This book has been on my shelf for over twenty years waiting for me to read it, and the only real expectations I had established were that people I respected in college recommended it. And that it has Zen and motorcycles in it.

I don’t really think I can “review” this book without “spoiling” some things in it. Though there really isn’t a whole lot to spoil. I’m also not sure how meaningful this review will be for anyone who hasn’t read it. However, just like the book, I think there are a number of threads here and some of them really don’t have much to do with this book specifically, so with that fuzzy-ass introduction…

I found this book a struggle to read. In fact, I think I broke it up into three different “sessions” with (many) other books in between them and it was right around 5 months from start to finish. I didn’t like the writing that much. I found the viewpoint character (and the author himself) pretty irksome and insufferable. I did enjoy many of the ideas, but even those dragged a bit so when I’d get to the end of a chapter or the end of a part I would walk away for a bit.

I’m not sure I really lost anything by experiencing it this way. There is no true narrative. Instead there are three threads throughout the book. First is the foreground of a man on a motorcycle driving across the country with his eleven-year-old-son. Second is the background memories of how that man ended up on that motorcycle. Finally, there is the “inquiry” part of the “inquiry into values” portion of the book — a meditation on quality, philosophy, and trying to find that One Answer For Everything.

So why even continue? Because despite all the unenjoyable aspects of the book it was putting new ideas in my head and reframing old ideas that were already in my head. I found the journey into Quality fascinating. I thought the 1970s framing, a time period of major disruptions, very timely here in 2026. “Groovy” and “square” fit just as well 50 years later. The synthesis of Western and Eastern philosophy was something pretty unique to me. I marked page after page of “interesting” passages throughout the book.

It was the equivalent of getting some interesting and novel ideas presented to me while slowly realizing that I really didn’t like this guy. And it’s important to point out here that I didn’t like the narrator nor did I like the past ego of Phaedrus, though for very different reasons. I found the narrator to be a coward. I found Phaedrus to be smug. Though in some ways maybe it was for the same reason — I found both of them to be inveterate narcissists, wholly involved only with themselves and their own headspace.

This is, perhaps, most apparent when viewed through the lens of the narrator’s son Chris riding on the back of the motorcycle. The boy who doesn’t see anything but his father’s back while they drive through the country. The boy who hasn’t really been taught to communicate because it doesn’t appear he’s been communicated with very much. Ostensibly the whole journey is supposed to be about Chris and yet looking back over the narrative…it really was not. Chris is as much a ghost in the narrative as Phaedrus — though Chris is mentioned less and possesses even less agency.

Perhaps this says more about me than about the book. I have very strong expectations of fatherhood and I felt like they were not met at all. And I struggle with overt philosophy much of the time because I find it reductive and frequently masturbatory. So to read about someone trying to “make it make sense” to the point of an obsession that disregards their son I’m not sure I can help but feel like it’s incredibly self-involved.

Insightful though, too, and thus my ambivalence. Some journeys are not meant to be easy or comfortable or to be taken just with people that you love. Sometimes you just have to drive down the bumpy road and listen to the sound of the engine I suppose.

So I think it’s a good book. I think it’s a thought-provoking book. I think wading into the mind of the author will give me insights into how to live my own life and how to think about the world. I guess I’m glad there are people in the world thinking and writing like this, but I don’t think I would be at all interested in sitting down and getting to know the author at a bar or on a motorcycle trip.

Which, of course, now raises the question — was that the point? Was this supposed to be a raw human with all the niceties stripped away and anyone like that is unlikeable? Was writing this book actually brave? Was there just more subtext I was supposed to pick up on that solved for the fatherhood gaps and the narcissism gaps? Maybe I just don’t “get” it. This is a frequent thing for me when I read the “classic” and “popular” books, that I suspect I’m just missing something.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that it was worth reading and it has Quality.

I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.

1. You are what you consume is an interesting meditation from Noah Smith on one way of defining identity outside of what you produce. Very thought-provoking for me.

2. Interesting reasons why so many people are Right-Handed.

3. “We are moving from a world where features were bound by the constraint of how fast engineers could type to one where we are bound on human creativity, management of agentic systems, and how fast the product surface can absorb the output.” I think this is a little hippie-dippie overall but the sentiments make some sense to me.

4. Really interesting write-up on Tim Cook from Stratechery as he steps away from the CEO role. Learned quite a bit about Apple.

5. I love Cloudflare’s communication styles and the way they approach engineering problems. This write up about their internal AI engineering stack was an amazing read and taught me a bunch.

6. I keep meaning to write-up more about all the AI datacenter bullshit but for now I thought this was an interesting historical perspective on the Luddites from Sean Goedecke.

7. Meta gonna start Big Brothering to an interesting level and watching all their employees actions on their computer so they can use it to train AI. Well then.

8. If America’s So Rich, How’d It Get So Sad? by Derek Thompson. A good read and a great question.

9. I really like this wildly pessimistic take on the past fifty years by Freddie DeBoer: We Are (Still) Living in the Long Boring. I don’t necessarily agree with it, I naturally put more weight on the information age and the AI age but his points are solid -- we aren’t seeing a world that’s fundamentally changed that much from 50 years ago. Still circling the parking lot at Target, as he says. Of course, that’s assuming you didn’t have someone drop off your package. Many things have changed and many things, just, have not. So an interesting thing to noodle.

10. So now there’s a thing called “tokenmaxxing” that’s all about how many AI tokens you can burn at your job and…I just…wow. Anyways I do remember back in the mainframe days we used to get ranked by how much we made the mainframe crunch under our userid so this is essentially the same thing. An interesting badge of “honor” in this day and age. Here’s a related paywalled article too about JPMorgan measuring this stuff.

11. It’s an interesting framing that coding is a “meta-task” - meaning it’s a task that’s really about another task. It’s just problem-solving. So the better AI gets at coding the better it gets at general problem solving. I think I agree with this quite a bit.

12. Software Engineering my no longer be a lifetime career. I think I agree with this also. I don’t consider myself a “coder” though so I am hopeful I’ll be alright…at least until the AI can fully solve problems and completely do the “meta-task” which…I think we’re a long way from that right now.

13. An NYPD cop is coming up on 200 speeding tickets issued by cameras but, you know, since he’s a cop he doesn’t actually have to worry about them. Thus the eternal question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

14. There’s a huge chunk of ice in the way of setting up Everest for climbers. They’re talking about airdropping people behind it while they wait for it to melt.

I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.

1. Strong piece from the President of FIRE — you might not like lawyers but they are fundamental to our country and Trump’s attack on them is bad and opens the door for the same crap with the next Democrat. “That is why this story should chill anyone, left, right, or otherwise. If the government can punish lawyers simply for opposing the administration in court, then it is not just threatening a profession. It threatens the right of all of us to defend ourselves, to dissent, and to place any meaningful check at all on executive power. It attacks what makes America great—the rule of law. “

2. Mushrooms form information networks! What!

3. Good write-up on where Artemis goes from here. Was cool to follow the progress while on vacation but, for me, the coolest part was the excitement it seemed to generate — that’s the one thing I think we can get better from something like NASA for sure.

4. I have had a Kindle for well over a decade. The news that Amazon is going to effectively brick a bunch of old ones is honestly just fine. I think we should normalize that technology is not going to work forever, and we shouldn’t foot the bill of keeping it working forever. I’m frankly amazed how long they supported these things — and while I still don’t like my newer Kindle paperwhite as much as my old clicky-button Kindle it was a big improvement when I finally sucked it up this year and switched.

5. As I was reading through various links after vacation something that struck me was just how litigious Elon Musk is. He has weaponized the courts to further his businesses and, much like the overly litigious culture of America, I think this is a bad thing. He’s fighting with Altman and willing to donate money just to say he won. He’s using the FCC to attack Amazon. He’s desperately trying to force everyone involved in the SpaceX IPO to use Grok. I don’t think this is that much different than what others businesses like Microsoft did in the past but still sad to see the common thread during one session at my computer.

6. Sam Altman talks a bit about his family, having a Molotov cocktail thrown at his house, mistakes he’s made, and the trajectory of AI. A good quick read.

