Daily Log Digest – Week 36, 2026
2026-08-31
Silicon Valley AI inspired slang
Why Is Everyone in Silicon Valley Talking Like That?
Silicon Valley has long had its own dialect. Venture capitalists are always talking about the value of being “high agency” and making “orthogonal bets.” But lately, tech vernacular has taken a peculiar turn—people have started describing themselves as if they were chatbots. If you misspeak, maybe you’re “hallucinating.” Don’t know the answer to a question? That’s because it’s not in your “training data.” Feeling forgetful? Perhaps you have a case of “context rot,” a phrase that refers to the degradation of a bot’s responses over a long conversation. “I’ve been telling my wife I have context rot for months,” Conor Bronsdon, the host of an AI-focused podcast, told me.
Where I live, in San Francisco, such comparisons are inescapable. “I’ve described myself as high temperature,” a friend recently told me; in AI-speak, this means he is prone to randomness. AI experts now talk about updating their “weights” when they learn something new and training on “synthetic data” when going over internal thoughts. “Humans have a huge base model trained over billions of years of evolution,” one software engineer wrote on a popular tech forum. “It’s impressive how quickly we learn, but it’s arguably comparable to fine tuning.”
Solving the fertility crisis
This is a pretty wild abstract (emphasis mine)
The cross-national correlation between gender equality and lower fertility is exceptionally strong (r ≈ 0.81). After the 1960s, a unique mating regime spread across parts of the world—with female emancipation, individual mate choice, and effective birth control—followed by a continuing rise in singlehood and declining fertility. Almost all women still want to reproduce, but many struggle to find a good-enough partner. This article argues from an evolutionary perspective that many men’s utility to “free women” has been so diminished that solving the fertility crisis by increasing pair-bonding rates seems unfeasible. A viable means for aiding the survival of low-fertility nations could be to provide women with the economic and social resources necessary for them to conclude that having children alone makes for a better life than remaining childless. Such policies would likely exacerbate male marginalization, but new technologies are on the horizon that could offer men reproductive equality.
I actually find the idea very fascinating and compelling, but the author of the blog I found a link to this paper from seems pretty livid about it, which is understandable because he sounds most times like a right wing nut 🤷🏽♂️.
When Men Become Optional, Babies Disappear
So far the analysis is sober and largely persuasive. Then the paper takes a turn. If pair bonding can’t be restored, the authors argue, the answer is to help women have children without men. Governments should “consider experiments” offering single women enough money and support to make solo motherhood appealing, with “24/7 nearby childcare.”
The researchers concede this would further reduce men’s value to women and aggravate male marginalization. They argue the stakes justify it. They suggest that “perhaps men should not have to pay child support, particularly if experiments show that women are mostly interested in having children with the most compelling men.”
This is where the paper collapses into fantasy. Take the two-parent family, an institution that the social science literature consistently indicates is one of the most reliable predictors of child well-being we have, and replace it with a state-funded apparatus of cash, communal housing and shift-worker child care. Tell men that their economic role is obsolete and their parental role is optional.
The children in this scheme are an afterthought, as are the men. So, eventually, are the women, who are being told that the right response to a romantic market they find frustrating is to accept a permanent arrangement with the government in place of a husband.
If the problem is that fewer couples are forming, we should ask why. Economics explains some of it. So does culture. Some of it is the slow erosion of norms—religious, civic, familial—that once nudged young people toward marriage before their fertile years ran out. None of that is easy to rebuild. But difficulty isn’t a reason to give up on the family and hand the job to the government.
The fertility crisis is downstream of a pair-bonding crisis. The researchers are correct that the standard explanations miss it. They’re wrong that the way out is to accelerate what the crisis started. A civilization that can’t persuade men and women to form families won’t be saved by subsidizing fatherlessness.
This guy seems a bit too fixated on pair-bonding!
2026-09-03
What will be scarce
What will be scarce? #ai #work
Economics is the study of decision-making under constraints, i.e., scarcity. If advanced AI brings material abundance—if machines can produce many if not all forms of human production at very low marginal cost—does economics become irrelevant? No, we will still have scarcity, but the kind of scarcity that matters will change. Ultimately the answer to any question about the future economics of advanced AI begins with identifying what becomes scarce. After answering that question, the rest of the analysis is pretty straightforward. In this essay I’m going to explore what becomes scarce when automation can replicate many if not all human production, and what that may mean for the types of jobs that emerge.
After Work, We’ll Have Each Other
Very interesting take on work. I was drawn in by the quote: Once you realize what that means, you’ll be giving two cheers for the American work ethic.
Relational living comes to us naturally. It’s the most common form of social organization in human history, and millions of people around the world are perfectly happy with it. But when our personal dignity comes from our membership in a group, everything the group does reflects on us — and everything we do reflects, unavoidably, on the group. It’s not a coincidence that Russian princes and Bostonian Italian day laborers spent most of their time gossiping (or, if we want to be technical, constructing and enforcing norms of behavior). They were defending their collective reputations: the thing that mattered most to them in the world.
This is why so much contemporary discussion of work and meaning is misguided. It’s very clear that humans don’t need work or anything like it to live meaningful lives. Nor do we need the things that people who talk about “meaning” mean — individual self-actualization, personal growth, serving a greater purpose. We can get by just fine without any of them, as historically most of us have. What we absolutely can’t live without is a social framework for understanding ourselves in relation to the rest of our society and gaining the respect of our peers. The most important thing work gives us — after money, of course — is an alternative way to meet those needs. Not all jobs are pleasant or rewarding, but all of us benefit from living in a system where we can earn respect and dignity as adults from what we do, not who we know, or who we are.
And this is exactly what we see when we look at what Americans actually get out of work.
love the way it ends
This brings us back to what we already know: The modern labor market has dissolved the bonds of tradition, family, and clan. In the modern world, relationships matter less. And because they matter less, we can do much more inside them. They are freer. They have room to breathe.
As with so many things, the Scottish Enlightenment understood this first.11 The possibility of friendship in a commercial society was a serious concern for Adam Smith, David Hume, and Adam Ferguson. Specifically, they believed that commercial society made friendship possible. In the bad old days before impersonal markets and bureaucracies, the only way to survive was through personal ties to allies or to kin. As a result, every personal relationship was transactional.
When we can all support ourselves by our own labor, these transactions are no longer necessary. For Smith, the absence of necessity created room for a better form of friendship, based on “natural sympathy” instead of mutual need. This sympathy between individuals would in turn serve as the basis of a more universalist social morality, not bound to the competing needs of feudal institutions or family groups.
Our attitude to work is just one part of the historical transition to a liberal, democratic, individualist culture, but it is an important one. Today, work makes our personal independence materially possible. But even if our material needs are met, relying on our personal relationships to meet all our needs for identity and belonging creates a similar kind of dependence. We can see it in Ostrander’s ladies: When we take away more impersonal forms of work from the rest of the package, the older ties reassert themselves.
I’m not certain that that’s what we’re facing now. I said that I don’t like making sweeping statements about the relationship between technology and cultural change, and I meant it. If a more relational world is the most serious problem AI causes, I’ll certainly be relieved. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m looking forward to it. I like my job, and I like liberal individualism. If the former will one day be a casualty of progress, I hope the latter will survive it.