June 1, 2025

Daily Log Digest – Week 21, 2025

2025-05-25

Entry-level tech hiring

Entry-level tech hiring is down 50%. So much for that diploma #tech #software #hiring

Not sure how long this will endure, but it makes for grim reading.

(Also I can't quote from it for some reason)

Silicon Valley Used to Idolize Youth. AI Is Changing That. - Business Insider

This isn't just an economic or technical evolution, it's a cultural one. Where Silicon Valley once idolized youth, today's market prizes proven execution. Risk tolerance has dropped across the startup ecosystem, and with venture capital funding tightening, founders are hesitant to invest in long-term potential over short-term impact.

Interestingly, this has opened the door for more seasoned professionals. While C-suite hiring has also slowed, companies are increasingly turning to "fractional" roles — part-time CTOs, CMOs, and advisors — to access senior talent without inflating their burn rate, according to SignalFire.

Dumb Phones

Is America Headed for an Age of Dumb Phones? - Business Insider #tech #dumb

Matt Thurmond seems like a poster child for tech-forward millennials. He runs an AI-assisted platform for mortgage professionals. He leads a nonprofit that connects longevity researchers, investors, and startups. He was the copresident of a technology conference at Harvard, where he got his MBA.

So it's a little surprising that Thurmond is almost never on his phone.

Count him among the "appstinent" — one of a growing number of Americans, mostly millennials and Zoomers, vowing to live a life free of endless scrolling. "Screen time was just crowding out other things," says Thurmond, who's 41. "That's not where I want to get my entertainment, and it's not really where I want to have any substantive conversation. I prefer to do that kind of stuff in the analog world."

"Appstinence," a play on abstinence, was coined by Gabriela Nguyen, a 24-year-old graduate student at Harvard. Nguyen, who grew up in Silicon Valley and got her first iPod Touch when she was 9, came to view her addiction to phones and social media as the enemy of productivity and living in the moment. She found her calling in encouraging people to wean themselves off their phones. Last year, she started a club called APPstinence at Harvard and launched a website of the same name.

2025-05-28

The Who Cares Era | dansinker.com

In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.

In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.

At a time where the government's uncaring boot is pressing down on all of our necks, the best way to fight back is to care. Care loudly. Tell others. Get going.

As the culture of the Who Cares Era grinds towards the lowest common denominator, support those that are making real things. Listen to something with your full attention. Watch something with your phone in the other room. Read an actual paper magazine or a book.

Be yourself.

Be imperfect.

Be human.

Care.

Personal Software

RedwoodSDK is a React framework for Cloudflare #software #programming #hipster

We believe software can be personal again. Not just technically, but philosophically. Owned. Forkable. Shareable. Local. Beautiful. Built for use, not for scale. Built with love, not venture funding. Built for yourself - and maybe a few others. If this resonates with you, come join us. We're not just building a framework. We're building a future where software is yours again.

Adolescence

What “Adolescence” Gets Wrong About Incels, Crime, and Class #tv #incel

Despite its emotional impact, though, “Adolescence” is fiction widely misinterpreted as fact. The very aspects praised as realistic are, indeed, statistically improbable and misleading.

Shortly after watching the show, I spoke with William Costello, a PhD student at the University of Texas who is among the few researchers seriously studying the incel subculture. His findings complicate the simplistic narrative many viewers seem to believe “Adolescence” affirms.

The creators of “Adolescence” may have intentionally crafted an atypical narrative to highlight how rage and violence can appear unexpectedly. Ironically, some of the series’s admirers miss this nuance, mistaking a fictional tragedy for a representative one.

In doing so, they overlook uncomfortable truths about the causes of most violent crime, which are rooted less in online radicalization than in fractured families and offline peer dynamics.

“Adolescence” is a superb work of art. It should not be mistaken for reality.

The Copilot Delusion

The Copilot Delusion #copilot #ai #software #programming

The thing I hate the most about AI and it's ease of access; the slow, painful death of the hacker soul... Brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By buttons. By bots.