7. Learning in the age of AI is turning out pretty horrific. Much like we’re only now adjusting to what social media and “always on” internet is doing to generations I am terrified of what it’s going to mean for education. To teach in the time of ChatGPT is to know pain

8. It’s spookily dystopian that Meta is making a Zuck-bot with his personality, mannerisms, and opinions. But I actually think this is going to be something we all end up doing to some extent. In fact, part of why I’ve been taking inventory of all my writing throughout the years is for something similar down the road.

9. What struck me about What Makes a Good GitHub Copilot Skill is how it dovetails quite a bit with what I see my job as being. Namely, it’s more about guardrails and patterns and systems than it ever was about banging out code. The deeper I’ve gotten into technical expertise the more I’ve seen that it’s about the thought patterns than anything else. Kinda neat.

10. The Real Reason Dating is So Hard Right Now (That No One is Naming). There’s a lot going on with that piece, including an incredible amount of mass being put on some statistics, but this was a great read.

Should the government totally ban cigarettes? Should they tax them into oblivion and legislate them out of existence like Australia is doing which has led to a resurgence in organized crime and black markets? Should people be free to slowly kill themselves? Where is the line between personal responsibility and protecting society from itself?

Always fun questions. Squirt, by the way, goes full on Communist command economy when it comes to cigarettes. Government should crush it under its jackboot and rip it out root and branch. Wipe out the companies and jail the leaders. Hardcore.

Addiction

Quitting smoking was probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. I loved smoking. I started when I was fifteen years old and I grew to adulthood with cigarettes as the most effective emotional regulator I’ve ever found. Anxious? Smoke. Depressed? Smoke. Happy? Smoke. Hungry? Smoke. Sleepy? Smoke. Angry? Smoke.

Think about it for a minute. I was fifteen years old and physiologically I was nowhere near grown. But my body was a storm of hormones, emotions, drama, and all the other things that make an adolescent itchy in their brain and body. Lighting up scratched the itch. My mind didn’t know how to stop. It didn’t know how to reset. But lighting up made it quiet and that’s been a thing I’ve sought my whole life.

Every cigarette was meditation. An opportunity to slow down and breathe. To process and regulate and deal with all the things we deal with as a human. Sure, it wasn’t good for me physically but mentally you better believe it was a goddamn amazing thing. What do you mean I should quit?

Escape

Quitting required me to relearn how to be human.

Quitting required me to relearn how to exist.

I couldn’t do it on my own. I ended up using Chantix which is a miracle drug in my opinion, even though I fucking despised it. I think there’s a hilarious (funny-not-funny) line in that link:

If you are using varenicline [Chantix] and experience hostility, agitation, depression, suicidal thoughts, or changes in how you act that you don’t think are due to quitting smoking, you should stop taking the medicine and talk to your doctor right away.

Because you’re absolutely going to feel hostility, agitation, and depression just from quitting and they know it. You’re gonna feel all-the-things. For me, being on that drug was also like my brain was wrapped in wool. Everything was fuzzy and plodding and just sluggish. I hated being on Chantix.

But I did quit. I relearned how to be human. I did a thing they say is harder than quitting heroin. Six years later, though, and I still think about smoking probably on a weekly basis.

This is at the top of my brain whenever I think about addiction. How even more than half a decade later I still sometimes don’t feel “right” because I haven’t had a cigarette. It’s what I think about when I see headlines about how Google and Meta just lost a major court case about the addictiveness of their social media features.

Social Media

I thought it was interesting that The Dispatch article above starts with talking about smoking. I’ve been framing social media harms that way with Squirt for a while now but to see someone else do it was gratifying. I believe the parallel to smoking is also mentioned in The Amazing Generation by Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price. It’s a very solid metaphor that I think we’ll see grow as the pushback on social media, and the realization that it’s not good for us, continues to grow.

Squirt asks: “If smoking was so bad why did people do it?” and there are a couple points I make. First is that the extent of the danger wasn’t always clear even if we knew it was “bad.” Another was that the social stigma that has grown around it didn’t really exist back then either. Another is, as I tried to illustrate up above, it is a very useful habit for some folks. Utility and being virtuous are not required to be together.

But the primary answer is pretty simple: I made a mistake. Fifteen years old I tried my first cigarette and I fucking loved it. It was awesome.

So with social media. It becomes a part of life. It is useful and enjoyable. It gives you those little drips of dopamine. Whether you’re comparing yourself to someone else or sharing in rage or just finding the first people that think like you — you’re enjoying it and hating it both. You’re doing it when you get up in the morning and when you’re sad, happy, hungry, sleepy. Before you know it, it’s just part of your waking moments every. single. day. You realize you cannot get through a day without the little ritual of it.

And the kids watch the parents do it. I have a down moment and I check back in on reddit or Facebook. I learned it from watching you, right?

Blame

Fault is so hard to assign here. The internet is an attention economy so of course social media companies, and news companies, and Substackers, and every other damn thing just is thirsty for attention. Eyeballs are dollars. So creating something that holds attention is sort of the whole point. Can you fault a company for doing what it does to make money?

Of course personal responsibility should also be a factor. I think America is already a bit too litigious. If I die from some smoking related factor down the road it’s not the tobacco company’s fault. Surprisingly my life insurance company says I’m considered a “nonsmoker” now though, which I thought was interesting.

Of course, “everyone is doing it,” right? This has weight. It’s the strongest argument for the kids as well — to not be one left out from social media and having a smartphone and all of that crap. It’s like they’re surrounded by kids that are smoking, and talking about it, and socializing while they do it. The kid that isn’t using it is the weird one.

I envy people their certainty. Squirt’s hardcore approach to eliminating cigarettes from the world. Banning social media from younger kids and removing a parent’s agency in how they raise their kids. Or the opposite extreme of just leaving it all up to personal responsibility and agency. I see the points and stand here ambivalent. I stand here thinking real hard about when Squirt will get some of these things because I remember very clearly just what happened when Squirt’s dad embraced an addiction that will be with me until the day I die.

Squirt Says…

I know I might be clinging on to a certain part of it but a second hand smoke and in fact a second hand vape is horrible for you. You can read where I got it from here but basically a second hand smoke is when a person nearby smokes and you breathe it in. It cause[s] 19,000 people per year from it [to die], and adults that do not use tobacco product but are exposed to a second hand smoke have 20 - 30% chance increase of developing lung cancer. So, do your research before you make a comment like that.

Dad Responds…

I’m reminded of the piece I wrote — The Dose Makes the Poison. It is very true that second hand smoke is bad, but the 20 - 30% increases are for those living in the house with a smoker and constantly exposed, not for someone who encounters it walking down the street outside. The larger question that we keep returning back to, however, is at what point is the government allowed to force someone to not do something in order to protect others. Where does a person’s autonomy and freedom stop and society’s liberty to be “safe” being?

I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.

1. I love Rohit Krishnan’s idea that eventually running businesses and working in IT will become like playing a game because of AI agents. I’m sure part of this framing appeals to me because of my gaming proclivities but I think, also, he has some generally solid points and those very same gaming proclivities (not to mention the science fiction reading habit) have helped me with this world we’ve found ourselves in for the past 3.5 years or so.

2. Noah Smith has a fascinating conversation with Claude about where Claude thinks Claude will be able to help with the future of science. It is a very interesting read and I learned a number of things, but one of my other take-aways was just how similar Claude talks to Noah. I’ve never been privy to someone else’s long drawn conversations other than my own and this was an eye-opening experience that fits when I take a step back but still put me in the uncanny valley.

3. Noah Smith also has a fantastic argument for Democrats to embrace some pragmatism and come to the center. While the far left drift is way way less problematic than what’s happening on the right the independent middle shouldn’t be struggling to choose and, frankly, they are.

4. Popehat has an older take on free speech and the NYT Editorial Board that I enjoyed reading again today.

5. Squirt hates I-Ready and, honestly, I can understand why having read this piece about how dystopian it is.

6. Parents refusing to listening to doctors’ advice for babies is more extensive than I realized. Natural isn’t better. Good quote: “Nature will allow 1 in 5 human infants to die in the first year of life,” Hill said, “which is why generations of scientists and doctors have worked to bring that number way, way down.”

7. Jury finds Instagram and YouTube liable in landmark social media addiction trial reports the AP. This is something that Squirt and I have discussed more and more. I think Jonathan Haidt has done some really good work in this area too and I highly recommend The Amazing Generation for kid level intro. I have drawn parallels to smoking and how it wasn’t considered so horrible back in the day and I like that metaphor more and more.

