June 8, 2025

Daily Log Digest – Week 22, 2025

2025-06-01

A Complete Unknown

Finally got around to watching this and feeling pumped!

It occurred to me that Bob Dylan's iconic song The Times They Are A-Changin' might also be relevant to the current times.

The stay-at-home son

The New Dream Job for Young Men: Stay-at-Home Son - WSJ #culture #genz #jobs

You’ve mocked them as mooches and mom’s basement dwellers. They prefer the term “stay-at-home sons,” and have a new hero in “Jeopardy” champion Brendan Liaw.

This graduation season is likely to produce a whole lot of stay-at-home sons. The overall unemployment rate is 4.2%, but 8.2% of 20- to 24-year-olds are jobless. The unemployment rate for men in that age range is even worse, 9.6%.

On Rhyming and Poetry

Rhyme, once in its prime, is in decline #poetry #rhyme #literature

In the 20th century, many artforms became “more abstruse, inaccessible and difficult to appreciate”, says Steven Pinker, a professor at Harvard University, “possibly as a way of differentiating elites from the hoi polloi”. Any fool can enjoy an enjoyable thing, but only a committed intellectual can enjoy an unenjoyable one. By the mid-century, rhyming lines had fallen by half.

Modernist verse is thus the peacock’s tail of poetry: something that evolved to be clearly hard to bear, but impressive if you can. Consider the epigraph of T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece “The Waste Land”. It begins, forbiddingly, in Latin, then ends in ancient Greek with the words apothanein thelo (“I want to die”). Eliot can make everyone feel a bit like that.

Look at a list of recent winners of any of the big poetry prizes and most will share three characteristics: you will not have heard of them; their poems will not rhyme; and they will have worked as poets in universities, peddling poetry as (partially) state-subsidised muses. This is poetry less as a paid-for product than as a literary utility: something that—like road surfacing or sewage disposal—is widely considered necessary for a civilised society but that no one wants to fork out for.

The poetry that does sell is produced by a new generation of social-media poets such as Donna Ashworth and Rupi Kaur. This is to the distress of intellectuals, for Instapoets’ verse is not the gas-works and cemetery kind. It is designed to be shared online, meaning that it is anodyne and often accompanied by line drawings of birds.

Young Voters and Donald Trump

How young voters helped to put Trump in the White House #elections #trump #genz #millenial

Pretty detailed analysis of voting patterns of GenZ and millenial voters in 2024.

THE 2024 election unfolded like a political thriller, replete with a last-minute candidate change, a cover-up, assassination attempts and ultimately the triumphant return of a convicted felon. But amid the spectacle, a quieter transformation took place. For the first time, millennials and Gen Z, people born between 1981 and 2006, comprised a plurality of the electorate. Their drift towards Donald Trump shaped the outcome.

Millennials and Gen Z are the most diverse and educated generations in American history, traits long thought to favour the Democratic Party. Yet a new report from Catalist, a left-leaning political-data firm, shows that although Democrats still won a majority of young voters, their long-standing advantage over the Republican Party was reduced by nearly two-thirds. In 2024 Kamala Harris’s margin of victory among these voters was 12 points smaller than was Joe Biden’s in 2020, a bigger swing than for any other cohort (see chart 1). The exodus was caused in large part by non-whites and helped propel Mr Trump back into the White House. But many of these voters lack firm partisan loyalties. They are still up for grabs.

Research by Columbia University found that events in voters’ early adulthood have an outsize effect on their long-term partisanship. Older millennials aged into the electorate against the backdrop of the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street. But for the youngest voters formative political events have been more diverse and disruptive. They have come of age during covid-19 lockdowns, cost-of-living shocks and the rise of and backlash against wokeness. How they will make ideological sense of the whiplash is difficult to predict.

AI and Job Loss

Why AI hasn’t taken your job #ai #jobs #unemployment

Returning to a measure we introduced in 2023, we examine American data on employment by occupation, singling out workers that are believed to be vulnerable to AI. These are white-collar employees, including people in back-office support, financial operations, sales and much more besides. There is a similar pattern here: we find no evidence of an AI hit (see chart 2). Quite the opposite, in fact. Over the past year the share of employment in white-collar work has risen very slightly.

Across the board, American unemployment remains low, at 4.2%. Wage growth is still reasonably strong, which is difficult to square with the notion that AI is causing demand for labour to fall. Trends outside America point in a similar direction. Earnings growth in much of the rich world, including Britain, the euro area and Japan, is strong. In 2024 the employment rate of the OECD club of rich countries, describing the share of working-age people who are actually in a job, hit an all-time high.

There are two competing explanations for these trends. The first is that, despite the endless announcements about how firms are ushering AI into their operations, few make much use of the technology for serious work. An official measure suggests that less than 10% of American companies employ it to produce goods and services. The second is that even when companies do adopt the tech, they do not let people go. AI may simply help workers do their jobs faster, rather than making them redundant. Whatever the explanation, for now there is no need to panic.

