other people's stuff
bookssongs
albums
films
quotes
readings
search this site
"I said, 'Kiss me, you're beautiful; these are truly the last days.' You grabbed my hand, and we fell into it, like a daydream, or a fever."
-Godspeed You Black Emperor, "Dead Flag Blues"
June 10. Links via Hacker News, starting with a thread on the death of Bill Atkinson, one of the greatest programmers of all time. There's some discussion of how his key invention, HyperCard, could have evolved into a much better tech world than the dystopian one we're in.
A long thread about EMP weapons, with lots of debate about whether they would fry small electronics, and how to build a Faraday cage.
Coventry Very Light Rail is a "rail-based travel system that can be delivered at less than half the cost and in half the time of conventional light rail systems, while providing the same benefits." Basically, by spending some money on lighter and stronger materials, it saves a lot of money on digging and infrastructure.
Smart People Don't Chase Goals; They Create Limits. There are some great ideas here, but the author doesn't quite capture the benefits of following constraints over goals, and the Hacker News thread goes completely wrong by changing the title from "smart" to "successful". I would say it like this. If you want to do a specific thing, set a goal. If you want to do something interesting, set constraints. But there's no guarantee the interesting thing you do will be recognized or rewarded.
June 7. For the weekend, three happy links about practical things. The Rise of the Japanese Toilet
Cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains in Australia
The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State
June 5. Quick note on politics. I was just reading how, in 2016, conservative author P.J. O'Rourke endorsed Hillary Clinton, saying "She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters." I feel something similar about Trump: He's wrong about everything, but at least he's wrong outside of normal parameters. Neoliberalism is dying because it cannot conceive of any alternative to the present system, while the right offers a time-tested alternative: charismatic warlords and fanatical tribalism.
Three Reddit threads about the failure of normal parameters:
What's a thing that is dangerously close to collapse?
What's one thing you think is quietly fading away from our lives or society?
And the most powerful thread, of course removed by mods: What's a sign that someone has quietly given up?
June 3. Probably just posting links this week. I check the Ask Old People subreddit twice a day, and it's mostly just nostalgia, but sometimes there's a great thread that inevitably gets removed. Here are two: How many older people have decided to just stay away from Doctors? And a thread full of good stories about ways people have died besides in their sleep.
I've been heavily following the college softball playoffs, and here's a great play from this weekend where a Texas Tech player steals home, taking off with the pitch and the catcher doesn't notice.
May 30. I've posted my Psychedelic Folk Spotify playlist. Psych folk is a hard genre to define. Some of the songs are maybe not psychedelic, and some of the artists are definitely not tagged as folk, but I knew what sound I wanted and I found enough good stuff to go over three hours. Nine of the 47 songs are from 1971, with no other year having more than three, but 19 are from this century. I'm obsessed with Spotify play counts, which on this list range from Big Blood's Blind Owl II at 1600 plays, to Pink Floyd's Fearless at 72 million. The median is Carissa's Wierd's Phantom Fireworks at 140K. The most psychedelic songs on the list are from These Trails and Camper Van Beethoven. The most beautiful song on the list is Beat Happening's Godsend. And the one that blows me away on every listen is Melanie Safka's epic cover of Lay Lady Lay.
May 28. The Who Cares Era is a blog post about our AI-aided culture of mediocrity, and how nobody is doing careful work that rewards close attention. I would say, nobody is funding careful work that rewards close attention. This is a disease of capitalism, and there's some good discussion in the Hacker News thread. From the top comment:
It's not that the dudes don't care, it's that the dudes have 15 other things expected of them, which weren't expected 15 years ago and caring capacity feels like a biological limit. There isn't the required amount of caring available in the average human any more, and caring is needed for standards to be maintained.
On the subject of careful attention, Good Writing is a Paul Graham post arguing that "writing that sounds good is more likely to be right." It's easy to think of counter-examples, but he says some interesting stuff. I would say it like this: If a writer cares about both readability and accuracy, then any wrangling with the text is likely to improve both. So if you wrangle with the text to make it flow better, you're likely to also find ways to make it more accurate, and vice versa.
