Daily Log Digest – Week 9, 2025
2025-03-02
Stablecoins
Stablecoins: the real crypto craze #crypto #stablecoin #finance
stablecoins are increasingly used for real-world purposes, too. Migrants send remittances with them, replacing a correspondent-banking system beset by high fees and delays. The Turkish trader says that shopkeepers in the Grand Bazaar pay suppliers with the coins as they are the fastest option. In countries where inflation erodes savings and dollars are scarce, they are catching on as a store of value. A survey of stablecoin-holders in Turkey and four other emerging markets by Castle Island Ventures, which invests in crypto startups, and Visa, a payments giant, finds that nearly half use them for this purpose.
Oversight is not all bad for stablecoins, facilitating interest from mainstream finance. Stripe, a payments firm, has bought Bridge, a stablecoin-infrastructure startup. Visa has built a platform to help lenders issue coins; BBVA, Spain’s second-largest bank, will be among the first to use it, perhaps for money transfers. Stablecoins have shown their value in the backrooms of the Grand Bazaar. Their next task is to do so in the regulators’ offices and boardrooms of Washington and Wall Street.
Being Independent
Pure Independence · Collab Fund #self-help #self-improvement #independence
Great piece by Morgan Housel
I have seen many people achieve some level of financial independence only to be sucked into a new kind of dependence: the culture of their tribe. Financial freedom is achieved, but it’s replaced with sycophancy to a new boss, or a blind adherence to tribal views you might disagree with deep down.
It’s a unique form of poverty: rather than needing to work for money, you are indebted to needing to think a certain way.
I once heard a good litmus test: If I can predict your views on one topic by hearing your views about another, unrelated topic, you are not thinking independently. Example: If your views on immigration allow someone to accurately predict your views on abortion and gun control, there’s a good chance you’re not thinking independently.
Grid and Flexbox Visual Cheatsheets
Nice visual cheatsheets. #grid #flexbox #css #cheatsheet #tools - GRID: A simple visual cheatsheet for CSS Grid Layout - FLEX: A simple visual cheatsheet for flexbox
Personal Renewal by John Gardener
PBS - JOHN GARDNER - EDUCATION AND EXCELLENCE #self-help #self-improvement #ambition
We've all seen men and women, even ones in fortunate circumstances with responsible positions who seem to run out of steam in midcareer.
One must be compassionate in assessing the reasons. Perhaps life just presented them with tougher problems than they could solve. It happens. Perhaps something inflicted a major wound on their confidence or their self-esteem. Perhaps they were pulled down by the hidden resentments and grievances that grow in adult life, sometimes so luxuriantly that, like tangled vines, they immobilize the victim. You've known such people -- feeling secretly defeated, maybe somewhat sour and cynical, or perhaps just vaguely dispirited. Or maybe they just ran so hard for so long that somewhere along the line they forgot what it was they were running for.
"Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account."
I'm not talking about anything as narrow as ambition. After all, ambition eventually wears out and probably should. But you can keep your zest until the day you die. If I may offer you a simple maxim, "Be interesting," Everyone wants to be interesting -- but the vitalizing thing is to be interested. Keep a sense of curiosity. Discover new things. Care. Risk failure. Reach out.
I've watched a lot of mid-career people, and Yogi Berra says you can observe a lot just by watching. I've concluded that most people enjoy learning and growing. And many are dearly troubled by the self-assessments of mid-career.
Such self-assessments are no great problem at your age. You're young and moving up. The drama of your own rise is enough. But when you reach middle age, when your energies aren't what they used to be, then you'll begin to wonder what it all added up to; you'll begin to look for the figure in the carpet of your life. I have some simple advice for you when you begin that process. Don't be too hard on yourself. Look ahead. Someone said that "Life is the art of drawing without an eraser." And above all don't imagine that the story is over. Life has a lot of chapters.
The more I see of human lives, the more I believe the business of growing up is much longer drawn out than we pretend. If we achieve it in our 30's, even our 40s, we're doing well. To those of you who are parents of teenagers, I can only say "Sorry about that."
