2025-10-15 22:26:41
[Disclosure: I have a personal bias towards this book]. There's a really interesting category of books that kind of serve like mantras. I listened to this one on audiobook and it made me more notice-ful for the duration of my listening, which is wonderful.
I feel like I should pick some traits I wish I had more of (say, Bravery) and just listen to an audibook about them regardless of its quality, as a kind of mantra-practice to prioritize prioritizing that trait.
I got this because I enjoyed Yu's poems about cats, and also because the title is so fantastic. But I did not enjoy this book at all. But do check out his Cat Poems.
So, many years ago I had this idea for a sci-fi premise where this new invention allows people to sleep as long as they like and spread their waking-lifespan over as much or little time as they wanted: you could choose to be awake 24 hours a day for 50 years, or 2 hours a day for 600 years, or 10 minutes a day (average) for 7200 years.
My intuition was that this would create an economic split where if you make your money from capital you would want to extend as much as possible, while if you make your money from labour you would want to compress as much as possible, but I'm not at all sure about that.
I never got anywhere with it in part because I felt like I had a premise but no plot. A while ago I mentioned the concept to a dear friend who said oh yeah that's already been done, check out Orson Scott Card's Worthing Saga. Since life is short and my ideas for books are many, this was more relief than disappointment: someone else has already done it! I can experience this world without needing to create it!
Alas, I feel that Card doesn't do the idea justice at all – it's an element of his world but I don't think he really thinks through the implications or figures out how this world would work.
(Overall I thought the book was fine, Card is a very proficient craftsmen so once I started I found it hard to put down, but at the end of it all I wish I hadn't started, I don't think this one will stick with me at all).
I kind of enjoyed the book but can't really recommend it – it's EXTREMELY "here are my ideas about the afterlife pretending to be a novel", and I'm extremely tolerant of Novels of Ideas and still only found this one good-or-ok, and most people I meet seem to hate the whole category so probably shouldn't read it. I do really recommend the movie!
2025-10-13 20:56:38
An argument often given against conspiracy theorists is that it's implausible that thousands of separate people could ever keep a secret.
Something I've realized lately is that often the answer to this can just be "it's a coordination problem": lots of people know the secret, and would prefer to expose the secret, but any single person exposing it will pay huge costs (and receive little personal benefit), so it's hard for the various secret-knowers to coordinate to publicize it.
Take the Edward Snowden revelations. I think that anyone speculating before 2013 about the surveillance network Snowden disclosed would have been told 1) this is a crazy conspiracy theory, 2) it's impossible, because thousands of people would have to know about it, and a thousand people can only keep a secret if 999 of them are dead.
Edward Snowden paid a high price for revealing the secrets, and seems to have done an unusually effective job of it – you can easily imagine a world where he paid an even-higher price and didn't successfully publicize the secrets either.
And personally I suspect that Snowden was pretty unique in his willingness and ability to blow this particular whistle: I think that without this one very specific person getting the secret out, it might have been decades or more before they became public. Was there a conspiracy? Or just a coordination problem among secret-knowers?
On a much smaller scale, when I was a college student I spoke with various social science professors who privately trashed the research of many of their famous colleagues, saying Everyone Knows that Professor X's research doesn't actually replicate and is ultimately false. (Not the X-Men guy, I believe his research was pretty robust, but you know what I mean).
But calling out these colleagues publicly would have been bad for their careers, so for a long time this collective falsehood was maintained. Eventually the "replication crisis" became public, but I think there were decades before that where a bunch of people basically knew about it, but managed to keep a collective secret. Was that a conspiracy, or just a coordination problem?
I don't know any world-shattering secrets myself, but I can see the same dynamic play out with the few small things I know which would be Of Public Interest but don't ever seem to become public.
For example, a famous politician had a longtime media reputation for avuncularity, but everyone I've met who directly worked with him describes him as being aggressive and abusive, and says that everyone else in politics-world knows this too.
So political journalists are surely aware of it, but each writer or editor individually knows that going public about it would only cause them grief, and they don't. (If you know what you're looking for you can sometimes see oblique references to his behavior in articles, but nobody ever seems to say it outright).
