Daily Log Digest – Week 6, 2025
2025-02-09
The Psychology of Severance
The Psychology of Severance | Psychology Today #severance #tv #psychology
This disconnection is particularly evident in Mark S., the protagonist, whose "outie" has chosen to undergo the severance procedure to escape the grief of losing his wife. Yet his "innie" is trapped in a cycle of meaningless labor, unable to understand why he exists only within Lumon’s walls. His "innie" never sleeps, never rests, and the minute he leaves work, his next conscious experience is that of arriving at the office again for a new 8-hour work cycle. This mirrors what we see in some trauma survivors, who may unconsciously or consciously repress or dissociate from painful memories as a defense mechanism. The severance procedure is, in effect, an extreme version of psychological compartmentalization—a way to avoid emotional pain by physically splitting off access to distressing memories.
Tokyo Drift
Tokyo drift: what happens when a city stops being the future? | Japan | The Guardian
Still, mass tourism is as demoralising and demeaning here as anywhere. Tourists disrupt the rhythm of the city, agents of minor turmoil set loose in familiar spaces. There may be no way to describe these transgressions without sounding like a crank – I know it is not maliciousness on their part – but I have lived in Japan long enough that the surprise of encountering a broad, looming American, with their transparent expressions and flashy Lycra pants, stuns me out of the daze into which the city has lulled me. I am rankled by offences invisible to outsiders. While part of me sympathises with the family of sightseers blundering their way on to a crowded Yamanote Line train with their suitcases, or the young women filming TikToks in the aisles of a Ministop, my Tokyo training means I know infringement of its unwritten rules when I see it. This is a city that expects people to suffer in peculiar ways. You would need to live here to know that using a bicycle bell is anathema when you can simply squeeze the brakes by way of warning. There is no way to explain that the cement curbs around the overgrown green spaces carved out of the pavement at many intersections are not for sitting. I couldn’t say for sure why the rumble of the plastic wheels of rolling suitcases is more frightening than jackhammers.
The guest worker in Japan, though necessary to keep operations running, is stretched thin between demand and bureaucracy, especially considering the quasi-legal subterfuge required to ship them in. While the recently assassinated former prime minister Shinzo Abe expanded the quota for moderately skilled immigrants in a series of reforms translated as “comprehensive measures for acceptance and coexistence of foreign nationals”, many still arrive on student visas. Brokers and language schools arrange minimal coursework and permission to work a 28-hour week on the side, though much longer shifts are typical. Legal measures to end death from overwork could be more difficult to enforce among student workers, who are preyed on by language schools and staffing agencies. The truly unlucky souls wind up as part of the technical intern training programme, a scheme to bring in unskilled labour under the guise of vocational training that domestic and foreign investigations have found is rife with human trafficking, fraud and vicious abuse that culminates in death, disfigurement and psychological trauma. When guest workers abscond from the legal programmes – in 2023 alone, more than 9,000 interns disappeared from the books – they become even more vulnerable, surviving on under-the-table jobs.
Writing Good AI Prompts for Code Generation
Prompt patterns for LLMs that help you design better software | Chuniversiteit
Developers typically use LLMs via prompts, natural language instructions that can be used to generate code(side note:This means that prompting can technically be seen as a form of programming.) and other types of artefacts. Prompt patterns are reusable prompt designs that codify best practices, and can be used to consistently achieve good results. This week’s paper introduces 13 such prompt patterns.
The 13 prompt patterns that are presented in this paper can be grouped into four categories: requirements elicitation, system design and simulation, code quality, and refactoring. All prompt patterns were tested with ChatGPT, but will likely also work with other LLMs.
2025-02-10
How to Achieve Immortality
How to Achieve Immortality - by Ted Gioia #transhumanism #immortality #lifespan #extension #ageing
But there are some similarities between ancient heroes doing great deeds, and today’s Silicon Valley transhumanist. They both want to be like the gods (only their methods are different). Also, they are both admired leaders in their respective societies.
