Daily Log Digest – Week 42, 2025
2025-10-19
The purpose of a system is what it does
The purpose of a system is what it does | Des Traynor #system #complexity
When you’re building, running, or ultimately accountable for any mature system anywhere, the first thing you should understand that is that the purpose of the system is what it does.
The nature of working in a startup is that most business functions are either non-existent or broken and your job (regardless of when you join, honestly) is to help get them working well. Even the founders of the best companies I know, as in the $10B+ ones, will admit that whole chunks of the company are works in progress held together with duct tape at best, and blu tack at worst.
The job as an early hire in any function is to make it work well, and the evaluation of whether you did that will be simply: did that happen? Your intentions don’t matter. Your excuses don’t matter. Not to be all James Heftfield, but nothing else matters. The purpose of a system is what it does.
2025-10-20
Old and Young
Everyone under 30 is prematurely old (worried about savings, career, FIRE).
Everyone over 50 is desperately young (Burning Man, psychedelics).
My theory: Information abundance aged the young by showing them all future problems all at once.
Information abundance also made the old young by showing them all missed experiences all at once.
So now Gen Z talks like retirement planners and boomers act like teenagers.
It's so over.
From:
Everyone under 30 is prematurely old (worried about savings, career, FIRE).
— Fernando Nikolić 🇦🇷 🟠 (@basedlayer) October 18, 2025
Everyone over 50 is desperately young (Burning Man, psychedelics).
My theory: Information abundance aged the young by showing them all future problems all at once.
Information abundance also made the… https://t.co/fbcqAh29uf
AI has a cargo culting problem
AI has a cargo cult problem #ai #bubble
The same analogy now applies to AI. Almost every business executive today is eager to tell investors about their AI strategy (even though 95 per cent of companies have not (yet) seen revenue gains) and every VC group is keen to show AI plays.
Similarly every Big Tech executive is investing in massive data centres, even though Bain reckons some $2tn of revenue will be needed to fund this by 2030. And charismatic figures like Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, keep promising fresh magic. Or as Stephan Eberle, a software engineer, laments: “Watching the industry’s behaviour around AI, I can’t shake this feeling that we’re all building bamboo aeroplanes [like cargo cults] and expecting them to fly.”
Read Your Way Through Hà Nội
Read Your Way Through Hà Nội #vietnam #travel
Nice collection of books about Vietnam.
2025-10-21
AI Coding Claims
Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up
The section on counterarguments to rebuttals that are commonly brought up by the AI-pilled folks is nice.