On the subject of escaping from the frantic modern world, a Reddit comment, in a thread about weird stuff at sea, about a guy living on a tiny island:
This is the absolute middle of nowhere and there's a tiny coral island with no trees or vegetation just a fuck load of birds... and a cargo container next to a tent. The ship is hardly moving at this point and the captain calls out over a mega phone to see if anyone is there. After a minute a guy who's clean shaven but wearing clothes worn to rags and a deep tan wobbles out of the cargo container.
They ask if he needs help and he says he's good. He "had no food but dried fish and some water distilling thing." Related: Penn Engineers Discover a New Class of Materials That Passively Harvest Water from Air. The article incorrectly says it defies the laws of physics, but what it will eventually do is open up more remote areas for off-grid living.
May 26. Good piece in the Guardian, Systems are crumbling - but daily life continues, about the Soviet concept of "hypernormalization" coming to America.
It's "the visceral sense of waking up in an alternate timeline with a deep, bodily knowing that something isn't right - but having no clear idea how to fix it," Harfoush tells me. "It's reading an article about childhood hunger and genocide, only to scroll down to a carefree listicle highlighting the best-dressed celebrities or a whimsical quiz about: 'What Pop-Tart are you?'"
For me, the most striking moment of the movie Zone Of Interest was the soccer broadcast, that right in the thick of WWII and the Holocaust, people were still playing, attending, and cheering for sports events like everything was normal. I think one of the things that's feeding Trump's popularity is a general disaffection with modernity, the sense that our whole way of living is rotten and needs to be knocked down. What's happening instead is that everything annoying about modern life is getting more annoying -- if you're lucky, and if you're unlucky you get disappeared.
One thing that I've learned already, just from the early stages of Trump, is not to judge Germans who didn't "do anything" to stop Hitler. Because there's absolutely nothing we can do. Peaceful protests are a nice way to feel solidarity with our neighbors, but Trump probably loves the attention, and if we do anything with tactical value, it will only serve as an excuse to strengthen authoritarianism. It's only a matter of time before ICE gets in a shootout and Trump suspends habeas corpus.
I continue to think it's a mistake to view Trumpism in moral terms. He and his movement have all the moral agency, all the self-awareness, and all the mechanical inevitability of a fire. It just burns everything that can be burned. Or it's like a rising tide. You can't shovel it back, you can only try to stay above it until it turns. The best case is that 2026 elections actually happen, Trump loses congress and fades away. The worst case is written all over history. One thing that makes me optimistic is that Cambodia and Rwanda are really nice countries now. America will get better, but first I expect it to get much, much worse, and the only thing we can do about it is to survive.
May 22. After Monday's post, I got some feedback about moderating internet use, and my latest thought is, social media addiction is mainly a problem for people who already have addictive personalities. Whatever the seduction, the bigger a problem it is for you, the more you need strict rules. The less of a problem it is, the more you can wing it. A serious alcoholic has to never drink a drop. A non-alcoholic can easily have one drink and say that's enough.
More generally, I think the most valuable mental/emotional skill right now is the skill of pulling out, or letting go. Not just pulling out of a compelling behavior, but pulling out of a compelling idea. There are a lot of very harmful cognitive shortcuts floating around, simple and satisfying ways of thinking, and we need the skill of saying, that thought is not true, and that thought is not me. It's just a tool that you can pick up and put down.
May 19. I have no interesting ideas this week, but here are two expressions of an obvious idea. On The Death of Daydreaming is a thoughtful book excerpt about how smart phones and social media are bad for human cognition.
And a deleted comment by Reddit user xGray3:
People will say it's always been this way, but I disagree. What we're seeing is the end result of attentional decay caused by social media. Social media is a drug. Full stop. It was crafted in a lab to take advantage of human psychology and pull you in deeper and deeper. And once it has its hooks in you, it starts to fuck with your reasoning skills and push you towards radical and conspiratorial viewpoints. It does this in order to drive "engagement", which for social media companies translates to profit. That "engagement" takes the form of showing people upsetting and controversial content and making it appear organic. People think that what they're seeing is the truth of the world, when really they're being fed a very specific and radical view of the world by social media companies in order to drive up their profit. And this is all without even mentioning the ways that social media deteriorates people's attentional skills by giving them shorter and shorter forms of content with less deep analysis. When you train your brain on such shallow content, your critical thinking skills are going to start weakening.
