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Taste Is All That's Left | Blog

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:25:34 +0000

For most of the time I have been writing software, the hard part was making the thing exist at all.

You had an idea, and between the idea and the working program stood hours— sometimes weeks—of typing, of reading manuals, of misunderstanding an API and slowly grinding the wrong version into a slightly less wrong one. Production was the wall. Everyone hit it. It was the thing that separated the people who could from the people who could only talk about it.

That wall is gone. Or rather, it has been rented out. ¹ You can describe a thing now and receive a plausible version of it faster than you could have typed the first function by hand. The idea-to-artifact distance, the one that defined the entire craft, has collapsed to almost nothing.

Though, you have not been warned about one little thing: the value you built by learning to climb that wall does not disappear. It moves.

The Bar Went Somewhere

We keep asking whether the machines are any good. It is the wrong question. The output is good enough—that is the problem. Good enough is a solvent. It dissolves the reason to do better. For as long as making things was expensive, the expense did quiet work on our behalf. It rationed output. It meant that anything which existed had, at minimum, survived the cost of being made. You know what I mean? Effort was a filter, and like all filters it was invisible until it was removed. Nobody shipped a thousand mediocre variations of a feature, because a thousand mediocre variations cost a thousand times as much as one. The economics enforced a floor.

The floor is now gone. And when the floor goes, the thing that decides what is worth keeping is no longer the cost of making it. It is you. Your judgement. The verdict you reach when you look at three plausible versions of the same function and know, somehow, that two of them are wrong. That verdict has a name we are slightly embarrassed to use in engineering circles, because it sounds soft and unfalsifiable and vaguely aristocratic.

Taste.

What Taste Actually Is

I want to be careful here, because “taste” is doing a lot of work and it is easy to hear it as decoration. A matter of preferences. Whether you like your braces on the same line.

That is not what I mean.

Robert Pirsig spent an entire book circling a word he refused to define, because he had convinced himself that defining it would kill it. He called it Quality. His argument, roughly, was that you recognise Quality before you can explain it— that the recognition comes first and the reasons arrive later, if they arrive at all. A good mechanic knows the engine is wrong before he knows why. A good editor feels the sentence sag before she can name the clause that failed. ²

Taste is that. It is the compressed, wordless verdict you reach faster than you can justify. It is the “no, again” you say to yourself with total conviction and no available argument. And it is not soft at all. It is the hardest thing in the work, because it is the only part that was never mechanical to begin with.

Everything downstream of the verdict—the typing, the syntax, the wiring of one library to another—was always, in principle, automatable. We just had not gotten around to it. The verdict was the thing the machine could not do for you.

It still cannot. It can only make the absence of it cheaper to ignore.

Taste Is Downstream of Friction

Here is the uncomfortable mechanism, the part I would rather not think about.

Where did your taste come from?

No really. Where did it come from, was it genetic? Were you abducted by aliens one day that forcefully injected your sense of taste into your mind and wiped your memory?

I’ll tell you this much: it’s not from consuming good work. You cannot read a hundred excellent programs and absorb the judgement by osmosis, any more than you can become a chef by eating in good restaurants. Taste is built the slow, stupid, humiliating way: you make something bad, you are forced to live with it, it fails in front of you, and some part of you files the failure away. Then you do it again. The palate is an accretion of your own mistakes, sat with long enough to sting.

The friction was not an obstacle to developing taste. The friction was the curriculum. Every wall I cursed while climbing it was, without my noticing, teaching me which walls were worth climbing. The cost that rationed my output also educated my judgement, because paying the cost over and over is how you learn what is worth paying for.

So watch what happens when you remove the friction for the next person.

They can generate fluently from the first day. They will never ship the bad version and be forced to sit in it, because the tool offers them a competent version for free. They will climb no wall, and so they will learn nothing from the climb. They will arrive at fluency having skipped the entire apprenticeship that fluency used to require—and they will be more productive than I was at their stage, by every metric anyone bothers to measure.

They will be able to make anything, and unable to tell (or stop to think) whether they should. Not necessarily through any fault of their own. We removed the part of the process that would have taught them, and we called it progress, and by most definitions it was.

The Economics Are Against You

Suppose you have taste. Suppose you paid the full price and you can feel the sag in the sentence and the wrongness in the function.

Congratulations! You now ship at exactly the same speed as the person who cannot.

This is the quiet cruelty of the situation and I do not have a comforting way to phrase it. Taste is slow. It says “no, again.” It sends the plausible thing back because plausible is not the same as right, and while it is doing that, the person without it has already shipped, closed the ticket, and moved on. The market timed you both with the same stopwatch and it did not see the difference. It cannot see the difference. Taste does not show up in the diff.

It is unmeasurable, uncreditable, and invisible on a dashboard. You cannot point to the disasters it prevented, because prevented disasters leave no trace. You carry a cost—the extra hours, the returned work, the refusal to ship the fine thing when the right thing is still reachable—and you carry it alone, against an incentive gradient that runs the other way.

Harry Frankfurt once drew a careful line between the liar and the bullshitter. The liar at least respects the truth enough to work against it. The bullshitter does not care about the truth in either direction; he is simply indifferent to it. ³ Slop is the bullshit of engineering. It is not wrong, exactly. It is indifferent. It works, it passes, it is fine. And fine, produced without friction and shipped without judgement, is now the most abundant substance in the field.

The Flood

Sturgeon said it decades ago, defending science fiction from a critic: ninety percent of everything is crap. He meant it as consolation. Ninety percent of every field is bad, so do not judge the field by its bulk. But the ratio was never the danger. It held steady for centuries. What held the flood back was that producing the crap cost something. Bad novels still took a year to write. Bad software still took a month to build. The ninety percent was throttled at the source by the sheer inconvenience of making it.

We have now removed the throttle and left the ratio intact. Ninety percent of an infinite output is still infinite. The signal did not get worse. The noise became free, and free noise rises without limit, and every real thing you make now arrives into a sea of plausible nothing that looks, at a glance, exactly like it.

Which means the scarce act is no longer making. It is choosing. Deciding what, out of the endless generated plausible, deserves to exist and be kept. Curation was a minor virtue when things were expensive to make. It is the whole game when they are free.

What Deserves to Exist

There is a rhyme here, if you go back far enough.

When the factories came, they could suddenly make everything—cheaply, uniformly, by the thousand. And a handful of people, Morris and Ruskin among them, looked at the flood of cheap identical goods and asked a question that sounded, at the time, sentimental and doomed: not can we make this, but should this be made, and made this way, by no one, for no reason but that the machine could.