That’s the part that troubles me most. If the dude slurping up stem sells in a bunker was just another crazy person, I wouldn’t worry about it. But, unfortunately, these unhinged narcissists include some of the most powerful people on the planet.
We should all be concerned about that.
…
This is what art does. Even at secondhand.
If you’ve crossed paths with a great artist, some of that immortality might even rub off on you.
That’s a different way of surviving—and one that no tech bro can match by getting injections of teenager blood or gulping down 100 nutritional supplements per day.
It’s useful to remind ourselves of this genuine immortality of art and of the great deeds praised by the ancients—especially in an age that worships tech and marginalizes all other pursuits.
And it’s especially wise to do this, given how tech actually focuses so much on the ephemeral nowadays—all that scrolling and swiping ‘content’ that only lasts a few days, or less.
What these platforms deliver is the exact opposite of immortality. The empires of TikTok and Instagram and hundreds of other apps are built on the flimsiest of foundations—a few seconds of streaming data.
So it’s ironic that the people who promote this vapidity are seeking immortality for themselves. I doubt they will find it. But they do have good reason to fear transience and oblivion—because that’s what they’ve staked their whole careers on.
Economics as politics and philosophy
So economists know they are lying to the public about fiscal matters because if the truth about the capacity of government and the reality of all the charades about debt issuance, central bank independence, and the rest of it was understood, then we would make greater demands on government.
Just like religion that attempts to control us through fear of a terrible afterlife, economics as practised by the mainstream is a control mechanism to ensure the powerful retain their position in the pecking order and their wealth and privilege.
…
Economics as a discipline has morphed into becoming a support mechanism to ensure private profit continues to be accumulated by the few while the rest of us increasingly struggle with various challenges that such a bias has created – deterioration in the quality and availability of housing, environmental degradation, diminishing employment quality, diminishing quality and availability of health care, increased corporatisation of education, etc
And the conduct of central banks in this era is one significant aspect of this bias.
Under the pretense of ‘fighting inflation’, they manipulate interest rates to the benefit of private bank shareholders, financial wealth holders and oversee the massive redistribution of income away from low-income mortgage holders towards high-wealth asset owners.
They demand that unemployment has to rise to the reach the unobservable NAIRU, which evades accurate statistical estimation – which is so inexact that the concept is devoid of practical use as a policy guide, quite apart from its vacuous theoretical status.
They then threaten governments with even more punishing interest rate hikes, if they don’t cut fiscal outlay to ensure the unemployment rises, and, meanwhile, they regularly make political statements about the dangers of deficits etc, then tell everyone that they are independent of the political process.
How Venture Capital Works
As a startup founder, you really need to understand how venture capital works | TechCrunch #vc #venture #capital
Bookmarking it here because I thought it was a nice overview of the basics of how VC works - with terms like corporate VC funds, LPs
Grand Strategy
Killing A Bad Strategy Before It Kills you #books #review #strategy
Rob Henderson reviews On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis.
This one stood out to me.
6. Leaders Must Appear Certain, Even When They Aren’t
- Decision-making often happens without complete information.
- Goethe: “For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him, he must regard himself as greater than he is.”
- Self-belief, even when slightly exaggerated, can boost effectiveness in leadership, relationships, and career success.
2025-02-11
How do radical ideas go mainstream
How do Radical Ideas Go Mainstream? - by Alice Evans #feminism #radical
Over the 1970s, Americans rapidly became much more supportive of gender equality. Departing from the cult of domesticity, families increasingly came to support equal rights at work and in politics, as well as the transformation of intimate relationships.
What enabled this remarkable shift?
Most Americans encountered feminism indirectly, yet media coverage was overwhelmingly hostile. Mainstream news, like the New York Times, focused on outrageous protests and vilified feminists as rebellious extremists.
Some scholars point to ‘counter-publics’ - ‘feminist consciousness-raising’ in small groups, which problematised sexism and envisioned more egalitarian alternatives. Feminist newsletters and bookstores also gained popularity - at least in San Francisco. But how did radicalism spread beyond small activist circles to influence millions of Americans?
