Hi divas! It’s Victor! Spring is here! Celebrating with a shorter than usual newsletter.

Wikipedia is the best website

• Potoooooooo (pronounced pot-8-os 🥔) was an excellent name for a racing horse.
• The Wow! signal was a radio signal detected in 1977 that bore expected hallmarks of extraterrestrial origin.
• A few dozen people have been diagnosed with Gourmand syndrome: after a frontal lobe injury, they developed an eating disorder where they crave gourmet food.
• Friction-maxxing is the practice of “intentionally choosing less convenient options in daily life to build tolerance for discomfort, resist technology-driven ease, and preserve what proponents describe as meaningful human experiences.”
• Last year, after the state of Montana enacted a ban on showing the Pride flag on government buildings, the city of Missoula decided to make its official flag a rainbow flag.

Kiwi with legs

Mildly interesting

• Food scholars rise up: a new theoretical model of breakfast has dropped, and we’re now all on the hunt for Dark Breakfast.
• Yeah the Manosphere documentary is cool and all but have you read My Life as a Sex Worker at a Nevada Brothel?
• We disinfect water before we drink it; why don’t we disinfect the air before we breathe it? Just like chlorination transformed water safety in the early 20th century, germicidal UVC lights could make airborne diseases rare in indoor air — but widespread adoption is held back by a lack of product standards, certification, and definitive research.

• A great portrait of Jason Saft, an interior designer who stages “unsellable” New York apartments.

  • His company’s portfolio also has a metrics page that feels like an uneasy psychology experiment about framing; the increase in purchase price by just creating a fantasy with furniture (that buyers don’t get to keep) feels a little insane.

• Iceland only has one forensic pathologist, and since he’s not that busy over there, he also runs a course teaching crime writers about death.

Everything is depressing

• The Rat is an essay that’s more about war than rats and really articulates how I’m trying to feel about… everything right now.
• Over on Aeon: how do we deal with the catastrophe of uninsurability? Corners of the world prone to natural disasters are going to change extremely rapidly, when getting a mortgage or running a business becomes impossible when no one wants to insure you.
• Kristie de Garis on her life with chronic illness: “We tend to understand illness as something you either die from, or recover from. Those of us who are chronically ill live in the awkward inbetween space. Not dying, but not getting better either. Not an emergency, not something fully resolved.”

• Recent AI reads:

  • In n+1: Large Language Muddle makes a point of how to resist the bad aspects of AI. “There’s still time to disenchant AI, provincialise it, make it uncompelling and uncool.”
  • Because you need to use things to understand how they can suck (and how they can be good): the AI hater's guide to code with LLMs.
  • Cory Doctorow’s reverse-centaur’s guide to criticising AI: a great explanation of how AI could be a net good, but is currently deployed to replace workers with systems that makes humans miserable while enriching monopolists, rather than empowering everyone.
  • Most people paying attention think AI frontier startups are likely to collapse because they still have no path to profitability. However, I found the (booster) theories in The AI Gründerzeit quite compelling: historically, technology and infrastructure built by bubbles (railroads and the internet) have been here to stay even after the bubbles burst. (h/t Darío)
  • Some fun speculative fiction: When Vibe Coded Consumer Agents Go Rogue.

Good to look at

• Extremely cool toy: TuneJourney lets you listen to 70,000+ live radio stations from anywhere in the world on an interactive 3D globe.
• Some great insights in Elliot Clowes’ list of 34 things he wished he’d known at 21.
• ADORE these tiny, surreal sculptures by Frank Kunert.
• The creator of Wordle has a new game out called Parseword, which interactively teaches you how to solve cryptic crossword clues.
• Pink Trombone is a kind of… synthesiser of the vocal tract? Very trippy.
• Artist fnnch on how to make a living as an artist. (”The number one mistake I see artists make is not accepting that they run a business. If you cannot accept and even embrace this simple fact, you are totally hosed. It is hard to start a business; it is way harder to do it by accident.”)

Have a blessed rest of eternity,

Victor