They lost the economic argument. They were always going to. But they were right about the thing that mattered, which is that when the making becomes free, the choosing becomes the craft. The human question stops being “can I build it” and becomes “does this deserve to exist”—and that question was always the more serious one. We just could not afford to ask it while we were busy climbing walls.

I keep coming back to this turn. It is not consolation but a correction.

The tools did not devalue the skill. They stripped away everything that was not the skill. All those years I thought the work was the production—the typing, the wiring, the wall—and production turns out to have been the toll. The tax you paid for the privilege of exercising judgement. Now the tax is close to zero, and what is left standing, exposed, with nowhere to hide, is the judgement itself. The part that was always the point.

Taste did not become less valuable. It became the only thing that was ever scarce. We just could not see it, because it was buried under all the labour it used to take to get to it.

A Defense, Then

So here is the defense, such as it is.

Anyone can generate now. That race is over and it was never worth winning. The discipline that remains—the one the machine cannot rent you and the dashboard cannot see—is in the deletion. In the “no, again.” In caring about the difference between fine and right when nothing external will ever reward you for caring, when the market has timed you and shrugged, when the plausible version sits there working and passing and asking only to be let through.

Refuse it anyway. Not out of nostalgia for the friction—I do not miss the wall, and I will not pretend to. Refuse it because the verdict is the last part of this that is actually yours. It is unmeasurable, which means no one can take it from you by measuring it. It is unautomatable, which means no one can sell it back to you. It is slow, which in a field optimising for infinite speed is starting to look less like a handicap and more like the only remaining evidence that a human was here and gave a damn.

Everyone can make anything. Almost no one can tell you what is worth making.

That was always the harder skill. It is now the only one left.

Footnotes

There is an older word for this arrangement. You no longer own the means of production; you rent them, by the token, from whoever trained the model. An English teacher of mine—a committed socialist—would have had the whole thing diagrammed on the board before I finished the sentence: the worker separated first from his tools, then from the labour itself, then sold a frictionless substitute for the labour and told this was liberation. He would also, I suspect, have been the first to note the one part of the process that cannot be rented back to you, because it never left your head. Draw your own conclusions about which part that is. ↩
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, if you have not read it. It is about a great deal more than motorcycles, and almost nothing about Zen. ↩
On Bullshit. Frankfurt, 2005, though the essay is older. Yes, that is the real title. ↩

北欧：从海盗窝到福利社会

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:13:19 +0000

上周我走马观花地访问了北欧的丹麦和瑞典两个国家，看了很多博物馆，系统地了解了北欧的历史。北欧不大：瑞典人口只有一千万出头，丹麦六百万，其他国家更小。它们都是经济发达，人民幸福指数超高的地方。了解一点历史的朋友应该知道，这里一千年前可是杀人不眨眼的北欧海盗 Viking 的起源地。本文以丹麦为视角，带你走过它的文明进化史：只要军事上一直输，连输几百年，就文明了。

1520年：瑞典独立

Gustav Wasa

很久以前，瑞典和挪威是从属于丹麦的附属国。它们都是中世纪欧洲典型封建国家，各自有不少的封建领主，领主效忠于国王，而这国王习惯性地来自实力最强的丹麦，兼任丹麦，瑞典，挪威三国王位，要在三国分别加冕。这一年丹麦的国王是克里斯蒂安二世，瑞典有不少领主不欢迎他来瑞典坐王位，他们起兵反抗。克里斯蒂安二世带的丹麦军队虽站上风，但瑞典反对派也一时半会打不掉，怎么办呢？

双方开始谈判，反对派愿意放弃抵抗，条件是得到完全宽恕。克里斯蒂安二世同意了。过了两个月，克里斯蒂安二世到瑞典斯德哥尔摩加冕瑞典王的时候，所有领主都到场宣誓效忠。结果克里斯蒂安二世背信弃义，抓住并杀掉了全部反对派领主，这个事件史称斯德哥尔摩大屠杀。被杀的一位领主有个儿子叫古斯塔沃瓦萨，他潜回领地，再举反旗。

这下反叛彻底压不住了。三年后，丹麦只能承认瑞典独立。古斯塔沃一世就是瑞典开国之君。

1658年：哥本哈根围城

丹麦国王

瑞典从丹麦独立后一百多年，两国之间一直有小规模的战争，丹麦一直是优势一方，可惜在种种原因综合影响下，两国国力逐渐逆转，在这一年战火重燃，瑞典连战连捷，兵临丹麦首都哥本哈根城下，围城长达六个月！

1658年的冬天奇寒彻骨，哥本哈根城外的海峡全部冰封。丹麦人引以为豪的海军成了摆设，陆军更强的瑞典人踩着冰面直接攻到城墙下。假如这城破了，丹麦可能就亡了。最终，丹麦人靠着万众一心，将将守住了哥本哈根。围城的瑞典人也磨不下去了，于是两国达成和议，瑞典人解围而去。和平的条件是丹麦割让全部 Scania给瑞典。从此，哥本哈根以东隔着一条不宽的海峡皆为瑞典，从王宫的高塔上就望的到。

打败丹麦后瑞典在军事上进入了一个黄金时期，直到几十年后东方出了个彼得大帝，俄罗斯开始崛起。丹麦割让给瑞典的Scania占丹麦领土的25%，全是沃野良田，从维京时代就是丹麦本土。想必丹麦不甘心吧。可惜，就算是瑞典被彼得大帝修理的最惨的时候，这片土地丹麦人也没打回来。

1807年：丹麦海军之亡

丹麦海军

这一年欧洲大战的主角是拿破仑，他带着法国独挑欧洲其他各大国（以英俄为主），端的是勇气可嘉。本来跟丹麦扯不上关系，但英国对丹麦发了最后通牒：把全部海军舰艇交出来！理由是：要是拿破仑打过来，控制了丹麦的海军（当时规模不小），将会对英国的海上霸权形成挑战，所以，英国要先下手为强。

这明明是一个强盗逻辑。英勇的丹麦人当然不能受这个屈辱。可惜，日不落帝国的海军不是丹麦海军能挑战的，最终，在顽强抵抗之后，丹麦还是失去了全部海军舰艇，英国海军甚至还炮轰哥本哈根，大批民房，宫殿，教堂被夷为平地。之后，丹麦为报海军灭亡之辱，毅然加入了拿破仑一方，然后陆军又输了一遍。

1814年战后清算法国，重新划定各国边界。丹麦屈指可数的海外殖民地全部被英国拿走，又被逼交出了挪威（丹麦附属国）给到瑞典，作为瑞典（反法战胜方小弟）承认俄国（反法战胜方大腿）吞并芬兰（瑞典附属国）的补偿。挪威人当然不愿被当成筹码转来转去，开始搞独立，到挪威终于独立的那天，已经是近百年后了。

