February 23, 2025

Daily Log Digest – Week 7, 2025

2025-02-16

Math Academy all day. The end is near. If everything goes according to plan, I will finish the Mathematics for Machine Learning course by Wed 🤞🏽.

2025-02-17

Finally!

2025-02-18

Export to Prompt

A good thread on resources for exporting an entire repo of code to an LLM Prompt. #llm #prompt #repo #tools

2025-02-19

Pros and Cons of uv

A year of uv: pros, cons, and should you migrate #python #uv

My conclusion is: if your situation allows it, always try uv first. Then fall back on something else if that doesn’t work out.

we are all androids

the "algorithmic gaze" affects everything you see online #culture #social-media #algorithms

The Wired writer Leo Kim argues that this goes back to the fact that we’re all androids. In the same way that our bodies are part of who we are, so too have our phones become a functional extension of our minds. We feel naked when we go anywhere without them, and to use them is to project our consciousness into the delicate haptic experience of thumb on screen. As such, we feel much closer to our phones than we do our computers or TVs, and enter a kind of “flow state” of media consumption when interacting with them. The rest of the world blurs away as we enter a tender, individualized connection with this unique part of ourselves.

Most of us don’t consider this when we’re in our “flow state” of scrolling. We’re too distracted by dopamine delivery, too captivated by the psychosomatic hypnosis of holding phone in hand. We consume mechanical reproduction of mechanical reproduction, eventually losing touch of what Benjamin labels “aura”—the sublime experience of reality that reminds us to think critically.

Government Debt

The Debt Scolds are Back. For Now. - by Stephanie Kelton #mmt #deficit #economics

So what explains the renewed angst over government debt? Maybe it’s because the world’s richest man keeps tweeting that “America is going bankrupt.” Maybe it has something to do with the fact that House republicans are looking to raise the debt limit by $4 trillion while enacting sweeping tax cuts and beefing up spending on border and other priorities. Even with President Trump posting BALANCED BUDGET! and DOGE flipping over seat cushions to save a billion here and there, deficits are on the republican menu. Maybe journalists are frustrated by the slow news cycle. (LOL It’s definitely not that!) Hey, maybe it’s because the U.S. Treasury Department’s own website uses inapplicable and reckless metaphors to “explain” the national debt!

Romantic Love

Three Interesting Things About Romantic Love #love #anthropology #romance

Naturally, culture matters. So does technology. The manifestations of love vary widely, from arranged cousin marriages to Durex-protected Tinder dates. But the underlying feelings seem to resonate across time and space. And why would they not? Romantic love is a natural emotion for lubricating human pair bonding — a well-respected Darwinian “strategy” amongst most birds and a minority of mammals. I write “strategy” in quotes, as some might mistake it for a cold-hearted calculation: a subconscious chess game to pass on one’s genes. This is nonsense. Love and lust have a Darwinian history but a romantic present. They are feelings which constantly turn against their original purpose, whether in the case of homosexual love — which pits love against reproduction — or in the form of disabling heartache, which devastates not only humans but prairie voles, too.

Love hurts. But that pain transcends cultures — even species.

Manto and Chughtai

Daak Weekly: Manto and Chughtai’s Friendship - by Daak Vaak #urdu #literature #friendship

In a culture obsessed with the passion and drama of romantic love, we often forget to celebrate our friendships, the constant constellations of our lives, witnessing and partaking in our joys and sorrows, even, and especially, the inevitable disappointments of romance. Perhaps even more than our partners, it is our friends who provide us with the emotional and intellectual fulfillment needed to grow into our potential. However, friendships are not without their difficulties; in a relationship that has no social, familial, or legal binding, it must be chosen and nurtured, consciously and intentionally. Yet, friendships are often the first relationships to be set aside amidst life’s clawing demands, in the hopes that they will remain ever fixed when we find the time, energy, or space to come back to them.

