Some takes

2026-01-13

• A lot of this stuff doesn't work by changing people's mind on topic X, but rather by saturating the informational environment so that people declare epistemological bankruptcy. For example, one thing that you can quite often hear from a Russian that has been confronted with something unpleasant is "well, who knows what's true". This is usually not a figure of speech, not some kind of washing down of facts, but rather an accurate representation of their mind.

  It's important not to give up, especially as we approach the age of cheap AI video.

• The Jeff Dean Facts

• One failure mode I worry about, with the skyrocking price of compute, is that the average person will get priced out of hardware and everything will be a service, all for the sake of fucking AI omg, that most people don't care about.

  Fuck, that's depressing, genuinely.

• How to be less awkward

  Study after study finds that people expect their conversations to go poorly ...

  I'm in this study and I don't like it.

  What's also upsetting is that this uncomfortable feeling doesn't leave during the conversation, so I ... well, I don't know what I do. I used to think I try to leave them as soon as possible but I don't think that's quite rght. Rather, I think I just am very uncomfortable the whole time.

  I'm not sure why I feel uncomfortable. I suppose I see it as some sort of failing on my part and I don't like that.

  I suppose one perspective that helps is that it's also the failure of other person.

  ... when in fact those conversations usually go pretty well.

  This reminded me of a conversation I had. I was talking to this girl (who I was mildly interested in) and she was telling me about her troubles at therapy.

  At some point in the conversation she looked at me and said "But you must be pretty normal right?" or something to that effect.

  I did an internal double take to this. I spend all this time self conscious about all these issues and I somewhat just assume that it manifests itself externally but ... maybe not? That being said, I talked to her for the total sum of 2 or 3 hours, so perhaps she's not the best judge.

• There is a deeper hurt in the tech world, which is that we have all been conditioned to crave greatness. Every employer tries to sell us on how important what they do is, or how rich everyone will become. We can't even vacation without thinking how much better we will perform once we get back. That struggle with greatness is something every human grapples with, but for workers in tech it is particularly difficult to let it go. The entire industry wants us to hold onto it until we are completely drained. Anyway the result is sentiments like this, where having fun, exploring and learning can't just exist for the inherent rewards.

• Kill Bill is a perfect allegory

• I wish people were more public

  Me too. I think once I asked my friend if they want to also blog and they said they are a private person and so they do not want to.

  That's okay and I used to think "I feel okay with this, it is what it is", but reading this article, I want to revise my position.

  It's still okay, but now I wish they were more public.