Daily Log Digest – Week 5, 2025

2025-02-02

I deactivated my X account for a month today. I definitely intend to be back on X, but let's see what this experiment yields.

Pataal Lok

Paatal Lok (TV Series 2020– ) - IMDb #tv #india

Bingewatched S2 of this excellent series. One of the rare instances where the second season was actually better than the first. Based in Nagaland, with large portions of the dialogue in the Nagamese language, it seems like a sincere attempt at portraying a region in India which is often largely ignored.

Photo Editing Using Lightroom

Surprisingly accessible video on how to edit photos using LIghtroom

How a Pro Photographer Edits iPhone Photos | Wirecutter #photography #editing #lightroom

Peak Tech Bro

Have we hit peak tech bro?

I don't believe we have reached Peak Tech Bro, but the article is interesting

Wenfeng provides an extraordinary counter-narrative to a script that has become almost vaudeville to those outside the bubble. In recent years the Silicon Valley culture has become so swollen on its success and privilege that its proponents now look like players in a pantomime.

Of course it’s not what you look like, but what you do that counts. But looking at Monday’s biggest financial losers from the fallout, you wonder if this strange parade of poseurs needed cutting down to size. Suddenly, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, whose company endured a $589bn wipeout in market value on Monday, looks a bit foolish in his $9k Tom Ford lizard-effect coat. As does Sam Altman in his child-man sweatshirts. And Larry Ellison, Oracle’s own 80-year-old Peter Pan, with his deep-V sweaters and permatan. 

The cult of personality that has grown around these men, the posturing, the self-branding . . . Could it be that we have reached peak tech bro? Perhaps it is no coincidence that many of the “winners” on Monday — Warren Buffett and Apple’s Tim Cook among them — are known for a more conservative deportment, the type of guys who wear a suit and tie. Off with the hoodies and funky medallions. In with the stiff collars and sober suits. Even Elon Musk, who spent the last six months slobbing around in a badly fitting T-shirt, has adopted a new tailored look.

Demographic Decline

The baby gap: why governments can’t pay their way to higher birth rates #demography #population #babies

Meanwhile, a McKinsey report in January suggested many of the world’s richest economies, such as the UK, US and Japan, would need to at least double productivity growth to maintain historical improvements in living standards amid sharp falls in their birth rates.

Parts of Asia, especially China, and Latin American countries are particularly exposed. In 1995, 10 workers in eastern Asia supported one old-age person; by 2085, it is projected to be one to one.

Politicians worry that they may be powerless to act, as social pressures on women undergo a profound change. Sarah Harper, professor of gerontology and director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, said surveys of young women across the world, from Europe to south-east Asia, suggested a once built-in social obligation for women to reproduce — and an assumption on their part that if they could, they probably would have children — no longer existed.

Careers and increased gender equality are a part of that. “We have a whole cohort of women in high-income countries, but also in south-east Asia, and particularly east Asia . . . who have been educated in a very gender-neutral way,” said Harper. “They enter the workplace in a gender-neutral way, and then they become parents and suddenly, no matter how hard one tries, it’s not gender-neutral.” 

Improving Terminal Setup

Improving my terminal setup | Alex Hyett #terminal #tools #fish #ghostty

Been meaning to try fish shell for a while, and this is a handy guide to running fish shell inside Ghostty, my new default terminal.

The End of Wokeness

Where ‘woke’ went wrong #woke #culture

The term “woke” emerged from the American Black community to describe awareness of the injustices faced by Black people, later gaining currency among the wider left. Critics on the right took the word and made it pejorative, just as they weaponised “political correctness” in the 1990s. Today they often deploy it disingenuously.

Wokeness — there is still no better term — now describes attempts to address systemic inequalities faced by disadvantaged groups, including women, people of colour, LGBT+ people and those with disabilities. It assumes that people can discriminate unconsciously by upholding inequitable norms.

If wokeness faced resistance, supporters could point to those who had opposed civil rights in the 1960s, or who had moaned about the suppression of sexist and racist jokes in the 1990s.

The problem, as writer Yascha Mounk argues in his book The Identity Trap, is that the new activism was built on a rejection of the civil rights movement’s optimistic pursuit of equality and racial integration. Its foundations lay in the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault, in postcolonial studies and in critical race theory. Derrick Bell, founder of critical race theory, argued in 1991 that Black people in the US had in effect seen no progress since slavery, and that yearning for racial equality was a “fantasy”.

The Art of Fermentation

The home cook’s guide to kraut, kefir, kombucha and kimchi #fermentation #cooking

Lovely article covering the basics of fermentation.

Last year The Art of Fermentation was named one of the 25 most influential cookbooks of the past 100 years. Published in 2012, the book was written by Sandor Katz, a former employee of New York City municipal government and member of Act Up, who joined a commune in the hills of Tennessee in the 1990s and started experimenting. As the author of other books such as Wild Fermentation and Sandor Katz’s Fermentation Journeys, Katz has become known as “the godfather of fermentation”.