Is it a conspiracy that there's no public accounting of something highly newsworthy that thousands of people know? Or is it just a coordination problem?
Ultimately I think a common thread across these coordination problems is that the people who benefit from the secret have concentrated benefits while the general public suffers a diffuse cost.
Meanwhile, anyone exposing the secret would have concentrated costs and very little personal benefit. So the public discourse remains a little less truthful, even before a specific power threatens consequences for anyone who exposes the truth.
2025-10-10 21:39:40
Person Do Thing is on Amazon. You’re here so you know Uri already, but I’ll just say that my family loves this one and that it makes a great gift for the person in your life that loves games.
The Resonant Computing Manifesto. See if you see anyone you know 😉.
The universe as an evolving organism. I have no idea whether or not this is true, but I really enjoy this style of conversation about black holes and space and what we know and what we don’t. There should be more of this.
Frequency reduces difficulty. Via Mark Larson.
What happened to .400 hitters?
“You have enough ideas to destroy Amazon.” Not just founders, product managers too.
Monarch butterflies produce a “super generation” that live 8x as long as the other generations to allow them to complete their migratory cycle. Again, via Secrets of the Forest, which has to be the children’s book of the year in the Dillard household. It’s beginning to rival the Kroger App for introducing me to delightful facts. And I don’t say that lightly!
If anyone knows the author, send her my compliments.
Brand Mascots are actually persuasive to children.
This is how the Canadian Supreme Court dresses. And even worse, they’re changing it. Why, Canada, why?
"Life is 10 per cent what you make it, and 90 per cent how you take it" ―Irving Berlin. Sometimes I think the quotes at the end of The Browser are aimed directly at me. I promise you my kids will grow up with this one memorized.
I was on the Demystifying Cosmetics Podcast talking about what I learned making high performance biomaterials from kelp.
If that’s not enough, we’re doing a live show of --dangerously-skip-permissions on Friday (today) at 2 pm ET. Come and hang out.
(I have to be the only person putting out a podcast on beauty ingredients and coding with AI the same week)
Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners
Mike Judge on the lack of AI software productivity in the data and a response.
2025-10-06 20:12:01
Ok, so: if you have pastries you want to save for tomorrow, you're kinda stuck. If you put them in the fridge they'll go soggy, and if you leave them out in the open they'll go stale.
It feels like the solution is a vacuum-sealed chamber, right? Like the thing you can do with wine bottles with that special cork and a pump and you pump all the air out and the wine (supposedly) stays un-oxygenated for longer.
And other people have had this thought, and the modern manufacturing sector is a miracle, so many such chambers are available to purchase online.
And yet I've never heard of anyone doing this, and the ratings on the aforementioned products are bad, so why doesn't this work in practice?
It is disproportionately hateful when something (or someone) you dislike succeeds in real time. Why? There's lots of already-succesful things in the world I dislike, and that doesn't bother me nearly as much as watching the ascendancy of a disliked thing happen in real time. What's the difference?
Here's some books I am reading, or thinking of reading – if you're currently reading them too let's chat:
Material World, by Ed Conway
Noticing, by Ziyad Marar
The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu
A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander
Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, by Joe Dispenza
Healing Back Pain, by John Sarno
A Story Waiting to Pierce You, by Peter Kingsley
People always take "I'm too sexy for my shirt" to mean the person is sexy. But what if it's just a really ugly shirt?
2025-10-03 20:45:02
Best enjoyed this week in a sunny corner of a park
If you’ve ever wanted to buy a life sized dinosaur, now is your chance. Someday my son is going to find out I had this opportunity and didn’t take it and will never look at me the same way again.
The Quiet Ones by Nikunj Kothari. An ode to the people that do the little things to make a company or a team effective.
Illiteracy is a policy choice. We don’t talk about Mississippi’s education system often enough (although careful readers of Good Tokens will recognize this from a previous edition). Every single state should be studying their approach to literacy. See also the Sold a Story .
Altoids by the fistful. Via my friend Daniel.
I now realize that everything I lorded over other people—all the things I gatekept without consciously understanding that this was what I was doing—I didn’t need to do that. It really didn’t help anything. For some number of people who interacted with me, I was the problem. I could’ve been more tolerant or forgiving, I could’ve said “let’s find out together,” I could’ve let other people have the fun once in a while.
