Daily Log Digest – Week 23, 2025
2025-06-09
Taxes of the Built Environment
Taxes of the Built Environment - by Josh Zlatkus #diaper #culture #technology #skill
An interesting aside in an otherwise unrelated piece about…erm…potty training.
As a brief aside, I think part of the reason we are so impressed with the abilities of ancient peoples is that we are surrounded in the modern world by so much technology, which obviates doing anything all that impressive. Don’t get me wrong: if our ancestors could see me typing away on my computer, their jaws would hit the floor. They’d be much more impressed by the computer itself, of course, than my ability to poke its keys, but I also think they’d reserve some of their astonishment for how quickly I hit the keys (90 words a minute, baby).
By and large, though, people with little technology are asked to fill the gap with skill. People with plenty of technology, not so much.
and another one about concrete being one reason to necessiate diapers
Recalling Heying and Weinstein’s notion from A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century that the benefits of new technologies are obvious but the hazards are not, I would argue that one of the overlooked hazards of concrete has been to render the modern environment inimical to quick and mindless elimination.6 The benefits of concrete are much more apparent—providing a consistent, level surface for people and vehicles to move on. Before cities were doused with cement and asphalt, floods were less predictable, roads were less permanent, shoes tracked more muck inside, and so on. In fact, because city surfaces were once more forgiving toward pee and poop, people and their animals likely peed and pooped on them more often, which obviously wasn’t ideal.
So, why do diapers exist? In a word, concrete. In three words, the built environment. Diapers aren’t an intrinsically easier way of doing things; they are an easier way given the built environment. The built environment includes concrete, clothes, vast indoor spaces, hygiene norms, and so on. Really, anything that humans have “made,” as opposed to what evolution, geology, and so forth have provided.
Granted, the need for diapers is the sort of small to medium effect that most people don’t notice or care about. Ditto for the necessity of wearing shoes, maintaining a lawn, and showering daily. However, I hope through my writing to uncover more taxes of the built environment—and make people as incensed about them as they are their income tax.11
In the end, what is the broad impact of the built environment? Over and over the organism goes to act, to impulsively behave, and has its wrist slapped. You can’t walk there. You can’t touch that. You can’t sleep now. You can’t just do anything.
The built environment is increasingly like a diaper, smothering our natural responses often before we even have a chance to acknowledge them.
The rich, the ultra-rich and America’s shifting political landscape
The rich, the ultra-rich and America’s shifting political landscape #wealth #inequality #class
“Class,” Williams writes, “shapes everything from how you define a good cup of coffee to what you see as the purpose of life.”
Indeed. The book is filled with wonderful details about the things elites simply don’t understand about working people, like the fact that hunting might well be about keeping the fridge full rather than toxic masculinity, or that patriotism is attached to the fact that the military is one of the few ways up the socio-economic ladder for working-class Americans.
While liberal elites tend to congratulate themselves on their “enlightened” political views and hyper-individualism, working people often see them as selfish, entitled and overprotective of their children.
Class certainly shapes politics in America, something that the Democratic party has, in recent years, ignored. Williams, like me, believes that progressives have focused far too much on race as opposed to class, leading to a fatal loss of “middle-status” voters to Donald Trump. While some of Trump’s base is racist, or at least xenophobic, there is, according to research cited by Williams, a good 19 per cent that are simply anti-elite. Democrats, she believes, should be “laser-focused” on recapturing this group by better understanding them.
Anti-elites hold “moderate views on immigration, gay marriage and the environment” but are typically non-college grads. They are mostly but not solely white and see their future economic prospects as worse than their past. They sit outside the country’s white-collar meritocracy and are more interested in community and traditional institutions (church, unions, the military) than individualism and achievement.
Many elites who wouldn’t dream of putting down an immigrant or an LGBT+ person are happy to speak about these people in punitive ways (which says something about the psychology of entitlement). But their condescension has come at a great electoral cost.