1864年：丹麦普鲁士之战

普鲁士大炮

丹麦王室从古以来一直控制着三个南部大公国，这三个大公国南界和汉堡市隔河相望，居民以说德语为主。在1849年丹麦已经和平转型成民主政体，而德语区在神圣罗马帝国被拿破仑打散后，还是散沙一片。这一年，神圣罗马帝国故地有一个新的大国崛起，就是普鲁士。普鲁士在威廉一世和首相俾斯麦带领下立志要统一德语区，成立德意志帝国！

普丹之战其实没有任何悬念。普鲁士人口，装备，组织能力都不是区区丹麦能相比的。普鲁士轻松打下丹麦属下德语三区，然后放过丹麦转头向南了。它心目中的真正对手是奥匈帝国，是法国，不是小小的丹麦。普丹战争只不过是普奥和普法两场大战的开胃前菜，1871年，大败法国的普鲁士国王在法国凡尔赛宫加冕德皇。

失掉德语三区之后，丹麦领土又小了30%，人口少了40%。战后，丹麦人痛定思痛，下定决心，再也不能打仗了：大国争霸还有赢的可能，小国永远是受伤害的。所以一战的时候丹麦置身事外。二战时丹麦继续中立，但还是被德国占领，成了个令人哭笑不得的被占领中立国。谁让德国就这么近呢？

战场之外

在战场上丹麦屡战屡败。战场以外呢？1520年之战催生了宗教改革，丹麦和瑞典都摆脱了罗马教廷的束缚。1658年之战催生了丹麦第一份宪法，使得丹麦逐渐脱离封建成为现代国家，1807年之战催生了丹麦文艺的黄金时代，并最终导致了民主转型。1864年之战又导致了政治左转，社会民主党上台，国家转型为高福利社会。今天北欧四国丹麦，瑞典，挪威，芬兰殊途同归，都是小国寡民的乌托邦式国家。

那几百年的国仇家恨呢？日不落帝国已是昨日黄花，德意志也被拆掉爪牙，关进笼子。哥本哈根和斯德哥尔摩市民都通晓英语德语，服务于满大街操英语德语的游客。丹麦和瑞典的世仇也早已和解了：十九世纪开始两国王室重新开始嫁娶，到现在都是欧盟成员国，大家边界开放，还有跨海大桥。所谓国仇家恨，不外乎是沉没成本罢了。

丹麦只有六百万人，相当于香港的规模，但丹麦对世界文明的贡献远高于它的体量。光是在20世纪，丹麦就贡献了在量子力学里的赫赫有名的哥本哈根学派，建筑设计里的丹麦风，当然还有我最爱吃的蓝罐曲奇。假如时光回到1520年，克里斯蒂安二世是一个彼得大帝级别的雄主，丹麦能一统北欧，进而与英国德国俄国争雄，甚至殖民亚非拉，丹麦之外的全世界人民当然不愿意，我想今天的丹麦人恐怕也不愿意吧。

I'll do it by hand. – a giant glacier

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 08:14:07 +0000

I'll do it by hand.

06 Aug, 2026

In university I took small jobs in town whenever I could. It was an excuse to get off campus, it meant a little cash in my pocket, and I got to interact with townspeople, most of whom had strong opinions about my school. The jobs were usually one-offs and involved gruntwork of the handyman variety. One day I might be hauling away piles of old boards, the next repairing a shed or cleaning out a basement.

Once I was working with a gent from school to replace floorboards in the closet of an old house. It was a simple carpet thrown over 2x4s, so all we had to do was remove screws, swap boards, and attach. The screw removal process was involved, though, as whoever had built this floor apparently thought 20 screws per board was the norm.

I sat on the floor of this dusty closet with my work pal, each of us removing screws one by one. The homeowner had given us two tools: a plain old screwdriver and a battery powered drill. I had the former, and as we worked, each of us commented on our methods' pros and cons. His was faster but more prone to error (and the errors were larger). Mine was easier to control, but slow and painstaking.

We both said we preferred the manual method, and we even swapped when removing boards from another closet. Why the preference? Because the screwdriver connected us to what we were doing, while the drill separated us. You felt every turn with the former. The latter, it was over too fast to know what was going on.

This reminded me of a section of Paul Kingsnorth's Against the Machine. Paraphrased:

Simple technologies were not much used by the ancient Egyptians. The issue was not a lack of knowledge but a concern about what their use might do to the shape of reality. To them, even simple technologies had moral and cosmic implications, as using them required treating matter as if it were no longer the dwelling place of spirit, but as if it were simply mass with little more to it than extension, density and weight.

I'd never thought there were gods in objects, but I did think there was something different about manual, hand-to-object interactions. I could feel it that day with the screwdriver, and I notice it now whenever I pick up a tool. Battery-powered grass trimmer? No thanks. Give me the little pincer thing that goes snik. There's something deeply satisfying about that action, that sound, the time it requires, the muscles involved, the senses it engages.

What about efficiency? Can't I cut more grass faster and with less effort using a machine? I suppose so, but what's the point? To finish what I'm doing or to do what I'm doing?

Tools give us new abilities, and they make tasks easier/less harmful for us. You're not going to hammer nails with your first or go diving without goggles. But our tools are so good they replace our interactions with shortcuts to the end. Shortcuts necessarily cut out something, though, and that something might just be important.

But for human-level jobs, tools feel like they can distort what we're doing and remove us from the process. It becomes about getting to a destination rather than the job itself. And when you're that goal-driven, the only thing you can do after you reach the goal is to set another and start working towards it. Don't pause to appreciate or reflect, just go go go.

I've had the same feeling about work, hobbies, tasks of any kind. All this AI stuff got me thinking about it, too. The process of doing (and failing at, and mastering) something is pushed aside in favor of being at the final product. Faster, cheaper, easier...but you're never done, are you? And even if you are, you're never satisfied.

Chrono Trigger 30 years ago:

We've got some great tools at our disposal these days. But don't confuse the tools with the thing you want to do. I'm embarrassed to think about how many times I've needed a lightweight notes app only to spend two hours finding just the right one. I should have just picked up a pad of paper, shouldn't I?

What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:59:50 +0000

If you work in or around the film industry, there is a decent chance you have used the work of The Numbers this month, whether you realise it or not.