2025-03-03
Erotic Writing
Erotic writing is becoming more explicit #erotica #books #literature
But eroticism is changing. Open “Onyx Storm”, the latest romantasy book (a genre that blends romance and fantasy) by Rebecca Yarros, and things are rather clearer. Hardy perennials are out. Words like “hard” are in—as too are words including “cock”, “fuck” and “straddle”. And people are buying it. Sales of erotica are booming: thanks to pre-orders, “Onyx Storm” had already been on Amazon’s bestseller list for 19 weeks by the time it was published in January. After release, it shifted almost 3m copies in a week. It sold faster than any novel in America in the past 20 years.
There is now a vast variety of erotica available, including cosy erotica (knitwear is torn off), Austen erotica (Mr Darcy has assets even more impressive than £10,000 a year) and fairy erotica. There is even erotica featuring—readers may wish to brace themselves—physicists. These titles contain such explicit lines as, “Your dissertation on liquid crystals’ static distortions in biaxial nematics was brilliant, Elsie.”
What has driven this is new digital formats, such as audiobooks. (Ms Yarros and Ms Maas dominate those charts, too.) The e-book has been especially consequential. It is discreet—no one can see what you are reading on a tablet. And it lets authors self-publish cheaply, as Ms James did in 2011 with “Fifty Shades of Grey”, a story of sadomasochism. It was later republished by Vintage, but romance lovers retained the habit of reading books digitally.
Authorial autonomy online means it is “impossible to police” what goes into books, says Hal Gladfelder of the University of Manchester. The ubiquity of internet pornography means that even to try to do so would feel “ridiculous”.
In one sense this new generation of erotic prose is more realistic than what came before. Floral analogies are out; proper body parts are in. But in another sense, it is not remotely realistic. Everyone is gorgeous; names like “Xaden” and “Aetos” dominate; most characters have remarkable powers, if not superpowers.
Crypto Bailout By Trump
Issue 78 – President on brink of bailout for bitcoin #crypto
From Molly White's latest newsletter.
And although many still describe bitcoin as “digital gold”, believing that it should serve as a hedge against economic turmoil in similar ways as some people view actual gold, bitcoin and other crypto assets are once again demonstrating that they are among some of the first assets to decline among broader economic uncertainty. With looming tariffs by the Trump administration against Canada, Mexico, and China, concerns from the Federal Reserve about those and other policies’ impacts on inflation, and continuing wobbles in the labor market, people are selling off risky assets like crypto in hopes of better weathering the economic storm on the horizon. The comparatively new bitcoin ETFs set new records for the highest single-day outflows on February 25, with investors withdrawing more than $1 billion in total from the eleven ETFs.3
Seeming to respond to the panicked pleas from the cryptocurrency industry, Trump rescued bitcoin from its below-$80,000 slide in a Sunday Truth Social post reiterating his plans for a “U.S. Crypto Reserve”, which he added would contain “XRP [Ripple], SOL [Solana], and ADA [Cardano]”. Further panic from bitcoin maximalists likely prompted his quick addendum two hours later that “And, obviously, BTC and ETH, as other valuable Cryptocurrencies, will be the heart of the Reserve. I also love Bitcoin and Ethereum!” Nice save.4
Why I don’t feel threatened as a software engineer
Why I don’t feel threatened as a software engineer #llm #software #programming
My perspective on this as a developer who’s been using these systems on a daily basis for a couple of years now is that I find that they enhance my value. I am so much more competent and capable as a developer because I’ve got these tools assisting me. I can write code in dozens of new programming languages that I never learned before.
But I still get to benefit from my 20 years of experience.
Take somebody off the street who’s never written any code before and ask them to build an iPhone app with ChatGPT. They are going to run into so many pitfalls, because programming isn’t just about can you write code—it’s about thinking through the problems, understanding what’s possible and what’s not, understanding how to QA, what good code is, having good taste.
There’s so much depth to what we do as software engineers.
I’ve said before that generative AI probably gives me like two to five times productivity boost on the part of my job that involves typing code into a laptop. But that’s only 10 percent of what I do. As a software engineer, most of my time isn’t actually spent with the typing of the code. It’s all of those other activities.
The AI systems help with those other activities, too. They can help me think through architectural decisions and research library options and so on. But I still have to have that agency to understand what I’m doing.