The big takeaway is that the super-rich are as anxious as anyone else, if not more so. Osnos builds on his infamous 2017 essay “Survival of the Richest”, in which he examined the luxury end of the world of bunkers being built in places like New Zealand by wealthy dotcom survivalists. “How did a preoccupation with the apocalypse come to flourish in Silicon Valley, a place known, to the point of cliché, for unstinting confidence in its ability to change the world for the better?” he asks. One reason is that technology “rewards the ability to imagine wildly different futures”, be they utopian or dystopian.
But my favourite chapter is “The Floating World”, in which Osnos sets sail aboard a half-billion-dollar superyacht docked in Monte Carlo harbour.
“Inside my cabin, I quickly came to understand that I would never be fully satisfied anywhere else again,” he writes.
As behavioural economics tells us, happiness is relative, even for the 0.1 per cent.
Banality of the algorithm
banality of the algorithm - by Adam Aleksic #hannah #arendt #banality #bureaucracy
Humans are also very susceptible to stigmergy. When I’m making my way down a crowded sidewalk, I’m always struck by how people naturally sort themselves into fluid columns, following others going in the same direction. It’s easier, of course, than trying to fight someone headed the opposite way—but then we also make it easier for the person behind us to move forward.
Beyond motion, this affects almost all of our social behaviors, especially in how we spread memes and language. It simply takes less mental effort and social risk to follow what others do, so we perpetuate trends—often reaping social benefits that reinforce our behavior. It feels good to place a pen by an author’s grave, so we do that, and then others follow in our example.
This particular trend is an especially apt way to honor Hannah Arendt, whose most famous work focused on the stigmergy of bureaucracy. To her, much of the Holocaust was perpetrated not out of sociopathic malice, but out of a banality of evil—an institutional complacency, resulting from political structures, that made it easier to perpetuate terrible actions. Even many top Nazi officials, at the end of the day, acted not out of monstrous intent, but out of mechanical complicity—ants following pheromones pointing to professional promotion or social prestige.
The Holocaust is an extreme, tragic example, but banality is responsible for so many of our collective actions, because institutions are always the path of least resistance. It’s simply easier to mold ourselves to social structures, in the same way that it’s easier to go with the flow of the crowd instead of against it.
Upon interviewing the creators behind viral racist videos, for example, I was surprised to discover that none of them seemed to be generating those videos out of actual racist intent. Yes, the racism was there, but their primary motivations were more banal factors like “views,” “virality,” and “followers.” Many were also taking cues from other edgy content creators, who were all taking cues from Meta’s recent decision to significantly loosen AI guardrails. In short, these Reels got millions of views because some Instagram executive decided that slop is better for their profit margins, and that eventually trickled downstream into our feeds.
The more I study cultural trends online, the more I see this cycle replicate, even for the most insignificant memes. As soon as a new idea becomes popular, creators hop onto the trend, indirectly coordinating to kill the meme in pursuit of clicks. Since words are memes, the same is true of language, which is why I think our “brainrot” vocabulary emerged from the over-commodification of speech.
Financial Shenanigans in tech startups
Bankruptcy Was Good for 23andMe - Bloomberg #startups #revenue #profitability
The great arbitrage is that nobody cares about a hot startup’s profits, but everybody cares about its revenue. If you sell $5 billion of artificial intelligence widgets, that’s amazing: It means that you have found product-market fit, that people love your AI widgets, that you will be able to scale and achieve a leading position in the AI widget space. If you have $6 billion of research and marketing costs, that’s fine, that’s great, venture capitalists will love you, they will understand that you have to invest a lot now to build the business; the profits can wait.
Whereas if you sell $10 million of AI widgets and have $5 million of costs, that is a higher net income, but not as exciting to investors looking for a home run.