A friendship that embodied both these potentials and pitfalls of friendship was the one shared by the doyens of Urdu Literature, Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chughtai.

How we lost the flow

How We Lost the Flow - by Ted Gioia - The Honest Broker

The flow state is important because it’s our most powerful weapon against the intense tech-driven rationalization of our lives.

The dominance of STEM-thinking has left so many of us hollow inside. In a world of intense rationality and digitization, people’s inner lives are gradually destroyed. They are hungry for something deeper, holistic, and more vital than data manipulation can deliver.

Just look at all the metrics on self-harm, suicide, addiction, depression, psychic disorders of every sort. People will tell you that you can’t measure a crisis in the inner life, but that’s not true—there are plenty of numbers and charts that spell it out.

The deepest thinkers of the last century have grasped this—and laid the foundation for flow psychology. I need to give credit to philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1942), seldom read nowadays—but it's no coincidence that his work influenced Proust (the deepest psychological novelist of them all), or that Bergson wrote one of the great philosophical studies of comedy.

These insights are developed further in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and others—all the way up to the leading thinkers of our own time, such as Charles Taylor and Iain McGilchrist.

These rank among the wisest individuals of modern times. But their wisdom is shut out in the cold by a data-driven, profit-driven, device-driven culture.

Even worse, we are now robbed of our flow state—which is now getting hijacked for corporate enrichment.

Scroll-and-swipe apps are now the dictators of the flow state for a billion or so people.

Their role model is narcotics, by the way. That, too, was once a destructive blight only criminals took advantage of. But it has now gone legit with support from the wealthy and powerful.

Scroll-and-swipe only got invented a few years ago, but it is already far bigger than the drug business. By the way, it is also run by a cartel—I call it the dopamine cartel.

Substacker Ken Klippenstein has an even better name. He calls it the Appistocracy. I like that term, and will start using it myself. It aptly describes the forces arrayed against us.

In our age of Appistocracy, everything online is getting turned into a kind of casino. Web interfaces deliberately emulate slot machines. The pacing, the colors, the hypnotic repetitions, and the like.

Trust the experts

Just Trust the Experts - Scott H Young

The rationale for defaulting to believing experts in almost all cases is simple:

1. An expert is, by definition, a smart person who knows a lot about a topic.
2. The typical expert has more true opinions than the typical non-expert because they have more knowledge with which to form an opinion.
3. The most common expert opinion is even more accurate than the typical expert. This is because each expert has a different subset of all available knowledge on a topic, so the average view is a better “best guess” than any individual’s opinion.
4. The majority expert opinion may be wrong. But contrarian opinions are even more likely to be wrong. The value of this perspective is probabilistic: expert consensus will fail sometimes, but it fails less often than the contrarian alternative. It is therefore a strong default presumption to hold.

You are using Cursor AI incorrectly

You are using Cursor AI incorrectly... #ai #tools #cursor #tips

A one sentence summary is that one should really be using the Cursor rules feature more.

2025-02-20

How GenZ sees the world

Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress - by kyla scanlon #genz #economics #demography

Great piece by Kyla Scanlon that is worth reading in full. All the links to other articles she has written related to this topic are worth following as well. This post does a great job of providing a broad persuasive sweep of how GenZ are seeing the world.

Key Takeaways:

• Gen Z faces a double disruption: AI-driven technological change and institutional instability
• Three distinct Gen Z cohorts have emerged, each with different relationships to digital reality
• A version of the barbell strategy is splitting career paths between "safety seekers" and "digital gamblers"
• Our fiscal reality is quite stark right now, and that is shaping how young people see opportunities

But young people are facing a double disruption - (1) technological creative destruction in the form of AI combined with (some form of) political creative destruction in the form of the Trump administration. When I talk to young people from New York or Louisiana or Tennessee or California or DC or Indiana or Massachusetts about their futures, they're not just worried about finding jobs, they're worried about whether or not the whole concept of a "career" as we know it will exist in five years. So in this piece, I want to talk about:

Paradox of Abundance

Paradox of Abundance: Automation Anxiety Returns

Despite sustained increases in material standards of living, fear of the adverse employment consequences of technological advancement has recurred repeatedly. This represents a paradox of abundance: technological change threatens social welfare not because it intensifies scarcity but because it augments abundance. For most citizens of market economies, the primary income-generating asset they possess is their scarce labor. If rapid technological advances were to effectively substitute cheap and abundant capital for (previously) expensive and willful labor, society would be made wealthier, not poorer, in aggregate, but those who own labor but do not own capital might find it increasingly challenging to make a living. This chapter considers why automation anxiety has suddenly become salient in popular and academic discourse. It offers informed conjectures on the potential implications of these developments for employment and earnings.

Using Willpower to Change Circumstance

Vacation Insights - by Josh Zlatkus - Living Fossils #mentalhealth

The most important insight skulking around the discussion so far is that the environment, context, circumstance, or situation is far more powerful in determining how humans feel, and therefore behave, than willpower, self-control, personality, or resolve.

The role of circumstance helps to explain our optimism on the way home from vacation. As we sit on the tarmac, waiting for a gate to open, our projection of the future benefits from the success of the past week—why can’t we carry this good momentum forward? Our problems seem infinitely manageable. Of course, the strong current of environment also explains why we are pulled back into the same old dynamics. If our failures or feelings were unique or inherent to us—part of our personality or personal history—then presumably they would show up on vacation. When they don’t, they are likely part of our circumstance. Others would respond similarly.

So, unless vacation’s positive momentum results in structural changes to a person’s life, it is likely to fade away. Trust me, I’ve seen this time and time again in my practice. People don’t feel better until they find the right relationship, the right job, the right friends, the right city, and so on. Suffering well is an important skill to have, since nobody ever has everything at once; but when it comes to a difficult job, for example, a client’s energy is typically better spent finding a new one than trying to feel differently about the current one.

Willpower should be used to change circumstances, not responses to circumstances. And it must be applied as far upstream as possible. By “upstream,” I mean close to the source of the problem. For example, let’s say you’re in the grocery store and craving ice-cream. You’re also trying to eat healthier these days. You have two options. The first is not to buy the ice-cream. The second is to buy the ice-cream and rely on your willpower later, once the ice-cream is already in your freezer. Which do you think has more chance of success?

As it turns out, there’s something more upstream still. You could eat before you go to the grocery store, reducing your craving. Borrowing language from the first section, we could say that this “diminishes the likelihood that the hunger system will activate and influence perception.”6

I try to make this point to clients all the time. “Willpower isn’t that powerful compared to circumstances,” I say, “and so when you think about using willpower, use it to change your circumstances.” Some clients, after this little speech, delete Instagram right then and there.

Suffering Well

The Art of Suffering Well - by Josh Zlatkus #mentalhealth #suffering #coping

The author argues that rather than over-medicalizing suffering, we should reclaim traditional ways of coping by focusing on expectation and meaning.

Expectation

• Suffering Is Inevitable: The modern mental health model wrongly implies suffering is avoidable, leading people to feel blameworthy for their struggles.
• Encouraging Resilience: Instead of treating people as victims in need of external solutions, we should promote self-reliance and resilience.

Meaning

• Suffering Should Not Be Meaningless: The DSM strips suffering of personal or cultural meaning, reducing it to a clinical issue rather than an existential experience.
• Traditional Coping Mechanisms: Historically, people turned to religion, art, community, and philosophy to make sense of suffering. These approaches were often more effective and enduring than modern clinical methods.
• Loss of Rituals for Suffering: Modern society has largely abandoned ceremonies, myths, and traditions that once helped people navigate pain. Instead, suffering is now seen as something to be managed or eliminated rather than integrated into life.