So as a software engineer, I don’t feel threatened. My most optimistic view of this is that the cost of developing software goes down because an engineer like myself can be more ambitious, can take on more things. As a result, demand for software goes up—because if you’re a company that previously would never have dreamed of building a custom CRM for your industry because it would have taken 20 engineers a year before you got any results... If it now takes four engineers three months to get results, maybe you’re in the market for software engineers now that you weren’t before.
Are we all severed
Are we all severed? | Dazed #severance #tv #culture #work
This article started with Severance but went to many places
Severance is often described as a dystopian work of science fiction, but there are stark similarities between the show’s world and our own. While it’s not possible to literally bifurcate your consciousness – yet – how many of us contain parts of our identities just to get through the day? How many of us have gone to work while depressed, brokenhearted or grieving? On a macro level: how many of us have gone to work knowing that wars, famines, and genocides are happening? Arguably, under late capitalism – which prioritises work over all else – we’re all kind of severed.
It’s partly a psychological survival strategy; compartmentalisation is a very common trauma response. Our brains can only handle so much. But it’s fair to say we feel considerable pressure to compartmentalise in the first place because society isn’t structured in a way which allows people to look at trauma head-on. Why is it that Mark must return to work three weeks after Gemma’s death_, when a steady return to normal functioning after a bereavement can typically take two or more years? The need for him to be productive and _keep working is so urgent, so imperative, that he allows his employer to stick a microchip in his brain. But Severance does not condone severance: Lumon uses the innies’ ignorance to exploit them in a number of innovatively cruel and evil ways. Instead, it emphatically skewers the ridiculousness of modern life, where productivity (and appearing sane) always takes precedence over personal pain.
NoteGPT
NoteGPT - AI Summarizer and Generator for Enhanced Learning #tools #ai
Useful suite of tools to perform a lot of AI assisted tasks like transcription, summary generation etc.
Men and Close Friendships
Too many men lack close friendships. What’s holding them back? | Psyche Ideas #friendship #masculinity #culture
High-quality, close friendships involve intimacy, the fragile closeness born of risking ourselves and being met with acceptance and belonging. This kind of closeness can evade men in environments that operate on norms of indifference or active hostility towards expressing what is happening in their inner worlds.
Alao, 33, a Nigerian gay man, put it more bluntly: ‘Straight men have a lot to learn from us.’ For him, the casual tenderness and care often seen in same-gender male relationships shouldn’t be confined to the queer community. Trans men echoed this perspective, drawing from their unique vantage point of navigating masculinity while remembering their previous girlhoods or womanhoods. ‘As a man with a girlhood, I’m confident in expressing vulnerable needs,’ said Liam, 28, a graduate student in New Jersey. He added that friendships with cisgender men often feel like ‘a step down in intimacy’. These relationships could be richer, he believes, if cisgender men risked sharing their own ‘vulnerable needs’, and also learned how to meet that need in others.
We have, as a society, always demanded bravery from men. But so many are still lost when it comes to the bravery that close relationships demand.
Reading - Switching from Paper to Screens
What does switching from paper to screens mean for how we read? | Psyche Ideas #reading #screen
Reading is so commonplace that it’s hard to appreciate how much of a challenge it poses to the human brain. As you read this sentence, you’re using the visual forms of words to access their meanings and pronunciations from memory, and then using this information, and the neural systems that evolved for spoken language, to construct larger units of meaning: phrases, sentences and extended discourse. Reading is a relatively recent cultural invention; our brain did not evolve to read. Only after years of education and practice do people learn to coordinate the brain systems needed to support skilled reading. This process is inherently difficult, as evidenced by the fact that a significant proportion of people struggle to attain reading proficiency despite having normal intelligence and opportunities for education.
One of these findings is the screen inferiority effect. As its name suggests, this effect refers to demonstrations that – with all else being equal – a text that is read on a digital screen will be less well understood than the same text if it is read on paper. If you’re reading this article online, for example, your understanding of its content may (at least to some degree) be compromised. After reading the article, you might be able to accurately answer questions about its gist, but not necessarily be able to report the details as well as if you had read it on paper. The effect has been documented across different languages and writing systems, indicating that it is robust.