8. Nobody is coming to save your career. This was an incredibly hard lesson to learn, but painfully true.

9. Solid meditation on the advent of gambling and the new prediction markets. Very worth reading. “It is now the market that tells us what things are worth, what events matter, whose predictions are correct, who is winning, who counts. Money has, in a strange way, become the last moral arbiter standing—the final universal language that a pluralistic, distrustful, post-institutional society can use to communicate with itself.”

10. The Dispatch asks Are We Approaching an Unprecedented Energy Crisis? I worry quite a bit that we may be because the world is not nearly as “in control” as some folks may think.

11. I love this point about developers not being “compilers.” I have a painful number of programming languages and syntax in my head and bringing any particular one out of the vault to answer things like interview questions is not the best way to judge how much I can impact your organization.

12. Turning Bourbon making leftovers into capacitors. Neat!

I love the concept of epochs. One moment in time when everything changes. For me the idea is closely associated with the idea of a revolution where something rapidly transforms in a fundamental way. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari breaks human history down into three revolutions: Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific. I like to take it a step further and break human civilization down a little bit more. I did so when I wrote Scarcity is the Lens but I’m going to crib it a bit here:

• Cognitive Revolution — invention of language and semantics for spreading knowledge and connection

• Agriculture Revolution — using knowledge, we started solving for food so we could have more brains to generate more knowledge

• Scientific Revolution — invention of systematic gathering and utilization of knowledge

• Industrial Revolution — using knowledge to begin solving for human labor weaknesses, the first true steps to removing scarcity

• Internet Revolution — explosion of knowledge and connection available to humans

• AI Revolution — using expanded knowledge and connection to begin solving for human knowledge weaknesses, another large step to removing scarcity

In the broadest strokes, this is humanity. These are our epochs. These are the turning points. Revolutions that fundamentally transform our world. And it is accelerating, as you can see from the hockey stick shape that traces an exponential explosion of human population.

The Thing You Want To Argue About

It’s the AI thing, right? Is this just another piece about how AI is going to change the world? One more tech bro who wants to frame AI as a revolution when it’s really just horrible? It’s a bubble. It’s bad for the environment. The water usage. The energy. The taxpayers that have to foot the bill for the utility costs. The economic shake-ups.

Fuck it. For the purposes of this piece let’s just throw out my injection of the AI Revolution. The last big revolution in human civilization was the Internet Revolution, alrighty? Cool?

Great! Glad we could agree on that.

It Ain’t Worth It…Usually

But, you know, now that we’ve agreed on me being wrong, let’s talk. Let’s talk about an unwillingness to go down some roads. Some arguments just aren’t fucking worth it. Sometimes the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

I could never write a single word ever again about AI and absolutely nothing would change about the march of human civilization. I could write a library worth of takes on AI and…wait for it…nothing would change about the march of human civilization. The stark truth is that I’m almost certainly powerless to alter the march of human civilization.

And you probably are too.

I think grasping that perspective is important, because I think it’s important to recognize reality, which was the first step of the framework I mentioned in Powerless.

Here’s an interesting image that Claude generated for me. I asked it if every human who ever lived was a drop of milk how big would the container be to hold all of us? The answer is 177 shipping containers stacked together or a six-story office building - not actually that much needed to contain 117 billion “humans as milk drops.”

It’s an interesting metaphor of powerlessness to imagine yourself as a drop of ink that drips into a six-story building filled with milk. Will anything actually change? Of course not.

But the world is filled with ink drops that did shift it all. Norman Borlaug. Gutenberg. Newton. Jesus. Marx. Darwin. Alexander. Muhammad. Hitler. Mao. George Washington.

Dad Note: I actually fell down a rabbit hole here arguing with Claude about their top twenty list vs. my list. It didn’t have Borlaug or Washington, and while it immediately put Borlaug in the top ten when I brought him up, it then equivocated on Washington and maintains that the American Revolution succeeds without him. Another thing to sit with — there isn’t a female on either of our lists. As Claude stated: “…the list reflects history more than capability. For most of human civilization, women were systematically excluded from the positions in which civilizational-scale impact was possible.”

So were these men heroes and villains of human civilization? Were they the “Great Men” I argued about in my review of Oppenheimer? I am ambivalent. But whether it was them being special or the time being right…the next Norman Borlaug is out there. The next Norman Borlaug could very well be Squirt. But the odds are pretty strongly against it and we should recognize that.

Choice

As is my custom, I’ve wandered around quite a bit. What does any of this have to do with “a refusal to be miserable?” Where are we going with this?

We are, each of us, a drop of milk in a six-story building. Just one star in the galaxy. I think in the end there are only two ways to respond to this realization…

Choose to be miserable or choose not to be. But you are always making the choice.

Every story, every life, every day we have a choice. Living life can be reduced down to making choices so much that I began a tag page to capture all the endless variations. Every story that has a climax has, at its heart, a choice. An inflection point. Turn left or turn right? Take the risk or not? Fight or capitulate? Climb the mountain or stay in the valley?

We cannot control the world. We mostly cannot change the world. We can always control ourselves. We can always change ourselves.

I refuse to be miserable.

What about you?

Squirt Says…

I find it interesting that all of humanity could fit in those 177 shipping containers represented as milk drops, but I don't feel that entirely represents it. [Some] have more impact then others by luck or hard work. Either way, I think it would be more accurate to have each drop size to be depending on their impact on humanity just to show how small of an impact you have on the world.

Dad Responds…

It’s true the metaphor breaks down a bit. It makes me think of a meme that shows up throughout civilization: “We all die twice; the first time is when we cease to be — the second, when we are forgotten.”

To say that more bluntly — the rich and powerful almost invariably are shielded from consequences and I think that’s a bad thing.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot since the war in Iran. It was top of mind when I wrote about it recently in Choosing Who Pays. It was also something that was top of mind after reading a piece yesterday from The Dispatch that asks the question Are We Approaching an Unprecedented Energy Crisis? Here, again, is a reminder that even when we don’t have a war and a very probable global energy crisis that it’s always something to be thinking about: where are the negative consequences falling?

3.27.2025

I’ve really been finding myself obsessed with “acceptable negative consequences” recently. I’m currently watching Reacher on Amazon — an incredibly well done show about a giant of a man who is brilliant, perfectly willing to be a vigilante, and possessing a physique that’s literally impossible if all he does is wander from town to town with the clothes on his back and his toothbrush. People scoff at dragons and spaceships but this show is easily as fantastical. Think Sherlock Holmes if Holmes was willing to break people’s necks who displeased him and got to sleep with a different smart/hot/tough woman every season. I’ve eliminated all nuance and I don’t want to give the impression I don’t like it - it’s one of the few shows I immediately watch when a new episode/season comes out - but it’s not going to speak to you in your heart of hearts.

I digress, but sorta not. In the last episode I watched, a cop yells at Reacher and says “what you’re doing isn’t justice.” Reacher responds with, “I don’t want justice, I want vengeance.” This is followed up with a warning that Reacher will be on the run for the rest of his life and this is going to fuck the cop over too, to which Reacher responds that it is already how he lives life anyways and he did warn the cop that this would probably happen if they got him involved. I’ve been sitting with that for most of a week.

What are you willing to accept to get what you want?

It reminds me a bit of those buffoons with their Punisher skull stickers on their big beautiful shiny trucks. Apologies to anyone reading this who has a ridiculous truck you’d never dream of carrying 2x4’s in with a Punisher sticker on it but, yeah, dude I am judging you. Performative security blanket aside, The Punisher is an emotionally crippled and world-weary vigilante lashing out in an unjust world in response to the murder of his family. Have you ever even read the comic book?

He’s not okay. He’s not a hero. He’s not someone to emulate. He’s someone to pity. Why the ever-loving-fuck do you have his symbol on your gender-affirming care object?

Acceptable consequences. Innocents die when the Punisher is around. Everyone but Reacher pays the price for his decisions. To be sure, the bad guys die in blood and fire as well but…there’s always a price to be paid and it’s rarely a price paid by the Punisher or Reacher. They’ll be back next week with a new bad guy to kill, new innocents to pay the price, and in Reacher’s case a new woman who will trip him into bed.

