February 2, 2025

Daily Log Digest – Week 4, 2025

2025-01-26

Read The Economist and tweeted out some deadpan quotes.

Spent the rest of the time struggling with the small papercuts involved in frontend (i.e. Node/Typescript/React/Tailwind) tooling. I wonder why people have gotten used to this 🤷🏽.

2025-01-27

Netflix Strategy

Earlier this week I posted snippets from a podcast where the guest broke down Netflix's strategy since its inception and its effects on shaping movie culture.

Came across a couple more articles in a similar vein: #netflix #movies #culture

• Netflix’s price hikes aren’t going to stop anytime soon - The Verge
• ‘Not second screen enough’: is Netflix deliberately dumbing down TV so people can watch while scrolling? | Television | The Guardian

Millie Jaco on Dating

This is such an anguished rant: in the bad place - by millie jaco - The Dybbuk Diaries #dating #relationships

The whole enterprise is a particularly cynical grift that exploits people with much of the same anxiety as myself, though maybe not on such a pathological level. I do have a diagnosed and certified mental illness, but I see a lot of it in others who are also navigating the dating scene. The anxiety is a simple one: we are all desperate to love and be loved. We are all desperate for companionship. We are all also suffering from this psychic sickness where we are supposed to act like pretending you are in a relationship for three months but not actually calling it that won’t lead to feelings developing on at least one side, because you’ve been simulating that for an extended period of time. We’re supposed to pretend that cancelling on someone you have supposedly built a rapport with last minute because something or someone better came up is run-of-the-mill and not really fucking rude, actually, or that having sex with someone and blocking them the next day is normal and not despicable, dehumanising behaviour. We’re supposed to pretend that if a man is giving you the absolute bare minimum and treating you as if you are just a convenient vagina, then the onus is on the woman for entertaining that behaviour. For being delusional. For not realising that ‘he’s just not that into you, babes :/ ’.

A sad byproduct of this avoidance of pain at all costs is a certain emotional numbing, which leads to a complete neutering of any heated, passionate, or particularly devastating matters of the heart. It is so evident in the way people now talk about heterosexual relationships in particular. Intensity early on is ‘lovebombing;’ communicating when you want to communicate is ‘double texting’ and therefore ‘chasing’ and therefore bad; steamy flings have become sterile ‘situationships.’ Leading someone on and manipulating them by showing just enough affection to give them false hope is ‘breadcrumbing.’

Media Literacy is Dead

media literacy: dead and streaming - by nana #culture #media

This isn’t even about the level of education either, as almost all my students are in private schools and should theoretically have access to some of the best resources and teaching available. Yet, I find myself working with seniors who struggle to extract the purpose of a text or identify its target audience, which are fundamental skills for any form of media analysis. These are students on the verge of entering university, yet many of them find it difficult to engage with texts beyond surface-level comprehension. They may excel in memorization or standardized test-taking, but when it comes to critical thinking; asking why a text exists, who it is meant for, and how it seeks to influence its audience, there is a noticeable gap.

…

Media literacy used to be about teaching people how to discern credible sources, evaluate biases, and critically analyze the content they consume. But in today’s fast-paced digital world, these skills are being replaced by shortcuts. Why critically evaluate a news article when a trending tweet condenses it into 280 characters? Why check the credibility of a source when ChatGPT can provide an answer in seconds?

Every Relationships is Parasocial Now

every relationship is parasocial now. #relationships #friendship

Introduction: A Generation Trapped in Survival

• The article begins with a reflection on modern disconnection and the loss of agency in contemporary life, likening our existence to a dreamlike, aimless state.
• Human power has been transferred to mediating technologies (e.g., AI, streaming platforms, online shopping), creating a fragmented and distracted existence.
• The medium itself, especially smartphones, has redefined how people interact and perceive power, exacerbating feelings of helplessness.

The Commodification of Life and Relationships

• Modern relationships and daily actions are quantified and turned into data—tracked, measured, and commodified.
• The marketplace prioritizes performance, surveillance, and the monetization of every human interaction, reducing people to objects within an economic system.
• Consumerism permeates all aspects of life, with individuals trading their emotions, actions, and data for societal participation.
• The author critiques the concept of "enhanced survival," where life becomes about endurance and routine rather than genuine, meaningful experience.