Zyn

How Zyn Conquered the American Mouth | GQ #tobacco #nicotine

Had no idea how big of a phenomena Zyn was, esp among GenZs.

ChatGPT Summary

2025-02-03

Restarted Math Academy today.

Book Recos as Hinge Prompt

NPR Books Newsletter #hinge #dating #books

Because I live in Baltimore, of course I’m familiar with that John Waters quote: “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t f— ‘em.” You see the line on tote bags and stickers all across this city. And I understand the point of trying to Lysistrata our way into making reading “cool.” But I’ve always been uncomfortable using books, or bookishness, as a proxy for judging people as people.

And yet, earlier this week, NPR posted this video on Instagram featuring me talking with one of our video producers, Wendy Li, about a peculiar Hinge prompt of hers. In it, she asked potential suitors to recommend a book. Which seemed simple enough to me – someone naive to what dating apps in 2025 are like. Obviously, dudes ended up using this prompt not to earnestly talk about books they loved, but instead trying to … I dunno, impress? Which led to certain books (The Catcher in the Rye, A Court of Thorn and Roses and others) becoming red flags for Wendy.

Unhingedness

on one-sidedness - by Ava - bookbear express #unhinged #personality #dating #novel

I saw this video of Deleuze saying that someone’s charm lies in their unhingedness. And I think with every passing year I’m like, yeah, it’s actually okay to be sort of unhinged, especially if it’s a private experience. Like feeling like you’re about to die because you’re so in love and then proceeding to not do anything about it actually this amazing experience to live through and there’s a reason we make so much art about it.

The quote from the link:

"The thing is, people only have charm through their madness…that is what is so difficult to understand. The real charm of a person is the side where they lose control a little, it is the side where they no longer really know where they are… That doesn’t mean they fall apart, on the contrary, these are people who don’t fall apart…but if you can’t grasp the root or seed of madness in someone, you can’t truly like them…you can’t truly love them. It’s the unhinged side, where we all are somewhat insane… If you don’t grasp one’s hint of insanity, the point where…I am afraid, or on the contrary, I am very happy…that point of madness is the very source of their charm."

The article links to a review by Adelle Waldman of a new book by Susan Minot titled Don't be a Stranger.

In a perceptive and original double review of Don’t be a Stranger and Miranda July’s hit novel “All Fours” in the online magazine Compact, critic Valerie Stivers questions the familiar, pop-psych analysis Ivy has mostly embraced by the end of the book, a take that is of course premised on the largely untested — and untestable — idea that passes for wisdom in our culture as currently constituted: that our happiness is entirely internally derived and shouldn’t be dependent on other people. Such conclusions, Stivers writes,

are terribly cynical, and also don’t seem right, given the passion and commitment of [both Minot’s and July’s novels] to describing the relationships, and given the commonness and perceived importance of exactly these tormenting human experiences. So what if both of these experiences were love—the genuine article? And what if this love proposed something right—a life ordered around a profound romantic, intimate, and sexual bond—instead of suggesting something wrong? What if the “problem” is not that [Ivy and the un-named protagonist of “All Fours”] can’t do monogamy or have a twisted, needy psychology, but that both, in an inchoate way, yearn for a better connection with a man and a more ideal family?

I think Stivers is right. Sure, it would have been better if Ivy hadn’t been so vulnerable to a jerk like Ansel Fleming. But learning to be more careful about not falling for jerks is not the same as learning—or trying to teach oneself—not to need anyone, not to need romantic love at all. And yet wide swaths of our culture have, it seems, embraced the idea that the desire for love and romance is something we should strive to overcome, or master, in the name of something like self-actualization. In fact — if we’re being real — we ought to acknowledge that self-actualization is a concept as little grounded in evidence as the belief in religious miracles, in that I’m pretty sure no one has ever witnessed self-actualization or knows what it looks like in practice. Rather, it always seems to be just around the corner, slightly out of reach, something this or that influencer or celebrity is about to attain now that he or she has finally realized this one new “truth” and has only to apply it, for all the pieces of their life to click into place. At least happiness in love — if rarer than we might like — is something we’ve all seen with our own eyes, if we haven’t experienced it ourselves.

Raycast

Raycast - Your shortcut to everything #tools #mac #shortcuts #snippets

Finally installed Raycast today, because I was looking for a way to activate text snippets. The free version looks pretty good for a lot that I would like to do.

Vibe Coding

Andrej Karpathy made an interesting tweet where he covers one kind of coding he is doing a lot with AI assistants

Found out about SuperWhisper from the tweet, which I look forward to trying.

Texting over Phone Calls

‘No, I’m not phoning to say I’m dying!’ My gruelling week of calling gen Z friends rather than texting them | Life and style | The Guardian #texting #calls #phones #genz

…those aged 18 to 34 – 61% of whom prefer a text to a call, and 23% of whom never bother answering, according to a Uswitch survey last year. Such is the pervasiveness of phone call anxiety that a college in Nottingham recently launched coaching sessions for teenagers with “telephobia”, and a 2024 survey of 2,000 UK office workers found that more than 40% of them had avoided answering a work call in the previous 12 months because of anxiety.