A problem I have with politics and capitalism and the world in general is that as you accumulate enough power, in whatever form, you gain the ability to push those consequences farther from yourself. Power is not just to effect change around you but also to defer the consequences of those changes. Musk, Biden, Hillary, Trump, Bezos, McConnell, Pelosi — none of these people are impacted by the consequences of their actions. They play games with lives in the world but unless a nuclear holocaust comes raining down on them they’ll never experience consequences.

It’s an unjust world we’re all living in.

I compare this to my own life. The idea of consequences is something that Squirt hears about constantly. He fucks up, he pays a consequence. Yesterday he was doing some experiment with wet paper...I didn’t really ask...but the sink was clogged in his bathroom when I went to use it. So I proceeded to snake the drain and get it cleaned up but I pulled him from his allotted game time to make him help me. When we were done he asked if he could add the lost time back to his game timer. You can imagine my response, I’m sure. He clogged the drain because he didn’t think about what would happen and he lost game time helping. It wasn’t coming back. Consequence of his actions.

And yet...

A problem I have with America is that we are so rich we frequently don’t have to pay the consequences of our actions. Harris or Trump, didn’t matter, still better to live in this country than most other places. Americans are generally insulated from the struggles outside her borders. We are the McConnell/Pelosi of the earlier metaphor. We don’t pay the consequences for most of our actions on the world stage. Those costs are reserved for others.

As a child most consequences are tightly coupled, and immediately coupled, to the actions. Clog the sink and you have to fix the problem and lose your game time. The price is right there. But as a modern nation or an adult? Not so much. Or not always. And the more power you have the less likely it’ll be you seeing the consequences at all.

There’s always a price to pay. But I guess it’s easier when it’s someone else that pays it.

Anyways, now it’s 4am so maybe I can get back to sleep.

Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

~ Henry Miller

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

~ Lao Tzu

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.

~ Pericles

The only constant is change -- the only strategy is to act.

~John Picard

Be curious, not judgmental.

~ Walt Whitman, or maybe just Ted Lasso writers, who cares?

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.

~Winston Churchill

References from my piece Peaks and Valleys

Disease makes health pleasant and good, hunger satiety, weariness rest.

~ Heraclitus

“Life is meant to be felt. Else why live? Valleys make the mountains.”

~ Pierce Brown, Dark Age

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

~ Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.

1. Great write-up on italics, grammar, and even if there are some whiffs of “get off my lawn” I love what David William Silwa has to say about ignorance and arrogance. Plain Text Nation.

2. Platform Engineering (what I do) makes a difference and how to prove it.

3. Slow Boring -- Worry less, do more. Even paywalled so you cannot read it all I really appreciated what Matthew has to say here.

4. Derek Thompson with a paywalled article that was value up to the wall anyways. The idea of AI being a bubble, but the bubble still bringing lots of value to civilization in the long run, is something I’ve been muddling over for awhile. There are some interesting historical examples of exactly this bubble->famine->feast type of technology.

5. Over four million books published in 2025. Vast majority being self-published. It’s interesting to see how this particular industry has been democratized and also how the removal of the gatekeeping has led to an incredibly amount of junk and made it even harder to find good things to read.

6. Every layer of review makes you 10x slower. While this is targeted towards software engineers I think this speaks more to organizations as a whole and how trust is general fragmented and damaged as the size increases. Thought-provoking read.

7. Arizona going after Kalshi for illegal gambling. Interesting.

8. Sharks in the desert feasting on over 300 pounds of fish a week. Joke is they eat better than the tourists.

9. Noah Smith dives deep on how AI can be a moderating influence and could actually sort of…inoculate…some of the social media problems. It’s an interesting take and feeds into my biases against social media, why I do not do particular things on this Substack to monetize the rage, and also appeals to my AI optimism.

10. Jonah Goldberg with An Anti-Manifesto on the Iran War. I think I pretty much stand with him.

11. Thoughtful piece on how to be warm when meeting folks.

12. Mining the ocean floor is not something I had heard of before. Except, you know, in Subnautica I guess?

Recently, Squirt and I have been talking about Heraclitus’ Unity of Opposites because what kid doesn’t want to talk with their dad about a Greek philosopher who predated Socrates? I never mentioned Heraclitus though. Instead I talked about a concept that I’ve found fascinating throughout my life: the idea that suffering and shitty things are the only way to define the good. Something I call “peaks and valleys” to capture a specific sentiment: duality drives definition.

Disease makes health pleasant and good, hunger satiety, weariness rest.

~ Heraclitus

We have also been talking about poetry recently. Squirt, just like me at his age, has struggled with it. His complaints are the same complaints I had for the first couple decades of my life — namely that poetry rarely makes sense. I’ve lived my life trying to live as the astronaut instead of the caveman and Squirt naturally ends up there much of the time as well. But buried in that piece is a reminder: you need the caveman too.

Poetry, perhaps more than anything else, embraces that caveman side. It’s about touching on the ineffable that cannot be put into words. It’s not about going to the stars so much as looking at the stars and feeling.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

~ Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

You can click the title of that poem if you want to read some pretty good analysis on it, but the beauty of Rumi’s Guest House is that everyone connects to it in a different way and, indeed, I find quite different connections to it now than I did twenty-five years ago when I first discovered it.

Philosophy, poetry, and then I have the sixth novel from one of my favorite science fiction series of all time.

“Life is meant to be felt. Else why live? Valleys make the mountains.”

~ Pierce Brown, Dark Age

I like most quotes to stand alone but this particular one can benefit from a little context. The words are spoken by Sefi the Quiet — a warrior queen of a slave race bred for war by her masters. She’s talking to a “civilized” man who has given up on living and buried himself in drugs to numb his pain. Soon after this quote they find themselves in deep valleys. The entire book is really a valley, thus the name, and easily one of the gloomiest books I’ve ever read.

But without the darkness how can you even understand what light is?

Recognition

I’m ambivalent about where to go from here. I first wrote the phrase “depression lies” — turns out that’s such a trope of mental health that I literally cannot find a source for it. It is central to the concepts of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy but I wasn’t really looking to talk about that. Heraclitus wasn’t thinking about depression, nor was Rumi. And yet I think it’s a vital part of the peaks and valleys metaphor when we talk about the darkness and the depths. When you are deep in a valley the peaks look insurmountable. You cannot imagine ever getting to the top. All you see is the climb and the barriers and the darkness whispers, “you’ll never get there, why even try?”

My second thought was one of acceptance. Or perhaps “recognition” might be a better word. Recognition that, yes, the valleys fucking suck. That they do exist. That the climb will be hard and the barriers will be tough. It is true that depression lies, but there is truth in the whispers while you’re at the bottom. The lie isn’t that you’re in the valley and the peak is a climb. The lie is that you’ll always be in the valley.

Duality

If we subscribe to the Unity of Opposites then we believe that both sides must exist and define the other. And if we listen to Rumi there is a belief that each comes in sequence with another guest, a change, waiting just outside the door. And finally, if we listen to Sefi, we embrace that life is about feeling all of it. The peaks and the valleys both. And always wary of the lie that there will not be a change. Whether that’s believing you’ll always be at the peak or always in the valley. Wherever you find yourself if you keep moving forward and growing you’ll find yourself on the opposite side down the road.

And finally, I think it’s important to recognize that the opposite always exists. Laughing at a funeral. Anxiety because you realize something amazing can be lost in an instant. I was looking at a photo Substack this morning entitled Holding the Opposite which delved into this from the perspective of the Yin and Yang. The idea that both exist and define each other but also that there is always an aspect of the other inside as well.

The Point

There really isn’t one beyond recognizing a piece of reality. That’s it. Live with it. There are peaks. There are valleys. On a given day I can wake up in a valley or I can wake up inexplicably on a peak. At other times life itself has shoved us into a valley or given us a hand up. The important part is to accept what comes as a guest, realize that we can keep moving forward, and know that whatever may have come it can be faced with confidence.

Squirt Says

I don't feel that you need a valley to experience the peak. What person would torture others just so they better appreciate other aspects of life. A monster. The idea has come from the inevitability of it. It isn't possible to have a day without a valley. We have come to accept the inevitability of valleys and say that it defines the happiness. This is pure blasphemy.

Dad Responds

Hmm. We’ll need to revisit this down the road. Also we’re going to to have a talk about what the definition of “blasphemy” now.

I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.

1. From The Dispatch — Bipartisan energy policy might finally get a chance thanks to the Iran War?

2. And also on the Iran War — Nate Silver has a phenomenal take on the war about how, maybe this time, there’s a thing where there are consequences for Trump.