"The devil’s oldest strategy is, of course, promising godlike creation without godlike effort." Slop is a choice.
Let’s see if I can land the plane on this one. I’m surprised that there isn’t more nostalgic fiction about growing up in evangelical Christian circles. There’s satirical stuff like Saved but nothing that I’m aware of like The Big Sick that both pokes fun at being a child of immigrants while also on some level clearly feeling affection for it. Is this out there and I just don’t know about it?
Are we at the point where “yes, and…” is overrated? If not, how long until we get there?
Something I struggled with this week: for someone like you and me, in 2025, what does it mean to live a good life? At 19, it was easier for me to articulate an answer to this question I actually believed than it is now in many ways. If you feel like you have a good answer to this, consider this me humbly requesting that you write it and share it.
Apparently Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake”, according to a recent Rest Is History Bonus episode. I’m a sucker for things we think that aren’t actually so.
China installed more industrial robots last year than the rest of the world combined. This is one of those stats that a 17 year old is going to be citing in an AP History Exam in 2084 about why China won the war for Taiwan.
Badgers air out their beds to keep them clean, via Secrets of the Forest.
“You are going to continue sucking for the rest of your career.” A call from Nerajno to embrace learning.
Episode 2 of Dangerously Skip Permissions. Mark your calendars. Tell your friends. Tell people you don’t even like.
A list of ways to run more than one Claude Code instance at once. I was hoping to build in this space but I may be too late.
The future is compounding teams
Simon Willison on designing agents loops.
What does a UI look like that all users are able to edit? What primitives are needed to build it?
Fuzzy compilers in less than 30 seconds.
Making a note to try out Microsoft’s amplifier.
Human / AI synergy and having a theory of mind.
2025-09-29 20:55:53
My game Person Do Thing is now available in the US; it'll be out on Amazon soon, but if you want to get early-adopter bragging rights you can order right now on want.persondothing.com for shipping this week.
First, a caveat: I love coming up with new voting systems, but I'm very unconvinced that (in practice) this is at all a good idea.
Long story short, I tend to believe that the theoretical properties of a voting system are conditional on their legitimacy with the population, such that the best voting systems in practice are ones that are 1) familiar, 2) very simple to explain, 3) don't require maths. For real life, I largely approve of approval voting.
I also think that without a very rigorous plan and a willingness to spend your life implementing it, talking about voting systems is a lot like doing a crossword – it's a fun puzzle that vaguely mentions current events, but it has ~no actual connection to politics in the real world. This is plausibly true for most public policy discussions, but might be especially true for voting reform, because voting reform is almost-always against the interests of the current government who were voted in by the current system. There are all kinds of easy improvements that don't get implemented (cough anti-gerrymandering cough cough) because the people who decide about them are exactly the beneficiaries of the current messes. So I don't believe that writing blogposts like this has any chance of changing the world as it actually is.
But for the rest of this piece, I'm going to pretend I don't believe those things, so I can have fun thinking about voting systems.
In short: Weighted FPTP would be a parliamentary voting system where each representative gets votes in proportion to their vote-share in their district. If Anna wins her district with 60% of the vote, she gets 60 votes in parliament; if Billy wins his district with only 42% vote share, he gets 42 votes.
This has some properties:
1) it mildly counterweights gerrymandering. Gerrymandering usually works by putting Our Voters into districts with small majorities, and Their Voters into one district with a huge majority and several others with small minorities, therefore "wasting" a bunch of their votes. Under Weighted FPTP, this effect is lessened (but not removed!) because the huge-majority district delivers more votes to parliament than a small-majority district.
2) at the same time, because it's still FPTP, this system gives disproportionate reward to the winners: a candidate who gets 51% of the vote gets 51 more votes in parliament than the runner-up who got 49%. But this is both good and bad, because truly proportional systems can become dysfunctional when no faction has enough votes to get anything done.
3) it can encourage politicians in safe seats to keep working for their constituents despite knowing they're going to win anyway – even more so if the vote share used is "% of voting-eligible population" rather than "% of people who actually voted."