And so if you are in the business of selling AI widgets, you might go to your mom and say “hey mom would you buy $1 billion of AI widgets from me,” and she would say “I’d love to honey but I don’t have $1 billion,” and you would say “that’s okay I’ll just buy $1 billion of cookies from you, which will give you the money to buy the widgets,” and she would say “but I’d have to bake a lot of cookies,” and you would say “no just bake one, the cookies are so good that I’ll pay a billion dollars for one,” and she would say “okay but do you have $1 billion,” and you would say “no but it’s fine we’ll just net the transactions.” Or variations on that theme. We have discussed some of those variations, which play a crucial role in a lot of tech market bubbles. As long as investors are investing on revenue rather than profitability, someone will find a way to pay for revenue.
It would be very weird if there was none of this in the AI boom. Here’s the Financial Times on Builder.ai:
and in the same newsletter, something I would never understand
As I often write around here, right now the US stock market will pay $2 for $1 worth of Bitcoin. This is most famously demonstrated by MicroStrategy Inc. (or just Strategy), a company with a $60 billion pot of Bitcoins and a $118 billion equity market capitalization,
Psychedelics in America
A new psychedelic era dawns in America #psychedelics #mushrooms #tech
The most vocal psychedelic proponents say their focus is healing, not getting high. They claim the hallucinations psilocybin produces calm anxiety and tap into a lasting sense of peace. Author Michael Pollan, who co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP), once wrote that it can relieve “existential distress”.
Clinical trials show that psilocybin increases brain entropy (a measure of brain activity complexity), disrupting existing patterns. In other words, it can help you to think in different ways. (You can see why this might be popular with people in the tech sector who pride themselves on new ideas.)
I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan
The ‘wild’ writer who told the truth about work in China #work #china #books #author
Some eminently quotable lines here but the whole article was just really heartwarming so I recommend reading through the whole thing.
For more than two decades Hu was one of the 300 million internal migrant workers who are the lifeblood of the world’s second-biggest economy. After leaving school he worked 19 different jobs in six different cities. Sometimes the work was desk-bound, boring and pointless, but there were years of gruelling manual labour too, weathering an otherwise youthful complexion. What all these jobs had in common was poor pay and scant social protection or opportunity for progression. And as each one drew to an unremarkable, inevitable end, Hu would founder through the exhaustion and indignity.
With no children to support and his parents in Guangzhou provided for by the state, every few years Hu would emerge from his latest failure with a little money to keep him going without work for a few months at a time, sometimes longer. An avid reader of Russian and other western literature, he started writing himself, though without any serious ambition. Setting down his thoughts in earnest he described the insomnia that followed graveyard shifts in a packaging warehouse on the outskirts of Foshan, sweating in the tropical heat of southern China, sipping from four-litre bottles of knock-off baijiu, averaging just four hours sleep before returning to work.
He noted that the prime selling point for a 72-hour-a-week job as a convenience store clerk in Shanghai was that you were free to eat unsold stodgy dumplings, mini hotpots, fish cakes and boiled eggs after their use-by dates. He wrote about delivering parcels in Beijing, where his fellow delivery drivers battled each other to secure good neighbourhoods as their small fiefdoms: “a zero-sum game” where someone won and the rest lost, condemned to longer hours and lower pay. There was the plight of the driver who, after a customer complained that he’d shown a “foul attitude”, was ordered to read aloud a letter of self-criticism at neighbouring depots.
He captured the cathartic gallows humour and subtle criticisms of officialdom that are commonplace in China. Responding to a manager who said “the customer is God”, Hu instinctively retorted: “There should be only one God, but I have to serve many every day.” For nearly 10 years he recorded his observations on a second-hand Huawei phone, an early Chinese-made rival to the first generation of iPhones, with a clunky Android operating system and a screen resolution about one-fifth of the quality of today’s devices. On that brick-like phone he attempted — and abandoned — longer pieces of fiction too, but his output was mostly a series of disjointed journal entries, documenting the minutiae of his working life, how his body and psyche evolved in response.