In this aspect I am more genz than millenial. I hate phone calls.

Algorithmic Ranking

Algorithmic ranking is unfairly maligned #algorithms #feeds #content

I theorize that the skeptics are right and algorithmic ranking is in fact bad. But it’s not algorithmic ranking per se that’s bad—it’s just that the algorithms you’re used to don’t care about your goals. That might be an inevitable consequence of “enshittification”, but the solution isn’t to avoid all algorithms, but just to avoid algorithms you can’t control. This will become increasingly important in the future as algorithmic ranking becomes algorithmic everything.

2025-02-04

The Abstraction Ceiling

Justing Skycak from Math Academy has a great thread on large differences at the tail end of exponential distributions. This for e.g leads to vast differences in talent between 99th & 99.9th percentile, which is larger than the difference between 50th & 90th percentiles. #talent #competition #abstraction

Here is the image he links to with quotes from Douglas Hostadter's book.

Why Are We Distracted

Why You Can't Focus - 5 Mistakes Keeping You Distracted - YouTube #distractions

Cal Newport's newest podcast covers five reasons why folks are distracted

• Using Your Phone as a Stress Reliever: Many people reflexively turn to their phones to cope with stress or boredom, reinforcing a habit loop that fragments attention.
• Playing "Obligation Hot Potato" at Work: Many workers handle incoming messages and emails by deflecting them as quickly as possible rather than resolving them, creating a cycle of continuous distraction.
• Doing Too Many Things at the Same Time: Multitasking leads to an “overhead tax” where too much time is spent managing logistics rather than accomplishing deep work.
• Being Disorganized: Lack of structured planning forces people into reactive, last-minute decision-making, leading to stress and distraction.
• Lacking Foundational Pursuits: Without long-term, meaningful activities, people default to distractions.

Actionable Takeaways:

• Replace phone scrolling with higher-quality stress relief activities.
• Write more thoughtful responses to emails to reduce unnecessary follow-ups.
• Reduce the number of concurrent projects to minimize cognitive overhead.
• Use structured systems like status boards and weekly planning to stay organized.
• Develop meaningful long-term pursuits both at work and outside of it.

Adobe's C2PA standards for establishing image provenance

This system can sort real pictures from AI fakes — why aren’t platforms using it? | The Verge #ai #image #provenance

Good overview of Adobe's new standards for establishing image provenance

React as the "linux kernel" of modern software development

NYT Amplifier: Grammy Nominees

Meet the Grammys’ Best New Artist Nominees - The New York Times #playlists #nyt #amplifier

Each year, just before the Grammys, I like to create a playlist that introduces listeners to the nominees for best new artist. And since this year’s ceremony is on Sunday, it’s time.

If you’ve been paying attention to popular music at all in the past year or so, quite a few of these names need no introduction. Sabrina Carpenter scored not one but three massive hits last year, all of them animated by her perky, quirky charisma. Shaboozey’s downcast foot-stomper “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” was so ubiquitous, it tied the record for most weeks spent atop the Billboard Hot 100 (19 — that’s over a third of a year!). The soulful vocalists Teddy Swims and Benson Boone both had breakout hits that propelled them into the mainstream (“Lose Control” and “Beautiful Things”).

In a different kind of year, any of those artists could have easily been the front-runner for the best new artist trophy. But in this contest, they’re going up against the red-hot, pop-cultural supernova that is Chappell Roan. As she says: Good luck, babe!

YouTube Music Playlist: Grammys’ Best New Artist Nominees

Stablecoins and Product-Market Fit

Looks like the powers that be are pushing this narrative or "Stablecoins have Product Market Fit" very hard. I heard it on the a16z podcast a while ago, and now Techcrunch has an article on it. Almost makes me suspect it's a paid placement of some kind. Nevertheless, I found some of the use cases compelling.

Stablecoins are finding product-market fit in emerging markets | TechCrunch #stablecoin #crypto

To bypass these challenges, SpaceX turned to stablecoins, a fast-growing method for cross-border payments already widely used in emerging markets. The company partnered with Bridge, a stablecoin payments platform, to accept payments in various currencies and instantly convert them into stablecoins for its global treasury.

This move positioned Bridge as a viable alternative to correspondent banks in markets where traditional financial systems fall short. Soon after, Stripe took notice, acquiring the startup for more than $1 billion and solidifying Bridge’s reputation and driving up its valuation as an infrastructure player, solving inefficiencies in global finance.

The rise of stablecoins — now a $205 billion market — is driven by real-world utility, not speculation, particularly in emerging markets where the most compelling use cases unfold. Cross-border payments in these regions are typically slow and expensive, involving multiple intermediaries. For example, a textile manufacturer in Brazil paying a supplier in Nigeria might have to go through several banks and currency exchanges, each adding fees and delays. Stablecoins remove this friction, enabling cheaper, near-instant transactions.