The Rise of Parasociality

• All relationships, even those between close friends, are partially mediated through digital interfaces (texts, likes, profiles), introducing a layer of parasociality.
• The author notes that most interactions lack the authenticity of face-to-face connections, instead being shaped by nostalgia, curated images, and commodified exchanges.
• Social media exacerbates this issue, as people present curated, performative versions of themselves rather than authentic ones.
• Relationships have become transactional, and the boundaries between genuine connection and performance blur.

The Role of Technology in Isolation

• Technology encourages parasocial interactions by prioritizing performative over authentic engagement.
• The digital sphere has infiltrated spaces traditionally reserved for human connection, such as concerts, parties, and even private moments.
• As a result, people feel increasingly alienated despite constant connectivity.
• The pandemic accelerated this trend, cementing digital interaction as a primary mode of connection.

Economic and Political Implications

• The global economy leverages parasocial dynamics, turning individuals into commodities to sustain declining hegemonies, particularly in the U.S.
• Cyber-neoliberalism transforms all social interaction into commodified exchange, extending surveillance and control into every facet of life.
• The United States' focus on immaterial production (e.g., social media, culture) as a response to China's rise further deepens this commodification of identity and interaction.
• The author critiques cryptofascism and digital nationalism, which reinforce the idea of allegiance to platforms and markets rather than to communities or shared humanity.

The Cultural Crisis of Meaning

• The pervasive focus on survival over living creates a vacuum of meaning, as people are disconnected from real joy, spontaneity, and togetherness.
• Historians may look back on this period as one defined by stagnation, where human potential was diminished by the dominance of commodified existence.
• The author argues that survival—reduced to an endless cycle of productivity and consumption—has replaced the pursuit of a truly lived life.

Revolutionary Possibilities

• Despite the bleak outlook, the author holds onto hope that humanity can reclaim genuine connection and agency.
• The key lies in acknowledging and resisting the parasocial nature of modern relationships by prioritizing face-to-face interactions and non-digital forms of connection.
• Revolutionary change will require breaking free from the current techno-neoliberal system, rediscovering balance between online and offline life, and fostering authentic togetherness.

Call to Action: Reclaiming Humanity

• The article concludes with a call to reject the commodification of relationships and embrace genuine human connection.
• Suggestions include: - Sacrificing digital personas and curated selves to prioritize real interactions. - Shifting away from platforms driven by advertising and surveillance. - Valuing unmediated experiences over symbolic gestures or performative actions.
• By doing so, people can reclaim agency, rediscover meaningful relationships, and resist the dehumanizing forces of cyber-neoliberalism.

Cringey Powerful Men

I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers | Rebecca Shaw | The Guardian #masculinity #technology #culture

Whether I am engaging with the news, or with Musk tweeting constantly like a man with no job or friends, or with Zuckerberg sending out weird videos and appearing on Rogan, I am in pain. Not just because I don’t like what they are doing but because they are so incredibly, painfully cringe.

I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down. What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be. I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.

…

Climate crises keep coming, genocides continue, women keep getting murdered, art is being strangled to death by AI, bigotry is on the rise, social progress is being rolled back … AND these men insist on being cringe? It’s a rotten cherry on top. This combination of evil and embarrassment is a unique horror, one that science fiction has failed to prepare us for. The second-hand embarrassment we have to endure gets even more potent when combined with other modern influences on young men, like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.

These articles on podcast bros who helped Trump win back the White house was in the back of my head when I read this.

• The podcast bros who helped put Trump back in the White House
• How 9 Popular YouTubers Helped Trump Win a Second Term

Dave Anderson on Legacy Code

Great thread by former Amazonian (who was immensely popular and I had the good fortune of being in a few meetings with, fwiw) about legacy code. Some of the advice is a bit idealistic and it's not like organizations I have been in (incl. Amazon) follow any of it. #code #software #legacy #engineering

Open Socrates by Agnes Callard

Open Socrates by Agnes Callard review – a design for life | Philosophy books | The Guardian

This is the segment that got me excited to read the book.