A tremendous new paper by Francesca Polletta, Debra Boka, Caroline Martínez and Mutsumi Ogaki offers an answer which I had previously overlooked, but immediately found compelling. Women’s magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s made feminism relatable. And they reached a massive audience - 50 million plus. A single issue of McCall’s reached one in four American women! Bam.
Podscript Support for Amazon Bedrock and Gemini
Samrat Jha added support for two additional models for Podscript's YouTube captions cleanup subcommand.
- Gemini: feat: Add Gemini support by samratjha96 · Pull Request #23 · deepakjois/podscript · GitHub
- Amazon Bedrock: feat: Add Amazon Bedrock support by samratjha96 · Pull Request #22 · deepakjois/podscript · GitHub
Super pumped to see more people being interested in this tool.
Jessica DeFino interview in L’ADN magazine
Care/Expression Vs. Harm/Oppression #beauty #psychology #skincare
L’ADN: Why can seemingly harmless beauty trends be harmful? For instance: glass skin and its derivatives, celebrity brands, Sephora Kids, but feel free to choose your favorites…
JD: There are psychological, physical, and environmental consequences to nearly every beauty trend, on the individual and collective levels. To use glass skin as an example: On the psychological level, this is literal self-objectification. On the physical level, the excessive product use required to create that glassy effect can damage the skin barrier, disrupt the skin microbiome, and cause inflammation. On an environmental level, we’re continuously producing and consuming products — products often produced with fossil fuels and petrochemicals — in order to meet a definitionally unmeetable goal, which exacerbates the industry’s devastating impact on global warming.
In Praise of Ponzis
In Praise of Ponzis #crypto #product #marketing
Today, there is an abundance of many things, if not everything. And most traditional gatekeepers have lost their old powers (even those that are doing well financially like, say, The New York Times, have a far smaller share of global mindshare than they used to).
Today, the main gatekeepers are the crowd and the algorithms that gauge and guide the crowd's attention. These algorithms create a world in which the biggest winners are bigger than ever. Success breeds success, creating path dependencies that make it hard for runners-up to catch up. In a growing number of industries, rewards are power-law distributed. This means the crowd is more important than ever and that launching a successful product is both harder and more lucrative than ever.
"Harder" might not be the right word. Let me rephrase: Launching a successful product is riskier than ever and more dependent on random forces than ever. In the past, a producer could rely on their own manufacturing capacity and on relationships with powerful gatekeepers to guarantee a product's success. It did not always work, but it often worked.
Today, producers can launch products more easily. But so can their competitors. And ultimate success depends on the behavior of large groups of people. These people cannot be coaxed or threatened. But they can be bribed.
Jujutsu Version Control System
Jujutsu VCS Introduction and Patterns | Kuba Martin #jujutsu #version #control #git #tools
Looks like this is the new hotness and best of all, it's based on Git. Hoping to play around more later.
2025-02-12
Math Academy and a LOT of chores.
2025-02-13
Chinese Marriages
Why are Chinese Marriages Plummeting? - by Alice Evans #marriage #relationships
China’s marriages have hit rock bottom - only 6.1 million weddings in 2024. This has massive economic consequences - fewer marriages mean mean fewer births, an ageing population, with declining labour productivity, and a rising dependency burden.
Bloomberg blames marital collapse on economic hardship. But my interviews with Chinese young people suggest three further drivers.
Cultural liberalisation means singledom is more permissible, while status is tied to economic success;
Online connectivity enables young women to celebrate independence & equality;
Men and women seem to be retreating into digital worlds.
NYT Amplifier: 10 Songs That Celebrate the Sound of Philadelphia
Can't seem to find a link to the site. #music #playlist #nyt #amplifier
Across all sorts of genres, Philadelphia has a rich musical history and a vibrant musical present. The sound of Philadelphia soul defined the early 1970s (even David Bowie wanted a piece of the action), and its heirs adapted its influence into a neo-soul boom that took off in the late 1990s. Philly has long had a thriving underground music scene, too, as evidenced by its tight-knit indie-rock community and its reputation for eclectic, innovative hip-hop.
