Keir Starmer is typographicus, and Kemi Badenoch is interneticus

Interneticus, wrote Mr Goldhaber, would attach himself to new communities based on affinities “unshackled by space, unbounded by borders”. So the causes that most animate Ms Badenoch are litigated online and heavily influenced by America: gender identity; critical race theory; diversity, equity and inclusion schemes. She wants her party to think deeply about the civilisational questions the internet poses, such as the loss of presumption of innocence that emerges from online “pile-ons”.

…

Sir Keir was baffled: had her party not been in power for 14 years, while reports into the abuse gathered dust? Why was she tweeting about it now? Yet, wrote Mr Goldhaber, the internet would erode notions of time, because unlike musty books which immediately betray their age, pixelated text is continually refreshed. Interneticus would live in a “space devoid of chronological ordering…an ever-changing now”. And so the court judgments of over a decade ago pinging round X seem as urgent as if they had been written yesterday.

…

A decade ago another prime minister, David Cameron, crowed that his defeated rivals had tangled themselves in online debates: “Britain and Twitter—they’re not the same thing.” Or as Mr Goldhaber put it: “For Homo interneticus, cyberspace is most of the real world, and the rest is an appendage of it.“

Jujutsu

The Jujutsu version control system | Hacker News #tools #git

Someday soon, I need to try Jujutsu.

The Evolution of AI Assisted Coding

The Evolution of AI-assisted coding features and developer interaction patterns | sankalp's blog #ai #coding

Great overview of the history and current state of affairs in the AI assisted coding landscape.

How to Use Figma

This tutorial video came highly recommended by somebody on X #tutorial #figma

Oddly Influenced Podcast E1: Boundary Objects

Oddly Influenced | Transcript: E1: Boundary Objects

Here’s the quick definition:
1. People collaborating on projects can be divided into groups (“social worlds”, in the jargon). Think of testers and programmers on a software project.
2. Those groups have different values, goals, ways of looking at their jobs. Yet they are collaborating to accomplish one single thing in the world.
3. One way to organize collaboration is to highlight certain words or things – those are the boundary objects, so-called because they lie at the boundaries between social worlds.
4. These boundary objects are a bit delicate because they have to accomplish two things at once.
4.1. When people from different social worlds use a boundary object with each other , they have to agree that they’re talking about the same thing, yet…
4.2. The different interpretations they give to that word have to be flexible enough that they don’t cause arguments, wasted time, and so on.

…

“Social worlds” is a term of art in sociology, one that I didn’t find a good definition of. But it goes something like this:

Humans are social animals who talk to each other. You and I perceive the world, but we interpret the photons that strike our eyeballs in the light of previous social interactions. It’s people around us who tell us what to value, how to value it: what’s interesting, what’s boring; what to pay attention to, and what to pretend doesn’t exist; what has meaning and what doesn’t.

Differing social worlds is what makes it possible for two entirely sincere people to interpret the same event in not just opposing but in seemingly completely disconnected ways.

So how is it that the collector and scientist collaborated to produce something whose value lasted a century? The answer the paper gives is that they use boundary objects to help them coordinate.

Close Readings: Marcus Aurelius

This is a great podcast about Marcus Aurelius’ book The Meditations and it's timeless appeal. #books #stoicism

This specific portion of the podcast transcript appealed to me a lot:

Thomas Jones: And as for the longer term legacy of Marcus' thought and writings that The Meditations are still quite widely read and quoted, perhaps more quoted than read. Claire Hall in a recent piece on Galen for the LRB began by saying that Galen couldn't stand gym bros. Marcus' teachings are popular with tech bros. What is it about them that seems to appeal so much to a certain kind of modern man?

Emily WIlson: It's so funny, isn't it? I mean, the Silicon Valley version of stoicism seems to get more and more popular. And, of course, the fact that we've emphasized this is a self help for someone in a position of enormous privilege, which doesn't ask you to interrogate your privilege and instead sort of leans into it where you were born to be a leader and you can be even more leaderish and even more of a bro boss if you do a tiny bit or you don't even have to read very much of it. Just spend 5 minutes reading because it's also the kind of book that you can get a little bit out of and get most of the gist of it with 5 minutes of reading labor. So I think there are many reasons why it's as popular as it is, especially with the tech bros, but not just with them.

Right? I mean, it's striking to me that, you know, I've been teaching at university level for decades, and Marcus Aurelius is not usually part of the university syllabus in most places. And yet, I've looked up some various bestseller lists, and it's always almost at the top, and it's always sort of in the top 500 of all books on Amazon. It's extraordinarily best selling nowadays, which means it's not just Elon Musk who's reading it or buying it at least even if he's not reading it. It's a lot of people who are buying it and thinking this is going to give them some kind of insight into how to live.

And, of course, the fact that it does dig into things that we all wrestle with about fear of death and other people and how do we deal with with change and the temptation to be furious or annoyed all the time. Those are relatable issues even if the actual lived experience of Marcus Aurelius was not not relatable whatsoever because most people are not Roman emperors.

Thomas Jones: But also that he'd lived through a a pandemic and economic collapse and these things. So there are ways even though he'd not lived in the

Emily WIlson: So times of huge change. Yes. So stoicism is a philosophy for times of huge social upheaval and change and for people who are experiencing lack of political power and anger and lack of agency. As a result, it gives you that sense of agency in a time where you feel you don't have any. And that also suggests why is it appealing to people who don't have power as well as those who do.

Thomas Jones: Yeah. And sometimes in in tweet length bites.