Africa:

Yellow Card, which provides a platform that lets users convert fiat to crypto and back to fiat, doubled its annual transaction volume to $3 billion in 2024 from $1.5 billion in 2023. Conduit, which enables stablecoin payments for import-export businesses in Africa and Latin America, saw its annualized TPV jump to $10 billion from $5 billion. Lagos-based Juicyway, which facilitates cross-border payments using stablecoins, has processed $1.3 billion in total payment volume to date.

Beyond consumer savings, stablecoins are reshaping global payroll. As remote work expands, startups like Rise allow companies to pay contractors using stablecoins. The platform lets businesses pay in fiat while contractors receive stablecoins like USDC or USDT, avoiding currency volatility. Last November, Rise raised $6.3 million in Series A, fueling its expansion in stablecoin-powered payroll solutions.

This January, Brazilian unicorn Nubank introduced a feature rewarding USDC holders with a 4% annual return, following a tenfold increase in customer-held USDC last year. Now, 30% of Nubank’s users have USDC in their portfolios. Nubank joins other fintech giants like Venmo, Apple Pay, PayPal, Cash App, and Revolut, which already enable in-app stablecoin transactions.

Sniffnet

Sniffnet — comfortably monitor your Internet traffic 🕵️‍♂️ #tools #networking #monitoring #observability

Looks pretty!

2025-02-05

Twins in our Primate Past

Were Twins the Norm in Our Primate Past? – SAPIENS #twins #evolution

Our recent research suggests that twins were actually the norm rather than an unusual occurrence worthy of note much further back in primate evolution. Despite the fact that almost all primates today, including people, usually give birth to just one baby, our most recent common ancestor, which roamed North America about 60 million years ago, likely gave birth to twins as the standard.

Modern humans overwhelmingly birth just a single child—a rather large child with an even larger head. Human brain and body size is certainly connected to our ability to create and refine technologies. Paleoanthropologists have long been investigating what they call encephalization: an increase in brain size relative to body size over evolutionary time.

For primates, and especially humans, childhood learning is crucial. We propose that the switch from twins to singletons was critical for the evolution of large human babies with large brains who were capable of complex learning as infants and young children.

Based on mathematical modeling, the switch to singletons occurred early on, at least 50 million years ago. From there, many primate lineages, including ours, evolved to have increasingly larger bodies and brains.

Paradise TV Show on Hulu

Caught up to this new show Paradise on Hulu, which covers themes similar to Silo and Fallout. #tv #scifi

2025-02-06

Pure Lithium

Why we're bad at charging #battery #charging #energy

A Boston-based startup called Pure Lithium recently announced a breakthrough with its lithium metal batteries. While the lithium-ion batteries in your phone start to degrade significantly after a few hundred cycles of charging and discharging, these lithium metal batteries, which use pure lithium rather than a lithium compound, can last over 2,000 cycles without significant damage degradation, an ongoing test shows. Plus, the lithium metal batteries can store twice as much energy and weigh half as much as conventional lithium-ion batteries. Pure Lithium cofounder and CEO Emilie Bodoin calls this combination of features “the holy grail of energy storage.”

Meco - an app for consolidating newsletters

For those folks who don't want to fiddle with Gmail filters and RSS feed readers to redirect their newsletters to unified view, this app might be a good alternative: Meco: The #1 newsletter aggregator | Declutter your inbox #newsletter #aggregator

httptap

GitHub - monasticacademy/httptap: View HTTP/HTTPS requests made by any Linux program #go #networking #tools

When you run httptap -- <command>, httptap runs <command> in an isolated network namespace, injecting a certificate authority created on-the-fly in order to decrypt HTTPS traffic.

Written in Go, runs only on Linux.

Httptap only runs on linux at present. It makes use of linux-specific system calls -- in particular network namespaces -- that will unfortunately make it very difficult to port to other operating systems. If you know how httptap could be ported to other operating systems then please get in touch!

Monastic Academy

I was reading the README of the httptap and I came across this: #buddhism #ai

Httptap is part of an experiment in developing technology in the context of Buddhist monasticism. It was developed at the Monastic Academy in Vermont in the US. We believe that a monastic schedule, and the practice of the Buddhist spiritual path more generally, provide ideal conditions for technological development. The way we have set things up is that we live and practice together on a bit over a hundred acres of land. In the mornings and evenings we chant and meditate together, and for about one week out of every month we run and participate in a meditation retreat. The rest of the time we work together on everything from caring for the land, maintaining the buildings, cooking, cleaning, planning, fundraising, and for the past few years developing software together. This project is a demonstration of what is possible on the software side, but of course to see the full product of our work you should come visit us.

If you're interested, we run an AI fellowship program, which is a funded month-to-month program where you live on the land, participate in the schedule, and do your own work during the day. We also have a 3-month monastic training program, which can lead into our long-term residential training.

For the past few years we have been recording a lecture series called Buddhism for AI. It's about our efforts to design a religion (yes, a religion) based on Buddhism for consumption directly by AI systems. We actually feel this is very important work given the world situation.