A less serious author would have devoted a great deal of time to establishing how their subject’s ideas might grant us practical advantages when dealing with the minutiae of everyday life. There’s something rather bracing and brilliant about how rapidly Callard sweeps all that off the table, confronting us with the terrible existential torment that hit Tolstoy at 50, right at the peak of his material success. He was revered as a writer, financially prosperous, he had his health and family, yet he claimed that one question brought him “to the point of suicide”. It was: “What will come from my whole life?”

Callard calls this the “Tolstoy Problem”. It belongs to a whole category of “untimely questions”: issues of huge gravity we can spend our whole lives avoiding. They’re not merely hard to answer, but hard to ask. As Tolstoy’s case shows, they can be actively dangerous, especially if the work is left half-done – as if you had started rewiring your house only to leave bare cables trailing over the floor. Callard shrewdly argues that Tolstoy’s error wasn’t in raising such intimidating questions, but in responding too hastily: there is a “simultaneity of question and answer”, where he at once concludes his problems defy meaningful enquiry.

The thrust of the book is that, in the figure of Socrates, we can find a way through that Tolstoy couldn’t…

A Primer on Compression

Taking a Look at Compression Algorithms | Moncef Abboud #compression #files #zip #gzip #deflate

While proceeding with my implementation, I realized I really didn’t know that much about the fascinating topic of compression. I vaguely remembered Huffman trees and some information theory from school, but that was the extent of it. Importing packages and calling friendly APIs felt lacking. So, in the spirit of rabbit holes and indulging, I decided to take a bit of a deep dive to get a better understanding of some of these compression algorithms.

Nice deep-dive and a handy reference if I have to ever deep-dive into this.

2025-01-28

Deepseek

Karen Hao has an excellent Twitter thread on an alternative paradigm of moving AI forward.

DeepSeek FAQ – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Here’s the thing: a huge number of the innovations I explained above are about overcoming the lack of memory bandwidth implied in using H800s instead of H100s. Moreover, if you actually did the math on the previous question, you would realize that DeepSeek actually had an excess of computing; that’s because DeepSeek actually programmed 20 of the 132 processing units on each H800 specifically to manage cross-chip communications. This is actually impossible to do in CUDA. DeepSeek engineers had to drop down to PTX, a low-level instruction set for Nvidia GPUs that is basically like assembly language. This is an insane level of optimization that only makes sense if you are using H800s.

There is also a bit about why this might be good for big tech, but in the long run.

Bibliotherapy: 14 books that will change your life

Bibliotherapy: 14 books that will change your life | Dazed #books #lists

2025-01-29

Links In Progress on Family Policy and Pronatalism

Lots of good links: Links in Progress: Should we give babies the vote? #family #pronatalism #babies #children

2. More evidence that access to housing is a fertility bottleneck. A new paper has found that receiving money through a lottery can boost the probability of having a child by 32 percent among Brazilians aged 20-25, and by 10 percent for those aged 25-35. But Lyman Stone, on his new substack, explains that these housing lotteries are not lotteries as we traditionally understand them but instead usually a way of extending credit to people who cannot get mortgages. Not only are the participants demographically unusual, they are also stuck paying in for years before they ever receive one. There’s a good chance that participants merely delay their fertility until they win a house.

4. Falling birth rates mean advanced economies could see per capita economic growth slow by 0.4 percent per year from 2030 to 2050. Consultancy giant McKinsey publishes new analysis on how the global birth rate challenge will pressure public finances and depress living standards all over the world.

6. Married Chinese women are being cold-called by local government officials asking about their plans to have children. The FT reports on China’s escalating efforts to raise birth rates.

8. India is getting old before it gets rich. Many parts of India have birth rates on par with western countries, and are rapidly aging and dealing with shrinking workforces. States including Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh are considering policies to incentivize citizens to have more children

10. Superstar economist Claudia Goldin argues that the rapid economic growth experienced by countries like South Korea and Japan has led to a clash between traditional expectations upon women and their new economic opportunities that means they then have fewer children. Goldin does not empirically test her theory.

12. Each cohort of young Europeans is delaying the major life events of early adulthood – like getting their first job, leaving home, moving in with a partner, and having their first child – by more and more each generation. Those with highly educated parents are most likely to postpone all these life events more.

13. Don’t turn birth rates into a culture war issue. In an article published in the summer, Addison Del Mastro argues that attempts to subsume the birth rate challenge into culture war discourse distract from policies that can actually help more people start families and will never convince anyone unsure about parenthood to take the plunge.