It helped that Hu was among a new wave of yesheng zuojia, or wild writers, a group which stands out in China for being distinct from the established clique of highly educated authors, some former journalists, who are connected via formal writer collectives and state-affiliated institutions. One, Chen Nianxi, a miner from the north-western Shaanxi province, became a well-known name in 2015 after featuring among a group of working-class poets in a documentary and has gone on to publish six collections. In 2017 a domestic helper on the outskirts of Beijing had a similarly rapid rise to fame after her eponymously titled essay “I am Fan Yusu” went viral online in a matter of hours. Fan’s story, of leaving a village in central China to travel to Beijing to look after other people’s children in the Chinese capital, drew so much media attention that within three days after its publication she had essentially gone into hiding, refusing interviews.
Hu’s honest self-analysis had turned him into an everyman for modern China. Readers from all walks of life found parallels with the relentless grind of their own working lives. They were moved by his assessment that the pursuit of freedom, away from work, was a matter of consciousness. “In a sense, there is no essential difference between white-collar workers or blue-collar workers, working in a cubicle or on a construction site . . . I hope everyone can be freer,” wrote a user called Lottie.
“This kind of person with a strong sense of morality, a low sense of worthiness, and a high sensitivity, the world usually hurts him more severely than others,” wrote another Douban user. “The pain must be unbearable, but he endured.”
In November 2023, eight months after I Deliver Parcels in Beijing was released, the party’s official newspaper, The People’s Daily, wrote that hangye xiezuo (workers’ writing) was a “fine tradition of Chinese literature” and declared the book was a “must-read” for all Chinese citizens. Hu’s work, the paper added, “clearly describes those ordinary and meaningful moments, the self-control and self-reflection of ordinary people in labour and tempering, and the precious pursuit of the meaning of life”. The endorsement was placed on the front cover of later editions.
Reviewing I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, Lu Yanjuan, a professor at the Institute of Marxist Literary Theory of the Chinese Academy of Arts, praised the book’s “very important” literary significance. “I feel that the author is very close to me and I must have brushed my shoulders and nodded to him many times . . . ,” she wrote. “If ordinary people cannot see their own lives [in literature] and cannot empathise with the joys and sorrows of ordinary people in the world, then what is the point?”
But in August 2023, when he won a prize from Sanlian Lifeweek, an influential news magazine, he said: “I have been repeatedly asked what I think about the labels that have been attached to this book. I usually answer: if it is valuable, time will wash away the labels on it; if it is not valuable, then it doesn’t matter if it is labelled.”
In his book Hu broke down the “time-cost” of his life as a courier in Beijing. To earn an acceptable 7,000 yuan (around £700) for 26 days a month, he needed to make 270 yuan in an 11-hour day, 30 yuan an hour, or 0.5 yuan (around 5p) each minute. This meant completing, on average, a 2-yuan delivery every four minutes. Racing between deliveries there was, therefore, no time to find a toilet and pee — assuming a two-minute urination had a time-cost of 1 yuan. The impossible deadlines wore him down, changed him. “Little by little”, he wrote, he became irritable, prone to anger. And yet his underlying reflex was acquiescence. He was always trying to please people.
The Trauma of Porn
The Mass Trauma of Porn - by Freya India - After Babel #trauma #porn
2025-06-11
who do you go to for advice
who do you go to for advice? - by Ava - bookbear express #friendship #romance
Everyone agrees with this conceptually, but most people have relatively little interest in living it. Making friends is impossible as an adult. It’s impossible, I don’t have time. I just don’t connect with anyone in the city I live in. We’re taught that we should work hard to get into and sustain romantic relationships, but friendships are supposed to be automatic and effortless. If you have to try, aren’t you doing something wrong?
Of course, the reason why most people don’t have friends isn’t because they never made them, but because they lost them over time. Maintenance is always the battle in love and in work. Asking your friends for advice doesn’t just serve you—your vulnerability and trust serve the relationship, as long as you make space to pay it back in kind.
The rewards and challenges of romantic relationships are so much more prominent in our culture than those of friendship. We’re presented with a straightforward narrative: meet the right person, marry them, and you’ll have figured out a major part of life. It’s no wonder that people often neglect close friends or renounce them or a partner.