Some studies, however, have provided evidence that the size of this effect is influenced by a number of variables. One of these variables is the nature of the text: the comprehension of narrative texts (in which readers become immersed in a story) seems to be less affected by how the text is displayed, compared with the comprehension of expository texts. So, if you’re engaged in an interesting novel, as opposed to studying a textbook, your grasp of the text will likely be less influenced by whether it’s on a screen or in print form. Another important variable is the amount of time available to read, with the screen inferiority effect being larger when readers are under pressure to read rapidly. If you have to read something very quickly, you’d probably be better off reading it in print. There is some evidence that reading skill is an important variable, too, with the screen inferiority effect being more pronounced for less skilled readers.
2025-03-04
The Return of Romanticism
We Really Are Entering a New Age of Romanticism #culture
An article from Ted Gioia which gave me a lot of hope.
In the old days, movie villains were mobsters or crime syndicates. Nowadays they are tech innovators. This kind of shift in the popular imagination does not happen by chance.
Now let’s revisit the (even older) history.
Back in the 1700s, ruthless algorithms had a different name. They called them Rationalism—and the whole Western world was under the sway of the Age of Reason. But like today’s algorithms, the new systems of the Rationalists attempted to replace human wisdom and experience with intrusive and inflexible operating rules.
It didn’t work.
“This rationalistic philosophy, which had been expected to solve all the problems, had failed to rescue society from either despotism and poverty,” explains Edmund Wilson in his masterful study To the Finland Station.
“The mechanical inventions of which it had been expected that they would vastly improve the lot of humanity were obviously making many people miserable,” he continues.
(By the way, it’s no coincidence that recent tech overreach has been accompanied by a New Rationalism, championed by crypto swindler Sam Bankman-Fried and his many fellow travelers. But that subject deserves a whole article of its own….Now let’s return to history.)
The Rationalists of the 1700s (and today) put their faith in three things—and they all backfired.
(1) The most obvious failure was the attempt to impose rational rules on the political system. This led to the French Revolution, which soon collapsed in terrible bloodshed, and resulted in the dictatorship of Napoleon.
Millions of people died because the dominant algorithms didn’t work.
(2) The second obsession of the Rationalists in the 1700s was the total systematization of all knowledge. (Does that sound familiar?)
They didn’t have ChatGPT back then. But they did the best they could with the immense efforts of the French Encyclopedists and German taxonomists.
Everything got classified, codified, quantified, named, and placed on a chart. Foucault later mocked this as an “archeology of human sciences.”
Everything was forced into the system—even (or especially) humans.
That’s because this way of understanding the world failed to grasp anything that evolved or grew or changed or lived. Like the tech-gone-wild ethos of the current day, the messy human element was removed from the Rationalist systems.
(3) But the Rationalists of the 1700s made one more mistake—and it reminds us again of our current situation. They let a brutal technocracy destroy people’s lives—driven by dreams of profit maximization, and ignoring the human cost.
It wasn’t called Silicon Valley back then. The name given to the technocracy in the 1700s was the Industrial Revolution.
We don’t fully grasp the horrors of the factory sweat shops today—because the Romanticists worked on fixing the problems of industrialism in the 1820s and 1830s. This new generation of artists, humanists, and compassionate critics of the technocracy passed laws against child labor, unsafe working conditions, abusive hours, and other exploitative practices.
In other words, the Romanticists replaced the algorithm with humanist values. Rationalism on its own would never do that.
Canva Design Essentials
Graphic Design Essentials #canva #design
Decided to watch this video series from Canva's Design School collection on a whim. Finally took the time to properly go through the color theory stuff which is well explained.
Freelancing as Software Engineer
Came across a couple of articles this week that contained some good tips on how to get freelancing gigs. #freelancer #jobs #software
Nerd Reich
The Nerd Reich #silicon #valley #politics #fascism
Have to admit this is a great name for a newsletter by Gil Duran that critiques the politics of Silicon Valley. He has been at it for a long time now, long before current political developments post the presidential elections.
He came on the Angry Planet podcast and did a scathing takedown of the current administration and its policies: Welcome to the Nerd Reich - Angry Planet (podcast) | Listen Notes
Some excerpts from the podcast transcript.