Terminal Aesthetics on a Webpage

srcl #css #terminal #monospoace #retro

Check out the demo website: srcl

SRCL is an open-source React component and style repository that helps you build web applications, desktop applications, and static websites with terminal aesthetics. Its modular, easy-to-use components emphasize precise monospace character spacing and line heights, enabling you to quickly copy and paste implementations while maintaining a clean, efficient codebase.

Are we in a relationship recession

Dazed and Discoursed: Are we in a relationship recession? | Dazed #relationships #dating

Link to ChatGPT Summary: ChatGPT - Relationship Recession Discussion

NYT Amplifier: 7 New Songs You Should Hear Now

7 New Songs You Should Hear Now - The New York Times #music #playlists

YouTube Music Playlist

Today’s selection features a few indie stalwarts returning with new albums (Perfume Genius, Lucy Dacus, Japanese Breakfast); two young hip-hop stars teaming up for a collaboration (Central Cee and Young Miko); and a certain 79-year-old Canadian legend debuting his latest band and, thus, continuing to rock in the free world.

Relational Concerns in Fairness Judgements

Relational Concerns in Fairness Judgements by Angarika Deb, Harry Walker, Christophe Heintz :: SSRN #fairness #psychology #anthropology

An interesting take on fairness, talking about relational concerns as opposed to purely rational concerns that some economists tend to emphasize.

When people make judgments about the fairness of distributions, they do so not just as calculators of costs and benefits, but as socially situated beings who are sensitive to relevant social relationships. They understand that people play particular roles within a larger social fabric that shapes their identities and expectations, and that their self image is affected by appraisals of how well (or not) they perform these roles. We designate here as relational concerns the considerations that arise from these roles and relationships, and study how they affect judgments of fairness. A series of vignette studies is used to explore how relational concerns compare with the impartial principles of equity and equality that fairness is commonly held to entail. We provide evidence that for participants based in the UK and in India, relational concerns are important for judging the fairness of distributions where people coordinate around shared goals. We also show that relational concerns may vary across cultural communities.

Evolutionary Origins of Patriarchy

The evolutionary origins of patriarchy | Human Nature #evo-psych #evolution #gender #patriarchy

This article argues that feminist analyses of patriarchy should be expanded to address the evolutionary basis of male motivation to control female sexuality. Evidence from other primates of male sexual coercion and female resistance to it indicates that the sexual conflicts of interest that underlie patriarchy predate the emergence of the human species. Humans, however, exhibit more extensive male dominance and male control of female sexuality than is shown by most other primates. Six hypotheses are proposed to explain how, over the course of human evolution, this unusual degree of gender inequality came about. This approach emphasizes behavioral flexibility, cross-cultural variability in the degree of patriarchy, and possibilities for future change.

The six hypotheses proposed in the paper to explain the evolution of patriarchy are:

1. Reduction in female allies – Female ability to resist male aggression was weakened due to reduced social support from kin and female allies​.
2. Elaboration of male-male alliances – Male alliances became more developed, often directed against females, increasing male power over women​.
3. Increased male control over resources – Males gained control over resources critical for female survival and reproduction, increasing their ability to control and coerce females​.
4. Increased hierarchy formation among men – Male sociopolitical arrangements increased wealth and power disparities, making women more vulnerable to powerful men​.
5. Female strategies reinforcing male control – Women, in pursuing their reproductive and material interests, sometimes engaged in behaviors that helped perpetuate male dominance​.
6. Evolution of language and ideology – The development of language allowed males to create and propagate ideologies that justified male dominance and female subordination​.

2025-01-30

Is Brain rot real

Is internet-induced brain rot a myth? | Dazed #distractions #social-media #screen-time

Przybylski, who has spent years researching the impact of technology on cognition and well-being, argues that the moral panic around phones lacks sufficient evidence. He also points to a rise in opinion pieces and bestselling books that make sweeping claims without rigorous scientific backing. “The ideas in these books are not peer-reviewed,” he says. In 2023, Przybylski and his colleagues analysed data from almost 12,000 children in the US, aged between nine and 12, and found no link between screen time and brain connectivity or well-being. “If you publish a study like we do, where we cross our Ts, dot our Is, state our hypotheses before we see the data, and share the data and code, those types of studies don’t show the negative effects people expect.”