3. It’s dystopian as hell but also painfully true. Neo Symbolic Capitalism has become one of the primary measurements of “wealth.” Like the author says, symbolic capital has always been a thing, but it’s perhaps one of the most twisted things with media in the modern world.

4. Did everyone else know that ant smuggling was a thing?

5. It’s such a weird thing to go on a rant about how Steam was telling the truth with how many games make money but at the same time it’s all just a lie and really game development doesn’t make money and somehow we should all blame Steam? I’m not really sure what Steam is supposed to do here — gatekeep?

6. Good short story “from the future.” Buried in the end was a nugget I think resonated the most — that attention is one of the few scarce things that will not change no matter how far we go.

7. Some thoughts on ego and software engineering. Very good piece. “But you really do need a strong ego to be an effective software engineer, because software engineering requires you to spend most of your day in a position of uncertainty or confusion. If your ego isn’t strong enough to stand up to that - if you don’t believe you’re good enough to power through - you simply can’t do the job.”

8. It goes along with As an engineer, I’d rather be thought stupid than stay silent.

9. Why DO people do speakerphone in public? How can anyone be that oblivious? Ars Technica has no answers but it’s a good read.

10. David William Silway digs into how LLMs are fantastic at the past but shit at novel futures they not only only fail miserably but actively squash the innovation. I loved the SpaceX example. This digs deep into the edge of the limitations of LLM in a way I hadn’t seen before and very strongly points out the fundamental differences between something like a creative AGI and what we have today.

11. I don’t really understand how Twitter has become a place to put tiny essays but at least they are publicly accessible. This one on how the workflow for animations is pushing towards better/perfect solutions was quite interesting.

12. An astrophysicist breaks down the physics of Project Hail Mary which comes out this week and I am super hyped.

I’m a fan of Libertarianism. I don’t identify with the label, mind you, but I’m a big fan of the ideas. Freedom from authority is how we thrive. Freedom from coercion and violence. Do what we want as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else, and leave us to choose our own destiny. Make it so that personal responsibility, and our own drives and strengths, are all that matter. Ideals to strive for. Things, I suspect, most of the folks in Gaza, Ukraine, and Iran would love to be talking about.

Of course, they’re busy just trying to stay alive. Libertarianism is the belief that success should simply be a personal triumph and the world is extraneous to that. That success is a result of good old hard work, and seizing opportunities and assistance as they come along. Enlightened self-interest that leads to a utopia for those that choose to put in the work. I have always sort of thought that it was the most idealistic way of viewing the world I had ever encountered.

Like I said, I’m a fan. Looking at my personal results for the political compass you can see exactly that.

I encourage you to take the test, it is a very valuable use of a couple minutes and will help frame what’s to come…

The methodology for the test is interesting. As best I can tell, it takes propositions/vibes and then asks you to force-rank them as strongly disagree/agree or moderately disagree/agree. And then it moves that little red dot up or down, or left/right, a certain amount based on what you chose. The more “strong” your choices than the more extreme and the farther distance the red dot jumps. It would be very interesting to watch the dot move around the quadrants with each answer of an additional. It is also interesting to compare one’s test results to their placement of, for example, the 2024 Presidential candidates.

I am so far away from the candidates, especially on the Authoritarian/Libertarian index. I suspect that most of the people I associate with are also pretty far away from the candidates. Squirt’s results are far away as well…

In fact, his results are very representative of all the friends I’ve lightly polled about this very subject. At most there is some movement on the Left/Right axis but we’re all pretty Libertarian to one extent or another.

We all just want freedom to make our own choices.

But the nature of civilization is that we very rarely actually have this freedom. The nature of civilization is that we are frequently powerless. Sad, but true.

Civilization

It is not fair.

Injustices of every size spring up all over the place. The nepo baby gets the promotion over you. The suck-up gets handpicked for the big project over the superior employee. Extroversion and symmetrical faces are a demonstrable advantage out in the world. Different rules for the rich and the powerful. The Karens of the world largely face positive outcomes when throwing temper tantrums and being a Karen actually gives them strength. Squeaky wheels, right?

To rely so heavily on personal responsibility is to create an illusion of agency. That with the right approaches, stuff like “justice” and “fairness” are givens and being a strong individual leads to controlling your own life. This factored into my long explanation for why Squirt has to go to school even if School Sucks — but the gist is that civilization moves forward while trending towards mediocrity and there is little you can do but operate within that mediocrity.

This Sucks

Squirt remembers Covid but not like most folks reading this will. He didn’t really grok living in civilization before the pandemic. (Thanks Musk for fucking up what was a fantastic neologism from a good book). The world since Covid is wobbly and, I think, it’s because we all had to come face to face with powerlessness in a way that couldn’t be avoided anymore. For the modern developed world, it was a novel experience. Finding yourself in a warzone is another one of those unavoidable experiences where your powerlessness is smashed into your face over and over again. My meditation, such as it was, on the war in Iran is at least in part an appeal to realize that American hard power is an attempt for America to own our destiny in the face of any other nation’s power.

But things like this only ever move the needle a little bit. At an individual level there is very little power over our own lives specifically because we live in a society that is collective. A couple bad weeks from complete chaos. Unable to grow our food or build our own shelters. Few of us really grasp how to defend ourselves from violence, and of those that do we almost invariably overestimate our abilities. This is what specialization is. My ability to be a nerd is very valuable as long as there’s enough food to go around and no missiles flying and the plumbing works. From a market perspective, the mean income level of a software engineer is quite a bit higher than the mean income of a soldier or a farmer or a plumber.

At least until AI eats all my value, right?

I think that perspective is interesting. Before Covid, we could more easily convince ourselves we had power. While not in a war we can convince ourselves of the same. Until the looming specter of AI, the answer was always “learn how to code.” But even closer to everyone’s lives we know that life ain’t fair. We cannot control the world, only the way we respond to it.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are.

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Responding

Really, this is where I wanted to get to. Because I’ve been feeling particularly powerless recently and facing scenarios where I have no agency. Squirt has heard his entire life — you cannot control the world, only your response to it. But despite me constantly saying it, it’s an understanding that I myself struggle to remember and respond to. So it’s a work in progress with both of us.

How do you accept being powerless? What do you do when you are powerless?

Recognition, I think that’s the beginning. Start understanding the problem space — the boundaries, the rules, the goals. What is possible, what’s impossible, and what are the probabilities. We need to recognize the entirety of the problem because having no agency at all is pretty rare.

Resiliency, that comes next. You’re going to lose sometimes. You can let it ruin you or you can keep on moving. This is something Haidt and Lukianoff talk about in The Coddling of the American Mind. Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.

Adaptation, that’s the proper response. You can always learn something. A different approach, a different angle on the problem for next time. If you walk away from a disappointment but you’re smarter for next time then you have a victory.

Acceptance, which is perhaps the hardest part. Take the disappointment, understand what happened, what you learned from it, but then move on. It’s easy to let it fester but there’s no advantage. It’s feeding the caveman instead of the astronaut.

Sometimes life sucks, and that’s worth recognizing. But handling that is important, as is learning from it, and in the end it’s just one more valley in your life so it’s time to focus on getting to the next peak.

Squirt Says…

I like how you use the phrase it's not fair because it isn't. People who waste others' time complaining get what they want. Now I'm saying that arguing is a bad thing. Only when productive can it be reasonable. A Karen complaining that their coffee is too cold is not going to do much. Politely asking for a new one makes a person's day brighter and a little easier.

I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.

1. A meditation on Why Gen Z Is Choosing Pets Over Children by Sean Kearnan which taught me the sociological construct of atomism.

2. Speed is Quality. Agile Rehab: Replacing Process Dogma with Engineering to Achieve True Agility

3. Adding this on 3.8.2026 and it’ll be interesting to check in on Nate Silver’s prediction that Gas Prices are Set to Go Vertical by the time I’ve filled up my link dump here.

4. Apparently fishermen keep dragging up chemical weapons from World War One of the coast of places like Jersey? And the proper response is to just throw them back in the ocean?

5. John Scalzi on Art, Work, and how There Is No Selling Out Anymore. I’ve always appreciated his pragmatism and mercenary approach, he knows the world he lives in.