The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs. It’s that it will entice people who never wanted the job to begin with. People who don't care for quality. It'll remove the already tiny barrier to entry that at-least required people to try and comprehend control flow. Vampires with SaaS dreams and Web3 in their LinkedIn bio. Empty husks who see the terminal not as a frontier, but as a shovel for digging up VC money. They’ll drool over their GitHub Copilot like it’s the holy spirit of productivity, pumping out React CRUD like it’s oxygen. They'll fork VS Code yet again, just to sell the same dream to a similarly deluded kid.

There was once magic here. There was once madness.

Kids would stay up all night on IRC with bloodshot eyes, trying to render a cube in OpenGL without segfaulting their future. They cared. They would install Gentoo on a toaster just to see if it’d boot. They knew the smell of burnt voltage regulators and the exact line of assembly where Doom hit 10 FPS on their calculator. These were artists. They wrote code like jazz musicians - full of rage, precision, and divine chaos.

Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard, born to be great, is going to get told to "review this AI-generated patchset" for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin.

Because you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s the cruel joke. We’ll fill this industry with people who think they’re good, because their bot passed CI. They'll float through, confident, while the real ones - the hungry ones - get chewed up by a system that doesn’t value understanding anymore. Just output. Just tokens per second.

And what’s worse, we’ll normalize this mediocrity. Cement it in tooling. Turn it into a best practice. We'll enshrine this current bloated, sluggish, over-abstracted hellscape as the pinnacle of software. The idea that building something lean and wild and precise, or even squeezing every last drop of performance out of a system, will sound like folklore.

If that happens? If the last real programmers are drowned in a sea of button-clicking career-chasers - then I pity the smart outsider kids to come after me.

Defer your thinking to the bot, and we all rot.

How to be a great thinker

How to be a great thinker #intelligence

Most people are getting dumber. Largely because of the smartphone, we’re in an era of declining attention spans, reading skills, numeracy and verbal reasoning. How to buck the trend? I’ve charted seven intellectual habits of the best thinkers. True, these people exist in a different league from the rest of us. To use an analogy from computing, their high processing power allows them to crunch vast amounts of data from multiple domains. In other words, they have intellectual overcapacity. Still, we can learn from their methods. These can sound obvious, but few people live by them.

1. Read books: Books convey the nuanced complexity of the world.
2. Don’t use screens much: This frees time for books and allows the mind to roam.
3. Do your own work, not the world’s: Focus on personal intellectual freedom rather than maximizing income.
4. Be multidisciplinary: Break down barriers between disciplines to foster innovative thinking.
5. Be an empiricist who values ideas: Prioritize empirical observations and insights.
6. Always assume you might be wrong: Challenge your own assumptions to reach deeper insights.
7. Keep learning from everyone: Embrace lifelong learning and insights from all individuals, regardless of status.

Also loved this story about Isaiah Berlin

In March 1944, Isaiah Berlin returned from Washington to London on a bomber plane. He had to wear an oxygen mask all flight, wasn’t allowed to sleep for fear he would suffocate, and couldn’t read as there was no light. “One was therefore reduced to a most terrible thing,” he recalled, “to having to think — and I had to think for about seven or eight hours in this bomber.” During this long interstitial moment, Berlin decided to become an historian of ideas. He ended up writing the classic essays The Hedgehog and the Fox and Two Concepts of Liberty.

2025-05-29

The Inverse Catfish Method

What's The Opposite Of Catfishing? #beauty #gender #relationships

Allow me to introduce my signature online dating move: the Inverse Catfish Method.

Back when I was on the apps, I’d upload slightly _un_flattering photos of myself — an up-close, no-makeup selfie; a wide shot in a muumuu the size of a small circus tent — in an effort to meet men who weren’t primarily interested in looks. Bonus: In person, I exceeded all expectations! I’ve found love two, maybe even three times this way (the last one stuck) despite the fact that my skin, like yours, is marked by acne scars, visible pores and a smattering of old chicken pox pits (plus the burgeoning wrinkles of a woman ten years your senior).

If this makes me seem like I have some neurotic need to diminish myself before a man does it first, well… guilty as charged. After reading your question, Not A Catfish, I’d say we have this in common.

