Short things, kept in the open. A commonplace book, formerly rabbitholes.garden.

If only politicians could think past the next 8 minutes:

Manipur’s misfortunes can seem irrelevant to Indians who live in the country’s heartlands. Yet the state’s fate has national implications. It has been riven by a decades-long insurgency, led largely by Meitei groups who desire independence. That had been quelled in recent years, but as frustration and alienation deepen there is a risk that it will resurface. Above all, the crisis offers a warning about the dangers of identity politics. Across India, parties increasingly campaign on promises of special privileges and protections for ethnic or caste groups. As affairs in Manipur demonstrate, that is as likely to widen rifts as to heal them.

VCs say the damnedest things, and I hate to be the guy who agrees with a VC. But sometimes—not often, but sometimes—they say something useful. Today I came across this tweet by Anish Acharya of a16z: the timeline is full of people using Claude Code to generate ads, recover corrupted video, make landing pages, manage…

Tailwind laid off 75% of their team because of AI: I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it. But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. And every second I spend trying to…

We love saying that bad habits are easier to build than good ones. But I think that’s wrong. Here’s what made me realize it: I saw a man rolling his own tobacco outside a filter coffee stand. Completely absorbed in his work. Fully focused. The world around him didn’t exist. He was practicing a craft. And this wasn’t…

Timothy Lee on the whether AI can automate jobs debate: If you’re thinking about starting an argument with “AI will eventually automate all jobs,” I’m begging you to (1) talk to a plumber and a kindergarten teacher, and (2) have an economist walk you through how a big increase in the efficiency of producing X impacts…

Ben Thompson makes an optimistic case for AI: In fact, I have great optimism that one potential upside of AI is a renewed appreciation of and investment in beauty. One of the great tragedies of the industrial era — particularly today — is that beauty in our built environment is nowhere to be found. How is it that we…

This reflection is based on a post by Chris Loy on the industrialization of software. And unlike me, he’s a professional coder. His post is about technical debt, maintenance, and the downsides of AI-generated software at scale. But I’m interested in the other end of what he’s describing—not professional software, but…

What a beautiful poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist. A Psalm of Life Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream!— For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem. Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal…

Loose reflection. Since I work in finance, and since my area of focus is around investing and personal finance more broadly, a lot of people—friends, relatives, colleagues—ask me for advice on various aspects of their finances. And in all of this, the one big recurring theme I’ve noticed time and again is that people…

Hamilton Nolan on Trump’s attack on Venezuela: For those of us interested in reality, the question becomes: Might there be some downsides of kidnapping the president of a sovereign nation, because he is not sufficiently in America’s pocket? One thing we have done is to supercharge the urgency of almost all smaller…

Sonora Jha on writing:

I have come to see that writing has become a way for me to be in the deepest conversation with myself while also sensing the hovering presence of another. I don’t know who that other is – perhaps a gentle future reader. This personal conversation feels forbidden, in a way, given my work in journalism. But I find treasures in my thoughts and feelings, and I rush to put them on the page. Then a story takes shape and tells me something about life, about ideas, about the world. Yes, it’s cathartic and yes, it’s also an outward conversation.

Yes, yes, a hundred times yes!

Can’t agree more with Scott Alexander. We should all do more things and have more fun.

I’m not trying to push you in any direction, honest. If you get everything totally wrong, too bad, but you’ll still be remembered forever for trying. Even Pontius Pilate has immortality of a sort. Both Eliezer Yudkowsky and Beff Jezos have their page in the textbooks assured. If you’re a well-off Silicon Valley person, you’re already well-placed to join them. So participate in the discourse. Create some art. Donate to a cause you believe in. Make a prediction. Discover something interesting.

Have more fun than anyone has ever had before - after all, history remembers Aristippus! Start a cool group house - after all, history remembers Epicurus! Be extremely hot - history remembers Antinous too! Sell people the lowest-quality copper that has ever been sold, and live forever as a meme six thousand years later!

But don’t waste this amazing opportunity you’ve been given on a vapid attempt to “escape the permanent underclass”.

I think the future Erik Brynjolfsson is describing is highly probable:

Future historians will see that the seeds of a profound transformation were planted in 2025. By 2050, most people will command workforces larger than the biggest multinational corporations of today. But our “employees” won’t be people sitting in cubicles or standing on factory floors. They will be fleets of AI agents—digital workers which can perform tasks like design products, write code, negotiate supply chains, run complex experiments, and devise marketing campaigns while we sleep.

—

Consequently, in this new world, many workers will become what I call Chief Question Officers (CQO).
In the coming years, a CQO’s primary job will be to possess the judgment to know what to ask, why it matters, and how to evaluate if the AI has actually succeeded. We will be the architects; the AI will be the builders.

So true. From this wonderful post by Vaibhav:

Most human beings are elementally similar but structurally different. Every living being around us is elementally similar, most are roughly the same few elements, but the arrangements of those carbons, protons, neutrons, electrons are different. That arrangement is what makes you you. That is the unique pattern for every species on Earth, and even for every individual. Seven billion humans, billions of animals, other species, you get this absurdly large number of distinct arrangements of atoms in space, not in vacuum, but inside this dense, interacting reality.

Ooh, also this: 2025 was the year when it dawned on my feeble brain that “when in doubt, do” is a good philosophy of life to live by.