YouTube music playlist: 10 Songs That Celebrate the Sound of Philadelphia - YouTube Music
USAID
A World Without Aid? - by Oliver Kim - Global Developments #aid #foreign #us #politics
Most of my readers are likely deeply concerned about the wholesale destruction of USAID. They don’t need to be convinced further with statistics—that 19 million lives have been saved by PEPFAR, that 434 of 634 vital soup kitchens in Khartoum will have to shut down, that $500 million of food aid is stuck rotting in warehouses rather than going to the hungry.
Just to lay all my cards on the table, I’m gutted.
Ken Opalo, Lauren Gilbert, Kelsey Piper, among others, have already done an excellent job analyzing the developmental and humanitarian consequences of this rollback. Pushback has begun, as have attempts to mitigate the damage.
Tyler Cowen on Stablecoins
Stablecoins Will Entrench Dollar Dominance for Another Century - Bloomberg #crypto #money #stablecoin #dollar
Some history: The late 19th century brought a unified gold standard to much of the world. The end of World War II brought the Bretton Woods system, which ended in 1971 with a new era of fiat money and floating exchange rates. Crypto was invented in 2008, but the new monetary system that it enables has not become clear until recently.
Stablecoins are programmable crypto assets that promise conversion into some currency, typically US dollars. Currently, they are the fastest-growing sector of crypto. Stablecoin usage is up 84% since August 2023 and is now at a peak of $224 billion. The sympathetic stance of President Donald Trump’s administration toward crypto is likely to help growth further.
It is noteworthy that, measured by market capitalization, perhaps as much as 99% of stablecoins are denominated in dollars. That is a much higher share than is found in standard international trade and finance. This shows that, if monetary institutions were started all over again from scratch — which is part of what crypto is doing — the market would opt largely for dollars.
How Much Protein Do We Actually Need?
How Much Protein Do We Actually Need? - by Chris Gayomali #protein #health #exercise
The tl;dr is that proteinification is the coalescence of two main forces: the mainstreaming of fitness culture and capitalism’s remarkable ability to transform garbage into profit. Whey protein, for example, is a byproduct of cheese. Whey was historically treated as refuse, either dumped in our rivers or used as slop to feed pigs and cattle. And then some smart people realized that whey is actually nutrient-dense and could be refined into a powder and jammed into all sorts of stuff we eat, like protein bars. One cheesemaker’s trash is a fitness bro’s treasure.
The linked article: Big Food Gets Jacked
Production grade frontend app in Go and WebAssembly
We Replaced Our React Frontend with Go and WebAssembly - Dagger #go #wasm #react
Our starting goal was to be able to reuse one codebase for both Dagger Cloud and the TUI. We decided fairly early to make it a Go codebase. Technically, we could have gone the other way and used TypeScript for the TUI. But we're primarily a team of Go engineers, so selecting Go made it easier for others in the team to contribute, to add a feature or drop in for a few hours to help debug an issue. In addition to standardizing on a single language, it gave us flexibility and broke down silos in our team.
Once we decided to run Go code directly in the browser, WebAssembly was the logical next step. But there were still a couple of challenges:
- The Go + WebAssembly combination is still not as mature as React and other JavaScript frameworks. There are no ready-made component libraries to pull from, the developer tooling isn't as rich, and so on. We knew that we would need to build most of our UI components from scratch.
- There is a hard 2 GB memory limit for WebAssembly applications in most browsers. We expected this to be a problem when viewing large traces, and we knew we would have to do a lot of optimization to minimize memory usage and keep the UI stable. This wasn't entirely bad though; the silver lining here was that any memory usage improvements made to the WebAssembly UI would also benefit TUI users, since it was now a shared codebase.
2025-02-14
Math Academy, and coping with life stuff.
2025-02-15
Math Academy!