Gary Small, chair of psychiatry at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, similarly agrees with Przybylski. Having studied the potential harms and benefits of digital technology, he argues that, to his knowledge, “there’s no compelling evidence that using digital technology or devices causes permanent brain damage.” Instead, he tells the Guardian that people should “be smart about how you use your devices. Manage the devices – don’t let them manage you.”

Workplace Sexual Dynamics

We’ve reached peak workplace fetishisation | Dazed

According to Kate Daly, relationship expert and co-founder of online divorce services company amicable, it’s no coincidence that you can develop feelings for people you work with – it’s a phenomenon known as the exposure effect. “Spending significant time with colleagues creates familiarity and comfort, which can then lead to romantic feelings,” Daly says that intimacy and emotional connection often build due to regular conversations, something facilitated by the nine-to-five. “As more people return to a physical office either by choice or by ‘order of the management’, the exposure effect is fuelling office romances in a way we haven’t seen since before 2019. As the pendulum swings away from the treadmill and expense of dating apps, IRL encounters in the workplace become an attractive alternative where you can take the ‘blindness’ out of a date and get to know someone before having to spend money on drinks and dinner.”

The Authority Framework

Building Authority - by Joshua Tiernan - Tiny Empires #career

Expertise alone doesn't make you an authority.

Visibility does.

But not just any visibility.

Strategic visibility.

Here's how to build it.

Seems like a lot of slop, but keeping it around in case it felt like it was just about interesting enough that I might wanna revisit the idea.

The Attention Economy

Chris Hayes on the attention economy - by David Roberts

ChatGPT Summary: ChatGPT - Attention Economy Breakdown

Start a Blog

Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog #writing

People tend to sound more like themselves in chat messages than in blog posts. So perhaps write in the chat, rapidly, to a friend.

Not that many people will care about what you write, at least for the first few years, so make the writing useful to you. Write in a way that lets you refine your thoughts about the things that matter. Write to experience what you care about in higher resolution—write to enhance your feeling of aliveness.

What if you want to write 5000 words about the history of French grammar but fear people will get bored by that? What should you do? You should write 5000 words about the history of French grammar. It will filter your readers so you attract those who like the grooves of your mind.

Candace Owens

Candace Owens launches new women's media platform #tradition #conservatism #gender

In Owens' view, the digital media industry has abandoned these women. After the traditional women's magazine industry crumbled, a generation of digital media companies sold millennial women on female empowerment and girlboss corporate feminism—Lean In-style articles that encouraged women to climb the corporate ladder while juggling a family life. But recently, more women have become disillusioned by this promise. Owens recognizes an opportunity to sell them something different.

There has been a significant resurgence of anti-feminist media aimed at promoting traditional gender roles and a homemaker lifestyle to women in recent years. Tradwife influencers like Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman have surged in popularity, amassing millions of followers across social media. Peter Thiel-linked Evie Magazine launched to sell far-right ideals to Gen Z women. And a growing network of podcasts and app-based platforms such as "The Homemaker's Club" encourage women to adopt conservative values.

When Cruelty Becomes Cool

When Cruelty Becomes Cool - by Parker Molloy #wokeness #language #slur

With Donald Trump’s return to power, one of the most disturbing trends in public discourse has been the casual revival of what was, until recently, widely understood to be an offensive slur — the r-word. This resurgence isn't happening in some dark corner of the internet, but in mainstream spaces, and is now being promoted by influential voices who seem emboldened by Trump's victory.

Miles Klee at Rolling Stone documented the trend earlier this month, highlighting how the word has roared back into common usage across social media platforms. From podcast hosts to tech billionaires, from conservative influencers to ostensibly centrist pundits, the word is being deliberately deployed as a rejection of what they dismissively call "wokeness."

As Brock Colyar's disturbing dispatch from Trump's inauguration celebrations in New York magazine illustrates, there's a new breed of young conservative for whom offensive language isn't just acceptable — it's a way to demonstrate their bonafides with the ingroup. These aren't the stereotypical MAGA devotees. They're young, urban professionals who view cruelty as both entertainment and ideology.

