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

I believe going down rabbit holes is essential to living well. When something catches my attention—a “ripple”—I follow it wherever it leads, even if it seems random or pointless. These intellectual adventures have led me to the best books, projects, and ideas in my life. A few thoughts on tumbling down weird rabbit holes.

This tweet thread by Jake resonated deeply with me. We all seem to be becoming increasingly adversarial in how we think about the world, and that’s not a good thing:

The deepest divide in today’s world, whether in economics, politics, investing, or even religion, seems to come down to those who view society as a zero-sum game and those who believe in shared growth. This is increasingly showing up everywhere, from relatively benign issues like tariffs and tax policy to more consequential debates over social rights and aid (and even territorial ambitions). Decisions being made seem shaped by a mindset that there needs to be a winner and loser over collective progress… at the expense of longstanding norms and values.

And

If you see the world as zero sum, you end up resenting people who are different from you or who enter your space (whether in the economy, schools, or country) because you view them as an opponent and their presence as a direct cost to yourself.

The human brain isn’t built to process numbers about China: Today China’s share of global export containers is over 36%, though the country represents around a fifth of world GDP. A foreign-business boss in China foresees a reckoning: “There will come a point in time when China and the world simply cannot absorb more…

Amen. Amen a 100 times!

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” ― Franz Kafka

Hat tip to @kpxas.

Also see Maria Popova.

I’ve been messing around with AI coding tools lately, and they’re so good that even someone who can’t code (me) can build actual websites. While building Paper Lanterns to collect public domain letters and essays, I stumbled across Seneca’s letters to Lucilius. First read? Meh. Thought it was just another ancient Roman philosopher trying to sound profound. But when I came back to them a few weeks later and actually paid attention, I was floored. These 2,000-year-old letters about how to live a good life are ridiculously relevant—covering everything from managing time and emotions to dealing with death and maintaining friendships.

The letters are freely available on WikiSource, but reading them there wasn’t great so I built Seneca.ink—a simple, clean site where you can actually enjoy reading these letters without the clunky interface getting in the way. If you’re curious about Stoicism but don’t want to wade through academic texts or listen to LinkedIn influencers bastardize it into “productivity hacks,” these letters are the perfect starting point.

We’ve all seen images about the decline in the global fertility rate. Some have apocalyptic pronouncements about this, trend and predict the end of humanity, but I’ve never been convinced about the doom case. Surely this isn’t the first time this has happened in human history, and yet here we are. .png) The reason why…

Pew published a report on how Americans use and view AI, and it’s quite interesting. Americans are much more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, with a majority saying they want more control over how AI is used in their lives. Far larger shares say AI will erode than improve people’s…

Google DeepMind’s Gemini and OpenAI achieved gold-medal-level performance at the 2025 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals. OpenAI’s Mostafa Rohaninejad: We officially competed in the onsite AI track of the ICPC, with the same 5-hour time limit to solve all twelve problems, submitting to the…

The Swiss central bank has massive equity holdings. The Swiss National Bank has US equity holdings amounting to $167bn, spread across more than 2,300 positions, according to SEC filings from June. The DeepSeek hype was manufactured? TL;DR: DeepSeek’s record-breaking hype wasn’t organic — it was powered by thousands of…

Damn. What a powerful poem. If there was ever a poem for the present moment. Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is…

The ease with which Maria Popova strings together words of lyrical rhythm and immense depth is striking.

I thought of Einstein, who at sixteen, lonely and introverted, began wondering about the nature of the universe by imagining himself chasing a beam of light through outer space; I thought of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, also lonely and also dedicated to the light, who at the same time was formulating his general theory of love as “two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other.” And I thought about how love is simply the solitary light between people, neither partitioned nor merged but shared, to light up the sliver of spacetime we have each been allotted before returning our borrowed stardust to the universe.