Its hand-researched data is the highest quality, tracking box office grosses, budgets, home video and streaming across more than 78,000 films and 236,000 people. It gets north of eight million visitors a year, and is treated as THE definitive authority by journalists, academics, filmmakers, prediction markets, and even Guinness World Records.

And it was this GOAT status which caused the catastrophic events of March this year.

On the 5th March 2026, TheNumbers.com website vanished.

The site was down for over a week, without explanation. A week later, it resurfaced at a fraction of its former size. Gone were the historical charts, the individual movie pages, and even the much-loved Report Builder.

With only a generic “we’re rebuilding, please bear with us” message to go on, the internet responded as it always does - with confusion, anger, and conspiracy theories.
One Reddit theory even suggested it was a deliberate rug pull designed to cripple the free site to push people towards paid products.

Three months on, I spoke at length with Bruce Nash, founder and CEO of The Numbers, about what happened. He describes quite an unpleasant and eventful experience:

We got a lot of angry emails from people who are like, 'Where's this page that you used to have and you don't have anymore?'

Within his tale are a number of things that should worry anyone who runs, relies on, or simply appreciates the internet.

First, some background

On Friday 17 October 1997, mathematician and former IBM software developer Bruce Nash launched a Geocities site that tracked 300 films.

Bruce described the launch in a 20th anniversary essay (which now survives only in the Internet Archive, for reasons that will become clear):

I hit a button in an Access database, uploaded some HTML pages to Geocities, and made a brief announcement on the Hollywood Stock Exchange message boards to let people know that I was starting to analyze box office for films to help them pick MovieStocks to trade on HSX.

From those humble beginnings, Bruce and the team he built around the site turned The Numbers into the film industry's most reliable financial source.

At the start of 2026, the database tracked 78,396 movies, 178,375 theatrical release records, and 236,176 people.

The robots arrive

During its lifetime, the challenges The Numbers has faced have changed immensely. For its first quarter century or so, the traffic was manageable and mostly polite. As Bruce puts it:

Pre-AI, we got human traffic, mostly well-behaved search engine crawlers, and a few people crawling the site for personal projects. If someone got too greedy, we could spot them and block them.

Over the past couple of years, website owners the world over have seen their web traffic change. What was initially only people browsing gave way to an ever-increasing number of bots. By 2024, automated traffic had surpassed human traffic, and just last month, Cloudflare announced that bots had reached 57.5% of web page requests.

The Numbers felt this shift in two distinct waves. The first started around 2024:

We saw a big increase in crawls as AI training joined the search engine crawlers. The AI crawlers are generally less well-behaved than the search engines, which increased the management tasks for us to keep the site running smoothly.

And the second wave was stronger and more damaging:

Around December 2025, we saw another big spike in traffic which I attribute to agentic AI: a combination of AI agents that scrape sites in response to prompts, and people being able to write agents that scrape sites.

Like every data-rich site, by early 2026 The Numbers was being hammered hard by AI bots scraping its pages over and over at an industrial scale. Bruce says that only 10% of their traffic is from humans browsing the site, with the rest coming from AI bots and automated traffic.

Websites try to adapt to the new robots

This put enormous strain on the site, but Bruce and his team were able to take measures to mitigate the worst of it. One of the cleverest was talking to the robots in their own language:

There’s stuff on the site which is designed for an LLM to read, so that it can tell somebody ‘here’s how you licence the data’ rather than ‘here’s how you scrape the website’. It’s had a huge effect. We’re now getting probably ten times the volume of licensing enquiries.

But mitigation is not the same as escape. From December through early March, the team struggled to keep the site alive under the load. Bruce estimates that:

Around 90% of our time was spent keeping the existing site running while we spent our spare moments working on a new and improved system.

The problem was compounded by the site’s age: thirty years old, with approximately 160,000 source files serving around 2 million pages.

Then, in the early hours of Thursday 5 March, the servers collapsed.

The team scrambled to understand what had happened, initially assuming it was the sheer weight of AI traffic. It seems AI was to blame... but possibly not only in the way they first thought.

Buried in the flood of agentic traffic, the site’s logs showed something more pointed than scraping. As Bruce describes it:

Some of these used the site using legitimate URLs, others were looking for back doors, most likely so they could get to the data before it appeared on the site, or to manipulate the data presented to users.

On the advice of a friend who works in cybersecurity, the old server stayed off. For good. Restoring the backups and nursing the thirty-year-old site back online would have meant defending 160,000 legacy files against attackers who had spent months probing them.

The team rushed up a skeleton version of the website on new infrastructure, which could at least keep delivering the latest box office figures while they took stock of what had happened and what to do next. It went live on Friday 13 March.

Who would want private access to a box office website?

At first glance, The Numbers may not seem like an obvious target. It doesn’t collect credit card information, and there is no juicy customer data to flip on the dark web. It is a small, independent company that publishes how much money movies make.

How could someone expect to make money purely from having private access to their site?

In case you haven’t guessed it yet, it’s linked to prediction markets.

Polymarket runs weekly markets on opening weekends, and names The Numbers as the ultimate source of truth:

The ‘Daily Box Office Performance’ figures found on the ‘Box Office’ tab on this movie’s The Numbers page will be used to resolve this market once the values for the 3-day opening weekend are final.

The sums on any single weekend market are modest by financial-market standards, typically in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, with a couple of million dollars across live box office markets at any given time.

If you could see The Numbers data before everyone else, every single week, you would have a significant edge over all the other traders - learning the answers slightly ahead of publication would allow you to front-run the trades.

In a situation like this, it is hard to know for certain what happened. We know that the logs showed months of automated probing and scraping of the site, but what finally brought the site down, and who did it, remains an open question.

But the theory that someone used AI to develop an advantage in a prediction market is entirely plausible. The Numbers experience shows us that:

We now live in a world where a movie statistics website is worth hacking because prediction markets empower anyone to turn almost any data into money.
Hacking websites is now something anyone can do with a cheap AI subscription.
The web, as we have it, is incredibly fragile in the face of large-scale swarms of agentic AI bots.

How hard is hacking these days, anyway?

In November 2025, Anthropic (the AI lab behind Claude) published a report on what it called the first documented AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign. A state-sponsored group had used its coding tool to attack roughly 30 organisations, with the AI performing 80% to 90% of the work and humans stepping in at only 4 to 6 decision points per campaign.

Anthropic’s own conclusion was:

The barriers to performing sophisticated cyberattacks have dropped substantially, and we predict that they’ll continue to do so.

In an earlier threat report, Anthropic were even clearer:

Criminals with few technical skills are using AI to conduct complex operations, such as developing ransomware, that would previously have required years of training.

