Daily Log Digest – Week 25, 2025
2025-06-22
Gender Equality in Scandinavia
Why is Scandinavia the Most Gender Equal Place in the World? #gender #inequality #equality #scandinavia
Europe and North America escaped this trap through a fortunate confluence of factors: Christianity sanctified the nuclear family, the Protestant Reformation elevated marital bonds, the Enlightenment championed free expression of dissent, while robust states enforced laws and provided core services. Technological advances, media connectivity, and economic growth then proved transformative: women gained control over their fertility, pursued careers, built diverse friendships, demonstrated equal competence in socially valued domains, and mobilised for reform.
Yet Scandinavia had two unique latent assets which would prove transformative in the 20th century. Scandinavians never idealised female seclusion and there was a nascent culture of associations. Neither entailed gender equality, but rather they provided the latent assets for egalitarian ideological persuasion and capture of state power.
Scandinavian Christianity retained remarkable permissiveness. Ibn Fadlan, travelling from Baghdad in 922, was shocked to see Scandinavian merchants having sex with enslaved women in public view. In 1432, a Venetian captain shipwrecked on Norway’s Lofoten archipelago noted locals bathed naked together, unashamed.
A hundred years later, Andrew Boorde observed Icelandic priests keeping “concubynes”. 17th century travellers noted, with surprise, that bathhouses were sometimes nude and gender-mixed.
In northern Sweden and Finland, where agricultural productivity was low and class divisions were minimal, unmarried men and women might spend nights together without parental approval (‘nattfrieri’ - night courting). In 1799, Malthus noted that Swedish country girls often had “sweethearts for a considerable time before they marry” - frequently accelerated by pregnancy. Even in the late 19th century, 16% of first births to University of Iceland’s Theology Faculty were illegitimate.
What explains this permissiveness?
Low population density, minimal urbanisation, and sparse monasteries and bishoprics likely weakened the Church’s ideological control. Richard F. Tomasson argues, “The older permissive pattern persisted in those areas where the influence of Christian conceptions of marriage was weakest”. This openness enabled high female labor force participation, but that’s only one part of Scandinavia’s feminist secret…
and there is part 2 as well: Why is Scandinavia the Most Gender Equal Place in the World?
They laid out four fundamental demands:
All adults should have opportunity for independent development
Society should be neutral toward different domestic arrangements
Children's development should be independent of parents' economic circumstances
The Diderot Effect
The Diderot Effect is a social phenomenon where obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption, leading to acquiring more new things that complement or match the original item. This effect is named after the French philosopher Denis Diderot, who described how receiving a new robe made him want to replace his old belongings to match the new one, resulting in a cascade of purchases.
In essence, the Diderot Effect explains how one new purchase can lead to a chain reaction of additional spending to maintain a consistent lifestyle or aesthetic. #consumption #spiral
2025-06-23
Emotions vs Feelings
This is a good short YouTube video on distinguishing between feelings and emotions, and hence arriving at a more biological grounding for dealing with them. #feelings #emotions
I generated a summary of the transcript.
Theme Wise Breakdown
Misconceptions About Emotions
Lisa Feldman Barrett opens by addressing common myths: that emotions are hardwired and universal, and that emotions are simply reactive impulses of an "animalistic" brain potentially overridden by rationality. These myths characterize emotions as something that happens to you, causing uncontrollable reactions, or as a sign of morality or mental illness.
Redefining Emotions
Barrett explains that emotions are actually brain-generated constructions. They arise because the brain continuously regulates the body’s internal states (such as glucose or oxygen levels) and uses past knowledge to predict and interpret these bodily signals in relation to the external world. This process produces the experiences we recognize as emotions.
Difference Between Feelings and Emotions
She clarifies that feelings—such as pleasantness, unpleasantness, calm, or activation—are features of emotions but are not equivalent to emotions themselves. Emotions are more complex episodes where the brain is effectively telling a story about bodily states influenced by past experience.