Policing the use of certain words and phrases has definitely been taken to extremes in the name of wokeness, but this phenomena of celebrating the use of offensive words especially with undertones of establishing dominance and belonging to a group, is equally problematic.

ChatGPT as the AltaVista of 2025

Trump’s Inflation and AI Are More Important Than the Fed - Bloomberg #chatgpt #business

This section was kinda brilliant

Think of ChatGPT in 2025 as AltaVista in the year 2000

I think there are a lot of parallels to the Internet Bubble here. We have this new technological advance which will have huge ramifications for the future. But no one knows how much money to invest, how long it will take before investments garner profits, or what business models will make any money. Least of all, we don’t know who will come out on top.

It’s just a ‘build it and they will come’ Field of Dreams story at this point. Every single one of the companies we see now active in artificial intelligence could end up being a market loser 10 years from now.

In the late 1990s, there were a host of search engines trying to take what seemed at the time to be firehose amount of data and help users navigate to exactly the information they were looking for. Companies like Lycos, Excite, Yahoo, InfoSeek, AskJeeves and AltaVista were all plying their trade well before the dominant player today, Google, was founded in 1998.

If you had asked anyone who would be the winner, AltaVista would have been as good an answer as any. I asked ChatGPT “what happened to AltaVista?” It said this:

“AltaVista was launched by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in December 1995. It quickly became one of the most popular search engines of the mid-90s due to its advanced technology, which indexed the full text of web pages and returned faster and more relevant results compared to other engines at the time.

[...]

...AltaVista was acquired by Overture Services (an internet marketing company) in 2003, which itself was later purchased by Yahoo!. AltaVista was eventually folded into Yahoo!’s operations.”

Translation: AltaVista was an Internet loser.

Search became a huge revenue generator because of advertising. But AltaVista wasn’t the one who got the dollars. It was Google, a very late entrant into the crowded search market.

Crypto and Tokenization to Subvert Ownership Disclosure

OpenAI Doesn’t Want AI Cheaters #crypto #tokenization #levine

Yet another case of Crypto being used for nefarious purposes.

Crypto simply is not a technological solution to any problem involving private companies. But just as in 2018, it is a way of obfuscating the securities law point. “Because private-company stock is already regulated as a security by the SEC,” writes Tenev, “the commission is best positioned to swiftly modernize our securities laws and make tokenization of real-world assets possible.” I think “modernize our securities laws” here means something like “allow private companies to sell stock to the public without disclosure.” Our securities laws are outdated, because they require companies to disclose financial information before selling stock to the public. But with enough enthusiasm for crypto, we can fix that problem.

The Tradeoffs of language

The Tradeoffs of Language - by Josh Zlatkus and Rob Kurzban #language #ideas

language does a pretty good job of moving ideas around.

Optimistic Nihilism

Optimistic Nihilism: The Meaning of Life Is Right In Front of You #optimism #nihilism #philosophy

Nihilism carries a negative connotation. It conjures images of despair, meaninglessness, and hopelessness. It’s a philosophical belief that rejects or denies the existence of inherent meaning, purpose, or value in life. It suggests that life and the universe have no inherent or objective meaning and that any attempt to find such meaning is ultimately futile.

“Life is meaningless, but worth living, provided you recognise it’s meaningless,” Albert Camus, a French philosopher said. Nihilism is typically the rejection of religious or moral principles, often accompanied by a sense of despair or meaninglessness. Nihilists argue that traditional concepts such as morality, religion, and politics are human constructs with no objective validity and that people should create their own values and meaning in a world devoid of inherent purpose. Nihilism has been explored in various philosophical, literary, and artistic movements throughout history and has been a subject of intense debate among scholars and thinkers.

Friedrich Nietzsche, a 19th-century philosopher, is often associated with nihilism due to his critique of traditional values and his rejection of traditional morality and religion. However, Some philosophers have argued that nihilism can be seen as a positive, even optimistic, perspective on life.

2025-01-31

Tofu

Tofu: never judge a food by its political reputation #food #protein

SUELLA BRAVERMAN, Britain’s former home secretary, blamed “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati” for a protest that closed a bridge. Ted Cruz, a conservative American senator, complained that Democrats want Texas “to be just like California, right down to tofu”. Across the West, eating tofu is seen as leftist, weak and somehow unmanly. This view is silly, and carnivores who hold it are depriving themselves of a healthy, delicious and adaptable source of protein.