Ed Zitron on actually useful AI stuff

The Better Offline Mailbag - Better Offline (podcast) | Listen Notes #ai #skepticism

Below is a badly (AI) transcribed quote from Ed Zitron, the (in)famous AI skeptic from the Better Offline podcast answering a question about AI stuff he finds useful. There is a shoutout to Simon Willison and Max Woolf.

Question: A question from Garrett Smart. Do you think AI is actually useful and any capacity even as an assistant in the areas of art or programming?

Ed Zitron: If so, why so? When it comes to art, I think that there are new functions like slightly better clone tools as well that I've heard people use. But really this is just a bridge from photoshop. I will say, for the most part, art is a not a great one because usually it's just getting rid of the creative side. Programming is a more complex ones. So there's an excellent video link to in the episode Notes from the Internet of Bucks that Carle Brown I think his name is. I really want him on the show, Carle if you're listening, please come on where he kind of said that generative AI code is different to what software engineering is. Like software engineering, he is solving a murder or an investigation far more than generative AI is just creating code, because software engineering isn't just spooting out code and saying here we go, we're done. We now have software. Software is a manifold series of different things you have to do, and on top of that, things break when you plug me into other things, and our internet and most software products are built in a patchwork of different things, so software development. The best I've heard is that it can be used in very controlled situations for very specific things. If you're really interested in learning what it can actually do. I recommend Max Wolf and Simon Wilson. I'll link them in the notes as well, but those two are no AI guys. I also really recommend the Internet Bugs, which again i'll link as well. There are software developers who use this stuff. I don't know about it, and actually the Internet of Bug videos really good as well, because it breaks the whole myth of oh Microsoft and Google saying twenty to thirty percent of their code is written by AI. It's kind of bullshit, as you'd expect, because you can't just hand off code like this. There's also vibe coding. Vibe coding in and of itself has so many problems in that. Yeah, when you create something that works in a way that you literally don't understand by definition, yeah, it's probably going to fucking break. I mean it will break at some point and you won't know how to fix it other than to poke the machine that build it and say, fix the problem. I don't understand.

I posted this for a time when folks who hate AI skeptics like Ed Zitron claim that these people are not capable of believing that AI can be useful in any form at all.

Sarah Miller's Ayahuasca Experience

Pirates of the Ayahuasca | Issue 50 | n+1 | Sarah Miller #psychedelics

Honestly the article felt like a whole lot of nothing. That might be a tad unfair. Maybe there is something in it if one invests enough time and focus reading it.

My one and only ayahuasca experience was actually quite wonderful, and it did not have any of the drama around it, which constitutes the majority of the article. I came away confident in recommending psychedelics to most folks, as long as they were cautious and did enough research and introspection before taking the step.

The Rise of Substack

Substack Has Changed in the Last 30 Days - by Ted Gioia

This is a nice overview of how substack came to dominate the media landscape.

1. Stage 1: People ignored Substack as it was small and unfamiliar, leading to blank stares when mentioned.
2. Stage 2: Substack became a target for mockery, treated as a joke by established media and perceived as a circus.
3. Stage 3: Powerful figures began attacking Substack for its independence, but these efforts ultimately backfired and fueled its growth.
4. Stage 4: The establishment is now rushing to join Substack, marking a significant shift in perception and acceptance of the platform.

Male Loneliness

Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?

Yet another article in what it seems like a deluge of articles about male loneliness. But this one is worth read. I skimmed it and was a bit lazy to extract quotes though, except this one which looked interesting but isnt directly related to the subject matter

There was a particular episode that I devoured with rapt fascination. The guest was a man named David Goggins. He was hawking his book “Can’t Hurt Me,” a harrowing saga of being brutally beaten by his father when he was a child, getting called the N-word at his predominantly white high school in small-town Indiana, drowning his sorrows in doughnuts and eventually becoming a depressed 300-pound man. But then, after a particularly bad night at his job killing cockroaches, he comes home, sees a TV show about the Navy SEALs and soon after decides to lose 100 pounds in three months so he can qualify for active service and try out for the SEALs. Not only does he shed the weight in that preposterously tiny window of time, he then survives the SEALs’ infamous “Hell Week,” enduring an unrelenting barrage of excruciating physical trials bordering on torture (and which have led to several actual deaths) despite his injuries and congenital health issues. He becomes a SEAL, and after serving in Iraq, quickly transforms himself into one of the world’s premiere ultramarathoners, completing more than 70 endurance races, many of them in excess of 100 miles.

Goggins — who, in the wake of that “Rogan” appearance, became a mega-best-selling author with nearly 13 million Instagram followers — professes to absolutely despise running. And yet he laces up his shoes and hits the road every day, because he hates it. This is his message: Deliberately suffer. Do something you hate to do, every single day, no matter what. If you feel like a victim, victimize your own body. Callous the mind, keep going and stay hard.