Meanwhile, an autonomous AI penetration tester called XBOW reached number one on HackerOne’s US leaderboard, the ranking of the people (formerly all people) who find security holes in real companies for bounties, submitting nearly 1,060 vulnerabilities along the way.

Getting access to a thirty-year-old website with 160,000 legacy files is exactly the kind of known-flaw surface that AI tools have made cheap to probe. The expertise barrier that once protected small sites from all but the most determined attackers has largely evaporated.

What now for The Numbers?

Bruce and his team were relatively lucky. Despite having their entire site knocked out overnight, they were able to keep going. The Numbers has always been free to use, and the site hasn’t relied heavily on advertising for the past few years, so the outage didn’t destroy an income stream they depended on.

Their core business is tied to selling bulk data through the OpusData service, producing comp analysis reports for filmmakers and investors, and publishing the Business Report - all of which were unaffected by the public site going down.

But they do need to build an entirely new website, from scratch, to host those 78,396 movies, 178,375 release records and 236,176 people. Restoring the site from a backup wasn’t an option, as Bruce points out:

It was really clear that we couldn’t just put that server up again, because it would inevitably be brought down again, possibly within minutes.

That is why the site came back bare-bones in mid-March, and why features are returning gradually rather than all at once.

Right now, the team is having to reconsider what a public website even means in 2026. Bruce’s analysis is that The Numbers used to serve two audiences (human beings and search engines) and now serves roughly six: humans, search engines, LLM training runs, prompt-based AI traffic, agentic AI, and prediction market punters. Each has different needs and a different traffic profile. As he puts it:

We’ve gone from a world where running a web site meant focusing on three things (content, ads, and SEO) to about eight to ten different factors that go into every design decision.

The goal, he says, is to support all six audiences, with new OpusData services and online features for Business Report subscribers, and, importantly, to help regular human users of the site regain the data it has always provided, some of it in new and improved form.

How bad could bot scraping really be?

Pretty bad, tbh. Enough that site owners such as Bruce have to question the value of something that will take so much time and money to build and defend.

Cloudflare, which protects a huge share of the world’s websites, publishes data on how many pages each AI platform crawls for every one visitor it sends back to the websites it crawled.

Google crawls about five pages for every visitor it sends you. OpenAI crawls over 1,000. Anthropic crawls over 38,000 pages for every single visitor it refers.

Note that the scale is logarithmic, i.e. each step along the bottom is ten times bigger than the last, because otherwise the differences are quite literally too large for me to include on one chart.

For the history of the internet to date, the principle of the open web was that, in return for letting the search engine robots read your site, they would send you readers. But now, that trade no longer applies. The number of robots has exploded, and they no longer send anyone back.

When this firehose is aimed at a small site, it can inflate the bandwidth bill and possibly even take down an entire site. Sites which can relate to Bruce’s experience include:

Read the Docs, a non-profit that hosts documentation for open-source software, who watched a single crawler download 73 terabytes of zipped HTML in one month, costing it over $5,000 in bandwidth.
iFixit, the repair-guide database, logged a million hits from Anthropic’s crawler in a single day.
Triplegangers, a seven-person company selling 3D scans, was knocked offline during business hours by OpenAI’s bot, in what its CEO described as “basically a DDoS attack”. The founder of code-hosting service SourceHut reported spending “anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week” fighting AI crawlers, with “dozens of brief outages per week”.
The editor of Linux news site LWN described crawler traffic from “literally millions of IP addresses” and concluded: “it is a distributed denial-of-service attack”.
When the GNOME open-source project measured its traffic, roughly 97% turned out to be bots.
A university library banned 16,000 IP addresses in 48 hours to keep its catalogue online.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, reported in April 2025 that bots account for about 35% of its pageviews but at least 65% of its most expensive traffic, because crawlers bulk-read obscure pages that human readers rarely touch.

Six months later came the other half of the squeeze, when Wikipedia’s human pageviews fell roughly 8% year on year, as people increasingly get Wikipedia’s knowledge from AI summaries without ever visiting Wikipedia. The machines are taking both the content and the readers at an industrial scale, too.

Testing it in public

AI tools are some of the most powerful and destructive things humans have ever created. And they are being effectively tested by the public in real time in the real world. When the Manhattan Project was trying to work out the power of their atomic tech, they did not do so by sending everyone the specs each morning and seeing which houses blew up.

The world we have built thus far is so incredibly ill-prepared for the power and scale of the AI models we all have access to.

I don’t wish for this to sound like a one-sided anti-AI fear campaign. There is a lot to like about AI and what it can do for the human race. But we do need to consider the world we’re currently stepping into.

What breaks first are the things built for the old internet. The open web was built on assumptions such as that visitors are mostly human, that traffic roughly tracks readership, and that the cost of serving your site is related to the value you get from serving it. Every one of those assumptions is now out of date.

A year ago, Cloudflare launched pay-per-crawl, letting sites charge AI crawlers per page. Last week, it went further, announcing a pay-per-use model in which publishers get paid when their content actually appears in an AI answer, and declaring that, from 15 September, its customers’ ad-supported pages will block unpaid “mixed-use” crawlers by default.

Whether any of this works depends on whether the AI companies play along rather than route around it. But as Bruce put it to me, somebody has to try.

Epilogue

Let’s look beyond the specifics for a moment and consider what happened here.

A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy.

Unsustainable machine traffic hammered it from above, and in all likelihood a financially motivated intruder, operating in a world where breaking into websites has never been easier, took it down.

Bruce’s business and livelihood survived only because the website was not the whole business.

Others have not been so fortunate. Just last week, ZEGO, a German textile firm that had been in business for 37 years, filed for insolvency after a single cyberattack in March shut down its production for six weeks. Unlike The Numbers, they had no other business to fall back on.

The web is full of independent archives, hobby databases, local news sites, forums, reference works. Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.

The Numbers is coming back, better built than before. I would encourage you to keep using it, keep supporting it, and, if you are one of the many people who emailed Bruce in fury about a missing page, perhaps send a kinder one now you know why it was missing.

The most American thing about me is the coffee – Tadaima.

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:44:47 +0000

The most American thing about me is the coffee

17 Jul, 2026

I'm not pretentious when it comes to coffee. I like it slightly weak and bitter with a ton of milk or cream in it, and that's it. Go to any cafe in America and this is the kind of coffee you find: drip coffee, bitter but weak, with a splash of milk (some people even push it further with pumps of sweeteners, but fortunately I'm not that uncultured).

However, it wasn't until the first time I left the US (I went to London over a decade ago), when I ordered "just a small coffee, please" and watched in horror as the woman prepared an Americano, that I realized I drank coffee "like an American." I remember walking out of the cafe confused, thinking she got my order wrong. But it kept happening.