Michelin Star

The Michelin Guide is no longer the only tastemaker in town

It began, implausibly, with a guide to French roads. In 1900 two brothers, André and Édouard Michelin, wanted to promote travel by car as a route to rev up sales of their tyres. Their first book gathered practical information such as maps and the locations of mechanics; later, recognising that travellers want fuel for themselves as well as their vehicles, it expanded its restaurant recommendations. The company first introduced its star-ranking system in 1926.

In the century since, over 30m copies of the Michelin Guide have been sold—making it about as widely read as “Gone with the Wind”, “The Great Gatsby” or “Pride and Prejudice”.

Jevon's Paradox

This term has been blowing up in the feeds.

Tech tycoons have got the economics of AI wrong #economics #jevons #efficiency

Even as economic growth was just taking off, some economists were already pessimistic. Coal, wrote William Stanley Jevons in 1865, is “the mainspring of modern material civilisation”. Yet it was finite and would soon run out. Although more could be found by digging deeper, it would be increasingly expensive to extract and these higher costs would reduce the competitiveness of Britain’s manufacturers. After all, in other countries the black fuel was still in sight of daylight. Efficiency gains—using less coal to produce the same amount of stuff—would not save the country. Indeed, cleverer use of limited resources would simply provide an incentive to burn even more coal, which would, paradoxically, lead to an even faster use of British reserves. There was no escape, the Victorian economist believed. Coal would be exhausted and the country was likely to “contract to her former littleness”.

The Jevons paradox—the idea that efficiency leads to more use of a resource, not less—has in recent days provided comfort to Silicon Valley titans worried about the impact of DeepSeek, the maker of a cheap and efficient Chinese chatbot, which threatens the more powerful but energy-guzzling American varieties…

How Might AI Change Programming

How might AI change programming? - by Thorsten Ball #ai #programming #llm #coding

Good list of things to ponder about as AI assisted programming becomes more and more mainstream.

Working out cost-free

How to keep fit without stretching your finances | Fitness | The Guardian #fitness #exercise

• Walk
• Run
• Yoga
• Bodyweight Exercises
• Calisthenics
• High-intensity interval training (HIIT)

The Review of Beauty by Jessica DeFino Jan 31

Hailey Bieber's Flesh-Eating Empire #beauty #feminism #gender #skincare

Some banger quotes from the latest The Review of Beauty issue

On skincare treatments

“To want these kinds of results with bare skin is very shocking, because it doesn't make sense,” says Paris-based skin pharmacologist Dr. Elsa Jungman, Ph.D. Healthy skin should not look like food. “For me” — a scientist of the skin microbiome — “it’s hard to understand,” she says.

The typical, multi-step, glazed-and-glowy skincare routine may sensitize the barrier and compromise the microbiome and acid mantle — the body’s built-in protective measures. The amount of moisture required for that wet-out-of-the-oven look makes the skin overly permeable, says aesthetician and product formulator Mary Schook, and prone to surface-level symptoms (redness, roughness, oiliness, flakiness, acne) as well as sun damage.

At the very least, constant stimulation of the skin barrier can cause inflammation. It’s thanks to that swelling that pores may “appear somewhat tighter” and smooth as a steamed dumpling, according to Dr. Sadick.

On feminism and beauty

Dehumanization is always on the menu when it comes to female beauty standards. Throughout history, women were peaches, pieces of meat, their skin compared to porcelain — a plate on which their beauty (cheeks like apples, lips like cherries) was served.

Activists quoted the late Audre Lorde: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare,” she said. Beauty brands slyly swapped the word “self” for “skin.” Customers ate it up — of course Lorde meant Saran Wrap when she preached about preservation! — because exfoliating is easier than engaging in political action.

It’s in line with decades of unrealistic beauty ideals, which exist to service “a secular society” that worships “ever-increasing industrial productivity,” Susan Sontag writes in On Women. The philosopher describes a sort of self-objectification that isn’t concerned with appealing to men, but rather, with deifying and even identifying with products.

On capitalism and beauty

If the male gaze describes the psychological condition of existing under patriarchy, the psychological condition of existing under capitalism could be called the “sale gaze.”