Cure for Individualism

What is the cure for the West’s individualist worldview? | Aeon Essays #individualism #western #philosophy #confucianism

Yet even people living in individualist societies can recognise that the worldview leads to problems when taken to its extreme. At the broadest level, it encourages a mindset of seeing others either as competitors or as means to our own satisfaction. In politics, it undercuts attempts at social justice or building safer and healthier communities, holding that any restriction on individual rights is either ‘communism’ or ‘fascism’. A number of our books begin with a litany of global problems that the individualist worldview seems powerless to solve: climate change, wealth inequality, political polarisation. While individualism encourages an ethic of personal responsibility in relation to our own choices and actions, it doesn’t ask much of us in connection to issues that we did not directly cause.

The Confucian alternative begins from a notion of what contemporary scholars call the ‘relational self’ – that a person cannot be understood in isolation from their connections with those around them. What is most relevant about me is not that I am a free and autonomous agent, but rather that I am so-and-so’s son or daughter, grandchild or sibling; someone’s teacher, colleague or mentor; a member of such-and-such neighbourhood and community. In its conception of the person as inseparable from their relationships, the role-bearing self poses a challenge to the social contract view of humans as pristine individuals who participate in society only voluntarily.

If it is impossible for people living in modern, Western societies to ever get rid of individualism in its entirety, the only cure is to develop more balanced and humane forms of individualism. If we see hyper-individualism as a problem, then studying traditions such as Confucianism can help us keep in view the broader range of things that ought to matter in a good human life. For those forms of individualism that we find worthy of our allegiance and protection, the Confucian relational perspective can deepen our perspective on what it means to be an individual among others, along with a set of daily practices that can aid in our self-realisation.

The ideal of interconnectedness is not limited to Chinese or East Asian philosophy. It is also found in Western political philosophers such as Aristotle; in contemporary communitarians and virtue ethicists; and in versions of care ethics that have been developed by feminist thinkers. Cross-cultural philosophers have used concepts from other non-Western traditions – such as ubuntu from African philosophy, or the no-self from Buddhism – to launch similar challenges to the predominance of individualism in modern life. Seen in the context of these other traditions both inside and outside of Western philosophy, individualism appears as less of an inevitability.

Since individualist philosophy is so deeply embedded in the cultures of much of North America and Europe, the study of non-Western traditions can be helpful in providing an alternative vision of the good life. One thing that crosscultural philosophy teaches us is that stepping back from our cultural norms is often far more difficult than we think. Even when they attempt to provide alternatives to individualism, philosophers working exclusively in Western traditions can remain mired in individualist assumptions. Philosophical traditions from Asia and Africa give us fully worked-out conceptual schemes that have developed in relative isolation from the Western individualist ethos. These traditions can help us figure out what we might be missing in modern societies, while at the same time showing us some of the things that we may have gotten right. In developing a better version of ourselves, we need all the help we can get.

Blackout Poetry

TIL Blackout Poetry. Love the concept!

The Experience of Being Single

Is being single a happier experience for women or men? | Psyche Ideas #gender #relationships #love

One potential reason why single women might tend to experience a happier singlehood has to do with their social support system, including their friends and family. It’s well established that strong social ties are an important factor in happiness, and they even seem to be one protective factor against an early death. Single people are no exception to the reality that social connections are a valuable part of a full life; singles often report that their relationships with friends, family, neighbours and acquaintances are important to their happiness.

Women having a better time in singlehood might also reflect that, for many of them, being single seems preferable to the alternative. One perspective advanced by sexuality researchers proposes that women in heterosexual relationships are often expected to take on most of the household work and management in a way that leaves them feeling more like ‘mothers’ than lovers to their romantic partners. Add to this that women’s sexual pleasure often comes second (at best), and you can start to see why some women feel like relationships are a net loss.

The bargain might have seemed more worthwhile to some of these women in a time when men dominated the workplace, so that a relationship was the most viable path to having money in the bank. But as women have continued to make strides in the workplace and many societies have gradually moved toward greater pay equity, more women may be choosing ‘no deal’ when it comes to having a spouse. It could be that many of the single women we surveyed see singlehood as a space where there is less work, less hassle and more room for a life that addresses their needs.

If our data are telling us that this happy story applies more to women than men, on average, what can single men take away from it? In light of the growing concern about male loneliness, perhaps men can learn from women’s approach to singlehood. While social norms around masculinity might encourage them to focus more of their time and energy on pursuing financial success and climbing the career ladder, men, and particularly single men, may need to make sure they are directing enough attention towards building and maintaining social connections and taking care of themselves. This might include things like initiating more coffee chats or other hangouts to catch up with friends, or speaking with a therapist to work on their mental health. For single men who want to partner up eventually, a stronger social circle might have the benefit of making them more attractive to potential partners. But more importantly, it might bring men greater joy in singlehood as well.

Research Behind Bloomberg Travel Guides

Want to Be a Travel Writer? How the Job Actually Works - Bloomberg

This is a great in-depth look into how Bloomberg produces its two-night guides for cities around the world as part of its travel section. If not anything, this makes me take their guides more seriously next time I am doing my travel research.