Viktor Shvets on Govt Spending

Viktor Shvets on what DOGE Is Getting Wrong on US Government Spending - Bloomberg #deficit #economics #finance #government

Risks of an Imbalanced Economy

• Persistent deficits carry risks, but they are less severe for monetarily sovereign nations like the U.S.
• Global rebalancing efforts (e.g., the Plaza Accord in the 1980s) have historically triggered economic crises, suggesting that shifting U.S. deficits may not be simple.
• The Trump administration views deficits as signs of excessive spending, but they have been a key driver of U.S. economic strength.

Addressing Concerns About Government Inefficiency

• The U.S. federal workforce is relatively small compared to other developed nations (8.5 employees per 1,000 people vs. 22 in Germany, 14 in Australia, and 10 in Canada).
• Total government spending as a share of GDP (35%) is lower than most developed economies (which typically range from 40%-60%).
• While bureaucracy exists, there is no strong evidence that the U.S. government is excessively inefficient compared to international standards.

2025-02-21

What is your lore

How Deep Is Your Lore? - WSJ

I love an article that goes deep and deconstructs what might otherwise be considered random genz slang.

Lore is valuable online currency these days. A finalist for Oxford Dictionary’s 2024 word of the year (it lost to “brain rot”), this Old English word for knowledge has become slang for dramatic, and often traumatic, details that define a person’s existence. Driven by the impulse to self-mythologize and spin yarns, young people are enshrining even the most minor incidents as essential public knowledge.

“It makes your life sound like something that has these hidden facets that people would really want to know about,” said Dan Walden, 36, a humanities professor at the University of Tulsa. “Instead of just saying, ‘I had depression when I was 16,’ it sounds more mystical to say, ‘That’s my lore.’”

Wound-baring confessionals have long been a surefire way to get likes and views on social media. Influencers use “get ready with me” videos to pair their makeup routines with intimate, sometimes painful personal stories as a way to build connections with viewers. Now, many of those videos include “lore drops”—not only personal stories but gossip and hearsay.

…

“Online, there is a kind of consciousness of your identity, an awareness of how you’re projecting your qualities, and so to that extent, you are playing a role,” Sokolowski said. “And lore conveys character, conveys narrative, conveys deep history, like ancient history.”

Woke

Opinion | How ‘Woke’ Became the ‘Woke Right’ (and Why It Shouldn’t Surprise Anyone) - The New York Times

More interesting stuff about the origins of the word woke

“Woke” has often been reported (including by me, previously) as first appearing in print in 1962, in an article about “Negro” slang published by The Times. But my colleague Emily Berch has recently brought to my attention that in 1940 the Negro United Mine Workers, a West Virginia labor union, issued a statement that included the lines, “We were asleep. But we will stay woke from now on.”

The blues singer Huddie Ledbetter gave us the first “woke” on record — pun intended — on a 1938 recording of his song “Scottsboro Boys,” urging us to “stay woke.” “Staying woke” meant understanding that there are larger forces operating to keep power unequally distributed in our society, disfavoring especially the poor and people of color. Genevieve Larkin, the wisenheimer social climber in the film “Gold Diggers of 1937,” might not have known the term, but she was getting at something similar when she said, “It’s so hard to be good under the capitalistic system!”

Why “woke” rather than “woken”? Black English tends to collapse the past tense and the participle forms of verbs. Textbook English is present tense “sink,” past tense “sank” and participle “sunk.” Black English is just “sink” and “sunk,” a simplification that’s been catching on more broadly for some time.

…

This is how language change happens, and it is happening especially quickly these days in the language we use to talk about culture and politics. The language is morphing to an extent hard to process day to day.

