- “14 Novels I’d Save”
- “Under communist rule, Poland was exceptionally unequal in nearly everything that mattered” (X) Interesting.
- The Secret History Is Still the Book I Recommend to Everyone (paywall) “The Secret History is my personal Platonic ideal of what a novel should be, and since I first read it back in the heady days of junior high, I have spent my entire reading life attempting to find similar versions of it. It is the urtext of what I now consider to be my favorite genre — namely, wealthy students at elite colleges exploring sex and murder through classic literature.”
- The Number Go Up Rule: Why America Refuses to Fix Anything
- Average Manager vs. Great Manager
Basement Whatever
Escape the algorithm
advice aging ai Art biotech Chicago cities codes comics community corporations democracy design fantasy France future games happiness history hollywood information Internet magic management media MTG music nerd organization perspective philosophy practice predictions reading reality social social media symbols technology travel ttrpg tv USA wealth work
about
-
-
Look for the repeating patterns of desire in moments when you are truly happy. Look for the arrangements of energy that compel you. Remember, you are looking for general shapes, like “the feeling of sharing confidences,” or “the knowledge that you have served your duty.”
— Read on sashachapin.substack.com/p/the-two-kinds-of-desire-and-one-of -
If we don’t recognize good technology when it happens, we can get cynical by missing out on the good things. Downloading maps to your phone is an example of good technology. Having a downloadable map, anywhere – available to your phone at a high fidelity of detail, which can be deleted when you don’t need it, is an example of user delight – a positive feature that produces good in the world. Whoever designed that feature raised world happiness, and I like recognizing that because it’s a reminder that there are good people out there creating good things for their fellow humans.
-
They are powerful because it is seen as unseemly to mock them because they are rich and “running a company,” a kind of corporate fealty that I find deeply unbecoming of an adult.
We are, at most, customers. We do not “owe them” anything. We are long past the point when any of the people running these companies actually invented anything they sell. iIf anything, they owe us something, because they are selling us a product, even if said product is free and monetised by advertising.
— Read on www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-them/ -
the core idea was never that every crypto application would emerge all at once, or that finance wouldn’t come first. The core idea was — and remains — that blockchains introduce a new primitive: the ability to coordinate people and capital at internet scale, with ownership embedded directly into the system.
— Read on x.com/cdixon/status/2019837259575607401 -
I am also somewhat-serious about this one: dating app swipes are too “cheap”, and don’t signal anything. In this app, each user would set a multiple-choice question, and in order to match with someone you have to get their question right.
— Read on www.atvbt.com/dating-apps-i-would-like-to-see/ -
I want to automatically tag my Magic the Gathering cards, because tags really help with making fast commander decks. But it takes time, and I’ve probably tagged <3% of my cards. So I set out to build a solution in Replit.
(more…) -
I’m talking about interstellar travel. It will never be a thing. It turns out that starships exist on the exact same level of plausibility as wizards and it’s kind of weird that, as a culture, we assume the former will someday be reality.
— Read on jasonpargin.substack.com/p/interstellar-space-travel-will-never -
I was extremely happy with the Dolmenwood character generator I built with Replit. I then further updated the multi-prime classes (Magician, Friar, Knight) to adjust the mix, but I over indexed on it. So I decided to fix it.
(more…) -
In a thousand years from now, all the 11-dimensional charts at that time will show that “the singularity is near.” Immortal beings and global consciousness and everything else we hope for in the future may be real and present but still, a linear-log curve in 3006 will show that a singularity approaches. The singularity is not a discreet event.
— Read on kevinkelly.substack.com/p/the-singularity-is-always-near -
I was frustrated with the existing Dolmenwood character generator, because it doesn’t allow me to iterate levels, and doesn’t show the levels on the character creation screen. I did like the backgrounds though. So, armed with a sense of purpose – a quest, if you may – I set out to see if I could use Replit to build a better character generator for Dolmenwood. I had the PDF of the Dolmenwood Player’s Book, which I purchased from Necrotic Gnome, so with that in hand, I got started.
(more…) -
“culture is what is left over after you have forgotten all you have definitely set out to learn”
And:
“To be a cultured person is to be a person with some kind of original philosophy… This implies a desire to focus such imaginative reason as we possess upon the mystery of life.“
And:
“The more culture a man has, the more austerely — though naturally with many ironic reserves — does he abide by his own taste.”
— Read on www.themarginalian.org/2015/11/25/the-meaning-of-culture-powys/ -
As soon as February 6, the crew of Artemis II will also head moonward. It will certainly not spell the first human expedition to the moon, but it will be the first since 1972—when the crew of Apollo 17 came home, the Apollo moon program was canceled, and the translunar trail went dark.
— Read on time.com/7346146/artemis-ii-launch-nasa-astronauts-moon-mission/ -
Arnis uses free geospatial data from OpenStreetMap to generate detailed Minecraft maps based on a specified real-world location.
— Read on www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/minecraft-tool-lets-you-create-scale-replicas-of-real-world-locations-arnis-uses-geospatial-data-from-openstreetmap-to-generate-minecraft-maps -
- Millennial fathers spend about the same time parenting as Boomer mothers (X)
- Progressives have a population problem (X)
- Partying is way down (X)
- The most successful film of all time is “Paranormal Activity”
- “The World’s Worst Bet”: Bill Clinton looks back on the world he built. Candidate for best article of 2025.
-
Oracle has burdened itself with debt and $248 billion in data center lease obligations — costs that are inevitable, and are already crushing the life out of the company (and the stock).
The only way out is if OpenAI becomes literally the most-successful cash-generating company of all time within the next two years, and that’s being generous. This is not a joke. This is not an understatement.
— Read on www.wheresyoured.at/haters-guide-oracle/
Basement Whatever 