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

If debt were inherited over generations, it’s easy to see how it would quickly leave some trapped in permanent multigenerational poverty, unable to escape no matter how hard they worked or how high an income they managed to secure. The interest on debt would compound over generations and eventually no amount of work would be enough for it to be paid off. Being trapped in debt is something many can understand. But the reverse – inherited wealth – has exactly the same effect on society.
A few people and their descendants, like

Benjamina and his magic money printer, have a distortionary effect and control over our society and our energy budgets, reducing the space of the possible, our ability to innovate, and ultimately preventing us from cracking the next energy level that leaves everyone better off. In turn, we gradually enter a new feudalism.

Brilliant post on the history of web forums! I came online too late for the heyday of web forums, but I’ve used a few. They certainly did have a distinct charm compared to modern social platforms. The reason it struck a chord is because I’ve been thinking of setting up a small forum online as a calm space to discover…

Obvious but…

This article reviews recent economic studies on the causal effects of temperature on labor productivity. The negative effects of extreme temperatures are widespread, and the magnitudes of the impact differ across social and economic factors. In addition to physical outputs, extreme temperatures also impair mental productivity, including cognition and learning. In utero exposure to extreme temperatures has profound effects on human development. Although the literature has detected various adaptation strategies, the conclusions are mixed. We discuss some limitations of existing studies and propose several directions for future research.

Beautiful:

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.

So true:

Orhan Pamuk: I understand, I am an admirer of René Girard’s work but I have come across him later in years, The Scapegoat, Sacrifice, I like these subjects, but on the other hand it was a rather simplistic or simple idea that I think that even in the worst conditions that to be able to tell a story is a sort of a great relief for me, that I believe that in fact if there are Hegelian minds who are trying to over- rule each other which is a Hegelian point of view of history, I think that my understanding of people’s wills or minds clashing is who is going to tell who’s story earlier? Who is going to impose his or her story? It think all of my characters in various books be it My Name is Red, be it The Black Book or even Snow, the one who manages to tell his story, pass his story, survives or telling stories is a way of surviving and continuing to live.

From Kottke:

Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion, I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is my — what is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? EVERYTHING!

I use voice typing heavily because it saves me a lot of time. So I asked Claude/Codex to build me a desktop app. They built a damn good one works like a charm. Still blows my mind that a dummy like me can get this done.

Number 4 is counterintuitive. I always thought that you are not supposed to run ong running sessions. The accepted wisdom is that after 1 or 2 compactions, moving to a new session is a better idea. What Simon here is saying is the exact opposite. I’ll experiment with this

3/ Try using one long-running implementer session for the entire project. Mine routinely run for days or even weeks continuously, compacting many, many times. Compaction works now. Long sessions remember your conventions and patterns and you stop needing to re-explain things.

4/ Drive it with a persistent task list. Your job is to add vetted tasks faster than it can complete them. It’s like shoveling coal into a steam engine. Each task should be: what to do, how to verify, proof notes once completed. The bar is: if satisfied as written, you’d trust the result. Queue as much work as you can before you stop working for the night, especially on Fridays.

 

So it’s not all hype!

Some of what we describe above is not entirely unique to Mythos Preview. When we ran other frontier models through the same harness, they found a fair number of the same underlying bugs, and in some cases they got further than we expected on the reasoning side too. Where they fell short was at the point of stitching the pieces together. A model would identify an interesting bug, write a thoughtful description of why it mattered, and then stop, leaving the actual chain unfinished and the question of exploitability open. What changed with Mythos Preview is that a model can now take those low-severity bugs (which would traditionally sit invisible in a backlog) and chain them into a single, more severe exploit.

I first read the phrase “garment of destiny” in the wonderful book Fluke, and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can…

Amen:

Maybe this sounds banal and corny, but I’ve experienced it as personally profound: you can shift your perspective from “wow, that person is being incredibly stupid” to “maybe they’re currently learning something important,” for any person, at any time. You can also do this to your view of organizations, countries, even the human species.

From Nonrequired Reading by Wisława Szymborska: One more comment from the heart: I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised. Homo Ludens dances, sings, produces meaningful gestures, strikes poses, dresses up, revels, and performs elaborate rituals. I don’t…

Addy Osmani on harness engineering:

A decent model with a great harness beats a great model with a bad harness. I’ve watched this play out on my own work over and over. And increasingly the interesting engineering isn’t in picking the model, it’s in designing the scaffolding around it.

This is the first open-weight model that plays like a top-class agentic model. Watching it go through ambiguous and meticulous chained tool work successfully puts it squarely in the wheelhouse of Opus 4.6. We’re looking at an open weight model, but with much cheaper direct inference provider pricing. For a subclass of our eval set, it’s outperforming GPT 5.2. We’re about to undergo a gigantic industry shift.

Russia is not running out of new soldiers to send to the meat grinders in Ukraine: The main sources of data on new recruits signing up are federal and regional budget spending reports, which include a separate section on bonuses paid for signing military contracts. The sizes of the bonuses paid at both the federal and…

Nick Maggiulli writes that AI disruption will be the same as previous technological shifts:

Some will argue that “this time is different” because AI is replacing knowledge work, not just physical work. And, if this comes to pass, what will there be left for people to do?

It’s a compelling argument, but people made similar arguments about the automation of physical work. There was literally a group of people in England in the early 1800s called the Luddites who destroyed weaving machines due to their adverse impact on textile workers.

The Luddites couldn’t imagine what would replace their livelihoods and the same is true for us now. There will be future roles that require a different set of human skills that we can’t even imagine today. These skills won’t directly compete with LLMs, but will enhance them.

Good advice from Tyler Cowen:

If strong AI will lower the value of your human capital, your current wage is relatively high compared to your future wage. That is an argument for working harder now, at least if your current and pending pay can rise with greater effort (not true for all jobs).

Attention is first philosophy.

One of my favourite sites on the internet. I hope it survives the end of time itself:

28 years of kottke.org, as of today. Older than Google. Older than The Matrix. Older than Christopher Nolan’s feature film career. Older than Elle Fanning. Older than Kurt Cobain when he died. 47,300 posts since March 14, 1998. It might outlast American democracy.

Found the link on https://smallweb.blog

Files under Claude Code are good enough to solve a whole host of peculiar problems peculiarly specific to you. Welcome to the age of home-cooked software.

A writing maxim I want to tattoo on my hand: Stop trying be smart. Just be honest about how you feel.

Defuddle and markdown.new.

Depressing chart by Rafael.

Why the Strait of Hormuz is important.

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 ↗

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.”