Emily Wilson: Exactly. Yes. Yeah. In fact, I don't know if there's a moxiebelius spot, but there should be. I mean, it seems like it's made for that.

Miranda July's All Fours on NPR Books Podcast

Link: In 'All Fours,' Miranda July tackles love, sex and reinvention in middle age : NPR's Book of the Day : NPR #books #ageism #desire

This book takes place in a transitional time. I mean, quite literally, like, perimenopause is a big, huge biological time of transition. If you think of puberty, we know that biological things are happening, but we never just think of those things. We think romance, like every song on the radio in some ways, is about that time or about this certain kind of love.

And I remember thinking, oh, every love story is a hormone story. And so what is the love story for this time of transition? What is this hormone story of perimenopause? And to know that you don't just need to know the facts from your doctor, which would be nice. We would appreciate that. But also, what is the story? In what way are you supposed to fall in love during this time?

Because it's a wild time. Some part of yourself is going to come out that has perhaps been starved before. And this moment when all your hormones are in transition, you're meant now to be sort of jumbled around enough inside that that blind spot comes forward and it's hungry.

Cal Newport on X

Link: 7 Habits To Make 2025 Your Best Year Yet | Cal Newport - YouTube #twitter #x

Cal Newport had some very insightful thoughts on a podcast while answering a reader question.

With over 200 million followers, Musk has the biggest account on X and increasingly uses it to wield political power. Look at this thing. In 26 days around the election, Musk fired off 3,870 posts that had more than 33 billion views. My God! If I was a shareholder in one of these companies, I'd be like, "What are you doing? Come on!" These 3,870 posts could have been like, "Are you thinking about our company?" Musk's reach transcends Trump's, with each of his posts typically seen by twice as many users as posts from the president-elect. As the post returns to Twitter, Trump's influence is smaller on there. As Musk prepares for a central role in the U.S. government, the billionaire has a political megaphone unmatched in modern society.

X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it, really is a playground of elites in a very broad sense. It was a place where intellectual, academic, technocratic, and political elites gathered, hashed out ideas, sought status, and collaboratively worked with each other to try to establish cultural Overton windows. So it was an important place for various elites. Most people in the country could care less. It's not a heavily used platform. It doesn't have a large number of active users. It doesn't play a large role in most people's day-to-day life. It's the smallest of the platforms in terms of usage. It's dwarfed by something like Facebook. That's why it was valued so little. That's why it was like a $40 billion company, whereas Meta is honing in on a trillion-dollar valuation. Whatever it is, $800 billion valuation—it's a pretty small company. But the people who write about it are part of that category of cultural elites to which it made a really big deal. So if you're covering technology, it's a really big deal. This was the clubhouse where we all were.

There was a change in fortune as the ownership of that clubhouse changed. The clubhouse became different. It was like a bigger kid took over the treehouse and put up a "No Girls Allowed" sign, like you would have had back when you were in fourth grade. The cultural-political equivalent of that is that the composition changed. There was a period in the lead-up to the last Donald Trump presidency and through the Biden presidency, up through Elon taking over Twitter, where certain groups sort of had control within these elites. Then it switched to like the other team got control of it, and this was very traumatic if you were someone who was hanging out in this clubhouse. But for the rest of the country, I don't think it mattered much. It did set the agenda for what elites wrote about, what other elites talked about. Elite politicians would look at what was happening on here, and this would set their agenda about how they thought about things or how they were reacting to things.

I think it was good for our culture at large that Elon Musk bought and semi-broke this platform because it reduces its influence on those cultural elites. Great fracture! It makes it more partisan, so its influence goes down. If it's more nakedly like, "This team has it; this team doesn't," its impact on how a politician thinks about what matters goes down. Its impact on how a journalist thinks about what they're going to write about or not write about goes down. Its impact on an academic trying to think about what they want to say or not say or pursue goes down. And that's for the good because it's entirely non-representative. It doesn't represent any sort of coherent understanding of the world. It's status-seeking elites from different sides all fighting with each other. Because, I guess if you do a little bit of math, 33 billion views with 3,870 posts would be about 8.5 million views per post, which I guess if you compare it to 335 million people in the U.S., it's only like—it's less than 3%. And it's the same people. That's the whole problem.

The problem is it didn't fall apart. Early on, there was this accusation of, "Look, when Musk took this over and started firing all these people, the platform itself technically was going to fall apart." I'd be like, "That would be great from my perspective as a cultural critic because this is not a useful contribution to our culture." The problem is Elon Musk is good at running tech companies, and he knows what he's doing. He fired a ton of people, brought in some 10xers, drastically cut down the expenses of running it, and you know what? It's perfectly stable again, and he's building. So that's the problem. He's too good at running companies to accidentally break it. But now it's just become like a smaller playhouse. There are these two sides fighting on there now. It's mainly just this side, and I don't think it's culturally important.

Dynamic variables in bash

Dynamic shell variables | Redowan's Reflections #bash #tools #tricks

Dynamic shell variables allow shell scripts to define and access variables based on runtime conditions. Variable indirection (${!var} syntax) lets you reference the value of a variable through another variable. This can be useful for managing environment-specific configurations and function dispatch mechanisms.

Here’s an example:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# script.sh

config_path="/etc/config"
var="config_path"

echo "The value of \$config_path is: ${!var}"

The value of $config_path is: /etc/config

Here, ${!var} resolves to the value of the variable config_path because var contains its name. This allows you to dynamically decide which variable to reference at runtime.

The article goes on to demonstrate the different uses of this technique: context-aware environment management, function dispatch, temporary file handling.