…

Now take this sentence: “The woke right oppose D.E.I. programs, the conception of ‘trans’ as an identity, gender-affirming care for minors, and terms referring to groups such as Latinx and BIPOC.” These unfamiliar uses of “woke,” “D.E.I.” and “trans” and the novel terms “gender-affirming,” “Latinx” and “BIPOC” would not strike someone from even just 15 years ago as Swedish, but would be nearly as incomprehensible. Much of our English vocabulary is in a kind of hypercharge of late, and this is why “woke” has seemed to be such a slippery shape-shifter.

The psychological centre of gravity

The Imperfectionist: Reality is right here

This edition of The Imperfectionist won’t be answering that question conclusively, I’m afraid. But there’s one piece of advice I’m confident applies to basically everyone: as far as you can manage it, you should make sure your psychological centre of gravity is in your real and immediate world – the world of your family and friends and neighborhood, your work and your creative projects, as opposed to the world of presidencies and governments, social forces and global emergencies.

• [ ] This will make you happier. It will make you more meaningfully productive. And to whatever extent it falls to you to be an active citizen – to be engaged in politics, say, or in otherwise addressing world events – it’ll make you better at that, too. There really is no downside.

…

One very good way to tell that your centre of gravity is out of whack is when it feels like you spend a lot of time inside the minds of far-off strangers. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han points out, the internet – contrary to the dreams of its hippie pioneers – hasn’t created a flourishing, supersized, wonderfully democratic public sphere in which we all get to constructively debate the issues of the day. Instead it erodes the public sphere, by connecting our minds directly to the unedited neediness, rage or fear inside everyone else’s minds, which in turn trigger such reactions in us. And so to follow American politics at the moment isn’t merely to follow the activities of Elon Musk, but to feel overly familiar with his twitchy and emotionally reactive inner life as well. This isn’t healthy. To get along successfully with each other, Han argues, we need a certain psychological distance, some cognitive privacy. There’s some appropriate level of such privacy between me and my wife, for goodness’s sake, so you’d better believe there’s one between me and Musk.

Reasons for drop in software engineering vacancies

Software engineering job openings hit five-year low? - The Pragmatic Engineer

The numbers don’t lie, job listings for devs have plummeted. There’s a few potential reasons why:

• GenAI impact
• Interest rate changes explain some of the drop, but not everything
• The tech sector seems to react to sudden events with more intensity than any other industry
• A perception that engineering is no longer a bottleneck could be a reason for lower hiring
• Still too many engineers, after overrecruitment in 2021-2022?
• Are smaller teams more efficient?

and finally

I’m sure that LLMs are a leading cause of the fall in software developer job postings: there’s uncertainty at large companies about whether to hire as fast as previously, given the productivity hype around AI tooling, and businesses are opting to “wait and see” by slowing down recruitment, as a result.

2025-02-22

How to live a meaningful life

How to make your life feel more meaningful | Psyche Guides #philosophy #existentialism #meaning #life

Key points – How to make your life feel more meaningful

1. A meaningful life is deeply connected. Strong links to friends and family, to a community, to your work or to a transcendent realm can help you feel that your life makes sense and that what you do matters.
2. Give yourself a meaning-in-life audit. Rate how well connected you feel to sources of meaning in each of the key domains (close relationships, community, work, spirituality) and see where you have room to grow.
3. Use the audit to refocus on your connections. Strengthening your connections in any one domain can help you build meaning overall – so focus on where your ratings are lower, such as by joining a group that aligns with your values (the community domain), or seeking new, purpose-driven challenges at your job or outside of it (the work domain).
4. Try existential exercises when you need a boost. Practice self-grounding by writing about an important personal value and what it means to you. Or reflect back nostalgically on personal milestones, important relationships, or challenges overcome to remind yourself of how the past has shaped you.
5. Pursue self-transcendent experiences. Explore new spiritual practices, novel encounters with nature, or other pathways to enhance your sense that you are connected to something greater than yourself.

LLM Codegen Workflow

My LLM codegen workflow atm | Harper Reed's Blog #llm #coding #assistant

Yet another post about how to use LLMs to generate code. Found this one to be a bit different. Need to try.