And this photograph appealed to the notetaker in me

US Drug Prices

How America Built the World's Most Successful Market for Generic Drugs - Marginal REVOLUTION #pharma #drugs #generics

Not a statement I thought I would encounter

The United States has some of the lowest prices in the world for most drugs. The U.S. generic drug market is competitive and robust—but its success is not accidental. It is the result of a series of deliberate, well-designed policy interventions.

to clarify from the linked post

The US has high prices for branded drugs but it has some of the lowest prices for generic drugs in the world and generic drugs are 90% of prescriptions.

The AI Jobs 'Apocalypse'

The "AI jobs apocalypse" is for the bosses #ai #jobs

I guess it depends on how you define “AI jobs apocalypse.” The way that AI executives and business leaders want you to define it is something like ‘an unstoppable phenomenon in which consumer technology itself inexorably transforms the economy in a way that forces everyone to be more productive, for them’.

As such, perhaps we should maybe pump the brakes here and look at what’s actually going on, which is more like ‘large technology firms are selling automation software to Fortune 500 companies, executives, and managers who are then deciding to use that automation technology to fire their workers or reduce their hours.’ There is nothing elemental or preordained about this. The “AI jobs apocalypse” is bosses like Barbara Peng deciding to lay off reporters and copywriters and highlighting her commitment to AI while she is doing so.

But of course there is no AI jobs apocalypse—_an apocalypse is catastrophic, terminal, predetermined—but there _are bosses with great new incentives/justifications for firing people, for cutting costs, for speeding up work. There is, to split hairs for a minute, a real AI jobs crisis, but that crisis is born of executives like Peng, CEOs like Duolingo’s Louis von Ahn and Klarna’s Sebastian Siemiatkowski all buying what Amodei (and Sam Altman, and the rest of the new AI enthusetariat) is selling. Amodei and the rest are pushing not just automation tools, but an entire new permission structure for enacting that job automation—and a framework that presents the whole phenomenon as outside their control.

Incel Bots on ChatGPT

OpenAI featured chatbot is pushing extreme surgeries to “subhuman” men #incel #chatgpt #ai #manosphere

This type of content is particularly concerning given where this language originated. The incel and manosphere forums that coined the terms used by the bot, including the “Looksmaxxing” name assigned to the GPT, regularly feature conversations in which men express their desire for revenge against women and anyone who’s sexually active, with rhetoric celebrating violence against women and openly praising mass killers. Multiple mass killings have been linked to these online spaces, or to men who have self-identified as members of these online subcultures. The communities’ core beliefs — that feminism and women’s rights have destroyed society and “rigged” the dating world against men — can serve as stepping stones toward more extreme and violent viewpoints. Other members of these communities turn their hatred inwards, and are met with posters who encourage them to “lie down and rot”, or even kill themselves.

OpenAI is not just hosting but prominently featuring chatbots that suggest dangerous medical interventions as crucial to men’s sexual and romantic success. They parrot extreme ideology around gender dynamics, sex, and dating; promote pseudoscientific beliefs; and potentially drive vulnerable or young users toward extremist communities.

2025-06-03

Relationships and Independence

This is lowkey profound #relationships #independence

Extravagant Weddings as a Costly Signal

Why Extravagant Weddings Are On The Rise At The Same Time Marital Rates Are In Decline

Marriage itself used to be a costly signal of commitment. Today, extravagant weddings serve this purpose.

Recall that costly signaling theory states that if you want to show you’re serious about something—your strength, your loyalty, your commitment—you have to incur a cost that’s hard to fake.

In other words, costly weddings have come to signal what marriage itself used to convey—that you're in it for the long haul.

People no longer trust the institution of marriage to signal commitment on its own, so they feel the need to stage it. In the past, marriage came with clear expectations—social, religious, and legal—that gave it weight and a common understanding of permanence. That’s no longer the case. So now, couples turn to performance. The wedding isn’t just a celebration. It’s a production. Outfits, lighting, music, a curated guest list. The whole thing is designed to prove, to everyone watching, that this is real. This is serious.

Interestingly, this ends up punishing the very people most in need of the stability that marriage can offer. Not because they don’t want to get married, but because the cost of looking committed keeps rising.

oh well, imo it's just another reason to move beyond marriage tbh 🤷🏽‍♂️!

The Recurring Cycle of 'Developer Replacement' Hype

The Recurring Cycle of 'Developer Replacement' Hype #ai #software #jobs

The cycles so far

• The NoCode/LowCode Revolution
• The Cloud Revolution
• The Offshore Development Wave
• The AI Coding Assistant Revolution

Here's what the "AI will replace developers" crowd fundamentally misunderstands: code is not an asset—it's a liability. Every line must be maintained, debugged, secured, and eventually replaced. The real asset is the business capability that code enables.

If AI makes writing code faster and cheaper, it's really making it easier to create liability. When you can generate liability at unprecedented speed, the ability to manage and minimize that liability strategically becomes exponentially more valuable.

This is particularly true because AI excels at local optimization but fails at global design. It can optimize individual functions but can't determine whether a service should exist in the first place, or how it should interact with the broader system. When implementation speed increases dramatically, architectural mistakes get baked in before you realize they're mistakes.