AI and Automation

Pluralistic: AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers (27 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow #ai #automation

Honestly the whole piece is worth reading -- it goes into the history of the Luddite movement, AI assisted coding, worker's rights etc

This is what makes investors and bosses slobber so hard for AI – a "productivity" boost that arises from taking away the bargaining power of workers so that they can be made to labor under worse conditions for less money. The efficiency gains of automation aren't just about using fewer workers to achieve the same output – it's about the fact that the workers you fire in this process can be used as a threat against the remaining workers: "Do your job and shut up or I'll fire you and give your job to one of your former colleagues who's now on the breadline."

So there are two stories about automation and labor: in the dominant narrative, workers are afraid of the automation that delivers benefits to all of us, stand in the way of progress, and get steamrollered for their own good, as well as ours. In the other narrative, workers are glad to have boring and dangerous parts of their work automated away and happy to produce more high-quality goods and services, and stand ready to assess and plan the rollout of new tools, and when workers object to automation, it's because they see automation being used to crush them and worsen the outputs they care about, at the expense of the customers they care for.

As has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, the project of automation isn't just about increasing productivity, it's about weakening labor power as a prelude to lowering quality. Take what's happened to the news industry, where mass layoffs are being offset by AI tools.

…consumers and workers are class allies in the automation wars. The point of using automation to weaken labor isn't just cheaper products – it's cheaper, defective products, inflicted on the unsuspecting and defenseless public who are no longer protected by workers' professionalism and pride in their jobs.

Love the description of centaurs vs reverse-centaur

In modern automation/labor theory, this debate is framed in terms of "centaurs" (humans who are assisted by technology) and "reverse-centaurs" (humans who are conscripted to assist technology):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

There are plenty of workers who are excited at the thought of using AI tools to relieve them of some drudgework. To the extent that these workers have power over their bosses and their working conditions, that excitement might well be justified. I hear a lot from programmers who work on their own projects about how nice it is to have a kind of hypertrophied macro system that can generate and tweak little automated tools on the fly so the humans can focus on the real, chewy challenges. Those workers are the centaurs, and it's no wonder that they're excited about improved tooling.

But the reverse-centaur version is a lot darker. The reverse-centaur coder is an assistant to the AI, charged with being a "human in the loop" who reviews the material that the AI produces. This is a pretty terrible job to have.

and an astute observation on the potentially waning power of the tech worker

Tech bosses tormented these workers but pampered their coders. That wasn't out of any sentimental attachment to tech workers. Rather, tech bosses were afraid of tech workers, because tech workers possess a rare set of skills that can be harnessed by tech firms to produce gigantic returns. Tech workers have historically been princes of labor, able to command high salaries and deferential treatment from their bosses (think of the amazing tech "campus" perks), because their scarcity gave them power.

It's easy to predict how tech bosses would treat tech workers if they could get away with it – just look how they treat workers they aren't afraid of. Just like the textile mill owners of the Industrial Revolution, the thing that excites tech bosses about AI is the possibility of cutting off a group of powerful workers at the knees. After all, it took more than a century for strong labor unions to match the power that the pre-Industrial Revolution guilds had. If AI can crush the power of tech workers, it might buy tech bosses a century of free rein to shift value from their workforce to their investors, while also doing away with pesky Tron-pilled workers who believe they have a moral obligation to "fight for the user."

…

When techies describe their experience of AI, it sometimes sounds like they're describing two completely different realities – and that's because they are. For workers with power and control, automation turns them into centaurs, who get to use AI tools to improve their work-lives. For workers whose power is waning, AI is a tool for reverse-centaurism, an electronic whip that pushes them to work at superhuman speeds. And when they fail, these workers become "moral crumple zones," absorbing the blame for the defective products their bosses pushed out in order to goose profits.

As ever, what a technology does pales in comparison to who it does it for and who it does it to.

On the Origin of Wealth

On the Origin of Wealth - by Rob Kurzban - Living Fossils #wealth #beliefs

We reset to the pre-fire days. A traveling guru arrives. Both charismatic and mischievous, he convinces the village that a comet will destroy the world in one week. Panic sets in. No one wants seed corn, let alone shovels anymore—what’s the point of planting if there’s no future? The farmer with the seed corn can’t get anyone to trade with him, making his seed useless. In fact, he stops bothering to protect his corn. Same for the shovel-maker. He can’t even give them away. Some people in the village who happened to have food around can still eat, but many people in the village have nothing left of value to trade. They are poorer. Now, the comet isn’t real. But the value—the wealth—disappears anyway. Even though the stuff is still there.