Importance of This Understanding
Barrett discusses how this perspective transforms the way we understand mental health conditions like depression, emphasizing that symptoms may arise from the brain’s metabolic regulation efforts rather than a straightforward pathology. This view invites a broader, more biologically grounded approach to treatment.
Implications for Personal Change
Since emotions are constructed using past experiences to make predictions, individuals are not prisoners of their past but architects of their emotional experience. Psychotherapy can reframe past experiences, and actively cultivating new experiences can alter brain predictions and future emotional responses. This empowers people to take control over their emotional lives by changing their present actions and experiences.
Responsibility and Control Over Emotional Life
Barrett notes that while early experiences shape the brain’s predictive models often without our control, adulthood brings the ability to choose and change experiences. These choices can reinforce or alter the brain’s emotional predictions, offering tools for healing and transformation despite life’s inherent unfairness.
Learning Electronics
Electronic Nights I - Getting Started ? #electronics
Stumbled on this great guide to getting started with electronics which also traces the personal journey of the author from not being able to install a 9V battery or jumpstarting a car to building a electronic gadget.
James Baldwin quote
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
I read this in a tweet today and realised that now more than ever in my past, I have truly internalized the message in the quote.
why we read pic.twitter.com/HGptJSyxv2
— Resh Susan (@thebooksatchel) June 23, 2025
2025-06-25
Top of Hacker News
Fun with uv and PEP 723 | Hacker News
An article I wrote for my new tech blog made it to the top of Hacker News.
Annotating Books
Marginalia mania: how ‘annotating’ books went from big no-no to BookTok’s next trend | Books | The Guardian #books #annotate
Looks like annotating books is in. I recently started doing this because I realised that it increased retention.
There are two kinds of readers: those who would choose death before dog-ears, keeping their beloved volumes as pristine as possible, and those whose books bear the marks of a life well read, corners folded in on favourite pages and with snarky or swoony commentary scrawled in the margins. The two rarely combine in one person, and they definitely don’t lend each other books. But a new generation of readers are finding a way to combine both approaches: reviving the art and romance of marginalia, by transforming their books and reading experiences into #aesthetic artifacts.
It is what her fellow scholar Jessica Pressman calls “bookishness”: a post-digital behaviour that has developed among passionate readers. But that is not to say it is purely performative: annotating a novel can allow us to retrace our first journey with a book, as well as revisit our state of mind at the time. I think of the last book that made me cry, Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss – what would my marginalia have looked like when I read it back in 2021, sobbing through the final pages at the reflections of my own struggles with mental illness? What would I see now in the notes I’d made then?
Annotation has also become a way of connecting: some BookTokkers lavishly annotate a copy of their friend’s favourite book as a gift, stacking the margins with observations and jokes; Marcela is excitedly planning to do this for her best friend. A dear friend of mine inherited the habit from his late mother and he now treasures the precious “scribblings” in the margins of her history and poetry books. Some people specifically seek out books annotated by other readers in secondhand shops – a spark of connection with the past – or even by their authors;
I’m like McAlister, who says that while she annotates her academic reading, well, like an academic, she’s usually too immersed in books to annotate for fun.A
Learnings from 2 years of using AI tools
Learnings from two years of using AI tools for software engineering #ai #software #programming
Working with Generative AI is fertile ground for several cognitive biases that can undermine judgment. I find this a fascinating part of GenAI: how manipulative this technology is.
Here are just a few examples of potential cognitive biases:
Automation bias represents our tendency to favor suggestions from automated systems while ignoring contradictory information, even when that information is correct. Once you've experienced success with AI-generated code, it's natural to start over-trusting the system. The confident tone and polished output can make us less likely to question its recommendations, even when experience suggests a different approach.
The framing effect reinforces the impact of the positive, confident phrasing of LLM responses. For instance, if an AI suggests that a particular approach is "best practice," we are more likely to take that at face value and adopt it, without considering context-specific factors.
The anchoring effect can kick in when AI presents a solution before we thought about it. After viewing AI's suggestions, we can find it harder to think creatively about alternative solutions. The AI's approach becomes our mental starting point, potentially limiting our exploration of better alternatives. On the flip side, AI can also help us mitigate anchoring bias, for example when assisting with modernising a pre-existing solution we're already anchored to.