So yeah. We're living in a world full of addicts right now and people only just seem to be coming to terms with it. Short form, highly controversial content is toxic to critical thinking skills.
May 16. Stray links. From Ask Old People, Did the stubborn people in your life get less stubborn as they got older? Almost every answer is, they got worse.
Found this Reddit comment after a tip from a reader: How I use self-administered EMDR at home. EMDR is a therapy technique to heal trauma by thinking about traumatic events while moving your eyes from side to side or tapping. Some people report great results, but you might read the cautions in this page, Can You Do EMDR on Yourself?
And some music. I can't get over the mysteries of musical taste. I'm doing research for a psych folk playlist, and a few weeks ago I mentioned this seven hour Psychedelic Folk/Freak Folk playlist by jmd273. Taste-wise, it has a diverse mix of songs I don't mind listening to, songs I hate so much I skip them, and songs I like so much that I check out the rest of the artist's discography.
When I finished it, I dove into this 17 hour Acid folk/Psychedelic folk playlist, and after going through the first 40 songs, and then the ten most recently added, I couldn't find a single song I wanted to keep listening to. For one thing, almost none of it is psychedelic, it's just regular folk. But still, it proves that musical taste is not random. This person has an ear that is the opposite of my ear, and is actively drawn to stuttery rhythms and frilly vocals that annoy me.
Now I'm listening to this three hour Psychedelic Folk playlist by Indie & Folk Radio, and I haven't found any songs I hate, or any songs I love. It's all very chill and dreamy.
May 14. Continuing from Monday, I keep thinking about this line: "When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break." That sentence seems to capture the entire collapse of late stage capitalism. We have all these systems that work pretty well, and we want them to keep working when things go wrong, but instead they're breaking down because someone is trying to squeeze blood from a stone in the name of efficiency.
What exactly is "efficiency"? When I think it through, that word points to at least two things, which I'm going to call internal efficiency and social efficiency. Internal efficiency is if you're doing some kind of task, and you want to smooth out the wasted motions so the task is less tiring.
Social efficiency is a competely different thing, when one person's "waste" is another person's voluntary action. What we're really talking about is selfishness. Government efficiency means self-interested taxpayers want to pay lower taxes and get more services. Business efficiency means self-interested owners want to pay less salary and get more work done.
What if self-interested workers want to do less work and get more money? Does that count as efficiency? No, it's called laziness. Spelling it out: The modern English language is authoritarian and elitist, because top-down self-interest is given a word that means clean and good, while bottom-up self-interest is given a word that means filthy and bad. In a culture with these values, you would expect the people at the top to become power-mad and never satisfied, and the people at the bottom to become depressed and fatigued.
Related, Chris Davis's Idle Theory:
Increased idleness means, on the one hand, increased chance of survival, but it also gives humans idle time in which to engage in activities other than self-maintenance. It is in this idle time that humans can do as they wish, rather than as they must, and they can think, talk, and play - i.e. act as free moral agents. In Idle Theory, humans are seen as part-time free moral agents, only free to the extent that they are idle.
May 12. Thoughtful blog post with a dumb title, The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction. What the author actually argues is that the commodity is lack of friction: the breezy convenience of the digital world, which people pay a lot of money for. And because our attention is in the digital world, we no longer appreciate the value and difficulty of the grunt work that holds it together. Examples include AI cheating in college, and air traffic breakdowns.
This is what happens when we treat public infrastructure like a tech platform... always on, low overhead, minimal headcount. My own diverted flight was just one minor data point in a much larger pattern of problems. The FAA's equipment now fails approximately 700 times weekly. Controllers work 10-hour shifts, six days straight. There's a backlog of replacement parts for components nobody manufactures anymore.
...
When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break.
Two tangents from that post: Kayfabe is a word from pro wrestling, meaning the portrayal of staged events as real, which has become normal in the world of politics.
And an article about the psychology of the resentful right, Weak Men Create Hard Times:
Who goes out of their way to spend hours each day posting slurs on the internet? Who obsesses over harmless cultural artifacts like a silly TikTok dance? The guy who does this (and it's almost always a guy) is not someone who is succeeding in his own life.