One day, after getting yet-another Americano I didn't order, I finally grew a backbone and told the person in my politest voice: "Um, I ordered a coffee, actually? Just regular coffee, please." The woman looked at me like I was stupid. "Yes, that is coffee," she said. That was when I realized that drip coffee wasn't a thing there, or really anywhere in Europe or Asia. It's really more of an Americas thing, but you don't realize that until you leave and suddenly realize you can't find anyone to sell you a massive "to-go" jug of watered-down drip coffee.

Over time I acclimated, but even while in Asia (which genuinely has fantastic coffee) I kept finding myself missing regular drip coffee. Espressos, lattes, and Americanos are strong and hard on the stomach. You can't drink too much of it. But I like drinking 3-4 cups of coffee a day due to ritualistic habit. I also like carrying my coffee with me all day so I can sip on it all morning.

In other countries, it's not like that. You're expected to just sit down, spend 10 minutes drinking this annoyingly tiny cup of coffee, and then leave. One time I ordered an ice coffee that came in a cup so small, I complained to my husband that the whole thing was gone in only two gulps. By the end of the trip, I was so desperate for a large cup of drip coffee that I almost walked into a Starbucks.

One night while having dinner with my husband's friends, I accidentally got too comfortable and said, "I think the most American thing about me is the coffee," which ignited a rant from someone at the table. He said Americans have the worst coffee, that we annoyingly pronounce it "CAW-FEE," that it tastes like sewer water, and that we're all fucking stupid for drinking it.

I told him I think of coffee the same way I think of beer. Is it the best tasting? No. Can it be bitter? Yes. But it's weak enough that you can drink several cups of them and get a nice buzz without overdoing it. I would never, for example, drink 5 shots of vodka, but I could easily drink 5 beers.

I thought it was a good explanation, but no one at the table agreed. American coffee is bad and I just needed to accept it, they said. I rolled my eyes, but then I started to think that maybe they were right. Maybe I'm just holding on to bad habits because they're familiar and they're what I'm used to.

When I got back to the US, the first thing I did was brew myself a regular ass cup of coffee (black, Twin Peaks style, although with a donut instead of a slice of cherry pie), and as I sipped it, it tasted like home, but it also kind of tasted...bad. But maybe that's how I like it. Beer doesn't taste good either, but sometimes when I'm in the mood for one, it tastes really good. It's hard to describe.

But, screw it, I like my watered-down coffee! It's cheap(ish), it's easy to make at home, and I can drink vats of it without upsetting my stomach. In fact, I'm drinking one right now.

Ah, delicious sewer water...

#coffee #travel

Uh-oh. I saw another movie this weekend

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 06:52:23 +0000

I know it’s only appreciated when I really hate a movie, but I liked Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Sorry.

Hey friends —

Before I saw Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey this weekend, I did my research. Not by reading the Odyssey, which I’d read in translation in high school, but by looking up what some of the most ludicrous characters on the internet were saying. So here’s Matt Walsh:

Not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is “the most beautiful woman in the world.” But Christopher Nolan knows that he would be called racist if he gave “the most beautiful woman” role to a white woman. Nolan is technically talented but a coward. Too afraid to do anything that even slightly challenges the spirit of the age.

There is a lot of concern about the casting. Lupita Nyong’o gets a lot of hate, because she’s black, but I’m sorry, Matt, she is a beautiful woman. I wouldn’t say she’s the most beautiful, but that’s because I’m already married to the most beautiful woman in the world, and that’s an assessment based on opinion. What counts is how well she acts, and one of the most memorable moments in the movie is when Agamemnon returns from the war and Clytemnestra reacts with rage and murders him in his bed. Sweet justice!

A lot of anger online is focused on that they dared to cast a black woman in the role of the most beautiful woman in the world. It’s very silly. There are no contemporary images of Helen of Troy, so they’re just projecting their imagined view of what she must have looked like. I don’t know, she was an Eastern Mediterranean woman, there’s a wide range of ethnicities there, and I am willing to embrace any actor who does a good job with the role.

Another element that sparked furious hatred is that Elliott Page exists and was given a role in the movie. They didn’t even know what role he had! Just the fact that a trans man was in the movie made the right-wing trolls upset. He was actually very good in a heart-wrenching role.

I should mention that there is a lot of cope about those actors, saying that Page and Nyong’o only had small roles. There are no small roles in this movie! There may be brief roles, but every speaking role is intense and memorable, and Nyong’o and Page hit hard.

The destruction of the Odyssey by Nolan and the Left isn’t just about a movie.
It’s about Western Civilization.
The Greeks were its foundation.
From Democracy to Art to Philosophy to Culture.
The Left wants to destroy Western Civilization and everything that helped create it.

Despite all the warnings that this was a WOKE movie and that its goal was nothing less than the destruction of western civilization, I went to see it. I had to, I was the volunteer projectionist.

I was prepared beforehand by these defenders of truth, justice, and the American way. I left the movie 3 hours later with one word to summarize it all.

EPIC.

I will give them that this was not Homer’s Odyssey. It’s Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, and he did add a lot to it. Yeah, the armor and the ships were not period accurate, and Elliot Page’s character was not from the Odyssey, but the Aenid, and he gave woman characters much more of a voice than Homer did, and Odysseus was a much more conflicted character, but that’s OK. The Odyssey was the product of a long oral tradition, created by artists who would have elaborated on and shaped the story to reflect their contemporary concerns, so Christopher Nolan is just fulfilling a long respectable tradition. He sings a story of wily Odysseus that emphasizes the horror of war, the pain of regret, and makes Odysseus a tortured hero who just wants go home and feels remorse for his actions. He still possesses elements of a modern action hero — there are multiple fight scenes in which he rips apart mobs of bad guys — but he also grieves deeply for his dead friends.

A welcome addition is the fleshing out of the women’s stories. Helen is bitter and scarred, resentful of her status as a pawn and a trophy. I already mentioned Clytemnestra and her righteous vengeance. One scene that made me sit up and pay attention was when Telemachus goes to his mother Penelope and tells her the country needs a king, and she rears up in fury and reminds him that she has governed for 20 long years, and yet her work is counted less than the the stubble growing on his chin.

So yeah, those critics were totally right in their condemnation of a movie they hadn’t seen: it was promoting modern Western values and was in direct opposition to the world of Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, the regressive idiots at the Daily Wire and Fox News, and all the rot their kind have inserted into our evolving civilization. I hope more people watch it and are inspired to tear down the poisonous version of western culture that is currently ascendant.