About Curtis Yarvin
So we're gonna get real granular with some of the stuff at the top, and explain some of the personalities. Who is Curtis Yarvin? Speaker 4: Curtis Yarvin is a software programmer mostly based in San Francisco who in the early two thousands started writing under the name Mintius Moldbug, a series of essays largely focused on the need to replace democracy with dictatorship. Back then, he's sort of an anonymous troll, not using his real name. People who'd known him a long time say he's always been like that and people probably didn't take him too seriously. But he caught the ear of some important people eventually. Most notable, Peter Thiel, who, by, you know, a few years later was investing along with Andreessen Horowitz in Curtis Charbon's software idea for something called Urbit to create this decentralized peer to peer computer network, you know, on libertarian vision. And he was became known for his ideas as Peter Thiel's house philosopher. And he's continued to write these things in, in subsequent years and laying out more aggressively and in more detail how one might go about replacing a democratic government with a sort of corporate tech dictatorship.
About pseudo-intellectualism in Silicon Valley:
The critique seems to be that democracy doesn't work and it's bad and it hasn't solved all the problems and it just creates more problems. But no no the the other part to understand about these guys is that they're not intellectuals. They are pseudo intellectuals. They pretend to be smart. They pretend to understand things like history.
Look, I'm not a historian. Right? Studied a lot of politics, but I'm not a political scientist. These guys act like they're all a bit altogether, political science, historian. But when you look at what they're actually doing, and I'm working on a piece actually that categorizes their argument style because they all have it in common.
They take something in history, completely misinterpret or warp it, cherry pick whatever facts they want, all to fit their thesis and try to say that everything in history proves that what I'm saying is right. Now a critical thinker and an intellectual is also aware of the contradicting information and you have to make your presumptions and your predictions based on a more nuanced version of things. For instance, I think that most tyrannies have a history of collapsing and being overthrown. And I think that'll happen with whatever these guys are trying to do. However, in history, we see that sometimes tyranny can last a few decades or longer.
So the question is, will this last a long time? Ten, twenty years, the rest of our productive lives? Or can we overthrow it, overturn it in a couple of years in the next election or whatever. Right? So, you know, but they cherry pick the information and pretend they know what they're talking about.
On the Silicon Valley ideology
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. That's true. Anyway, but, it the Silicon Valley ethos, I mean what? Yeah. I mean, if I create a video game, am I gonna become a total asshole?
Speaker 2: Mhmm. Yes. Okay.
Speaker 4: There are a few who don't seem to be like that, but I do think that it gives rise to this sort of, idea of supremacy. That you are of a superior intelligence because you understand technology and because you have managed to make a lot, a lot of money. And it's something I observed while I was working in politics was it seemed to me that if you have power, then you want money. If you have money, then you want power. If you want both, then you kinda wanna live forever and be God, and that's where you start to have a problem.
And so I think we're at the part where the the people with money have realized that they have power, they're using it. And And we're also starting to see that their ideology their ideology get really, really weird, and they're starting to talk a lot more about God and living forever and getting off the planet and being bigger than being human. And so I think that theory that I kind of thought up a long time ago that crossed my mind came is is coming to fruition because we do see this weird interesting turn, you know, there's this there's this bundle of ideologies that, a couple of researchers, Timnit Gebru and Emil Torres put together called tescreal, t e s c r e a l. Transhumanism, exotropianism, singularitarianism, rationalism, cosmism, effective altruism, and longtermism. I can't believe I remembered all of them off the top of my head.
But it's this I these ideas that have bubbled up out of Silicon Valley that essentially amount to an ideology of tech supremacy. We are smarter than everyone. We are richer than everyone, and a desired destiny to rule the world. And you see this coming out in terms of this sort of abundance agenda, which basically amounts to, let tech people do whatever they want without regulation and they'll save us. Right?
Podcast summary by ChatGPT here: ChatGPT - Silicon Valley Authoritarianism Rise
2025-03-05
Writing Styles of Famous Tech People
On Writing #1 - by Zvi Mowshowitz #writing #styles
Great post breaking down how famous tech folks write, and their peculiar style.
