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

Defuddle and markdown.new.

Depressing chart by Rafael.

Why the Strait of Hormuz is important.

This is true wisdom from William Blake.

This is hilarious 😂

Brilliant piece by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi:

In a farcical re-enactment of the Iraq War script, we were told that the Islamic Republic would collapse like a house of cards. But unlike in 2003, there has been little attempt to persuade the wider world, or even the US Congress. The rhetorical labour that accompanied the invasion of Iraq, however flawed or dishonest, has largely been abandoned. Even senior US military officials have struggled to explain how the campaign’s objectives would be achieved swiftly or decisively. The assumption of inevitability has replaced the burden of argument.

The absence of justification is not incidental. It is a morbid symptom of an international system in crisis. The certainties of the United States’ hegemonic stewardship of the ‘international rules-based order’ have been deformed beyond recognition by the Gaza genocide, but no alternative architecture has cohered in their place. Instead there is a politics of gangster imperialism that has neither international nor domestic consent.

Beautiful:

As actors, we get to live many lives. We get to explore ideas that affirm and elevate our shared experience. The stories we tell have a unique capacity to create moments of emotional connection. They bring us together. So while we’re all at different stages of our lives and careers in this room, we all share something fundamental. We share the privilege of working in the world of ideas, of empathy, of imagination. Sometimes we make entertainment. Sometimes we make art. Sometimes if we’re lucky we make them both at the same time. And if we’re really fortunate, we also get to make a living doing it.

youtu.be/dV_2CEa6Bbs ↗

Brilliant editorial analyzing the pathetic nature of American actions in Iran through the lens of Simone Weil’s prophetic writing.

Interesting paper on the success of China’s solar industry: China’s solar success gives hope for industrial policy, but it cannot necessarily be replicated in all sectors. Part of the success is likely because solar is a relatively young, high-tech industry, with more opportunities for learning than a more mature…

Indonesia will ban social media for children under 16, the communication and digital affairs minister says.

This is so cool. Goes to show the extent of ancient trade links.

A path-breaking finding has shed new light on trade links between ancient Tamilagam, other parts of India and the Roman Empire. Two researchers have identified close to 30 inscriptions in Tamil Brahmi, Prakrit and Sanskrit at tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. These inscriptions are said to belong to the period between the 1st and 3rd Centuries C.E.

These inscriptions were identified during a study carried out in 2024 and 2025 by Charlotte Schmid, Professor at the French School of Asian Studies (EFEO) in Paris and Ingo Strauch, Professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. The team documented them across six tombs in the Theban Necropolis. They followed the footsteps of French scholar Jules Baillet, who surveyed the Valley of the Kings in 1926 and published more than 2,000 Greek graffiti marks.

The paper was presented at this event. Haven’t yet watched it though.

YouTube · youtube.com ↗DAY 1 - A FOUR-DAY INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON TAMIL EPIGRAPHYTamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology on YouTube

Hat tip to Krzysztof Iwanek for sharing this.

Interesting discussion.

Daniel Smith on boredom:

Brodsky advised his listeners to give up trying to evade the feeling, and start respecting it. Boredom exists “to teach you the most valuable lesson in your life,” he said, “the lesson of your utter insignificance.” Boredom puts us in our tiny, fragile, finite place—and thank goodness for that, for “the more finite a thing is, the more it is charged with life,” with love, pain, excitement, and fear.

If you try to distract yourself from boredom, if you run from it, all will be lost. Brodsky quoted an imperishable line from Robert Frost: “The best way out is always through.” A note written by the novelist David Foster Wallace makes a similar point: “Bliss—a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom.”

Chinese people aren’t worried about AI:

Driverless taxis roam more than a dozen Chinese cities, and service robots putter through hotels and restaurants. Chinese tech companies have rolled out medical chatbots to help users avoid long lines at hospitals. They’ve embedded A.I. assistants throughout popular apps, so users can ask A.I. in their mapping apps to help them decide where to eat, or in their shopping apps to help them choose between pairs of shoes.

That’s because Chinese tech companies have focused intensely on real-world applications for A.I. By contrast, many leading American tech companies have been focused on more abstract goals, like developing the most cutting-edge model, or achieving artificial general intelligence.