Finally, our head teacher Soryu Forall published a book a few years back called Buddhism For All. We're working on a sequel at the moment.

I should join an AI commune and just work on side projects and meditate all day! This photo is just lovely.

the way a sovereign currency "works"

This is the clearest explanation of how a sovereign currency works using the framework of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). You don't even have to endorse MMT, just pay attention to the beginning of the lecture where Wray quotes from the St Louis Fed and prominent economists on why they continue to perpetuate the false claim that the US government can "run out of money". #mmt #money #sovereign #debt #deficit

Recently, there's a paper from the St. Louis Fed. Let me read this and then translate it. The St. Louis Fed, if you don't know, is a bastion of monetarism. This is Milton Friedman type economics. What I'm telling you is accepted from right to left: "As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose debt is denominated in dollars, the U.S. government can never become insolvent, i.e., unable to pay its bills. In this sense, the government is not dependent on credit markets to remain operational. Moreover, there will always be a market for U.S. government debt at home because the U.S. government has the only means of creating risk-free dollar-denominated assets."

Let me translate: the government can never run out of dollars, it can never be forced to default, it can never be forced to miss a payment. It is never subject to the whims of bond vigilantes. That's what the St. Louis Fed tells us, and you can find virtually identical quotes from Bernanke, from Greenspan, and really from almost all economists. When President Obama tells you we're running out of money, that the piggy bank is empty, that is just not true, and all economists know that it's not true.

The question is, why do they lie to you? There's a nice little video blog in which he interviews Paul Samuelson. I won't read this long thing; you can see the PowerPoint later. He says there's an element of truth in the superstition that the budget must be balanced at all times. But then later on, he talks about over longer periods of time. He likens it to an old-fashioned religion used to scare people so that they will behave in a particular way. He says, "We have taken away a belief in the intrinsic necessity of balancing the budget, if not every year, then over a short period of time." If Prime Minister Gladstone came back to life, he would say, "Uh-oh, what have you done?" And James Buchanan argues in those terms. I see merit in that view. He likens it to a superstition, an old-time religion. We have to do this because we have a fear that our elected representatives will spend without limit, and so we make up this lie that the federal government is like a U.S. household. You hear this all the time in debates about the budget, that the U.S. government is like a household. That is not true. Unless you have a printing press in your basement and you're printing up dollars, you are nothing like the federal government. The federal government creates money as it spends.

MAGA Obsession for the 1950s family

Brooding: Trad or Not, We’re All Nostalgic for a Fake Past #marriage #family #relationships

Conservatives are years deep into a period of raging nostalgia for a fake past, the historical details of which most people have a sketchy grasp on at best. They’re not nostalgic for the ’50s as it actually was — a time of government largesse, with huge spending on education and housing — but the ’50s as it exists in the imaginations of many white Americans: as the peak of “normal” white American culture. This is where our ideas about what a “typical American family” looks like tend to originate. The very concepts of the nuclear family, of “family” as a consumer category, of the roles that each member of a family are understood to play (“girl dad,” anyone?): All of this flows from mass media of the 1950s. Even though family life today bears little resemblance to that time, the aesthetic aura of the 1950s family has had diabolical staying power in our popular culture, a recent example being, of course, the whole “trad” thing.

and suddenly in the middle of the article, there is some actually insightful marriage advice!

But all this effort and expectation that we put into our family relationships is a double-edged sword, according to Coontz. Couples spend so much time together, trying to fulfill their obligations correctly, that they are losing the social connections they need to stay sane.

“Date nights are the worst marriage advice that I’ve ever heard of,” she said. The tyranny of one-on-one time, according to Coontz, is bad for everyone.

“We have to understand that it’s a win-win situation if we cultivate our single friends and our single lives and our single skills,” she continued. “It brings new life to our marriage, but it also protects us in two ways. It protects us against asking too much from our marriage, and if we leave our marriage, we already have social networks, so we don’t have to start all over.”

But the convenience structures of everyday life, from streaming to DoorDash, conspire to keep us more isolated from our communities than we could be, and more enmeshed in family structures that continue to resemble the historical anomaly of the 1950s nuclear family.

The Attention Singularity

Trumpcoin and TikTok - by kyla scanlon - Kyla’s Newsletter #attention #power

This is the birth of the Attention Singularity, where power, narrative, and wealth merge into one self-reinforcing system.

Think of the Attention Singularity like a black hole, but instead of gravity, it's attention that becomes so powerful it warps reality itself. We're watching the birth of a system where attention directly creates wealth (like $60B from Trumpcoin in 36 hours), wealth instantly enables power (potential TikTok acquisition), power captures more attention (platform control), and each cycle gets faster and stronger than the last.

Traditional limits like physical constraints, geographic boundaries, or institutional checks stop mattering because digital attention moves instantly and globally, while narrative overpowers physical reality. Once this feedback loop starts, it's self-reinforcing: attention creates wealth, wealth enables power, power shapes perceived reality, and reality drives more attention.