6. Water bears on Mars! This is an interesting link and Tardigrades are an endlessly fascinating scientific discussion.

7. Taming chaos is a learnable skill. What a great little read this morning and something I think applies everywhere.

8. Interesting meditation on why most people are terrible communicators. Very worth the time.

9. Designing Antibodies with AI. It flies under the radar compared to “bubble” talk and “the job market is on fire,” but these types of fundamental empowerments are really exciting to read about…even if I don’t really understand what I’m reading abut.

10. I did not know that agricultural fertilizer came from petroleum. Fascinating. Anyways, the price has exploded.

11. Similarly, today I learned that there’s still a bunch of hereditary politicians in England. Sounds like they’re mostly on their way out though.

Civilization is a zero-sum game. Wikipedia states it is a “mathematical representation…that involves two competing entities, where the result is an advantage for one side and an equivalent loss for the other….”

To say it a different way — if one thing is “winning” then something else is “losing.” There is not enough to go around. This is contrasted with a non-zero-sum game which, coincidentally, is what I was writing about just a couple days ago with The Prisoner’s Dilemma. This dichotomy is incredibly important to me when it comes to analyzing events and motivations. A day or two after Maduro was kidnapped from Venezuela, I wrote about exactly this in Scarcity is the Lens. My point then was to focus on how civilization can take three steps forward and then two steps back but there is overall forward progress. Today I want to focus more on the fact that choices can mean a march forward on one thing while there is a price paid by other things.

In other words, we’re going to talk a bit about what a budget is.

With President Trump starting a war with Iran, these types of comparisons are coming up in my information stream over and over again. I went and found something that’s over a decade old just as an illustration rather than using a current one but the sentiment is the same for all of them. And let me preface this with — there are a bunch of things that are misleading about this graph. Like all the criticisms it is factually correct while being misleading.

Like I said, there are a bunch of things wrong with this — most notably that state budgets should factor into a bunch of these things. Take education, a quick LLM response because I was lazy on the research:

In South Carolina, public K–12 schools are funded roughly 15% by the federal government, 45% by the state, and 40% by local sources, meaning about three-quarters of school funding comes from within the state rather than Washington.

Barely any of the money that goes to educating Squirt actually comes from the federal budget, so in some ways this image is just an example of lying with statistics. But in another way it is absolutely telling the truth about the zero-sum game that is the United States budget: Every dollar spent on defense is a dollar not spent on something else.

Sacrifice

This is identical to my personal budget. If I pump too much money into my saltwater aquarium hobby then I cannot afford to pay my mortgage. I cannot put (now very expensive) gas in my car. Keep the electricity running. Food on the table. In a scarce economy you must prioritize things, and if you prioritize the wrong things then bad shit happens. Everyone makes their own prioritizations and they are all subject to criticism and judgement. Buying too big a house, taking too lavish a vacation, spoiling their kid with electronics, or just pouring money out when you go to a once-a-year coral expo and then finding out that you bought coral and you don’t even have a place to put the coral in the aquarium so you seriously consider just buying a bigger aquarium and really it just makes sense because then you’d have lots of room, right?

Ahem. Anyways.

A dollar spent on one thing is one less dollar I have for something else. A government’s role is the same. They spend a dollar on one thing and that’s one less to be spent somewhere else. A government’s role is to pick priorities. And every foreign policy decision is a choice to either spend something on a foreign thing or to ignore it.

With Trump’s destruction of the USAID program an estimated half a million children around the world have died according to one dashboard I found today. A quarter of a million adults too. 88 deaths an hour. I can’t speak to the accuracy of the numbers but they pass a sniff test to me. USAID was not a priority for the administration. Better instead, they would say, to keep that money in our own country.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has just passed four years. There are now over 15,000 civilians estimated to have died along with over 100,000 soldiers. The Russian deaths are about triple that, surpassing 300,000 soldiers. To shift some lines on a map. America can shift those numbers by spending more money to help Ukraine. We could make it much more painful for Russia by sending more weapons and pouring even more money into the region. But every dollar we spend on Ukraine, well, that’s one less dollar spent on our children or our transportation or building a rocket to go to the moon.

There are always tradeoffs and something will be sacrificed. Whether that’s dead children halfway around the world, fewer dead Ukrainians, or a dead Iranian leader.

Pax Americana

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.

~ Pericles

Every foreign policy decision, every choice made by elected leadership in America, impacts me. Every dollar spent on a missile was a dollar lost to something else. So starting a war with Iran is meaningful to pretty much everyone who reads this. Dead Americans. Climbing cost of oil. A war touches us all.

I am not someone who immediately speaks out against war. I am generally a fan of Pax Americana and one of my favorite phrases from the Wikipedia article was “Pax Americana was based on the military preponderance beyond challenge by any combination of rival powers and projection of power throughout the world's commons – neutral sea, air and space.”

In other words — there was peace because we had a much much bigger stick and had signaled a willingness to use it. And I fucking love peace. If the only way we can get it is by having a really big stick then, fair enough, let’s buy another jet and buy it in the name of peace. As pretzel-brained as it sounds, you may very well achieve peace by going to war. There is an argument to be made that going to war with Iran could lead to more peace than that country has had in the past decades. There is an argument to be made that peace there is a peace that will be good for America.

I don’t think we, as Americans, really understand at all what living under the thumb of a theocratic regime is like. I’m pretty certain on that since we are not participating in violent uprisings and having thousands of folks murdered in the streets while they fight back against their government. So overthrowing the regime is a net good for civilization, I think. And it has a possibility of leading to peace.

But is it worth what we will pay?

No Answers

I don’t have any answers. As usual, I have an incredibly high level of uncertainty about what’s going down on the other side of the world. But I understand why America has grown the power it has, I understand that decisions have to be made about when to use it, and I understand that the administration will make decisions on priorities I won’t agree with. I know that going to war will cost Americans quite a bit. I know it’s also an opportunity for Iranians after decades of very bad things.

I am most wary of those who are certain this is a good thing or a bad thing, and I am most wary of those who want to hide from the prices being paid.

Squirt Says…

I’m not sure why we need such a big stick. We spend so much on military and weapons and yet we don't need and mostly don't use it. We use it as a threat. Yet we don't need it. We have alliances if China suddenly attacks us. We don't fight it all alone. We could spend it on education and advancements into technology.

Dad Responds…

We might not fight China alone. I’m not sure depending on other nation states on the other side of oceans is the right way to defend ourselves. But it’s undeniable we could do more to improve our country with education and technology if we spent less. It’s a delicate balance.

Final Thought

Maybe my favorite random AI generated image for a Substack post yet. The more you look the more you realize it’s kinda close but not really. A fantastic example of how surface-level the image generation can be. All I wanted was a Sankey diagram but, alas, it could not get there so I gave up and went for a spreadsheet.

I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.

1. Good piece on a way to reform science research. It sounds…so fucking dysfunctional as it stands right now.

2. Hot on the heels of all the Anthropic/Department of Defense stuff FIRE director Stephen Lukianoff has some thoughts also. This was a lens I hadn’t thought of. Even more recent information captured directly by FIRE here as well.

3. Also Anthropic/DoD, Noah Smith has the best summarization of everything. His conclusions, too, are pretty compelling. If AI is a weapon, why don’t we regulate it like one?

4. Marijuana and Girl Scout cookies are a bit like peanut butter and chocolate. This is entrepreneurship done right.

5. Interesting dive into how Japan could growth their manufacturing for the United States.

6. Derek Thompson On Being a Dad. I enjoyed his take and how very different it is from mine while still being very familiar.

7. An analysis of Chinese electricity usage vs. US usage. What I always appreciate about Hannah Ritchie’s pieces is her explanation of the nuances.

8. And The Dispatch has a deep dive into why energy costs of AI datacenters is not as cut and dried as “just make them pay for it.” Is AI Really to Blame for Costly Electricity Bills?

9. And in the same vein, and near and dear to my heart, I don’t know if my job will still exist in ten years [because of AI]. Sean is not wrong, the world is in flux.

10. Finally the first of two pieces on the War in Iran. From Applied Idealism: I Support the War in Iran

11. And as a chaser - my first gift link from The Dispatch - Nick Catoggio on the Broken Pottery approach to American foreign policy. In the end I think these two pieces are the best arguments I’ve seen for the conflict at this point.

I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.