This is a brilliant video by Gregory Sadler. I’ve always liked the thought that philosophy began as a way of learning how to live well. A few things that stood out to me in the video: Hadot isn’t saying philosophy-as-life disappeared after antiquity and medieval times, leaving only professors in universities. He notes…

From this article in the Foreign Affairs: Bukele has forced Salvadorans to trade civil liberties for a sense of security, a bargain that has only grown starker over his five years as president. But whether this arrangement lasts depends on whether it can evolve into a sustainable model of governance, which, given…

File this under hopeful naïveté, naïve idiocy, or pointlessly hopeless romanticism. I was playing around with Gemini’s new image model, NanoBanana, and I was shocked at how good it was. That got me thinking about the present state of AI tools—by which I mean large language models (LLMs). People often use “AI” to mean…

Is social media a net positive or negative for society? This is an interesting question, at least for me personally, and my answer keeps changing with each passing month. You can find opinions across the spectrum. Here’s what Noah Smith tweeted, quoting the graphic below: Social media is destroying our civilization.…

Glenn on Twitter said:

Hot take: Solar “scaling laws” will ultimately prove more impactful on humanity than the AI version

I agree.

Image: Our World in Data

Cheap solar is, in my humble view, one of the most underappreciated innovations in the recent past. I think it will prove to more consequential to humanity than most people assume.

While there is a loud debate about overcapacity among Chinese solar panel manufacturers, I think it’s a good problem to have. Look the spectacular increase in the import of Chinese solar panels by African countries. I’m pretty sure all these countries would love more overcapacity and, by extension, cheap prices.

Africa’s solar imports—charts from Ember.

China is the best thing to have happened to the green transition. There is no green transition without China!

Image: Ember Energy

Another way of visualizing this.

A beautiful perspective on what poetry can do for us by Leila Chatti: I have always put my faith in poetry, have come to it for answers. (I have never understood the shame, in poets, in admitting this.) And there was no one else, then, to turn to—the world closed, I lived inside a room of books. This is not metaphor.…

File under US-China tech cold war. Anthropic to stop selling services to Chinese companies: The policy, which takes effect immediately, will potentially apply to Chinese companies from ByteDance and Tencent to Alibaba. “We are taking action to close a loophole that allows Chinese companies to access frontier AI,” said…

Think of a fiber optic cable as a super-thin strand of glass (about as thin as a human hair) that carries information using light instead of electricity. It’s like a tiny, flexible glass tube that light can travel through.

Benedict Evans is one of the most thoughtful writers on technology. Whenever I listen to him, I end up feeling embarrassed, because I keep thinking: why can’t I think like that? 😬 Unlike many other commentators, Ben has a very practical and measured view of AI. One thing I love is how he goes about defining what AI…

I was listening to a conversation between Jack Clarke, co-founder of Anthropic, and Tyler Cowen. It was an interesting conversation with some interesting things that made me go, “Ooh, that’s interesting,” and a lot of vague, hand-wavy, speculative predictions that are unknowable, unprovable, and hard to mentally…

Came across this fascinating paper looking at whether developing countries are catching up to advanced countries. It’s frankly depressing, but I asked Claude for a summary. ### What Remains of Cross-Country Convergence? A Critical Review of 50 Years of Economic Growth Research. Summary by Claude. This comprehensive…

In this post, I argue that speculation is like water—it never stops, it just finds new channels. Using India’s gaming ban and global examples, I show why prohibition shrinks what’s visible but pushes play offshore or underground, and why channelisation with smart, coordinated regulation works better.

Sabine Hossenfelder tried to “vibe physics” using popular LLM models, and she was underwhelmed. So if you’re a physicist, I guess your job is safe for now. I’m not a physicist myself, and I couldn’t understand half the things Sabine said. That said, she points out that the current crop of LLMs are good at literature…

I watched this conversation between Dave Chappelle and Mo Amer and got really thinking about what artists are supposed to do. Mo’s Netflix show Mo is about Palestinian refugees, and he literally finished writing it right before October 7th happened. Hearing him talk about navigating that timing as one of the few Palestinians in Hollywood made me appreciate how hard it is to be an artist dealing with heavy, real-world stuff. I loved their discussion about how you know when a story or joke is worth telling—basically, if it makes people laugh, think, or feel something. Both of them talked about just “calling it like you see it,” even when it’s risky.

Sometimes, the most important discoveries come from simply wanting to know. This video by Betül Kaçar, “Why we explore, even when there’s no payoff,” is a beautiful reminder of the power of pure curiosity in science.

A dialogue exploring one of the most fundamental tensions of the human condition: our search for meaning in a world that often seems governed by chance. We dive into the science of chaos, the psychology of storytelling, and the philosophical frameworks designed to help us navigate this profound uncertainty.