I am being sweepingly dramatic in these statements, but they are important to think about.

Reminds me of the Homo Interneticus concept I posted about last month.

Placebo Effect of Therapy

The Placebo Effect in Therapy (Part 2/2) - by Josh Zlatkus #placebo #therapy #mentalhealth

I quoted part 1 earlier.

The way I see it, psychotherapy is no different than surreal caves, psychiatric medication, religion, Reiki, or whatever the hell this is. They are all platforms for belief, in addition to whatever else they might be.

The fact that psychotherapy is a platform for belief helps to explain why different versions nevertheless produce similar results. Therapeutic methods are akin to religious sects in that arguments about the “right” sect are pointless because the basic premise of a God just isn’t true. The healing value of religion isn’t in getting the “facts” right; it’s in sharing something to believe in. Ditto with therapy.

…

So, therapy is fake—is placebo—in its stated means of operation, but real in its delivered effect. A dialectical behavior therapist, for example, might think the client is improving because they are finally doing their homework. Yet it’s more likely that the client is improving because someone cares enough about them to assign homework and insist that it gets done. Most of the stuff that psychotherapists have long hung their hat upon—delivering brilliant interpretations, creating self-aware and compliant clients, uncovering the root cause of all subsequent illness—is irrelevant outside of its ability to legitimize the therapy, to make it seem like serious business with a good chance of success. Such content becomes the foreground, allowing the actual process of healing—via common factors such as the relationship and placebo—to operate smoothly in the background.

But the elusive mechanisms of healing by common factors helps to explain why we do not typically identify them as central—why clients will often say that therapy has been helpful and then balk at the natural follow-up of “why?” The reality is that they don’t know; and most times, neither does the therapist.

…

Here are some implications for the field if everything I’ve said is true:

1. The main value of therapeutic training is signaling value, which strengthens the placebo effect. The patient’s knowledge that their therapist has a Ph.D. contributes more to their healing than whatever their therapist happened to learn (or unlearn) in those 5-7 years.

2. If therapeutic training were designed to be technically helpful, it would focus on how to leverage common factors. For example: how to build strong relationships, listen carefully, facilitate open conversation, and use placebo. Training should also focus on what is knowable about mental health, much of which comes from an evolutionary perspective. For example, that emotions measure and motivate, or that emotions can misfire on the principle “better safe than sorry.”

3. Many alternatives to therapy exist. Most of these alternatives are less costly. If we want to give everyone access to mental health, these low-cost, widely-accessible alternatives should be front and center. Yes, I’m talking about diet, sleep, exercise, and social connection.11

4. The field should stop wasting its time comparing therapies. Someone ought to knock CBT off its high horse specifically.12

How do exchange rates work

How Do Exchange Rates Work, Anyway? - by Oliver Kim #money #exchange #dollar

Before I get to the mechanics of exchange rates and trade—somewhat in the news these days—let me start off with some fortune cookie koans about the nature of Truth:

• Lawyers: what’s provable is True.

• Artists: what’s authentic is True.

• Politicians: what’s popular is True.

• Practitioners: what works is True.

• Academics: what’s correct is True.

One immediate wrinkle is that firms, being firms, can smell a buck to be made. If the złoty falls—in effect, setting an international discount on Polish goods—they may raise their złoty prices a tad, offsetting a bit of the depreciation but allowing them to increase their profits. So some of the exchange rate depreciation is eaten by firms; the “passthrough” to prices observed by importers may be incomplete

Around 40% of all global trade is invoiced in US dollars, even though only 10% of global trade is destined for the United States. A similarly large share of world trade (around 46%) is invoiced in the Euro, but this is much more in line with the Euro Area’s share of world trade (37%). Over 80% of global goods and services are thus listed in terms of just these two currencies—and, in particular, 30% of global trade is invoiced in US dollars, even when America is not necessarily involved in the transaction.

Sports Betting and Robinhood

Robinhood Wanted B*ts on the B*g G*me

The other set of euphemisms is of course the use of words like “event contracts,” “derivatives” and, my favorite, “emerging asset class.” Robinhood will let you put in some money to predict that either the Philadelphia Unnamed Team or the Kansas City Unnamed Team will win the Large Football Contest. If your team loses the football contest, you lose the money you put in. If your team wins the football contest, you get back more than you put in. It’s a derivative contract, see? Are you betting on football? No no no no no no no no no no, this is an emerging asset class.

and then, what a load of crock

The announcement went on:

Robinhood’s mission is to democratize finance for all. With an emerging asset class like event contracts, we recognize an opportunity to better serve our customers as their interests converge across the markets, news, sports, and entertainment. ...

Event contracts for the Pro Football Championship leverage the power and rigor of financial market structure to facilitate greater liquidity, transparency, and price discovery.