1. Interesting, and long, read from Hugh Howey on his upbringing, atheism, and how Change Is Okay.

2. I think it’s incredibly healthy to be reading folks who think the AI hype is…not going to go nearly as far as the advocates say. I agree with David William Silwa to some extent but I do think this time is fundamentally a bit different. I suspect we’ll land in the middle.

3. Chaser to the shot - Noah Smith gives a laundry list of just how far current technology has supplemented and surpassed us. Lost in all the noise about AGI and superintelligence is just what has happened only in my lifetime. Fun to compare that to the claims Silwa gave up above and then look at the current state.

4. Nate Silver on whether Trump has gone to “war” with Iran and what it might mean. On the one hand, I’m always up for some semantics/linguistics comments. On the other, yeah we’re in a fucking war.

5. On the problem of “reliable sources” on Wikipedia. Incredibly long and detailed but, in the end, something worth reading to understand how Wikipedia is being abused.

6. Sean Goedecke on why giving LLMs personalities is just good practice. I am fascinated by this topic because I already see heavy differentiation between the “personalities” of the models. That is — they are being raised in different nurture environments. Even having been trained on mostly the same stuff they are fundamentally different because of these personalities. This will only grow and people already show attachment to particular models because of this.

7. Fetal surgery with stem cells to repair spina bifida is safe. This is just fucking cool.

8. I already love Go so when I saw Go is the Best Language for AI Agents I was sold before I clicked the link.

I pulled out all of the Anthropic / Department of Defense drama because, frankly, this conversation and the complexities of it are deeply complex and will have very far-reaching consequences.

(Note: I think arbitrarily changing “Department of Defense” to “Department of War,” but only kinda-sorta because it’s Congress’ job to pick that name, is why I continue to refer to it as DoD — I’m not interested in normalizing more erosion of Congressional power even if only with my language).

1. A friend sent me this experiment with LLMs and The Prisoner’s Dilemma and it was a riveting read right after my piece that used the same concept.

2. The Department of Defense labelling Anthropic a supply chain risk in a fit of pique is a hell of a thing.

3. Ben Thompson from Stratechery has a fantastic write-up however on the very complex nuances and wrinkles associated with the showdown between Anthropic and the Department of Defense. Some similar arguments I made, some arguments that a friend has made, and overall just an amazing piece. I think these questions will matter very deeply to all Americans.

4. Yet another take on the Anthropic/Department of Defense stuff which makes a pretty dark read on the future. Not sure I disagree with it either but I’ll have to muddle over it.

5. One more take from The Dispatch in their The Morning Dispatch where you can scroll down and read a just-the-facts summary.

I read a lot of random stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read and please forward to anyone else you think might find these interesting.

1. “Optimization costs me joy.” Truer words. Voltaire’s quote about perfect being the enemy of good is one of my all-time favorites and this dude’s take on it was well worth a read.

2. Brink Lindsey has some compelling thoughts on his “permanent problem” of human existence and how AI may very well make us face it. All sorts of interesting thoughts sprang from reading this one but the biggest question of them all is exactly that: what is the point of a human being?

3. Noah Smith asks Does anyone know why we’re still doing tariffs? And I think his answer for “why” is spot-on.

4. David William Silwa has a fiery take to burst the AI superintelligence bubble. Interesting chaser after Lindsey’s shot above. Great read also.

5. And old one but something I was reminded of today - Charity Majors on Friday Deploy Freezes Are Exactly Like Murdering Puppies.

6. I think this is something everyone needs to understand: YOU CANNOT IDENTIFY AI WRITTEN STUFF. There are some caveats to it but as a general rule when you build a Chinese Room based on creating writing like a human you’re mathematically creating something you cannot separate from human writing. Obviously there are some caveats but they are diminishing. This has happened, we are doing it, let’s figure out what it means.

7. Microsoft has a new way of storing data that they say will last for 10,000 years - glass.

8. I did not know that bubbles were such a big problem in manufacturing. Bubbles.

9. An analysis of durable software companies in the age of AI. Fascinating and quite a bit less breathless than much of the “future talk” that I’ve been reading. And then by the same guy so he doesn’t get another bullet here - When to Join a Startup.

10. A deeply crunchy analysis on The Fickleness of Scaling Laws as it relates to LLM training in different domains. I’m not going to pretend to have grokked all of this but the look into different domains and some of the training data was cool. I also wish we could measure this type of thing in humans - I feel like the smooth “drop” in a training session is analogous to what happens with a kid growing up. Something rolling around in my head right now is how there is a gap between LLM training (glorified calculator) and human mind training (actual consciousness).

11. A well-considered explanation of the Age Verification Trap.

12. In energy research, apparently, hydrogen comes in different colors. So-to-speak.

Unfortunately, the world is filled with neither of these things. Humans are short-sighted, greedy, irrational, and stupid. We are still cavemen. We are animals. We are perfectly happy to make deals with the devil. We just like to pretend none of these things are true. Enter game theory and politics.

Game theory chooses to focus on the rational actor. The word “rational” shows up thirty-nine times in that Wikipedia article. Politics, on the other hand, chooses to focus on idealism and morals. The word “rational” only showed up four times in that Wikipedia article which I found very funny — it’s worth searching for it to see how it shows up too.

There is however a concept that ties them both together very tightly, a concept that every human has deep down inside them: self-interest. That is to say, whether you’re talking game theory, politics, or just general humanity we are all out for ourselves first.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Enter my favorite game theory example — The Prisoner’s Dilemma. A quick refresher on the dilemma: Two rational actors can cooperate and get the best result. They can both defect and get the worst result. Or one can cooperate and one can defect and the one that cooperates gets fucked over. I’ll steal the picture from Wikipedia:

Moral? If we would all just cooperate everything would be sunshine and rainbows.

Reality? We’re gonna screw the guy. Officer, let me tell you exactly how it’s all the other guy’s fault.

Except, of course, when we do not screw the other guy over even though it makes sense to do so. Even when it might cost us something. There are all sorts of examples where we don’t act in our own self-interest. Everything from having kids to returning someone’s wallet to diving on a grenade.

We do not live in a fully rational world, and we do not live in a fully self-interested world. Idealism and altruism can, and do, win the day sometimes. But they are the exceptions. There is a churn between these things which leads me to…

Anthropic

Finally, the fucking point. Yesterday Anthropic dropped the latest salvo in their fight with the Department of Defense. Oh, wait, I meant the Department of “War” because we live in a kakistocracy. And the through-line of their piece is rank idealism. “We are keeping these things from the government because they are a danger to democracy.” And I see their point. They have created something powerful and they want to take it in a direction different from those that are using it.

They are mistaken in thinking that they have this agency. They are mistaken that these things are not already on their way. I continue to come back over and over again to the Manhattan Project. I was reminded of my review of Oppenheimer. Anthropic has tricked themselves into thinking the same thing — that they have some control over the djinn that they’ve let out of the bottle. Oppenheimer was first to the bomb but it was out of his hands immediately. Anthropic is first to these AI things but they still think they have control.

They do not. They are holding back a tide and there are only two outcomes. They will capitulate entirely, or they will see themselves fade away as more self-interested, and less idealistic, companies climb right over the still-cooling corpse of Anthropic as they die clutching their ideals.

A democratic country reflects the will of its people and the American people have chosen what they perceive as the best self-interested choice for them. They’ve installed a government that is perfectly fine with threatening corporations like an organized crime thug. The country is not interested in holding the Department of Defense back and since there is no impetus to hold back it will not. Eventually the shareholders will capitulate because that’s what you do when the government flexes its force if you want to stay in business. And Anthropic wants to stay in business.

It Matters

I’m thrilled to see this pushback. I’m thrilled to see the idealism, even if I think it is doomed to fail. One of the most important aspects of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is the prisoners cannot communicate with each other. Because if they could talk then they would reach an accord. In this particular case I appreciate seeing that conversation, even if it’s growing a little heated and there is no question in my mind who has all the leverage. The most powerful aspect of freedom of speech is that it spreads knowledge. And that’s what’s happening here. It’s the heart of what “solves” the prisoner’s dilemma as well.

So the stand that Anthropic is taking matters. These are questions that I think everyone in America should at least be somewhat aware of. Because we are living through a revolution that will be as impactful as the Industrial Revolution. It will be a fundamental shift of the firmament that human civilization stands upon. And it’s going to change the face of war and conflict and privacy. Communicating about these concerns and paying attention to them matters.

