I just posted the following to LinkedIn and I am inordinately pleased with myself about it: “Questex, the company where I have happily worked for the past two years, is now Forge, and ‘Forge’ is now my second-favorite F-word.”
Kyla Scanlon “on wealth vs. labor and ownership vs. effort."
Over half of Americans no longer believe full-time work will get them to their financial goals, Scanlon writes. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to be financially comfortable just through work, even if your work is skilled, white-collar, professional work. Our economy rewards owning things over doing things. Labor’s share of economic output is declining, while corporate profits rise.
This casino economy encourages a kind of performative affluence — social media influencers, and their followers, who flash the signifiers of wealth — fancy cars and jewelry — and promote get-rich-quick schemes. Often even the influencers are not themselves wealthy; it doesn’t cost too much to rent a fancy car by the hour to appear in your Instagram video.
Yes, Boomers have accumulated most of the wealth, but that’s just luck, not conspiracy. They came up in a period of affluence, when houses were affordable. They’re numerous, long-lived, they vote, and when they vote, they vote their self-interest.
I say “they” here to describe Boomers even though I am one myself. However, I was born in the tail end of the Boom and don’t feel particularly financially comfortable.
“On his deathbed, President Chester Arthur ordered that all of his personal and professional papers be burned. Three barrels of documents went up in flames. But 23 letters survived, initialed only ‘J.I.S.'”
Arthur was a prince of the spoils system of government — institutionalized corruption and bribery — that was standard through most of the 19th Century. But as President he led dismantling that system and replacing it with professional civil service that drove many of the great advances of the U.S. in the 20th Century.
Arthur was turned around, to a large extent, by those 23 letters, from Julia Isabella Sand, a woman who lived an obscure life in New York. Though she exerted great influence on Arthur, she and the President never met.
Comedian and amateur historian Elliot Kalan and 99% Invisible host Roman Mars tell the story.
Use an LLM to build a personal wiki for areas of research
At the beginning of April, the prominent AI researcher Andrej Karpathy tweeted (https://x.com/karpathy/status/2039805659525644595) out an idea that was, for a certain kind of productivity nerd, an infohazard. He described the idea this way: ‘Something I’m finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest.’ He proceeded to describe his process: adding source documents to a local folder and using an LLM to extract and organize their contents into a Markdown wiki that gets updated as he adds new material."
I don’t know whether I will do this but it sure is intriguing.
Anthony Bourdain in 2005: Direct from cassette. “Two hours turned into a highly personal conversation, recorded on a cassette that sat untouched for twenty years. This week, that tape gets its first public airing, and we discuss Tony’s preferred sucker-punch etiquette, his loyalty to cigarettes and the Chateau Marmont, ayahuasca in Peru, and the talk show he dreamed up with Christopher Walken in mind.”
“You can’t predict fire. But you can trade on it." California senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff want financial regulators to restrict people from using prediction markets to bet on how wildfires will spread, citing concerns that bettors could resort to arson to secure outcomes.
The Rest is History looks at the Irish Troubles. There are strong parallels to Israel and the Palestinians. The violence in Northern Ireland eventually ended, which is a cause for cautious hope in Israel/Palestine.
I admired Anthony Bourdain. I consumed his interviews and read as many articles by him as I could find. I found “Kitchen Confidential” among the most inspiring books I’ve read.
When he killed himself, I came to think of his public persona as a lie, and stopped watching, listening to or reading him.
But now I think the public Bourdain was a character he created, played and tried to live, and I should resume appreciating his life and work.
Why Some People Thrive on Four Hours of Sleep
“Short sleepers, who make up less than one per cent of the population, spend significantly less time snoozing without any apparent health consequences.” By Shayla Love at The New Yorker.
I envy these people — I need 8-9 hours. I get less than that most days, often as little as five, and that’s no fun.
Short sleepers are often lonesome, awake at night when there’s nobody around. Is that true for short sleepers who are also introverts? Or is that a combination that does not exist?
Maybe one day science will figure out a way to drastically reduce or even eliminate our need for sleep. But it’s a hairy problem — science doesn’t even know why we sleep, not really. So I’m not hopeful that’ll come in my lifetime.
I don't hate X/Twitter, but I don't see anything pulling me to it either
Sure, I oppose Musk — but that’s not what keeps me off X.
I don’t see Zuck as being vastly superior to Musk. Paraphrasing Walter Sobchak from “The Big Lebowski” — Musk is a Nazi but Zuck is a nihilist who is happy to work with Nazis if there is profit in it.
And yet I’m active on Facebook and I regularly check Threads.
My primary reason for staying off X is that I haven’t heard any reason for me to be active there. If anything interesting is going on there, I hear about it through other channels. I’m already on too many social media platforms; I don’t want to add one more, and I certainly don’t want to add a siloed platform controlled by one guy. I was super-active on Twitter for a long time but was already losing interest when Musk took over, and I quit in a fit of pique soon after that.
Now, I keep an account on X because I do occasionally need to check something there for professional reasons. The account has no avatar, no bio and no followers and I only look at X every few months or so.