In addition, most of China’s leading A.I. models are free to use, unlike in the United States, where users have to pay for chatbots like ChatGPT to access all their features. (In fact, Chinese companies have been giving away money and luxury cars to entice people to download their apps.)

LLMs are like index funds. You get beta of humanity.

What an inspiring man and what an inspiring story:

“I was facing this issue for a long time. The elephants were getting more aggressive. I lived in fear of them attacking the library. Finally, I decided that if I shifted it, I would also move my house. Protecting the knowledge the library gave was important.” He did not want the learning it stood for to be disrupted.

So he shifted the library a few kilometres, though still within the forested region of Edamalakudi. “The very week I left,” he says, tuskers “demolished the whole old structure in minutes.” But, he adds proudly, “I’d moved all the books out of there.” Being a forest dweller, he understood that something was going on with the great beasts. And bears no bitterness towards them. Moving, though, was a wise decision as they ravaged the entire structure. And Chinnathambi had no wish to literally discover the elephant in the room.

💯 China is quite aggressive and territorially self-aggrandising in its immediate backyard, but restrained beyond. Even occasional border skirmishes with India are basically fought with sticks and stones. Outside of the military build up triggered by the US during MAGA 1.0, China is not interested in projecting power…

Spotify is fucked, or so this piece tells me.

We don’t give a shit about anything anymore because we are bored, distracted and getting dumber by the second in the flickering shadow of the screen.

It’s kind of fun to watch many AI skeptics move from pure, unbridled skepticism about the usefulness of AI tools like Claude Code to becoming, if not outright boosters, at least genuine admirers of them. And this is just one example. Across many such cases, the pattern I keep seeing is that people often have a terrible…

This is a wonderful interview.

AI will make research a whole lot better.

The backlash against social media is gaining ground. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are widespread bans across the world in some shape or form in the next couple of years.

An interesting take on the issue:

China knows exactly what this does. Their domestic version of TikTok caps kids under 14 at 40 minutes a day, locks access between 6am and 10pm, and swaps the entire feed to educational content. Science, history, museums.

The version they export to everyone else? Unlimited, unrestricted, pure dopamine on demand.

When kids in the US and China were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, the number one answer in America was influencer. In China it was astronaut.

Macron calls this a cognitive war. Export what dulls young minds and keep what makes them intelligent for your own population.

This is the most effective weapon ever deployed against a generation’s ability to think.

Jeremy Siegel says there will be no AI apocalypse.

From Citadel’s response to the Citrini piece:

Furthermore, it is well acknowledged that training and inference requires significant semiconductor capacity, data centers, and energy. Displacing white collar work would require orders of magnitude more compute intensity than the current level utilization. If automation expands rapidly, demand for compute definitionally rises, pushing up its marginal cost. If the marginal cost of compute rises above the marginal cost of human labor for certain tasks, substitution will not occur, creating a natural economic boundary. This dynamic contrasts sharply with narratives assuming frictionless replication of intelligence. Even if algorithms improve recursively, economic deployment remains bounded by physical capital, energy availability, regulatory approvals, and organizational change. Recursive capability does not imply recursive adoption. The Citrini piece.

That humans—supposedly the smartest creatures in the known universe—splurge thousands of dollars on pointless baubles all to get the validation of strangers never ceases to amaze me: Even as luxury goods have become unattainable for those French and Italians meant to desire them, they have become near-ubiquitous for…

Saving this paper to read later: We tentatively conclude that the decline in fertility across recent cohorts in high-income countries is likely the result of evolving norms, expanding choices, and the role of broad social and economic influences. This multi-faceted cohort-based explanation contrasts with narrower…

I keep thinking about this quote:

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” ― Thomas Sowell

This is not from The Onion but from the Financial Times:

Officials working with Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” are exploring setting up a stablecoin for Gaza as part of efforts to reshape the devastated Palestinian enclave’s economy, according to five people familiar with the discussions.

The talks around introducing a stablecoin — a type of cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to a mainstream currency, such as the US dollar — are at a preliminary stage, and many details of how one could be introduced in Gaza remain to be determined.

I hate to agree with Altman but I think he’s right:

“I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but there’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there’s some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs,” Altman said