The existence of an internalized sale gaze explains the current beauty culture climate: the rise of the shelfie (an Instagram-worthy photo of one’s beauty products that, like the selfie before it, has come to communicate the poster’s “perceived identity”); the aforementioned conflation of “self-care” and purchasable skincare; and the era of ingestible beauty icons, marked by — and impossible without — significant and sustained product intervention. Beauty has become synonymous with buying. After all, when you see glazed donut skin, it’s not skin you’re seeing; it’s the layer of sheer, shiny, mass-produced skincare formulas on top of it.

Using Python's BytesIO efficiently

The surprising way to save memory with BytesIO

• Avoid BytesIO.read().
• If you need the contents as bytes, use BytesIO.getvalue().
• If you can use memoryview, use BytesIO.getbuffer().

BytesIO.read() copies data. BytesIO.getValue() is better but can be limiting in some cases. In those cases BytesIO.getvalue() which uses copy-on-write.

CBDC

How Long Do You Have to Be Short? - Bloomberg #cbdc #crypto #currency #monetary-theory #money

Today's Money Stuff has a good primer on CBDCs while covering a weird Trump administration directive about them that came out.

I have always found the term “central bank digital currency” annoying. Dollars are a central bank digital currency. The Federal Reserve issues dollars in the form of digital entries in the reserve accounts that banks keep at the Fed. Your dollars consist of electronic entries in the ledger of some bank, not the Fed; your dollars are not exactly central bank digital currency. But your bank has some dollars at the Fed, and those dollars are digital. They are central bank digital currency.

Of course ordinarily when people say “central bank digital currency,” or “CBDC,” they mean something slightly different. They mean that the Fed would issue dollars that (1) are on some blockchain and (2) anyone — not just a bank — can hold. In this structure, CBDC dollars would be liabilities of the Fed (not of particular commercial banks), and could be transferred freely on the blockchain between banks, companies, individuals, etc.

Now perhaps my annoyance is petty. “Widely available, non-fractional-reserve, central bank-issued, blockchain-based dollar” is probably more descriptive than “central bank digital currency,” but it is unwieldy, and everyone involved in crypto monetary discussions understands what “central bank digital currency” is shorthand for. If you are not involved in crypto monetary discussions, it can be misleading — “wait, Fed reserves are central bank digital currencies?” — but whatever, you can figure it out.

This paper by the Fed linked from the post is interesting: The Fed - Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation

2025-02-01

Podscript Web UI

Finally shipped this after a few days of work: Added web UI · deepakjois/podscript@0965b1e · GitHub #go #tools #frontend

Recorded a screencast to demo the UI.

Podscript Single Binary App

I used an interesting pattern to bundle UI assets into a Go binary for the podscript web frontend, so wanted to record that here.

Go supports asset embedding using the embed package, so it's very common for Go developers to ship a full app including a frontend using this technique. The podscript Web UI is a standard Vite/React/Typescript/TailwindCSS app, so I used the same technique to embed a folder containing frontend build assets

A couple of interesting things I did: - During development, I wanted to use the Vite development server along with the Go backend together. So I used the Caddy web server with a reverse proxy config to expose them on the same port. I also added a --dev flag to the web subcommand that would run in a mode where it would not use the embedded assets to serve the frontend. - I used a pre-commit hook to detect whenever files in the frontend changed, and ran the Vite production build and copied the assets where the Go build can pick it up. That way, the embedded frontend assets were always kept up to date, without me having to manually update them.

Severance

Have been enjoying the S2 of Severance, and following it along with threads on the subreddit and the Ringer podcast recaps. #tv #work #culture #pop-culture

Came across this article in The Dazed which was surprisingly detailed: Could the technology in Severance soon become reality? | Dazed

It’s unsurprising that Severance has been described as “the series for our times”. In recent post-pandemic years, society has taken a decidedly anti-work turn: thousands quit their jobs during the Great Resignation of 2021, Kim Kardashian quipped that “nobody wants to work these days” in 2022, and TikTok’s recent ‘lazy girl job’ trend advocated for seeking out stress-free roles which require no brainpower. Many Severance viewers, desperate for a better work-life balance, have half-joked about wanting to be severed. But could the severance procedure ever become a reality?