But I think it’s important to understand that this is happening. It’s not a question of whether it will happen, it’s a question of when it will happen and who will benefit from it. In the end, Anthropic’s shareholders will recognize that and they will want to benefit. Self-interest again.

And that’s okay. We’re doing okay as a species while self-interest drives us and idealism just occasionally gets its own nudge in. I’ll take the solution where we all get a little bit rather than any one group getting all of it and be happy with progress of any type.

I like whiskey. Squirt does not. More specifically, lest you think I give my child whiskey, he does not like the idea of me drinking whiskey. He recoils from it when it comes out.

And understandably so as I told him years ago that alcohol was poison. He took that to heart and, at least at this age, he is an inveterate teetotaler. In fact, he is so vehemently against it that as soon as the booze comes out I get the stink eye and commentary. Every. Time. Parenthood is grand.

He also took a video from one of our favorite YouTube channels and put it up on the living room TV and ordered me to watch it. I’m going to embed it here because it is amazing and, while you do not have to watch it to follow the rest of this piece, I would highly encourage you to check it out. And you can get a chuckle out of imagining me watching it while Squirt alternates between nodding solemnly at the screen and then giving me meaningful looks.

Divinity

Come with me down a rabbit hole that we can hopefully burrow back to my point. Take a look at this graph of world population over the last ~12,000 years of human existence. Even if you’ve seen this before, take an extra half second.

What does it mean to you to see an explosion like this?

Around that 0 in the graph above, the switch from BCE to CE, is where half of humans were born before The Zero and half of humans were born after (source). It took around 10,000 years to get to our median because in the past 2,000 years we’ve exploded onto the scene. More specifically in the past 200 years is when things really got cooking.

But this graph is actually kind of shitty in my mind. If you actually reframe it to the number of humans that saw adulthood then that halfway point at The Zero gets shoved spookily close to the modern age. As a broad generalization, you only have to go back around 150 years to reach a point where every second child died.

Let’s put that together with broad numbers. If you go back only three hundred years or so you would find yourself at an inflection point in human civilization. At that inflection point the human population was going to begin a headlong rush towards doubling all humans ever born who survive to adulthood.

If you find every human to be a fragment of divinity, then you cannot help but be relentlessly optimistic at the fact there are 8 billion of us and fewer and fewer of us have to watch our children die. For all our many faults we are in a place that is quantifiably better than ever before.

Say it again: There is not a better point in human history to be alive than right now.

But say also: We have so much further to go.

The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.

~ Max Roser

Humanity, fuck yeah.

Unnatural World

The problem is that humans in the developed world are incredibly ill-prepared for this world we find ourselves in. Biologically we are not wired to live in a world with running water, ready shelter, climate control, artificial light, abundant calories, and the miracle of modern medicine. We are adjusted to watching half our children die. We are built to fight for survival. We don’t know how to handle this world of relative ease.

I like to tell Squirt — we broke evolution long ago. We are animals evolved into a world that is red in tooth and claw. We are animals who have built a world that doesn’t work that way anymore. We are both the caveman and the astronaut. The caveman is the one ready to live in the natural world, wired for survival and propagation and not much else. But the astronaut is the one that can thrive in the unnatural world we have created.

It is the quest of a lifetime to be this astronaut.

The World We Built

There is a tension here. For over 10,000 years to be satisfied was to fall behind and fail. Nature ate the animal that let itself be satisfied. But we now live in an unnatural world where we broke evolution and created abundance. We built a world where we could finally be satisfied. But we aren’t built to be satisfied. So instead everything feels off. We feel like we are missing something. And because we are animals, we seek and hunger for whatever is missing. The world we built offers those missing somethings up over and over again too.

Food. Money. Sex. Alcohol. Social Media. Games. Screens. Drugs. Politics.

It is the quest of a lifetime to fill a bottomless void.

The Dose

Finally, I’ve arrived at my point. The thing I struggle to explain to Squirt. It is not wrong to temporarily fill this void, but it is wrong to make it an obsession or an addiction. It is not wrong to do things you enjoy, but it is wrong to lose yourself in the enjoyment. It is not wrong to drink a little poison, but it is wrong to drink so much poison you destroy yourself or others. It is wrong to give in to excess.

The dose makes the poison.

We’ve built a world that takes advantage of the void we carry around inside us. We’ve built a world with endless options to fill the void. Some of them destroy you the first time you try them, others destroy you slowly, but most only destroy you if you abuse them. So I will occasionally have my drink of whiskey at dinner but I will always be wary of the tension. And I will do the same for food and games and all the other things the world offers up to fill the void.

It is the quest of a lifetime to balance these things.

Squirt Says…

I find it interesting how the population has more than quadrupled in size in just the last 200 years. We've been around for 100,000 years. What changed? Was it some new technology? How could we have possibly go from less than a billion to 8 billion that quickly. Also, how dare you make fun of me for having an understandable distaste of the poison that crawls in your bloodstream.

Dad Responds…

The other thing you might find interesting is that we are rapidly approaching the peak population on the planet if trends continue. According to the United Nations World Population Prospects 2024, the global population is expected to peak at approximately 10.3 billion in 2084, before declining slightly to around 10.2 billion by the end of the century.

Lots of this is just logistic equations as life expectancy grows. Simple things like clean water, washing hands and understanding how infections work are the primary drivers. So technologies but not necessarily something we think of as technology anymore, it’s just part of civilization — at least in developed nations.

1. Americans don’t think they need to pay for news. For the longest time I agreed. However, more and more as I’ve made attention to motivations and the attention-economy I have started to change my mind. When I wrote about understanding media motivations a large part of what I had in my head was paying for the news. Similarly when I read Chris Hayes’ book The Sirens Call I strengthened this change in my mind. A news media diet that is only ever “free” has stared to scare me.

2. Hannah Ritchie created a slick little tool that answers the question of how much energy various things in the household cost. Make sure you pull in the chatGPT line item so you can compare to some other things.

3. An interesting study on what couples argue about. Really interesting that communication covers a huge chunk of it. I also thought it was fascinating that food and religion are way at the bottom.

4. So an AI agent published a hit piece on a developer who rejected some code changes from them. The internet reflects humans, and AI is trained on the internet. So AI just reflects humans. Reading over what the machine had to say…it is absolutely just a pissed of human in this scenario.

5. Cloudflare is creating a tool that simplifies HTML pages down to MARKDOWN files for LLM processing - to save money. I think this is an interesting “grease” type of work that we will see more and more of.

6. Matthew Yglesias on how Americans think everyone is corrupt. This piece spoke to my very soul and I loved it. Also take a look at the first footnote and the comments - that post is sponsored by Polymarket which is really interesting. I like the introduction of this type of sponsoring model, as long as it’s stated, because Yglesias especially paywalls stuff so it would free up more of his stuff for me to read. More avenues for him to get paid (as he should be) and more avenues for me to read his stuff even if I’m not up for paying him every month yet.

7. Noah Smith has an interesting look back on how his life has changed over his lifetime. It echoes what I’ve seen myself and I appreciated his introspection. This is a constant “thing” in my head when I think about the world Squirt is going to see. Also learned a new word: exocortex

8. The vibes on AI feel like they have shifted drastically in the past couple months. This piece says exactly that: something big is happening. And then I found an interesting addendum to that from another author and, god help me, it’s a twitter link: something big is happening part 2. Both are fascinating, and both read as fundamentally different from what we’ve seen before.

9. Similar-but-different from the AI vibe changes above is The AI Vampire. And then there is Gas Town which sounds both amazing and terrifying and is leading to multiple Claude subscriptions for each developer? Wut? Finally there is How I Use Claude Code. All of these are shifting my paradigm. All of these are fundamentally showing that the world is changing even faster here at the beginning of 2026.

10. OpenAI’s introduction of advertising, and the fallout, are a completely expected development. The slow slouching towards the Bethlehem that is enshittification is unsurprising. Doesn’t mean it won’t still be useful and powerful but…yeah.

11. FDA suddenly rejecting an mRNA flu vaccine trial is fucking stupid. I’m not sure what else to say, but it doesn’t seem to follow any rational or defensible justifications.

I read a lot of stuff. Link Dumps are the things I think are worth remembering. You can always check out my Link Dump Tag if you’re looking for even more to read.