For agency work building disposable marketing sites, this doesn't matter. For systems that need to evolve over years, it's catastrophic.

The pattern of technological transformation remains consistent—sysadmins became DevOps engineers, backend developers became cloud architects—but AI accelerates everything. The skill that survives and thrives isn't writing code.

It's architecting systems. And that's the one thing AI can't do.

a couple of Ask HN - How Do I Learn threads

These threads showed up at the same time on my HN feed and they are adjacent to some of the hobbies I wanna pursue, so just recording them here #learn #robotics #electronics

• Robotics: Ask HN: How do I learn robotics in 2025? | Hacker News
• Practical Electronics Repair: Ask HN: How do I learn practical electronic repair? | Hacker News

GenAI is our polyester

GenAI is Our Polyester #genai #ai #slop

Everyone knows happened next: There was a massive cultural backlash against polyester, which led to the triumphant revaluation of natural fibers such as cotton and linen. The stigma against polyester persists even now. The backlash is often explained as a rejection of its weaknesses as a fiber: polyester's poor aeration makes it feel sticky.

But there was also a massive aesthetic backlash to polyester, and this can't be separated from the fabric's social position. From the 1980s, cotton growers ran a massive advertising campaign to raise its profile among wealthy Americans and re-establish the fiber as luxurious. The Official Preppy Handbook arrived at the same time with the guidance: "Wool, cotton, and the odd bits of silk and cashmere are the only acceptable materials for Prep clothes." The book's editor Lisa Birnbach warned that a "small percentage of polyester" can ruin a shirt, and pointed to the fraying collar of over-washed cotton shirt as a status symbol. By this point, the connotation of polyester was no longer “high-tech” but low-class. This class bias imbued polyester with a negative status value that made it ultimately look ugly.

…

Today manufacturers continue to use polyester-cotton blends to create “wrinkle-free” garments, but the stigmas remain. A “beautiful” shirt from a high-end brand comes in real cotton or linen, despite all the inefficiencies involved.

I rehash the rise and fall of polyester because I believe it presages what will happen to generative AI art.

…

While polyester took a few decades to lose its appeal, GenAI is already feeling a bit cheesy. We're only a few years into the AI Revolution, and Facebook and X are filled to the brim with “AI slop.” Everyone around the world has near-equal access to these tools, and low-skilled South and Southeast Asian content farmers are the most active creators because their wages are low enough for the platforms' economic incentives to be attractive.

Humans have no universal faculty to judge aesthetics: Our appreciation of beauty is highly-contextual and depends on factors other than the raw visual stimulus. Most tech-workers are unaware of this fact, and for them, the fact that AI-art resembles human-art means it must be pretty damn good. But AI art is already in very poor taste: not just because it recycles existing conventions in a way that looks outmoded, but because it's already overly associated with less-than-prestigious institutions. GenAI art has already reached polyester status, and this is just the beginning. Despite all the techno-utopian promises, our brains see it as ersatz.

Software Engineering and Manufacturing

Why GUIs are built at least 2.5 times | Patricia Aas #software #engineering #manufacturing

That being said, when you strip away all the theoretical jargon of postmodernism, its theorists were simply describing an extinction-level destruction of cultural value. Our era's particular neoliberal hyper-connected, hyper-capitalist economy is creating a lot of profit for a few people, but it’s absolutely devastating for the creation of deep meaning. This is the main conclusion of Status and Culture: artifacts and styles take on their full value within a social context, and less value is created when all cultural artifacts are procurable with enough money, can be made anywhere by anyone, and offer no useful social distinctions between philistine and aesthete. AI is simply the latest step in this long process of devaluation — auguring a future where the entire fabric of our lives, from top to bottom, becomes polyester.

But the historical rejection of polyester gives me hope. Humans ultimately are built to pursue value, and create it where it doesn’t exist. When small groups invent new sources of value, others notice and want in. The more that the economy embraces synthetic culture, the more we'll be primed for a revival of non-synthetic culture. But this is where you come in: We have to be ready to fully embrace this return of human-made art. Our generation's polyester salespeople are not deep thinkers and they don't care about the externalities of what they're doing. They’re here to sell us polyester. We don’t have to buy it, but more importantly, we don't have to feel bad about not buying it.

Software development has a weird attribute, making 1 app locally on your machine that you deploy locally to your phone as a hobby, can take days/months/years. But once it is “done” you can put it in an app store or online, and all subsequent copies are “free to produce”. This is not how manufacturing works. Making item 2 and 3 has cost, in materials and labour. But in software all of, or the overwhelming amount of, cost is in making the first one (maybe you have some per user infrastructure etc).

So the perspective is wrong. Developers don’t produce code. Developers are trying to design a solution to a problem, and that is not done in isolation, and more “stuff” isn’t necessarily better.

Like imagine you like a minimalistic style, putting more and more stuff into your house doesn’t make it better, it makes it worse.

The goal isn’t to write code faster, it’s to make something that is valuable to someone.