Now imagine the opposite: the comet is real. Hurtling toward Earth. But this time, no one knows. People go about their lives, bartering, farming, planning next year’s harvest. The value stays intact—right up to the fiery end.

From these hypotheticals, we see that while stuff matters, just as in the cases of power, property rights, and groups, the real hard candy shell of wealth is beliefs. The actual comet doesn’t destroy wealth until it arrives, but beliefs about the fictional comet blew up the economy.

AI Hype

Don’t Believe the AI Hype by Daron Acemoglu - Project Syndicate

First the AI Snake Oil guys and now this.

2025-05-30

The Lost Art of Deep Reading

The Humility of the Page: The Lost Ethics of Deep Reading #reading

This is not just a private loss. It is a civic one. Without the capacity to dwell in difference, to engage with arguments we do not agree with, or to follow a thread longer than 280 characters, we become intellectually and morally brittle. We lose the very qualities that democratic life depends upon: empathy, nuance, deliberation.

Deep reading, particularly of literature, philosophy, and reflective prose, offers not just insight, but rehearsal. It trains us in the moral dispositions that public life requires: attention, imagination, restraint. To give ourselves to a complex text is to practice the patience we need for one another. It is a rehearsal in understanding before judging, listening before reacting. This is not merely a virtue. It is a survival skill for pluralistic, tolerant society.

Beauty is Pain

Beauty is pain: The increasing masochism of self-optimisation | Dazed #beauty #feminism #culture

By now we’re all too familiar with the old adage ‘beauty is pain’. Traced back to at least 1800s France (‘il faut souffrir pour être belle’, or ‘one must suffer to be beautiful’), the phrase has been used for generations to justify the physical suffering many women endure to maintain society’s beauty standards. “If suffering is beauty and beauty is love, she cannot be sure she will be loved if she does not suffer”, as Naomi Wolf wrote in The Beauty Myth back in 1990, unpicking the ways a modern patriarchal society leverages beauty standards as a way to oppress women – even while gender equality grew in the eyes of the law.

We’ve seen this truth play out throughout history, through extreme grooming acts such as wearing corsets and fontanges, hairline plucking and foot binding, disordered eating, and surgeries. But it’s also embedded into the very standards themselves. Today’s trends for thinness – whether via Ozempic or #SkinnyTok – come with the same message as 00s heroin-chic, or the Victorian obsession with the aesthetics of tuberculosis. A malnourished body, a controlled and surveilled body, an addicted or diseased body – i.e. a body in pain – is an intrinsically feminine body, and a beautiful one at that.

Also learned a new term - mewing.

What if modern beauty standards aren’t so much a war between genders, but a symptom of a system that preys on human weaknesses? It was philosopher Michel Foucault’s 1975 essay “Discipline and Punish” that famously illuminated the state of the human body under capitalism. “The new discipline invades the body and seeks to regulate its very forces and operation, the economy and efficiency of its movements… to increase the utility of the body, to augment its forces,” he wrote. Today, the same rings true. In a recent interview on Joshua Citarella’s Doomscroll, Professor Quinn Slobodian explains how we live under neoliberal power that upholds a capitalist economy by prioritising marketability at all costs. To survive in such a climate, it’s necessary that we, as members of this society, consider ourselves as marketable goods too. Ones that are as strong, healthy, beautiful, and optimised as possible.

Under capitalism, the idea that we need to suffer at work to both achieve success and enjoy our lives is one that is driven home constantly, and the same is true for aesthetics; the more committed we are and the more we suffer to achieve them, the more we deserve them. Think of how we might believe that the more a skin treatment stings and burns, the more effective it must be. Labour is a good thing, under this view, and required of all of us to take part in the economy.

AI Browsers

The AI browser wars are about to begin #ai #browser

At this point after fully moving over to Arc, the biggest thing I want in a browser is the concept of Spaces.