What this article fails to understand is the insanity of the whole project of modernity, which is too big a subject for this post, but I'm not going to judge anyone for being a loser, where winning is about conforming to a human-made world that is going farther and farther from human nature. Trumpers aren't wrong to want a simpler world, they're just unable to imagine less complexity without more domination. The author quotes Francis Fukuyama:
Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
May 8. I've been working heavily on my novel, and part 5 is up. So far, just like the books of Harry Potter, each part is longer than the last, and part 5 is tighter than part 4, with two new villains and a multi-chapter plot about the quest to find the Long Now Clock and re-objectify time. I've also made a bunch of small edits to the other parts, and added another religion in part 1.
Also, from Ask Old People, a nice thread for the weekend, What's one simple joy you think younger people overlook?
Quick note. This Reddit comment, and the comments below it, have some good discussion about the new pope.
May 5. Four long reads via Hacker News, starting with a Hacker News thread, I'd rather read the prompt, about various issues around students using LLMs. Two short quotes: "Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to the gym." And "Many people are in university to survive a brutal social darwinist economic system, not to learn and cultivate their minds."
The Cannae Problem is about the Roman defeat at Cannae, because they were mentally stuck in a certain way of thinking about warfare, and how it applies to modern issues. "Success creates its own failure mechanisms. The very things that make you successful produce the blind spots that make you vulnerable. Your greatest strengths, taken to their logical conclusion without adaptation, become your greatest weaknesses."
Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire, the thing they do in movies, where they all shoot their arrows at once. It's because 1) arrows can be shot fast enough that volleying isn't necessary, 2) holding a bowstring back is exhausting, and 3) arrow volleys aren't that deadly.
And a massive 11,000 word piece, Intrinsic Motivation: A deep dive. Condensed to five words: external rewards bad, autonomy good.
May 2. Today is Bandcamp Friday, when all the money goes to the artists, and I've just bought Daisy Rickman's 2024 album Howl. Only a few times a decade do I find an album that I want to listen to over and over again. The bones of the songs are classic folk, with acoustic guitar that reminds me of Gordon Lightfoot. But both the style and the songwriting are very droney, and I love how she sings at the bottom of her range. Overall it most reminds me of Forndom's Daudra Dura, and what both albums have in common is that all the sounds were made by one person.
April 30. Three links about AI. The prompt that makes ChatGPT go cold. More precisely, a system instruction that makes ChatGPT unfriendly and unemotional, like an old-timey robot. Many hilarious screenshots, and I like the potential to give your chatbot a finely tuned personality.
Try asking an AI for An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip. Yes, it looks exactly like Indiana Jones. The post has multiple examples of AI refusing to generate a copyrighted character, and then it becomes a game to give a prompt that the AI accepts, and generates a copyrighted character.
A mirrored NY Times piece that I would title AI is Mid. Now, a computer can do all kinds of data crunching that a human can never do. But if we're talking about using a computer to do a complex human task, like writing a paper, or managing a business, or even driving a car, the AI will do better than the worst human, and worse than the best human. In a few years, this will be so obvious that no one will bother to say it.
I found that link in this Adam Becker interview, Silicon Valley billionaires literally want the impossible. It's about "the ideology of technological salvation" and the misunderstanding of sci-fi among people with too much power.
By the way, in my new novel I'm trying to do what Becker suggests, and make a realistic, hopeful vision of the future. What makes it realistic is that the present tech system has collapsed. What makes it hopeful are social reforms that have actually been tried, like depreciating currency and basic income, plus marginally realistic technologies like battery-capacitor hybrids, primitive food fabricators, genetically upgraded wild edibles, and personal water condensers, allowing people to live without a top-down infrastructure. Part 5 should be up next week.
April 28. Links. From Ask Old People, Did gangs really "rumble" in the streets? Scroll past the jokes, and there are some good stories about how common physical fighting was not too long ago.
This surprisingly simple trick can aid speech comprehension in noisy settings. Just tap your finger, "especially at a rate that mirrors natural speech rhythms."
The people growing their own toilet paper, specifically a certain kind of leaf that's good for wiping.
How Wales is building a sharing economy through its 'libraries of things'
And a good long article about Home art galleries in Canada.