The Cult of Creativity
How creativity became the reigning value of our time | MIT Technology Review #creativity
Given how much we obsess over it, the concept of creativity can feel like something that has always existed, a thing philosophers and artists have pondered and debated throughout the ages. While it’s a reasonable assumption, it’s one that turns out to be very wrong. As Samuel Franklin explains in his recent book, The Cult of Creativity, the first known written use of creativity didn’t actually occur until 1875, “making it an infant as far as words go.” What’s more, he writes, before about 1950, “there were approximately zero articles, books, essays, treatises, odes, classes, encyclopedia entries, or anything of the sort dealing explicitly with the subject of ‘creativity.’”
This raises some obvious questions. How exactly did we go from never talking about creativity to always talking about it? What, if anything, distinguishes creativity from other, older words, like ingenuity, cleverness, imagination, and artistry? Maybe most important: How did everyone from kindergarten teachers to mayors, CEOs, designers, engineers, activists, and starving artists come to believe that creativity isn’t just good—personally, socially, economically—but the answer to all life’s problems?
Thankfully, Franklin offers some potential answers in his book. A historian and design researcher at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, he argues that the concept of creativity as we now know it emerged during the post–World War II era in America as a kind of cultural salve—a way to ease the tensions and anxieties caused by increasing conformity, bureaucracy, and suburbanization.
Absolutely. The two criteria go together. In techno-solutionist, hypercapitalist milieus like Silicon Valley, novelty isn’t any good if it’s not useful (or at least marketable), and utility isn’t any good (or marketable) unless it’s also novel. That’s why they’re often dismissive of boring-but-important things like craft, infrastructure, maintenance, and incremental improvement, and why they support art—which is traditionally defined by its resistance to utility—only insofar as it’s useful as inspiration for practical technologies.
At the same time, Silicon Valley loves to wrap itself in “creativity” because of all the artsy and individualist connotations. It has very self-consciously tried to distance itself from the image of the buttoned-down engineer working for a large R&D lab of a brick-and-mortar manufacturing corporation and instead raise up the idea of a rebellious counterculture type tinkering in a garage making weightless products and experiences. That, I think, has saved it from a lot of public scrutiny.
AI Assisted Coding Best Practises
AI-assisted coding for teams that can't get away with vibes - nilenso blog #ai #coding #programming #best-practises
Some very handy tips here.
Why I Gave Up My Smartwatch
Michel Foucault once described the modern subject as a self-surveying creature. Bent over spreadsheets, calorie counters, and productivity graphs, we monitor ourselves with the vigilance once reserved for prison guards. The smartwatch is simply the most intimate upgrade of that tendency: a panopticon you clasp on willingly every morning.
At first, it’s exciting. You learn how long you sleep, how fast your heart beats, how many steps you walk. But knowledge invites expectation. And expectation breeds disappointment. A night of rest that feels refreshing gets downgraded by your sleep score. A jog becomes unsatisfying if the zone chart looks too flat. Even sitting still can trigger a guilt-inducing vibration to "stand up and move."
Eventually, I stopped responding to my body. I was responding instead to a dashboard.
William James once said that the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the root of judgment, character, and will. It’s also the thing the smartwatch systematically erodes. It pings. It buzzes. It gives you little taps, like a child tugging on a sleeve. And each tap is a fork in the road: attend to your body, or attend to your device? This conflict isn’t always conscious, which is what makes it so dangerous. You lose the thread without realizing it. You forget what the body felt like before it was measured.
There’s a reason monks don’t wear Apple Watches.
2025-06-12
How should you choose your career
How Should You Choose Your Career? - Scott H Young #career #jobs
“Cool” careers tend to be overrated. All else being equal, the career paths that look fun, interesting or high-status tend to be more competitive. That might be fine if you’re passionate and highly-ambitious, but it does mean you’re picking a steeper hill to climb than a less-glamorous career in which you do useful work.