Whenever you feel shitty, stuck, or idle, you are blocking that process. You are not exchanging energy. You are not moving. That is why so many people say: just move. Do something. Take action. When you move, you exchange energy. When you move in a direction that feels positive, you move towards maximizing your entropy.

As a normal, non-technical person, I think we are living in magical times—and I say this because of LLMs, especially the LLM coding tools. As someone who doesn’t know a lick of programming, the fact that a person with absolutely no idea what coding is can still wrangle these tools and get useful things built is the…

Pure and sublime poetic beauty. The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs; and the flowers were all merry by the roadside; and the wealth of gold was scattered through the rift of the clouds while we busily went on our way and paid no heed. We sang no glad songs nor played; we went not to the village…

What will software look like in a world where it can be mass produced at industrial scale with the click of a few buttons? A good perspective by Chris Loy: Our appetite for AI slop is likely to be similarly insatiable. The adoption curve we’ve seen so far may pale beside what happens when disposable software production…

I didn’t think I’d live to see a time when a company would “burn” $100 billion. What wild times we’re living in. Wildddd.

OpenAI in particular should beware hubris. One vc says discussion of cash burn is taboo at the firm, even though leaked figures suggest it will incinerate more than $115bn by 2030. Sam Altman, its boss, said recently that one reason he wants to take OpenAI public is to watch its doubters sell it short. “I would love to see them get burned on that,” he said. Plenty of investors seem prepared to take the bet: both the public equity and debt markets have punished companies with significant exposure to his firm. ■

This reflection was sparked by this tweet from Peter Steinberger, whom you should absolutely follow on Twitter and read on his blog. I came across his account recently and started reading his writing. For an amateur web coder, his blog is surprisingly rich with practical, thoughtful tips. I’ve also been poking around…

Wonderful reflection on the rewards of writing by Victor Kumar. The post is filled with other rabbit holes including links to Victor’s writing and also other philosophers writing on Substack. My kinda post 😺

What I didn’t realize was that writing a Substack would also reignite my intellect. Over the first five months, I posted an essay nearly every week. I’ve always read a lot, but before, the words passed through me—my mind a sieve. Now, I keep dozens of running files in my notes app about topics I hope to write about. Before, spare moments were taken up by mindless scrolling. Now, they’re spent writing and editing. Substack brought my mind back to life. I gained autonomy over my work instead of being yoked to journal referees or newspaper editors. My essays here have less professional currency than journal articles, less reach than op-eds, but they’re more meaningful to me. (I’d give it all up for a byline in The New Yorker.)

Amen to this:

François Chollet: Social media is the sedative that makes us forget we ever had freedom and agency. You can just do things, but first you have to close the app.

This entire year has been a case me rediscovering the fact that I can just do things. All you need is orient your inner compass towards fun and then run in that direction.

Amen to this as well:

Kpaxs: Social media consume us, not the other way around.

Say what you will about the cesspool that Twitter has become. I refuse to call it X. It still remains, for better or worse, a big part of my media diet. Between the outrage and noise, I still find perspectives, articles, videos, and podcasts that make me pause. One such instance was Scott Belsky’s recent set of…

Interesting post by Peter Steinberger on coding in the age of LLMs: It’s incredible how far “vibe coding” has come this year. Whereas in May I was amazed that some prompts produced code that worked out of the box, this is now my expectation. I can ship code now at a speed that seems unreal. I burned a lot of tokens…

I asked Claude to adapt Adele’s Skyfall to a post-AI world: “Digital Fall” \[Verse 1\] This is the end Hold your resume close and pretend That you’ll find work when the models descend When it crumbles We will stand tall Face it all together at digital fall At digital fall \[Verse 2\] I used to draft the briefs at dawn…

The numbers on AI slop videos are crazy.

Five of the other ten trending AI slop channels with the most views are based in South Korea, with others in Egypt, Brazil and Pakistan. But the channel with the most views of all is in India. Bandar Apna Dost features over 500 videos, mainly “featuring a realistic monkey in hilarious, dramatic, and heart-touching human-style situations,” Many of which are variations on identical set-ups. The channel also has around 100,000 followers on Instagram; on Facebook, the videos are attributed to a ‘digital creator’ named Surajit Karmakar.

There two stunning things in this tweet: I use Claude Code heavily and it’s bloody amazing. That it can help a non-technical person like me to turn my ideal into reality still shatters my mind everyday, even after using Claude Code on an almost daily basis for over a year. It’s magic! I can’t believe it was a side…

Wonderful reflection on the many joys and rewards kd writing by Drew Breunig. Hard agree with everything, especially this one:

Writing gives you a license to explore and organize your thoughts. This is the fun bit. Chasing down an idea that interests you, forming questions and then investigating them; it’s a joy. The second most common question I get about my writing is, “How do you motivate yourself to write?” This is the answer. There are so many drafts that live, dormant in my draft folder. So many times I start a piece and lose interest. And then: something will click and I’ll draft, investigate, and finish a piece in an hour (here’s two examples). These aren’t always the most substantive pieces, but they keep the practice going and the momentum up.

Came across the article on Twitter.

Note: This is stream of consciousness. I’m working through my thoughts on AI coding tools in real time, and I’m not interested in being measured about it. I woke up this morning and I’m nodding my head so much in agreement that if I keep this up, there’ll be a new medical disorder named after me—the nodding head…