August 16, 2025

NESTED! Sloppers, purity spiral, sunscreen for cats, vab studies

Hey youse, it’s Victor and his newslettor. Hope the heatwave is not too crushing.

Here’s a selection of fun things I’ve read and learned this summer:

Wikipedia is the best website

• In the 18th century, British churches had sluggard wakers, parishioners whose job was solely to wake up anyone falling asleep during mass by tapping them sharply on the head.
• The 2012 Burger King foot lettuce incident has its own Wikipedia page, should you need to get caught up about it
• In Japan, Jōhatsu (or “evaporation”) is the practice of disappearing from their existing lives without a trace. There are businesses which help people “disappear themselves”.
• Voodoo deaths are psychosomatic deaths “caused by an emotional response—often fear—to some suggested outside force”, potentially arising from extreme stress or trauma.
• A purity spiral is a theory which argues for “the existence of a form of groupthink in which it becomes more beneficial to hold certain views than to not hold them, and more extreme views are rewarded while expressing doubt, nuance, or moderation is punished”.
• Up until very recently, South Korea was the only country in the world whose government websites only worked with Internet Explorer.

Live from my garden

Mildly interesting

• A Google Street View-powered analysis of all the words found on the streets of New York City.
• A very fun interactive toy to explore the mathematically optimal way to dice an onion. (tl;dr: radially, aiming for an imaginary point a couple centimetres below the chopping board).
• Medieval Cookery compiles modern translations and adaptations (with explanatory notes) of medieval recipes, some stranger than others.
• A paper exploring the “folk taxonomy” of planets. If you were sad about losing Pluto, be excited to learn that you can still count moons as planets!
• Small scientific-ish experiments on human pheromones show that dabbing some of your genital scents on your neck (or: vabbing) may make it more likely that new partners will stand closer to you for longer. Hence, studies called Eau de Vagina and Eau d’Homme.
• In more academic science news: models help us understand how the wheel was invented 6,000 years ago.

• Very Gay Interview of three people who run “Jackoff Clubs” (NSFW, duh), semi-public events for gay men who prefer mutual masturbation.

  • …or a “union jack”, as we learned last time (I can’t believe that’s the second newsletter in a row I’m talking about mutual masturbation)
  • Meanwhile, I assume women are all in 250 people group chats sending topless photos.

Everything is depressing

• An essay on choosing community care over conventional financial security: interdependence is my new retirement plan.
• Skin cancer is not reserved to humans, which begs the question: should you sunscreen your cat?
• Great article debunking some of the still-common misconceptions about COVID, as new variants continue to spread.
• P.E. Moskowitz: We Must Refuse a Forced Grieving, on the sudden sea change of politicians around Israel: “By waiting until a tipping point of starvation was reached in Gaza, the powerful can now acknowledge the crisis as it is, because in doing so they can convince us that there was nothing to be done; that the hundreds of thousands of deaths are inevitable, or, indeed, that those deaths have already happened, even if they have not yet happened in material reality, but in the psyches of those in power, and, they hope, in our psyches too.”
• “Inevitabilism” names the rhetorical strategy of framing something as a bigger force that will inevitably happen, crushing any criticism that considers a different path for the future (see: descriptions of AI being the new electricity). Talking of which…

This month in AI

• If you must read one single easy thing about understanding AI at the moment, make it this piece: Bag of words, have mercy on us.
• Latest copyright class actions could financially ruin AI industry, say trade groups. That byline is such a self-own. If your industry depends on doing copyright infringement to be profitable, perhaps it is not meant to exist in its current form!
• GenAI is our polyester: “The best way to understand generative AI art and aesthetics is to consider how previous ‘synthetics’ lost value in the long-run”.
• Fascinating new field of reality that sci-fi couldn't predict for this year if it tried: having to draft your will to prevent being turned into an AI ghost (even if you do, it’ll likely be ignored).

• New best insult of 2025 has dropped and it’s “sloppers”, for people who can’t do anything without asking ChatGPT.

  • Close contenders: “clanker” (the first insult for robots) and “waymo” (directed at a person when there’s nobody behind the wheel, so to speak)
  • Things that AI (not GenAI) does well: weather forecasts are getting easier, cheaper, and often more accurate.

Good to look at

• A cool, clear explanation of how screens work. The technology is so omnipresent yet rather insane — and modern screens are way more complicated than this abstraction. (As I like to remind myself every now: all computers are just carefully organised sand.)
• Being intelligent is not the same as being smart.
• Stunning, colourful photos of auroras, lightning, seas, dunes and more seen from the International Space Station.
  • Sky-related: this tiny website shows the current sky at your approximate location (as a CSS gradient). That’s it, that’s the website.
• Journavx, the first non-opioid painkiller for post-surgery pain, was approved this year.
• Love the projects of Dries Depoorter, an artist working on surveillance, privacy, social media and machine learning.
• Emma Clit’s comics are perfect to explain to someone what is the mental load at home (especially in straight dynamics): “You should just have asked!” and “Where does it go?”

Work! Design! Tech!

• In praise of “normal” engineers: don’t worship 10x engineers, “build 10x engineering teams”. Amen!!!
• A beautiful parable about measurement and numbers versus qualitative user experience.

• A guide to writing a good design document (for engineers but applicable to all digital prod-eng jobs imo)

  • And more advice for underappreciated writing: compelling software release announcements.
  • Pass this to your local IT admin: frequent logins don't make you more secure.

I'm just happy to be here,

Victor