…

The manufacturing perspective just doesn’t fit: we have no material cost (copies are free), we have no labour cost for manufacturing (copies are free), we don’t need a factory (copies can be made on a laptop). This is a very different thing than the manufacturing of physical things. It’s even different from the design process for manufacturing of physical things, because you can design a bridge, but building the bridge still costs money. And so does the next bridge from that same design. That’s not software.

Another weird thing about software is that we can fundamentally change it after it’s “done”. Even after the customer has it. We can continue to change it, for decades and decades.

Christophe Nuyens on whether artistic ability can be taught

Cinematography of “Andor” – interview with Christophe Nuyens · Pushing Pixels

Kirill: Do you feel that you can teach the technical part, but the artistic part comes from within a person, and if one doesn’t have it, it can’t be learned?

Christophe: No, I think you can teach both. When I was growing up, I didn’t have a lot of cultural influences in my life, at home or at school. It is something that I grew over the years. When I started at the film school, I noticed that I needed to catch up on it. I spent a lot of evenings around that time watching movies with my friends, and it grew on me.

You can cultivate it the same way you cultivate the technical skills. There are also people who are more artistic than technical. Maybe I am more naturally inclined to be better at the technical side, but I grew and worked on my creative side over the years. I really believe you can grow the creative part of your brain.

2025-06-04

AI is not a technology, it's an ideology

Toolmen | A Working Library #ai #ideology #technology

“Artificial intelligence” is not a technology. A chef’s knife is a technology, as are the practices around its use in the kitchen. A tank is a technology, as are the ways a tank is deployed in war. Both can kill, but one cannot meaningfully talk about a technology that encompasses both Sherman and santoku; the affordances, practices, and intentions are far too different to be brought into useful conversation. Likewise, in the hysterical gold rush to hoover up whatever money they can, the technocrats have labeled any and all manner of engineering practices as “AI” and riddled their products with sparkle emojis, to the extent that what we mean when we say AI is, from a technology standpoint, no longer meaningful. AI seems to be, at every moment, everything from an algorithm of the kind that has been in use for half a century, to bullshit generators that clutter up our information systems, to the promised arrival of a new consciousness—a prophesied god who will either savage us or save us or, somehow, both at the same time. There exists no coherent notion of what AI is or could be, and no meaningful effort to coalesce around a set of practices, because to do so would be to reduce the opportunity for grift.

What AI is is an ideology—a system of ideas that has swept up not only the tech industry but huge parts of government on both sides of the aisle, a supermajority of everyone with assets in the millions and up, and a seemingly growing sector of the journalism class. The ideology itself is nothing new—it is the age-old system of supremacy, granting care and comfort to some while relegating others to servitude and penury—but the wrappings have been updated for the late capital, late digital age, a gaudy new cloak for today’s would-be emperors. Engaging with AI as a technology is to play the fool—it’s to observe the reflective surface of the thing without taking note of the way it sends roots deep down into the ground, breaking up bedrock, poisoning the soil, reaching far and wide to capture, uproot, strangle, and steal everything within its reach. It’s to stand aboveground and pontificate about the marvels of this bright new magic, to be dazzled by all its flickering, glittering glory, its smooth mirages and six-fingered messiahs, its apparent obsequiousness in response to all your commands, right up until the point when a sinkhole opens up and swallows you whole.

When is Insurance Worth It

When Is Insurance Worth It? #insurance #finance

These are the things I would say in response.

• It is not a philosophical question, it is a mathematical one.
• Technically, some insurance is worth its price, even when the insurance company makes a profit.
• Whether or not to get insurance should have nothing to do with what makes one sleep – again, it is a mathematical decision with a correct answer.
• Saving up the premium instead of getting insurance is making the mistake of conflating an ensemble average with a time average.
• Love does not make insurance a mathematically appropriate decision. Running the numbers does.

The purpose if insurance is not only to help us pay for things that we literally do not have enough money to pay for. It does help in that situation, but the purpose of insurance is much broader than that. What insurance does is help us avoid large drawndowns on our accumulated wealth, in order for our wealth to gather compound interest faster.

Think about that. Even though insurance is an expected loss for the insured, it helps us earn more money in the long run. This comes back to the Kelly criterion, which teaches us that the compounding effects on wealth can make it worth paying a little up front to avoid a potential large loss later.33 The typical example is how it takes as long to go from $2,000 to $10,000 as it does from $10,000 to $50,000. This means that if we are forced to pay $8,000 out of our $10,000 wealth, we will end up with $10,000 again at the same time as we would have ended up with $50,000 if we had not been forced to pay. Losing $8,000 at one point is equal to a $40,000 loss later on, once compounding is taken into account. No wonder Einstein coined compounding the eighth wonder of the world. This effect is huge. Having to shell out 20 % of our wealth for an unexpected accident is so bad – even if the accident is improbable – that we may want to chuck out a guaranteed 0.5 % of our wealth to get out of that risk.

This is the hidden purpose of insurance. It’s great at protecting us against losses which we literally cannot cover with our own money, but it also protects us against losses which set our wealth back far enough that we lose out on significant compounding effects.