I don’t judge movies based on their box office, but apparently the Odyssey is doing gangbusters in that department. I couldn’t see it in my experience: we’re coming off three weeks of kids movies, Minions and Moana, that aren’t great art, but do pack the theater with families. Attendance at the Odyssey was very good, but it doesn’t compare to a family movie that brings in a mom, a dad, and 3 or 4 kids. Do not bring your children to this movie! It has long contemplative moments, it has bloody battle scenes, and it has monsters. Apparently, the eastern Mediterranean was an archipelago stuffed full of cannibals, one-eyed giants, and sorceresses.

I’m looking forward to being the projectionist again on Thursday, and since it’s going to run for a while, I’ll probably be there the week after as well. I’m going to see it at least 3 times! I’m not complaining, though — this movie can hold up under repeated viewings. Everyone should see it a couple of times, if for no other reason than that it will make Elon Musk mad.

All right, that’s all I have to say. It’s an epic movie with real depth. Make more, please. Not remakes and not franchises, make more movies that are this deep and complex.

Speaking of deep and complex, I’m going to end this with some video of my back yard, which has turned into an overgrown jungle full of insects and spiders. I’m loving it.

C罗为什么还在葡萄牙国家队首发？

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 04:09:30 +0000

葡萄牙已经从世界杯淘汰，41岁的C罗基本场场首发，甚至基本场场打满全场。他的水平早已不能适应世界杯这么高水平的赛事，拖累了葡萄牙的成绩。作为普通球迷的我都能看出这点，那国家队教练如何看不出来，队友又如何能接受背着包袱踢球呢？

常见的解释

网上常见的解释不外乎两种：

教练屈从于粉丝的压力
足协和C罗及其背后的资本利益绑定

C罗征战足坛20多年，威名赫赫，粉丝非常多。假如你到里斯本街上走走，到处都是穿C罗葡萄牙国家队队服和里斯本竞技队队服的人。其实C罗不到18岁就离开了里斯本竞技，这个队服早已脱离了现实。C罗的网上粉丝在全世界是数一数二的多，粉丝们未必理性，但这么多人在网上吵吵，国家队主教练屈从于舆论，所以不得不派他上场。这貌似有点合理。

但是，细想之下，这其实不合理。粉丝们总是会过高估计自己的能量，他们对国家队主教练马丁内斯的影响其实很小。马丁内斯都不是葡萄牙人，他能有的最严重的后果就是被葡萄牙足协炒鱿鱼，何况葡萄牙十六强出局成绩不如人意，马丁内斯已经被炒了。用C罗输了被炒，不用C罗输了还是会被炒，何不拼死一搏，不用C罗，说不定葡萄牙能进8强，4强，甚至想象一下夺冠呢？

利益绑定一说更像是阴谋论。资本是逐利的，利益从何而来呢？向粉丝们卖周边产品吗？盗版球衣有的是，粉丝这个群体其实大多数都是口HI，要他们真金白银地掏钱出来并不容易。诚然，C罗自己就很有钱，假如他自己砸钱进去，是有可能做到这件事。但是，这样就是球员贿赂足协的巨型丑闻，足协人多口杂，有人爆料出去的话，葡萄牙足协及C罗个人的声誉就全砸进去了。这明明是得不偿失的事情。

我的猜测

葡萄牙人口大概一千万冒头，说少不算少了，但是比起英法西班牙还是一个小国。葡萄牙的人口体量和荷兰，比利时是差不多的。有趣的是，荷兰，比利时，葡萄牙这三个国家都足球文化浓厚，国家队成绩都不错，但受限于人口基数导致的选材问题，很难组建一只没有短板的队伍去争夺世界杯，所以这三个国家都从未夺冠。

但是，荷兰和葡萄牙，比利时两国还有区别。荷兰号称无冕之王，荷兰足球的名气比葡萄牙比利时大不少，荷兰球员，荷兰教练在足坛也是会被人高看一眼的。这是为啥？

荷兰七十年代出了一位大神级人物，叫克鲁伊夫。此人不仅做球员的时候球技高强，战功赫赫，退役后做教练也是一代宗师，他提出的全攻全守理念影响了足坛每个人。我和一位荷兰朋友聊过，他说，荷兰之所以在世界足坛能有超越自身人口体量的口碑，就是来自克鲁伊夫的无形遗产。

所以我的理论呼之欲出了：葡萄牙足协也想捧出自己的宗师大神，葡萄牙版的克鲁伊夫，让葡萄牙足球再上一个台阶。这个人选，就是C罗。宗师岂能枯坐替补席，就好像巴西的过气球星内马尔一样。所以，C罗不能下！

效果呢？

我个人认为，C罗的球技，过往的战绩，个人魅力，还是比克鲁伊夫逊色了一筹。作为球员他要达到宗师的窗口已经关闭，除非他以后成为克鲁伊夫那样的传奇教练。但没发生的小概率事情谁也不能贷款，所以我只能认为不能。

那C罗对葡萄牙足球的地位提升呢？这里可能有几个方面：

新一代葡萄牙球星的涌现
葡萄牙俱乐部，国家队的战绩
葡萄牙籍球员教练的待遇

过去十年，葡萄牙确实涌现出不少有实力的球星，在欧洲个大俱乐部放光彩。这和C罗的影响有没有因果性的关系呢？这不好说。葡萄牙足坛还是三强鼎立：本菲卡，波尔图，里斯本竞技，它们在欧洲的战绩和C罗之前并没有明显的提升。这里提一句，波尔图在2004年得了欧洲冠军杯，这是了不起的战绩，葡萄牙俱乐部在这之后没有达到这个高度。但这和C罗毫无关系；他又不是波尔图培养的，而且2004年他还是初出茅庐的小字辈。

葡萄牙2016年得过欧洲杯冠军，这离不开C罗的功劳。但是，和世界杯相比，欧洲杯不是什么了不得的奖杯，丹麦得过，希腊得过，前苏联也得过。它们又怎么样了呢？意大利2020年欧洲杯夺冠，转年世界杯预选赛折戟，还不是被人笑话。

待遇方面，有不少葡萄牙球员和C罗一样，在沙特联赛淘金，确实挣得不少。所以可以说，C罗导致了葡萄牙球员待遇的提高。但是，沙特联赛是烧钱烧出来的，未来我看不到可持续发展的可能，一旦沙特人不再烧钱，球星必然流失，一切恐怕回归原来的样子。另外，葡萄牙一些当打球星，如鲁本内维斯，若昂菲力克斯过早离开高水平的欧洲赛场到沙特淘金，恐怕对他们个人水平的提升不利，对国家队也不利。