It matters, I care
It matters. I care. #news #cynicism
Let me be clear: It fucking matters. Truth matters. Documentation matters. Fighting corruption matters. That accountability seems out of reach right now doesn’t change that. When we internalize the belief that nothing can change, we stop demanding change. When we accept corruption as normal, we stop fighting it. When we dismiss documentation of wrongdoing as pointless, we give wrongdoers exactly what they want: permission to continue unchecked and with no record of their actions.
I understand the despair in these kinds of responses. We’ve all watched impeachments fail, courts falter, institutions buckle, and politicians repeatedly trade away democracy for their next campaign check. But giving up on the very idea that truth and morality matter is not just cynicism, it’s surrender.
Without a commitment to documenting truth, all that’s left is propaganda. And we’ve already seen this play out in what were once some of the most respected publications: Major news outlets have bowed to Trump rather than defend their reporting. They depict Trump’s outright lies as mere misstatements and spin his illegal actions as “controversies”. They engage in reflexive bothsidesism, desperately seeking to present “balance” even when one side is demonstrably false. They describe attacks on human rights as mere policy differences. They uncritically repeat government statements that plainly don’t reflect reality. In so doing, they’re not just betraying their fundamental purpose and abandoning their essential role in democracy. They’re helping ensure a world where truth becomes whatever power says it is, and undermining our collective power to build a better world.
Everything Feels Like It Doesn't Make Sense
Everything Feels Like It Doesn't Make Sense #culture #trump
Studs Terkel spent his career during a time of immense change (not too different from now) documenting in Working what happens to the people who do the work that makes everything else possible. He wrote:
This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence - to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.
He interviewed hundreds of people whose labor gets erased from our stories about progress: steelworkers, waitresses, cleaning ladies, farmers, firefighters. He talks with Roberto Acuna, a farm laborer and organizer. Roberto says:
When people have melons or cucumber or carrots or lettuce, they don’t know how they got on their table and the consequences to the people who picked it. If I had enough money, I would take busloads of people out to the fields and into the labor camps. Then they’d know how that fine salad got on their table.
There's a violence in making people invisible, in treating their work as just an input rather than recognizing their humanity. There is violence in ignoring the humans behind the story, ignoring the child fraught with misery in the name of progress.
Steve Bannon described the Trump strategy as "flooding the zone” where you overwhelm people with so much stimulation that they can't focus on any one thing long enough to understand it. The stories like Studs told get lost. It's the same principle that drives social media algorithms: flood your vision with everything at once so you keep scrolling instead of stopping to think.
why the age of AI is the age of philosophy
why the age of AI is the age of philosophy #philosophy #ai
This section was particularly interesting
Four differences between humans and AI
- Particularity: Humans are individuated beings persisting over time; AI instances are ephemeral and not singular entities, undermining claims of AI consciousness.
- Subjectivity: Humans have phenomenological experience ("what-it’s-like-ness") that AI lacks, making human reasoning deeply personal and reflective.
- Capacity to Reason as Free Agents: Humans can commit to premises, change minds, and act intentionally; AI’s reasoning is "zombie reasoning"—functional but without interiority or genuine agency.
- Physicality: Humans are embodied beings; AI is abstract and disembodied, lacking the lived experience crucial for moral philosophy and understanding physical pain or embodiment.
2025-06-13
A list of bad advice
Good list: Very Bad Advice · Collaborative Fund #lists #self-improvement #life
Non-things by Byung-Chul Han
Started reading this book: Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld - Kindle edition by Han, Byung-Chul, Steuer, Daniel. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. #books #culture #critical-theory
It's a pretty good read so far. I have lots of highlights on my Kindle app. Using this to test how well updating my daily log from Android works.
Today, we pursue information without gaining knowledge. We take notice (nehmen Kenntnis) of everything without gaining any insight (Erkenntnis). We travel (fahren) across the world without having an experience (Erfahrung). We communicate incessantly without participating in a community. We collect vast quantities of data without following up on our recollections. We accumulate ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ without meeting an Other. In this way, information develops a form of life that has no stability or duration.