To determine where the threshold for large enough losses is, we need to calculate.

AI Assisted Programming

My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts · The Fly Blog #ai #software #programming

I like the fact that the term "vibe-coding" has been used (and in an appropriate context) all of two times in the entire post. I also like the use of the term "AI-assisted programming" which is what I do most of the time.

Important caveat: I’m discussing only the implications of LLMs for software development. For art, music, and writing? I got nothing. I’m inclined to believe the skeptics in those fields. I just don’t believe them about mine.

Read your AI-generated code line-by-line before merging.

Are you a vibe coding Youtuber? Can you not read code? If so: astute point. Otherwise: what the fuck is wrong with you?

You’ve always been responsible for what you merge to main. You were five years go. And you are tomorrow, whether or not you use an LLM.

If you build something with an LLM that people will depend on, read the code. In fact, you’ll probably do more than that. You’ll spend 5-10 minutes knocking it back into your own style. LLMs are showing signs of adapting to local idiom, but we’re not there yet.

People complain about LLM-generated code being “probabilistic”. No it isn’t. It’s code. It’s not Yacc output. It’s knowable. The LLM might be stochastic. But the LLM doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you can make sense of the result, and whether your guardrails hold.

Reading other people’s code is part of the job. If you can’t metabolize the boring, repetitive code an LLM generates: skills issue! How are you handling the chaos human developers turn out on a deadline?

† (because it can hold 50-70kloc in its context window)

For the last month or so, Gemini 2.5 has been my go-to †. Almost nothing it spits out for me merges without edits. I’m sure there’s a skill to getting a SOTA model to one-shot a feature-plus-merge! But I don’t care. I like moving the code around and chuckling to myself while I delete all the stupid comments. I have to read the code line-by-line anyways.

on "craft":

Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed. If anything we build endures, it won’t be because the codebase was beautiful.

Besides, that’s not really what happens. If you’re taking time carefully golfing functions down into graceful, fluent, minimal functional expressions, alarm bells should ring. You’re yak-shaving. The real work has depleted your focus. You’re not building: you’re self-soothing.

Which, wait for it, is something LLMs are good for. They devour schlep, and clear a path to the important stuff, where your judgement and values really matter.

on mediocrity

As a mid-late career coder, I’ve come to appreciate mediocrity. You should be so lucky as to have it flowing almost effortlessly from a tap.

We all write mediocre code. Mediocre code: often fine. Not all code is equally important. Some code should be mediocre. Maximum effort on a random unit test? You’re doing something wrong. Your team lead should correct you.

Developers all love to preen about code. They worry LLMs lower the “ceiling” for quality. Maybe. But they also raise the “floor”.

hear! hear!

To the consternation of many of my friends, I’m not a radical or a futurist. I’m a statist. I believe in the haphazard perseverance of complex systems, of institutions, of reversions to the mean. I write Go and Python code. I’m not a Kool-aid drinker.

New Yorker profile on Curtis Yavin

Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America | The New Yorker

The German academic Hans-Hermann Hoppe is sometimes described as an intellectual gateway to the far right. A retired economics professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Hoppe argues that universal suffrage has supplanted rule by a “natural élite”; advocates for breaking nations into smaller, homogenous communities; and calls for communists, homosexuals, and others who oppose this rigid social order to be “physically removed.” (Some white nationalists have made memes pairing Hoppe’s face with a helicopter—an allusion to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of executing opponents by throwing them from aircraft.) Though Hoppe favors a minimal state, he believes that freedom is better preserved by monarchy than by democracy.

Yarvin nearly ended up a libertarian. As a Bay Area coder and a devotee of Austrian-school economists in his late twenties, he exhibited all the risk factors. Then he discovered Hoppe’s book “Democracy: The God That Failed” (2001) and changed his mind. Yarvin soon adopted Hoppe’s imago of a benevolent strongman—someone who would govern efficiently, avoid senseless wars, and prioritize the well-being of his subjects. “It’s not copy-and-pasted, but it is such a direct influence that it’s kind of obscene,” Julian Waller, a scholar of authoritarianism at George Washington University, said. (Over e-mail, Hoppe recalled that he met Yarvin once at an exclusive gathering at Peter Thiel’s home, where Hoppe had been invited to speak. He acknowledged his influence on Yarvin, but added, “For my taste his writing has always been a bit too flowery and rambling.”) Hoppe argues that, unlike democratically elected officials, a monarch has a long-term incentive to safeguard his subjects and the state, because both belong to him. Anyone familiar with the history of dictatorships might find this idea disingenuous. Not Yarvin.

It wasn’t until he reached the end of his speech, ten minutes later, that I realized he was, in his own way, addressing my initial question. “Unless we can totally reëngineer DNA to change what a human being is, there are many people who should not live in a modern way but in a traditional way,” he concluded. “And that is a level of revolution that is so far beyond anything the Trump-Vance regime is doing.”