“Our mission is to democratize finance for all” would be an absolutely incredible slogan for an online sportsbook, or a casino, or for that matter an old-time Mafia bookie. Robinhood surely does help a lot of people save for retirement with lower costs than they paid at pre-Robinhood brokerages, but in this case, “democratize finance for all” means “get people to bet on sports.” “Leverage the power and rigor of financial market structure to facilitate greater liquidity, transparency, and price discovery” also means “get people to bet on sports.” Rigor!

2025-02-07

Cerebras and DeepSeek

I learned about Cerebras from the latest Oxide and Friends podcast. #ai #hardware #inference #deepseek

At the moment they have a chatbot interface that one can try for a while before the token limit is reached. I just did and it is wicked fast! The entire response from DeepSeek was there in moments as I looked away from the screen for a split second.

2025-02-08

Tapestry

Tapestry • Your favorite blogs, social media, and more in a unified and chronological timeline

Tapestry combines posts from your favorite social media services like Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr and others with RSS feeds, podcasts, YouTube channels and more. All of your content presented in chronological order, with no algorithm deciding what you should or shouldn't see.

Marriage Material Shortage

America’s ‘Marriage Material’ Shortage - The Atlantic #marriage #relationships

Adults have a way of projecting their anxieties and realities onto their children. In the case of romance, the fixation on young people masks a deeper—and, to me, far more mysterious—phenomenon: What is happening to adult relationships?

American adults are significantly less likely to be married or to live with a partner than they used to be. The national marriage rate is hovering near its all-time low, while the share of women under 65 who aren’t living with a partner has grown steadily since the 1980s. The past decade seems to be the only period since at least the 1970s when women under 35 were more likely to live with their parents than with a spouse.

People’s lives are diverse, and so are their wants and desires and circumstances. It’s hard, and perhaps impossible, to identify a tiny number of factors that explain hundreds of millions of people’s decisions to couple up, split apart, or remain single. But according to Lyman Stone, a researcher at the Institute for Family Studies, the most important reason marriage and coupling are declining in the U.S. is actually quite straightforward: Many young men are falling behind economically.

How I use AI

How I Use AI: Early 2025 | Ben Congdon #ai #tools

some thoughts on friendship

some thoughts on friendship - by Ava - bookbear express

1. Asymmetric friendships are common. There’s a limit to how asymmetric ongoing romantic relationships can be, because at the end of the day in most marriages you still have to like them enough to live under the same roof. But friendships can be quite asymmetric! Last year a close friend and I were discussing how difficult it can be when one person wants to be supersupersuper close and the other person wants to be… kind of close. That’s not a terrible amount of asymmetry, but it can still feel crushing in the way all unreciprocated love does. Sometimes we really want to be close with someone, and they’re just not available, or not interested. It’s okay to admit that that hurts, even when it’s purely platonic.

Cairo's Female Skaters

Watch: Up close with Cairo’s female skaters | Dazed

Loved watching this (extremely) short film

The film follows a group of young, female skateboarders, drifters and motorbike riders, aged between 13 and 22, as they careen around the Egyptian capital. The girls are resilient in the face of a traditional, religious and patriarchal society which seeks to prevent them from pursuing their passions; the film follows the group as they overcome the barriers facing them, finding freedom and community in the process.

High Agency is Tech's Latest Buzzword

Why everyone in Silicon Valley wants to be 'high agency' #buzzword #culture

I love following the evolution of language, and Business Insider just published a great piece on a new phrase that has taken over Silicon Valley. People in tech used to call themselves "self-starters," then the term "disruptor" came into vogue. Now, everyone is claiming that they’re "high agency."

From Business Insider:

Over the past year, high agency has become the aspirational character trait of Silicon Valley. Early last year, the analytics site Brandwatch found there was a 500% jump in mentions of the phrase across X, Reddit, and other social media sites.

Not one but two podcasts titled "High Agency" have launched, one dedicated to AI, the other to entrepreneurship. On LinkedIn, a wide range of sectors, from solar to crypto, are suddenly seeking “high-agency” applicants. And on Substack, tech-culture essayists are schooling readers on how to ratchet up their “high-agency” qualities, which are said to be possessed by tech elites and top athletes.

"High agency" was coined in 2016, when Eric Weinstein, then the managing director of Peter Thiel's investment firm, referenced it during an appearance on a podcast hosted by the self-help guru Tim Ferriss. In Weinstein's formulation, a high-agency approach to the world is "constantly looking for what is possible, in a kind of MacGyverish sort of a way."

It's a trait mostly assigned to people who start their own companies, seize opportunities that others miss, and never take "no" for an answer. High-agency people are rich, successful, or on their way to being both. They're action-oriented and find opportunities where others see roadblocks.

As the article explains, Americans love phrases and terms that are meant to inspire future hard-working business leaders. Words like grit, type A, and even girlboss all connote an intense drive. The phrase “high agency” grates me a bit though. It sounds hyper-individualistic and implies a sort of pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps type mentality. The reality of life in America is that it doesn’t matter how “high agency” you are, you could end up in medical debt and lose your house, or become permanently disabled overnight from catching a virus someone gave to you on the bus to work.

