258 entries for 2026

[Customer service] works by the gradual buildup of sympathy through failed attempted solutions. If person X has told you to try something and it doesn't work, person X feels slightly sorry for you. X is slightly responsible for the problem now, having used up some of your time. Person Y, however, is considerably less moved that you tried following her colleague X's advice to no avail-even if it is the same advice that she herself would have given you had she been party to that earlier conversation. That's beside the point. The point is that she wasn't the one who gave you that advice. So she is not responsible for your wasted time.

[The same customer service representative miraculously] returns. "I can make an exception for you," she says.

It occurs to me that an "exception" is what programmers call it when software breaks.

["Impersonal friends" are those we are drawn to for their type, which makes them more or less fungible, in contrast to specific individuals we care about which can't be swapped. The difference develops through shared history.]

I've seen it happen between friends: "Once again, you've neglected to do what you've promised." "Oh, there you go right in with that tone of yours!" "Great, let's just dodge the issue and talk about my tone instead! You're so defensive!" "You're the one being defensive! This is just like the time you x!" "For the millionth time, I did not even remotely x! You're the one who …" And on and on. […] each remark after the first is only about the previous remark. Th "context, a kind of "Markov chain" of riposte, meta-riposte, meta-meta-riposte. If we can be induced to sink to this level, of course the Turing test can be passed.

I imagine an ancient Egyptian woman, say, who catches a man looking tenderly into her eyes, up at the far extreme of her body near her useless, good-for-nothing brains, and chastises him, hand at her chest. Hey. I'm down here.

[If every act is the means to an end, "eudaimonia" (εuδauovia in Greek) describes the ultimate end of "well-being of spirit". Closer to "flourishing" than "happiness" (which could be through consuming a destructive vice) or "success" (which could be cutthroat if you win, scam, or kill). It's not a feeling: you either have it or not, regardless of how you feel. Related is "arete" which refers to "excellence" and "fulfillment of purpose":] Flowers are meant to bloom; knives are meant to cut; what are we meant to do?

I find it so tragic that when an infant cries, the parents sometimes have no idea what might be the cause of the cry—hunger? thirst? Dirty diaper? fatigue? If only the child could tell them! But no, they must simply run down the list—here's some food, no, still crying, here's a new diaper, no, still crying, here's your blanket, maybe you need a nap, no, still crying … But it occurs to me that this also describes my relationship to myself. When I am in a foul mood, I think, "How's my work going? How's my social life? How's my love life? How much water have I had today? How much coffee have I had today? How well have I been eating? How much have I been exercising? How have I been sleeping? How's the weather?" And sometimes that's the best I can do: eat some fruit, jog around the neighborhood, take a nap, and on and on till the mood changes and I think, "Oh, I guess that was it." I'm not much better than the infant.

In a Canadian study, a woman gave her number to male hikers either just before they reached the Capilano Suspension Bridge or in the middle of the bridge. Those who met her on the bridge were twice as likely to call and ask for a date.

[They explained to me that although things would get a lot better after the body dies, suicide is decisively against the rules.]

Things lost in translation

In Western contexts, "martyr" carries a heavy political or theological weight—the idea that someone made a conscious choice to die for a cause. But that isn't how shaheed functions for Palestinians.

Calling a child playing in a yard, a sleeping family, or an elderly patient in a hospital bed a shaheed isn't claiming agency or choice. None of them chose to be targeted. Instead, shaheed is an act of love, sanctity, and honor. It is a communal refusal to let a life stolen by Israeli military violence be reduced to a cold, clinical statistic.

This creates a constant struggle in translation: In English, saying someone was "killed" feels completely inadequate—it strips away the honor owed to the victim and flattens the active, systematic violence taking their life.

What you get, the cobbling together of hundreds of thousands of prior conversations, is a kind of conversational purée. Made of human parts, but less than a human sum. Users are, in effect, chatting with a kind of purée of real people-the ghosts of real people, at any rate: the echoes of conversations past.

We once thought humans were unique for having a language with syntactical rules, but this isn't so; we once thought humans were unique for using tools, but this isn't so; we once thought humans were unique for being able to do mathematics, and now we can barely imagine being able to do what our calculators can.

each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.

A Quirky Introduction To Number Systems

[Math is software for your brain: each concept is an app or approach with uses and limitations. Getting stuck on a problem often has more to do with our method than reality itself.]

