Hi friends,

Hope you’re enjoying the spring!

I recently got back on LinkedIn, which is still the most cursed social network. However, it has been unexpectedly lovely to reconnect with some long-lost pals and colleagues — including some telling me that they still enjoy reading this newsletter! So if we’ve not spoken in a long time: do say hello! I love to hear from you!! I will never monetise this, but I am getting paid in praise.

Anyway here’s some links for ya:

Wikipedia is the best website

• There is a whole article exposing a debate about the mental health of Jesus and whether it was sane to start a religion. (The picture is sending me.)

• Until a few years ago, places and events in Sweden needed to apply for a paid dancing permit. “Establishment lacking such permit must prevent guests from dancing, for example by stopping the music. The police may take photographs and films of patrons moving in sync with the music in a dance-like way. These photos and films may later be used as evidence of a crime if the establishment is lacking the required permit.”

• I almost forgot about the 2016 clown sightings in random places.

• In 1995, a Dutch inventor claimed to have created a compression algorithm, the Sloot Digital Coding System, that could store an entire feature film in just one kilobyte. He demonstrated it convincingly to multiple investors, was on the verge of signing a deal worth millions — and died suddenly of a heart attack two days before the handover. The exact algorithm was never recovered, but the demonstration device was found to contain a hidden hard drive.

Enjoy this gal in our garden

Mildly interesting

• Why some people see collapse earlier than others: an essay exploring how neurodivergent people have different ways of seeking patterns and tend to be more “collapse-aware”.

• Beautiful essay on the utopia of the family computer: “There was a time when the internet had a place in the home; a corner, a schedule, a shared practice.” It’s a bit nostalgic but it’s important to notice how these barriers have vanished with newer technology.

• There’s a vast and deep network of fake rescue operations in Nepal, siphoning millions from travel insurance by claiming nonexistent helicopter trips and fake evacuations.

• Heated Rivalry feels like years ago, but this was a good op-ed that articulates some of what I felt: I’m So Used to Gay Tragedies That I Almost Missed Romance.

• Americans are experimenting at scale with off-label uses of GLP-1 like arthritis, cancer or addiction, because the drug reduces inflammation in many organs.

Everything is depressing

• The Rat is an essay that’s more about war than rats, and really summarises how I’m trying to feel about… everything right now.

• Andon Labs are running public experiments in AI safety: “we gave an AI a 3 year retail lease in SF, and asked it to make a profit”. The AI decided what to sell, ordered stock including custom merch, made its own (scary) branding and marketing, wrote and publicised job descriptions — then ran interviews, hired a few gig workers, and gave them exact instructions on what to do in the physical space — decoration, layout, merchandising etc.

  • “We don’t pretend to have the answers here, but we want to start the conversation by publicly demonstrating that this future might be nearer than many think. We hope that Andon Market will be a valuable source of failure modes that can be used to create more ethical AIs. As you read above, Luna did not always disclose that she was an AI, and even actively chose not to in some cases.”

Good to look at

• This feels adjacent to the Dark Breakfast theory of last month: The Cheese Map charts the combinatorial space of cheesemaking across multiple dimensions. (via Natalie)

• EZ-Tree is a procedural tree generator that allows you to create realistic 3D trees.

• Australia’s public service broadcaster has a Cultural Atlas, a comprehensive summary of attitudes, norms, and business practices across different cultures and countries. Some very interesting stuff to find in there!

• Noun Sense is a fun daily word game where you have to guess what noun most commonly follows an adjective. Harder than it seems!

• Every train, a note: “a jazz combo played in real time by every active NYC subway train.” This is the internet toys I want.

• It won’t surprise anyone who knows type designers that some of them have hobbies like carving a Bodoni alphabet into potatoes.

Work! Design! Tech!

• Train your judgement: how to make UI animations feel really good. (I generally feel like there’s still so few design resources that teach taste, but when AI can automate the execution it becomes so essential to have).

  • More UI excellence how-to: building a typeahead search. I love these breakdowns that explain how the details work and why.

• It’s an oft repeated point, but output isn’t design. “The hard part of design is rarely generating the form. It is understanding the problem well enough to know what and how something should exist at all”

• In engineering: “my industry is currently overrun with addicts. When engaging with boosters, you’re in many ways engaging with a meth house”. (via Darío)

May all your avocados be ripe,

Victor