2025-03-06
The Joy of React
The Joy of React #react #course
Speedran sections of this course because I got this sudden urge to learn React a bit more in depth.
I have to build another static site, and instead of doing it in Go like this one, I wanna do it in React. I feel like there will be less of a cognitive dissonance between the frontend tech and the the tech used to build the static site if I just do it all in Typescript. Let's see how the experiment turns out.
2025-03-07
The Lead-Pipe Theory of the Internet
Came across this great quote from the book The Socratic Method by Ward Farnsworth : Amazon.com: The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook (Audible Audio Edition): Ward Farnsworth, John Lescault, Blackstone Publishing: Books #books #socrates
The book will also offer some ideas about how Socratic teachings relate to our current cultural and political difficulties. Let us backtrack a moment. The ancient Romans built elaborate networks of pipes to deliver water where they wanted it to go. The networks were a marvel. But many of the pipes were made of lead, and the water carried the lead along with it. One school of thought regards this as part of the reason for the decline and fall of Rome: lead poisoning gradually took its toll, impairing the thought and judgment of many Romans, especially at the top. The theory is much disputed; perhaps it contains no truth. But as a metaphor it is irresistible. We have built networks for the delivery of information-the internet, and especially social media. These networks, too, are a marvel. But they also carry a kind of poison with them. The mind fed from those sources learns to subsist happily on quick reactions, easy certainties, one-liners, and rage. It craves confirmation and resents contradiction. Attention spans collapse; imbecility propagates, then seems normal, then is celebrated. The capacity for rational discourse between people who disagree gradually rots. I have a good deal more confidence in the lead-pipe theory of the internet, and its effect on our culture, than in the lead-pipe theory of the fall of Rome.
Against Self-Improvement
The Marginalian – Marginalia on our search for meaning. #self-help #self-improvement
Loved this quote from the book On Getting Better
We can’t imagine our lives without the wish to improve them, without the progress myths that inform so much of what we do, and of what we want (we don’t tend to think of ourselves as wanting to be what we are already). Whether we call it ambition, or aspiration, or just desire, what we want and what we want to be is always our primary preoccupation, but it is always set in the future, as though what could be — our better life, our better selves — lures us on. As though it is the better future that makes our lives worth living; as though it is hope that we most want.
On Vibe Coding
Will the future of software development run on vibes? - Ars Technica #ai #coding
As Karpathy humorously acknowledged in his original post, the approach is for the ultimate lazy programmer experience: "I ask for the dumbest things, like 'decrease the padding on the sidebar by half,' because I'm too lazy to find it myself. I 'Accept All' always; I don't read the diffs anymore."
At its core, the technique transforms anyone with basic communication skills into a new type of natural language programmer—at least for simple projects. With AI models currently being held back by the amount of code an AI model can digest at once (context size), there tends to be an upper limit to how complex a vibe-coded software project can get before the human at the wheel becomes a high-level project manager, manually assembling slices of AI-generated code into a larger architecture. But as technical limits expand with each generation of AI models, those limits may one day disappear.
But there are limits to how far Willison will go. "Vibe coding your way to a production codebase is clearly risky. Most of the work we do as software engineers involves evolving existing systems, where the quality and understandability of the underlying code is crucial."
At some point, understanding at least some of the code is important because AI-generated code may include bugs, misunderstandings, and confabulations—for example, instances where the AI model generates references to nonexistent functions or libraries.
Even so, the risk-reward calculation for vibe coding becomes far more complex in professional settings. While a solo developer might accept the trade-offs of vibe coding for personal projects, enterprise environments typically require code maintainability and reliability standards that vibe-coded solutions may struggle to meet. When code doesn't work as expected, debugging requires understanding what the code is actually doing—precisely the knowledge that vibe coding tends to sidestep.
Linus Torvalds on Being a Visionary
Linus Torvalds is not a visionary - YouTube #linus #vision
This quote resonates so much, esp when I see all the folks on X walking around in an AI driven haze. It feels okay to not be a part of that crowd and still feel validated.
I am not a visionary. I'm an engineer. I'm happy with the people who are wandering around looking at the stars but I am looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole before I fall in.
2025-03-08
Chill day. Watched some shows. Did some travel planning.