2026-02-10

Raw Japanese Denim Guide

Raw Japanese Denim: A Beginner's Guide #jeans #selvedge

Just putting it here for future reference. I currently own a pair of Nudie jeans made from Japanese raw denim, and another pair of bespoke Japanese raw denim jeans stitched at Monks of Method. Since over six months ago, I have only been alternating between these two jeans for my bottomwear. I haven't gone back to any of my other bottomwear in that time, no cap!

So I guess it will be a while before I have to go back and buy another pair of denims. Which is a bit of a bummer because some of these jeans look really cool. Maybe I can donate one of my jeans and get one of these instead, just to keep things fresh.

2026-02-11

LLM Information Inflation

The AI Edition — brandur.org

This section from Brandur's latest newsletter made me laugh out loud

A conventional practice for execs at Snowflake was to send out what was called a “snippet”. Usually on a weekly cadence, these were emails containing personal notes on ongoing action and details on what their divisions were working on. The first thing you notice about “snippets” is the sheer volume of them – in the default set of on-boarding mailing lists you start getting them from every part of the organization on day one. The second thing you notice about snippets is their length – comprehensive detail, painstaking even. Essays once a week.

One might even say a suspicious amount of detail. Detail that includes a few too many tables, emoji, and emdashes. Yes, most of these were undoubtedly LLM-generated.

But LLM use isn’t just reserved for execs. In fact, Gemini was on by default, so everyone who received one of these long scrawls got a short, three point summary on top of it. The summary was so concise and so convenient that most recipients (including yours truly) read nothing further.

You have to step back and appreciate the absurdity of this situation. An executive enters three lines to produce a small novella which he then bulk emails to the rest of the organization. Receivers get an automatic three line summary that … looks a lot like what the sender wrote in the first place. The novella’s read by no one except a few stragglers who aren’t in on the joke yet. Is this progress?

There’s a punch line about information theory in here somewhere.

2026-02-13

How Courtship Transformed Masculinity

How Courtship Transformed Masculinity - by Alice Evans #romance #relationships #culture #anthropology

Ask an economist what drives progress towards gender equality, they’ll probably emphasise sustained economic growth, contraceptives, and female employment. Talk to a political scientist, hear that it’s all about feminist activism. All valid, but I want to add a culture of female choice, male competition, and marital companionship.

While romantic love is experienced worldwide, there is enormous variation in the extent to which it is celebrated or suppressed. In regions where marriages are arranged by kin or coerced through brutal violence, her wants and welfare count for little. If divorce is stigmatised, she cannot credibly threaten exit and must then endure any abuse.

…

What follows is a speech I performed at my German friends’ wedding: two thousand years of history through the lens of marriage, starting with Ancient Rome to the Reformation, Wars of Religion and subsequent Romanticism, all the way to 1970s counter-cultural liberalisation.

Situationism - what people do is more often a function of their circumstances

Getting the Crab to the Beach - by Josh Zlatkus #evo-psych #evolution #psychology

A few months ago, I wrapped up a long series on human behavior arguing for situationism—the idea that what people do is more often a function of their circumstances than their character. I was pleased to discover afterwards that Angela Duckworth agrees.

In my musings on mental health, I frequently return to images of animals radically out of place: crabs in the canopy, otters in the desert, armadillos in the arctic. What would we learn by studying such animals? One obvious lesson is that if we wanted to help them, we should send them home. It would be a waste of time—or worse—to focus on what they were thinking, feeling, or doing, since these would be the downstream outputs of an animal in the wrong environment.

For example, we could draw all sorts of conclusions by watching a crab scrabble at the smooth surface of a tree branch. Perhaps there is food just under the bark. Maybe it’s a mating ritual or territorial instinct. The correct explanation, of course, would be that the crab is trying, unsuccessfully, to burrow in the sand. Yet we’d have a hell of a time figuring this out if we didn’t already know that crabs belong on the beach.

…

Humans, of course, are crabs in the canopy. We are vacuum cleaners on the roof. This modern world we have built, in the blink of an evolutionary eye, is not our ancestral home. So we live in many ways for which we were not designed—for example, in the constant presence of so many strangers. Yet few people carry this perspective with them, even into fields like therapy, where you might expect it to be foundational. The result is that when distress appears in its various confusing forms, therapists and laypeople rarely treat it as situational pathology—as the noxious byproduct of a poor fit between person and environment.

Millenials vs GenZ

Enjoyed this little dig at GenZ culture (as an elder millenial)

Won't Fix Self Help

"Won't Fix" self help #self-help #self-improvement

I can't read this article (members only!), but I love and wholeheartedly endorse the concept.

I'd like to propose a third option: the reasonable // rational recognition that most of your personal flaws are "Won't Fix" bugs, and the single most productive thing you can do about them is stop trying to patch them.

The self-help industry's entire business model depends on convincing you that every single bug in your system is fixable, that with the right framework, the right habits, the right coach, you'll finally refactor yourself into a clean, well-architected human being. But how many of your core personality traits have actually changed in the last decade?

The honest answer, for most people, is...very fucking few.

I also like the coding analogies used in the post 😊.

Self-improvement culture is a perpetual second-system rewrite of the self. You're constantly trying to architect Human 2.0, the version of you that's disciplined and calm and focused and doesn't check their phone 96 times a day (which is, by the way, the actual average for American adults, according to Asurion's widely cited research). But Human 2.0 never ships. You keep accumulating half-finished refactors and abandoned meditation streaks alongside a growing sense that something is fundamentally wrong with your willpower.

The alternative is the wrapper pattern. When you have a piece of legacy code that works but has an ugly interface, you don't rewrite it. You write a thin layer around it, a wrapper, that presents a clean interface to the rest of the system while leaving the messy internals untouched. The legacy code keeps doing what it always did, and the wrapper translates between the old system and the new requirements.

In Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day Stevens, the butler, reflects on the decades he spent perfecting his professional dignity at the expense of, well, everthing else. His entire life was a refactoring project: eliminate the personal, optimize for service, become the ideal version of what a butler should be. By the end of the novel he's technically excellent and profoundly diminished. He optimized the wrong thing for forty years because he never stopped to ask whether the specification itself was flawed.

Won't Fix is the practice of questioning the specification. Most of the things you're trying to fix about yourself are only problems relative to some imagined ideal of a person you were never going to be. Your distractibility is a bug in the "focused knowledge worker" spec but might be a feature in the "person who notices interesting things and connects them unexpectedly" spec. Your sensitivity and your stubbornness, your tendency to monologue about niche topics at parties: all Won't Fix, and all load-bearing, and all probably okay in the big, heat-death-of-the-universe scheme of all things.

Stop trying to ship Human 2.0. Tag the bugs, write the wrappers, and get back to building something worth building. The most productive version of you probably looks a lot like the current version of you, plus a few well-placed adapter patterns and minus about thirty self-help books worth of guilt about not being somone else.