1 / Reading

Enjoyed "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge" by Abraham Flexner, the founding director of the Institute of Advanced Study.

Alexander von Humboldt keeps cropping up in my readings (nature, knowledge, the nature of knowledge, the knowledge of nature; see below). I gained a newfound appreciation for Johns Hopkins University.

Also, three papers on general intelligence:

• Natural General Intelligence
• Visual General Intelligence
• Superchocolate (Four biological conjectures)

Feel like LLMs are phase 1 of the intelligence supercycle. Text was easy to strip-mine. Phase 2 will get a bit wild, I suspect.

2 / Building

Venkatesh Rao's Blygger is a protocol for publishing short, versioned writing from your own site, in a form other sites can follow. I set up a node at caseyjr.org/blyg to participate in the experiment.

While watching Sunday Night Football, I had inspiration for a post but I didn't want to get off the couch to grab my laptop, type out a .md file, then git add, git commit, git push.

So I vibe-coded a Drafts action that posts from my phone like a tweet. Open source: drafts-blyg.

3 / Listening

I went to a music festival and saw the weirdest / coolest band: Angine de Poitrine.

I love how:

1. in a culture obsessed with identity, they hide theirs
2. in a world that is absurd, they full send absurdity
3. in a year when nerds are obsessed with agentic loops, they shred using musical loops

Honestly thought I was at a cult ceremony when they started playing. The drummer's swinging proboscis is absolutely ludicrous.

But also, the creativity is top tier. Awesome artists. Weird times!

4 / Number

780 million

The job gap in developing economies over the next 10-15 years. While 420 million jobs are expected to be created for the 1.2 billion young people reaching working age, the world is facing a massive shortfall.

— World Bank

Thanks for reading!

Hit reply! I read every response.

Let me know what you’re reading, building, and/or listening to.

Abrazos,
Mike