Daily Log Digest – Week 40, 2025
2025-10-05
The Buchstaben Museum
The Buchstabenmuseum Berlin is closing | Hacker News #typography #museum
I had a chance to visit this museum just days before it closed down. Here is the instagram post with some pics: Buchstaben Museum Pics | Instagram
Hamlet is a GenZ story
Hamlet Is the Gen Z Story We Need Right Now - by Ted Gioia #genz #shakespeare
It’s a familiar story these days. You might even be living inside it. Or, if not, you know somebody who is.
A young man returns from college, but he doesn’t have a job. So he moves back home. But here his life is aimless, and he falls into a deep depression.
Even though he is back home, it doesn’t feel that way. He’s disconnected from friends, and his loneliness grows more intense. His relationship with his girlfriend falls apart. He knows he needs to get his act together—but how?
It’s not all his fault. His family is a mess, and he lives in a broken household. His mother is a head case. His absent father is too demanding.
And the whole social and political situation is fractured. Our sad young man feels like one more victim of the pervasive dysfunction.
It’s the classic Gen Z dilemma. Almost half of them move back home after college nowadays. The odds are stacked against them at every turn.
But the story I’ve just told isn’t about Gen Z. It’s Shakespeare’s Hamlet—and it was written more than 400 years ago.
If you were an existentialist or absurdist or beatnik, you recognized Hamlet as one of your own. He was lost in a meaningless world—but so were the other survivors of World War and economic collapse and the Holocaust. So were all the other sad young men, caught in a losing war against conformists.
And now today we recognize a completely different Hamlet:
- He’s the college graduate who can’t pay off all those student loans.
- He’s the over-educated and under-employed worker who can’t get a job because of AI.
- He’s the incel who can’t forge a relationship.
- He’s the unhappy child of a broken home, struggling with depression.
- He’s the scroll-and-swipe phone addict who retreats from the world, but at a devastating psychological cost.
- He’s the person posting cries for help on social media—but nobody listens.
Go read Hamlet’s soliloquy again—that anguished “To be or not be….” filled with what we call (nowadays) suicidal ideation—and it fits all these gloomily familiar personality types.
Maybe that’s why pop culture is rediscovering Hamlet right now. Taylor Swift’s new album even leads off with a Hamlet track—“The Fate of Ophelia.” She must have encountered these same personality profiles, and fears the consequences.
Robohiking
I am Robohiker! — testing the exoskeleton that promises to take hikers further, faster #augmented #hiking
I’m in north Wales to test the Hypershell — billed as the world’s first outdoor exoskeleton and promising to take hikers further, faster and with less effort. It has been developed by a Shanghai start-up that launched in 2021, aiming to propel technologies used in manufacturing and medical rehabilitation into the leisure market. Sales of the first model began in January this year, but I’m using an updated version, the flagship X Ultra, unveiled in early September.
In a hotel in Caernarfon where coach-tour pensioners bimble about the foyer, a Hypershell staffer clips me into what appears to be a climbing harness from a Mission Impossible movie. There’s a padded titanium alloy waistband with a slimline lithium battery, electric motors at each hip, and carbon-fibre calipers which curve to straps buckled just above the knees. It’s discreet(ish), sleek in matt black, and, at 1.8kg, relatively light.
The idea is similar to what e-bikes do for cyclists — offering assistance rather than taking over completely. The Hypershell senses which leg you’re beginning to move and engages the corresponding motor. And like e-biking it has different power settings — Eco and Hyper — plus a Fitness mode that actually increases resistance, making it harder to walk, for those in training. Control is via buttons on the motors (a confusing series of short and long presses) or, more intuitively, via an app or an Apple Watch.
The ai Boom
The ai Boom - Marginal REVOLUTION #ai #domains
The tiny country of Anguilla (pop 15,000) has an official country top-level domain code for the internet of .ai. Domain name registrations have surged from 48,000 in 2018 to 870,000 in the year to date and that source of revenue alone now accounts for nearly 50% of state revenues.
David Foster Wallace quote
From: Where to Start in Reading David Foster Wallace
Welcome to the world of reality — there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth — actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested…. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.
2025-10-06
The death of the corporate job
The death of the corporate job. - by Alex McCann
She's not alone. I keep meeting people who describe their jobs using words they'd never use in normal conversation. They attend meetings about meetings. They create PowerPoints that no one reads, which get shared in emails no one opens, which generate tasks that don't need doing.
But what’s weird is that everyone knows it. When you get people alone, after work, maybe after they've had time to decompress, they'll admit it. Their job is basically elaborate performance art. They're professional email forwards. They're human middleware between systems that could probably talk directly to each other.
What's emerging is something very interesting. People are building parallel systems of actual value while maintaining their corporate personas.
I know developers who do their "official" job in the morning and build their own products in the afternoon. Marketers who run their agencies from their corporate desks. Consultants who've automated their actual deliverables and spend most of their time on side projects.
They're using the corporate infrastructure, the steady salary, the laptop, the stability, as a platform for building something real. The corporate role hasn't died; it's become a funding mechanism for actual work.
The most honest person I've met recently was a VP at a tech company who told me: "I manage a team of twelve people who create documents for other teams who create documents for senior leadership who don't read documents. I make £150k a year. It's completely absurd, and I'm riding it as long as I can while building something real on the side."
From Part 3: The Death of the Corporate Worker: Part 3 - The Rise of Blue Collar Work.
Our generation of knowledge workers is navigating unprecedented career volatility. We're experiencing automation and AI disrupting roles faster than previous generations. Trained for linear progression in an era demanding constant pivots. Promised that good degrees guaranteed good careers, only to graduate into the gig economy and endless restructures.
I see it everywhere. Friends in finance watching algorithms do analysis they spent years learning. Consultants seeing AI produce better decks in minutes. Developers realising that coding might not be the safe bet they thought.
Work is splitting into two surviving categories: practical and personal. If your job involves fixing physical things or genuine human connection, you're probably safe. Everything else, the vast middle of knowledge work, is vulnerable.
Some of my friends are diving deeper into specialisation, betting they can stay ahead of the machines. Others pivot to coaching, therapy, anything requiring emotional intelligence. A few even consider trades, though starting plumbing at 30 with student loans isn't realistic.
Most are just stuck. Watching. Waiting. Adding vague buzzwords to their LinkedIn profiles. Every gathering eventually turns to the same topic, who's been laid off, who's pivoting, who's still pretending everything's fine.
2025-10-07
Anthropic Popup in NYC
Yup
From: How to make $183 billion disappear
Indefinite Backpack Travel
Indefinite Backpack Travel – Jeremy Maluf #travel #onebag
I love the term. Some good recommendations for one bag travel.
Deutschland vs Berlin
From: #430: Oct. 7 events, drones, döner saved, pudding with fork
Also true since at least the 1970s: The rest of Germany hating on Berlin. In a new survey conducted by Tagesspiegel and the Free University, Berlin ranked lowest in terms of likeability of any of the 16 Bundesländer or federal states (along with Bremen and Hamburg, we’re a city and a state). Hamburg came on top. What do Germans hate about Berlin? “Too multicultural, too dirty, too criminal, too full,” according to some comments by the 1,600 people surveyed. Other (stereotypical) criticisms the yokels out there brought up about us Berliners: “Loudmouths, hipsters, especially woke, direct, loud, argumentative.” Can’t really argue there.
The Job Market is Hell
The Job Market Is Hell - The Atlantic #jobs #ai #recruitment
“Young people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired”.