And finally, there is also a version of sunk cost fallacy at work when coding with AI. Investing less human labour into writing code, should make it easier to discard code that’s not working. However, I've caught myself becoming over-attached to large pieces of AI-generated code which I’d rather try to fix instead of revert. Perceived time savings create a psychological investment that can make one reluctant to abandon AI-generated solutions, even when they're sub-optimal.
Th Amplifier: 8 rising pop girls you should hear now
The Amplifier: 8 rising pop girls you should hear now #amplifier #music #playlist
YouTube Music Playlist: The Amplifier: 8 Rising Pop Girls You Should Hear Now
AI Killed My Job
AI Killed My Job: Tech workers - by Brian Merchant #ai #jobs #software #programming
These are some harrowing accounts of engineers from some of the top technology companies in the world, giving their take on what AI is doing to software engineering jobs.
I have been a software engineer at Google for several years. With the recent introduction of generative AI-based coding assistance tools, we are already seeing a decline in open source code quality 1 (defined as "code churn" - how often a piece of code is written only to be deleted or fixed within a short time). I am also starting to see a downward trend of (a) new engineers' readiness in doing the work, (b) engineers' willingness to learn new things, and (c) engineers' effort to put in serious thoughts in their work.
Specifically, I have recently observed first hand some of my colleagues at the start of their career heavily relying on AI-based coding assistance tools. Their "code writing" consists of iteratively and alternatingly hitting the Tab key (to accept AI-generated code) and watching for warning underlines 2 indicating there could be an error (which have been typically based on static analysis, but recently increasingly including AI-generated warnings). These young engineers - squandering their opportunities to learn how things actually work - would briefly glance at the AI-generated code and/or explanation messages and continue producing more code when "it looks okay."
This job market is absolutely punishing. I had a .gov job for the .com crash, a publicly funded .edu job for the 2008 crash, and a safe place inside a Dropbox division making money hand over fist during the COVID crash (Dropbox Sign more than doubled document throughput over 2020). This is my first tech winter on the bench, and I'm getting zero traction. 37 job apps in the months I've been looking, 4 got me talking to a human (2 of which were referrals), all bounced me after either the recruiter or technical screens. Never made it to a virtual onsite.
This has to do with me being at the Staff Engineer level, and getting there through non-traditional means. The impact is when I go through the traditional screens for a high level engineer I flame out, because that wasn't my job. The little feedback I've gotten from my hunt is a mix of 'over-qualified for this position' and 'failed the technical screen.' Attempting to branch out to other positions like Product Manager, or Technical Writer have failed due to lack of resume support and everyone hiring Senior titles.
Last year, a new hire came in to lead another department. Genuinely believe she is a product of the "LinkedIn hustler / thought-leadership / bullshit titles" culture. Super performative.
Recently and during a cross-functional meeting with a lot of people present, she casually referred to a ChatGPT model she was fine-tuning as our "Chief Marketing Officer"—in front of my manager. She claimed it was outperforming us. It wasn’t—it was producing garbage. But the real harm was watching someone who’d given decades to his field get humiliated, not by a machine, but by a colleague weaponizing it.
Today, in the name of “AI efficiency,” a lot of people saw the exit door and my CMO got PIPd.
The irony here is two-fold: one, it does not seem that the people who left were victims of a turn to "vibe coding" and I suspect that the "AI efficiency" was used as an excuse to make us seem innovative even during this crisis. Two, this is a company whose product desperately needs real human care.
All my life, I’ve wanted to be an artist. Any kind of artist. I still daydream of a future where I spend my time frolicking in my own creativity while my own work brings me uninterrupted prosperity.
Yet this has not come to pass, and despite graduate level art degrees, the only income I can find is the result of a second-class coding job for a wildly capitalist company. It’s forty hours a week of the dullest work imaginable, but it means I have time to indulge in wishful thinking and occasionally, a new guitar.