…On his travels, he often hosted “office hours”—informal, freewheeling discussions with readers, many of them thoughtful young men, alienated by liberal guilt and groupthink. What wins Yarvin converts is less the soundness of his arguments than the transgressive energy they exude: he makes his listeners feel that he is granting them access to forbidden knowledge—about racial hierarchy, historical conspiracies, and the perfidy of democratic rule—that progressive culture is at pains to suppress. His approach seizes on the reality that most Americans have never learned how to defend democracy; they were simply brought up to believe in it.

Yarvin advises his followers to avoid culture-war battles over issues like D.E.I. and abortion. It is wiser, he argues, to let the democratic system collapse on its own. In the meantime, dissidents should focus on becoming “fashionable” by building a reactionary subculture—a counter-Cathedral. Sam Kriss, a left-wing writer who has debated Yarvin, said of his work, “It flatters people who believe they can change the world simply by having weird ideas on the Internet and decadent parties in Manhattan.”

Such people have come to be known as the “dissident right,” a loose constellation of artists and strivers clustered around the Bay Area, Miami, and the Lower East Side micro-neighborhood Dimes Square. The milieu was drawn together by a frustration with electoral politics, Covid lockdowns, and the strictures of “wokeness.” Vice signalling has been central to the scene’s countercultural allure: instead of sharing pronouns and employing the approved nomenclature (“unhoused,” “Latinx,” “justice-involved person”), its members have revived insults like “gay” and “retarded.”

In the past decade, liberalism has taken a beating from both sides of the political spectrum. Its critics to the left view its measured gradualism as incommensurate to the present’s multiple emergencies: climate change, inequality, the rise of an ethno-nationalist right. Conservatives, by contrast, paint liberalism as a cultural leviathan that has trampled traditional values underfoot. In “Why Liberalism Failed” (2018), the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen argues that the contemporary American emphasis on individual freedom has come at the expense of family, faith, and community, turning us into “increasingly separate, autonomous, non-relational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” Other post-liberal theorists, including Adrian Vermeule, have proposed that the state curtail certain rights in the service of an explicitly Catholic “common good.”

Yarvin is calling for something simpler and more libidinally satisfying: to burn it all down and start again from scratch. Since the advent of neoliberalism in the late seventies, political leaders have increasingly treated governance like corporate management, turning citizens into customers and privatizing services. The result has been greater inequality, a weakened social safety net, and the widespread perception that democracy itself is to blame for these ills, creating an appetite for exactly the kind of autocratic efficiency Yarvin now extolls. “A Yarvin program might seem seductive during a period of neoliberal rule, where efforts to change things, whether it is global warming or the war machine, feel futile,” the historian Suzanne Schneider told me. “You can sit back, not give a fuck, and let someone else run the show.” Yarvin has little to say on the question of human flourishing, or about humans in general, who appear in his work as sheep to be herded, idiots to be corrected, or marionettes controlled by leftist puppeteers.

Dwarkesh on AI Progress

Why I have slightly longer timelines than some of my guests #ai #learning

But the fundamental problem is that LLMs don’t get better over time the way a human would. The lack of continual learning is a huge huge problem. The LLM baseline at many tasks might be higher than an average human's. But there’s no way to give a model high level feedback. You’re stuck with the abilities you get out of the box. You can keep messing around with the system prompt. In practice this just doesn’t produce anything even close to the kind of learning and improvement that human employees experience.

While this makes me bearish on transformative AI in the next few years, it makes me especially bullish on AI over the next decades. When we do solve continuous learning, we’ll see a huge discontinuity in the value of the models. Even if there isn’t a software only singularity (with models rapidly building smarter and smarter successor systems), we might still see something that looks like a broadly deployed intelligence explosion. AIs will be getting broadly deployed through the economy, doing different jobs and learning while doing them in the way humans can. But unlike humans, these models can amalgamate their learnings across all their copies. So one AI is basically learning how to do every single job in the world. An AI that is capable of online learning might functionally become a superintelligence quite rapidly without any further algorithmic progrss

2025-06-05

Relationship Anarchy

Is ‘relationship anarchy’ the solution to the loneliness crisis? | Dazed #dating #anarchy

I dunno why I am so addicted to modern dating discourse. Send help.

Despite what the name might suggest, relationship anarchy (RA) – a term coined by writer Andie Nordgren in a 2012 Tumblr essay – is not a style of nonmonogamy where there are no rules, no commitment and you can do whatever you want at all times. You don’t even need to live in Portland or make your own kimchi to practice it. Instead, RA is a relationship style centred on the very reasonable belief that “no relationship should be bound by any rules not entirely agreed upon by the involved parties”, as Feeld puts it.

Unlike Relationship Stalinism, its arch-rival, RA promotes a non-hierarchical approach to relationships, so that romantic and sexual partners aren’t ranked more highly than each other, than platonic friends or family members. So if your besties are as important to you as your love life, you might just be a budding relationship anarchist. If, on the other hand, you veer wildly between insisting that your friends are everything and chucking them off a bridge the second someone hot slides in your DMs, it might not be for you.

Link to original Feeld report: https://feeld.co/news/state-of-dating-vol-3