Silicon Valley billionaires like Marc Andreessen talk about “high agency” people as if they’re some superior class and the traits they carry are innate, which reads a bit weird to me considering how fond those people are of eugenics. That said, the phrase does seem to be getting mainstreamed enough already that it won’t carry those connotations for very long. It is already being fully adopted into the hustle-bro lexicon. You can read the full story on Business Insider.

Git - template for commit messages

Conventional Commits | Mike Perham #git #template #commit #tools

git supports a template for commit messages and any lines that start with # are ignored. I added this as ~/.gitmessage:

# type(subsystem): short description
### Types
# feat: A new feature
# fix: A bug fix
# docs: Documentation only changes
# build: Changes that affect the build system or external dependencies
# ci: Changes to our CI configuration files and scripts
# perf: A code change that improves performance
# refactor: A code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature
# style: Changes that do not affect the meaning of the code
# test: Adding missing tests or correcting existing tests

and then adjusted ~/.gitconfig like this:

[commit]
  template = ~/.gitmessage

What to read

everything i read in january 2025 - by Celine Nguyen

When people ask me, ‘What kinds of books do you read?’ I never know what to say. I suspect I’m not alone in this. Obviously, people tend to prefer certain books, films, songs—but I don’t know how many people will say that they just read sci-fi, only watch noirs, prefer hyperpop above all else.1 The best descriptions end up feeling very specific and very vague: Books about fatally flawed people who keep on going. Films about crushing on someone in a decadent setting. Music that feels pure and shot through with light.

My philosophy on reading can be summed up as: Don’t discriminate, but be discerning. I’d hate to dismiss a book for the wrong reasons—but I do want to feel opinionated about what I’m reading.

Suspectibility to Misinformation

Educated but easily fooled? Who falls for misinformation and why #misinformation

Political identity also played a key role. The meta-analysis confirmed previous research showing that individuals who identify as Republicans are more likely to fall for misinformation than those who identify as Democrats. Republicans were less accurate at assessing the veracity of news and tended to label more headlines as true, whereas Democrats were more skeptical. Individuals with higher analytical thinking skills—that is, who are better at logically evaluating information, identifying patterns, and systematically solving problems—performed better overall and were more skeptical (tending to classify news as false). People were more likely to believe that news that aligned with their political identity was true and to disregard news that was not aligned with their political identity—a phenomenon known as partisan bias. However, a counterintuitive finding was that individuals with higher analytical thinking were actually more susceptible to partisan bias. This tendency is known as motivated reflection, which is a cognitive process where individuals' analytical reasoning works against them to protect their pre-existing beliefs, values, or partisan affiliations. The strongest effect in the meta-analysis was the influence of familiarity. When participants reported having already seen a news headline, they were more likely to believe it was true. This finding underscores the danger of repeated exposure to misinformation, particularly on social media.

“The results highlight the urgent need to integrate media literacy and critical thinking skills into school curricula from an early age. Younger adults, despite being considered 'digital natives,' were less able to distinguish between true and false news,” Ralf Kurvers continues. More effective and age-appropriate media literacy programs tailored to this group are therefore crucial. Furthermore, given the strong effects of familiarity and political bias, interventions for helping people identify and share less misinformation must consider how information is presented and shared, especially on social media, where these effects are amplified. For example, effective interventions might emphasize commonalities and promote dialogue across political boundaries.

Building a customized vector database for image search

Why build your own vector DB? To process 25,000 images per second - Stack Overflow #vector #database #image #search

The transcript was a great read.

So we leverage a model that was published by OpenAI in 2021 called CLIP– C. L. I. P– Contrastive Language Image Pre-training, and this model was trained on images and their captions as I mentioned. OpenAI never released the weights, but there are open source versions of this model trained by the open source community and we picked one of those called OpenClip. And the model is only capable of understanding images, and that's why on the camera and the devices we actually detect using motions and using YOLO models which understand multiple frames. It detects the people, takes a crop of that, actually a high quality version of that subject, either person or vehicle, and then sends it back and we only index those images.

They built their custom vector DB because they wanted a database that was optimized for a write-intensive workload.

As you mentioned, vector database itself, we could also leverage some third party vector database in cloud like Pinecone. We first, in fact, started looking into, again, because of privacy, we decided not to send the data, but we started looking at open source. So we looked into Qdrant and Weaviate, which are some of the rising vector databases that are out there that especially the LLM users use. Very soon, we realized that we actually built a POC with both of them, but very soon we realized that our use case is very different because most of these vector databases are mostly read intensive. So you ingest your documents, let's say for RAG purposes initially, and then you read a lot of them. You just send the vector and try to search. Our use case is a bit different because of the scale of all these images coming in so it's a lot more write intensive.

we are destroying software

We are destroying software | Hacker News

We are destroying software with Leetcode interviews, resume-driven development, frequent job-hopping, growth investment scams, metrics gaming, promotion-seeking, sprint theatre, bullshitting at every level of the org chart, and industry indifference.