Here are the AI browsers mentioned in the article: • Comet (by Perplexity) • Arc (by the Browser Company) • Neon (by Opera) • OpenAI's browser (in development)

The State of IaC

Screaming in the Cloud | The Latest State of IaC with Ido Neeman #iac #terraform

Hypernormalization

Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues. The dissonance is real | Well actually | The Guardian #hypernormalization #institutions

“Hypernormalization” is a heady, $10 word, but it captures the weird, dire atmosphere of the US in 2025.

First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.

The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.

“What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working … and yet the institutions and the people in power just are, like, ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has,” Harfoush says in her video.

Hypernormalization captures this juxtaposition of the dysfunctional and mundane.

Naming an experience can be a form of psychological relief. “The worst thing in the world is to feel that you’re the only one who feels this way and that you are going quietly mad and everyone else is in denial,” says Caroline Hickman, a psychotherapist and instructor at the University of Bath specializing in climate anxiety. “That terrifies people. It traumatizes people.”

People who feel the “wrongness” of current conditions acutely may be experiencing some depression and anxiety, but those feelings can be quite rational – not a symptom of poor mental health, alarmism or a lack of proper perspective, Hickman says.

“People don’t shut down because they don’t feel anything,” says Hickman. “They shut down because they feel too much.” Understanding this overwhelm is an important first step in resisting inaction – it helps us see fear as a trap.

Curtis points out that governments may intentionally keep their citizens in a vulnerable state of dread and confusion as “a brilliant way of managing a highly febrile and anxious society”, he says.

In 2014, Ursula Le Guin accepted the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, saying: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

Harfoush reflects on this quote often. It underscores the fact that “this world we’ve created is ultimately a choice”, she says. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

We have the research, technologies and wisdom to create better, more sustainable systems.

“But meaningful change requires collective awakening and decisive action,” says Harfoush. “And we need to start now.”

Longevity

How ‘longevity’ became the new buzzword in health #ageing

Hawkins says: “Those two things open up an interesting split in the longevity conversation. On the one hand you have this high-tech, science-driven approach where someone is actively throwing quite a lot of money and technology at understanding and optimising their own ageing process; and on the other, with the Blue Zones, it’s a radically back to basics approach to health. A lot of the reasons that we see people living longer in Blue Zones are really foundational things: like having strong community ties and eating relatively unprocessed diets.”

Where once people would brag about being “crazy busy” or pulling an all-nighter at work, now logging eight hours of sleep on your Oura ring score carries more cachet. There’s been such a culture shift that it seems extraordinary now that live fast, die young was ever considered a cool rock’n’roll mantra.

Hawkins says the Future Laboratory report was exploring “this idea that you and your quality of life are ultimately your greatest investment. It’s definitely a status symbol in that way. Perhaps in the future it won’t be so much about the designer hand bag, it’s more what treatments do you have access to, what means do you have to take control over your ageing.”

Anthropic and their focus on Coding AIs

Claude-powered coding tools are poised to transform programming #claude #code #ai #coding

An underrated AI story over the last year has been Anthropic’s success in the market for coding tools.

“We believe coding is extremely important,” said Anthropic engineer Sholto Douglas in an interview last week. “We care a lot about coding. We care a lot about measuring progress on coding. We think it’s the most important leading indicator of model capabilities.”

This focus has paid off. The company’s models have excelled at software engineering since last June’s release of Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Over the last year, a number of Claude-powered coding tools—including Cursor, Windsurf, Bolt.new, and Lovable—have enjoyed explosive growth. In February, Anthropic released a coding assistant called Claude Code that has become popular among programmers.

In media interviews, Anthropic employees have touted the extreme efficiency gains Claude has enabled for its own programmers.

For some reason they never mentioned Amp below.

Anthropic’s success in the coding market has gotten the attention of both OpenAI and Google:

• In early May, OpenAI announced it was acquiring Windsurf, an AI-powered code editing tool that had been powered by Anthropic models.
• The next week, OpenAI announced Codex, a coding agent designed to compete with Anthropic’s Claude Code.
• Last week Google announced its own coding agent called Jules.

The Four Phases of Institutional Collapse in the Age of AI

The Four Phases of Institutional Collapse in the Age of AI

I think it’s happening like this -

This isn’t a linear story arc or a roadmap of change etc, just a rough progression. These phases overlap, feed into each other, contradict themselves. But they help explain what’s going on right now. Why everything feels like it’s… eroding.