A King In New York

Charlie Chaplin lectured by his son about freedom

Don't Make Assumptions

This is how learning works. Be interested. Don’t assume you know anything. That’s how you stay dumb. Be a beginner. Ask questions.

The Craft of Capitalism

‘Sterile’ is a word that accompanies the spread of modern corporate capitalism, precisely because of that process in which the rough edges of older, more informal markets are sanded away. In the midst of an accelerating capitalist economy, people operating according to its logic feel compelled to remove friction or ‘inefficiency’, but in doing so begin to scour away all the texture that gives a neighbourhood its soul. Inefficient snags are the very thing around which community collects, which is why efficiency can create malls but not community.

Gentrification appropriates the aesthetics of punk, anarchism, village life or immigrant culture, and uses it as a marketing tool while stripping away the substance of that culture.

The end result of a gentrification is an area that feels like a museum of itself. Your eyes catch glimpses of things that still look edgy, exotic or alternative, and yet your body does not feel it, because all those little cues that would be present in an authentic and alive space are missing. The honesty box by the beer fridge is gone. In its place is a Square terminal for cashless payments, plugging into the banking sector via Visa and Mastercard.

Jordan Prince: High's Cool

strange to shift from finger picking with contemporary pop chords to a kind of triplet blues. inspiring album concept.

Ingo Insterburg: Ich liebte ein Mädchen

style seems quite specific or idiomatic to German or Germany, curious to know other examples that fit this description

lilbee: the whole local AI stack in one executable

lilbee runs and manages the models across every GPU you have, then talks to everything you point it at: your files, your code, and the web. It crawls sites into your library, plugs into your coding agents, and backs the Obsidian plugin. Every answer cites the source, it all runs on your own machine, and there's nothing else to set up.

Jacob Bessen on How Sicilians are Neighbouring with Migrants

what do you want to keep purely for yourself, and what would actually be more fun if it were shared or done alongside other people?

Modern houses, built for self-contained nuclear families, are sealed against the world, the smells and sounds and life kept in, and that seal is precisely what has to be broken. In Sutera, people actively mourn the older ways of living around piazzas and street corners, because they wish they could easily see and feel the presence of others nearby and invite them in and go to others without invitation.

In this context, small towns aren’t boring because people are brilliant at talking, storytelling, and joking. That art atrophies without practice. In contrast, much sociality in much of modern life is organised around consumption rather than presence.

To enjoy breathing can mean enjoying the rest of your life.

Just Pay the Subscription

Take your favorite indie developer out to coffee, look them in the eye, and tell them the $5.99 you just spent on them should be good to cover their work until they die.

Paulo César Pinheiro, Mauro Duarte: Nunca Mais

very brazillian to turn the same repeated phrase into flowy magic; melody works nicely as instrumental too

AI: Artificial Ingredients

Git search all diffs

git log -G "alfa" -p bravo/

Let's talk about Trump and the GOP’s red scare rhetoric failing on the youth....

[The right-wing managed to mainstream socialism, which socialists were never able to do, simply by using it as a "derogatory" label for every means of government assistance that helped people most in need.]

[Young people without Cold War experience of socialism embrace the political ideology without associating it with the Soviets.]

[Jargon is an indicator of high-resolution conversation between those inside domain. It may exclude people outside, but that doesn't it should be avoided inside. Help newcomers quickly get up to speed and they'll be happy to join in.]

[The experiment suggests that participants chose cake afterwards not only because their challenging cognitive task required more calories, but also because the same process drained their willpower to resist. There's only one pool for both.]

Every moment spent struggling with a confusing UI, frustrating customer service, poor documentation, or anything requiring patience, self-control, or intense concentration on the tool could be stealing resources from learning, practice, and becoming badass at the thing they really care about: the context.

The Zeigarnik Effect means cognitive resources are being consumed in the background while you’re doing other things. The more open/unfinished tasks that are running in the background, the less resources are available for focusing, practicing, and learning.

[Marketing materials focus on the compelling context, while remaining easy to understand. Learning content focuses on the tool, and the dry or hard to read material gets interpreted by the brain as spam.]

[Asking "Why?", "So what?, and "Who cares?" can help reframe unfocused material so that the brain says "worthy".]

[Easier for their brain is good, but less is better: is that element truly necessary?]

[Reading a physical book gives me a choice to turn the page, look away, put it down, and trust that it will be as I left it when coming back.]