我的看法

我的看法是靠一个人提升一个国家的足球地位的时代已经过去了。就算C罗的球技，战绩，个人魅力真的能达到克鲁伊夫的高度又如何呢？现代足球讲究科学管理科学选材，个人品牌和软实力用处绝对不如七十年代那么大。一个例子是巴西和阿根廷过去40年有过宗师级人物，但南美足球的地位是下行的，这是经济基础决定的，不是少数大神能扭转的。

葡萄牙足协的盘算终究是一场空。粉丝终将散去，C罗和葡萄牙留在2026年只会有苦涩的回忆。

天津纺织工学院幼儿园1981届名单 – Yanwei's Blogs

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 19:00:00 +0000

共31人

41王晓光、42吕毅、43孙彦玮、44吴宏斌、45袁凯、46李珉、47张晓喧

31李红艳、32贾红丽、33翟悦悦、34刘钰、35张芳、36崔颖、37管明睿、38黄建仿、吴老师

袁老师、21娄隽、22黄勇、23宋炜栋、24杨明、25骆宇、26王晓健、27郭巍、28王鹏远、孙老师

11李欣、12杨萌、13姜宁、14赵霞、15刘彩妹、16韩晶洁、17李晓晖、18柴晶

编码规则

第一个数字代表从前往后数第几排。
第二个数字代表从左往右数第几个。

注释

定稿日期：2026年7月15日
共同回忆：管明睿、周溱、吴宏斌、冯志刚、娄隽；执笔：孙彦玮
扫描：孙彦玮；扫描日期：2001年；分辨率 200 dpi
惠普扫描仪：天津工业大学理学院（原天津纺织工学院基础课部）
扫描后，原照片与孙彦玮家的老照片，未放回相册，永远丢失。

扫描原件

评论区

周溱：我记得是张晓喧，不是张晓轩。他爸说他小时候太能哭，所以叫这个名字。

管明睿：这三个老师我都印象深刻。戴眼镜的吴老师比较厉害，孩子们都比较怕她。袁老师和孙老师都比较温和。我记得那时候比较喜欢袁老师和孙老师，比较怕吴老师。

吴宏斌：王晓光后改名高怀。

孙彦玮：咱们这个幼儿园合影在“中国照相馆”拍得非常有水平，镜头的选择、灯光、人物站位、后期显影。水平明显高于我初中、高中、大学、工作单位的合影。人生第一张合影即是今生水平最高的合影。

秦毅媚：好可爱，看到很多熟人小小的样子，不知道这么多人都是纺院的。黄健舫，我记得是这几个字。
孙彦玮：我问了黄建仿，她说，“就是这个 – 黄建仿”，历史上也没有用过“黄健舫”。谢谢你关于名字的质疑，时间太久了，得交叉验证才好。

相关阅读

告别摄影 – Another Dayu

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 06:19:18 +0000

Another Dayu

告别摄影

23 Jun, 2026

期望

韩炳哲在《爱欲之死》里聊到：如果说有一样东西需要对当今社会日益频繁发生的「失望」负责，那么它不是不断升华的想象力，而是不断提高的期望值。

过去，人们先经历，再留下记忆和图像。现在，我们还没有真正进入一个地方，就已经在观看它最漂亮的样子：最好的光线，最干净的构图，最适合发布的角度。

经验反过来变成照片的生产过程。

现实

现实从来不是这样。

天气可能不好，街道可能杂乱，行人可能很多，展览可能普通，餐厅可能拥挤，人可能疲惫，关系也可能尴尬。这些并不是现实的瑕疵，而是现实原本的质地。

图像世界和网络会把这些东西过滤掉，留下「最好」的瞬间，传播那些易于展示和观看的一面。

所以我们真正拿来比较的，并不是现实和想象，而是现实的完整经验，和图像筛选之后的理想片段。

当现实的粗糙感被抹平，世界就像是说明书，不再体验，而是在核对；不再认真相处磨合，而是确认对方是否符合某个清单。

告别

摄影和其他艺术不同的地方也在于此。照片看起来最接近现实，却也最容易暴露现实的不可抵达。

摄影用最接近现实的方式，提醒我们现实无法被真正占有。

既像证据，又像告别。

#摄影

Why Am I Left-Handed? | Quanta Magazine

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:32:45 +0000

When I was first learning to write, my letters and words ran from right to left, reversed as if in a mirror. Being left-handed, I was imitating the hand strokes of my right-handed teachers instead of reversing their strokes to replicate the letters. I gradually got the hang of writing in the correct direction, but it still feels natural for me to mirror-write. I have a mirror-written childhood diary. Leonardo da Vinci, another lefty, did that too.

Being left-handed is mostly no big deal. It is annoying how ink smudges under my hand. And I did once have to jump out of the way of a circular saw that I was holding backward; indeed, left-handers have more accidents while operating machinery. That aside, overall, I enjoy being left-handed. It grants entry into a smug little club, whose members — 10% of the human population — carry the secret knowledge that we are overrepresented among U.S. presidents, famous artists and musicians, and top athletes.

But our difference hasn’t always been welcome. My 91-year-old Texan grandmother remembers starting out left-handed (she, too, has examples of mirror-writing from early childhood) before being forced to switch, a common practice in much of the world until about the 1970s. The deep-seated disdain for left hands runs through our very language. “Left” comes from Old English lyft, meaning weak, foolish, worthless, or useless, while “right” means correct or proper. In other languages, the word for “left” can also mean awkward, unlucky, clumsy, suspicious, or sinister.

In college, I decided to spend a semester in Ghana, unaware that left-handedness is still stigmatized across much of Africa. Upon arrival, I kept accidentally offending people by eating or paying with my left hand, because, traditionally, the left is reserved for dirty tasks and the right for social interactions. When my Twi language instructor, Professor Kofi Agyekum, demonstrated how ceremonial robes are draped around the left shoulder and arm, leaving a chief’s right arm bare and free, I asked what happens if the chief is left-handed. “Oh no, no, we don’t go in for that,” he said.

Fortunately, our brains are plastic. My grandma developed beautiful handwriting as a right-hander. I easily changed my habits in Ghana. And as a kid I learned to use scissors right-handed. Today, given a choice, I don’t think I’d be able to cut with my left.

That we can fully retrain our hands (and brains) reinforces how little it matters which hand naturally dominates. And that’s part of what makes the circumstance so mysterious. If it makes no material difference, then why am I left-handed? Or perhaps more pertinently: Why are 90% of people right-handed?

An astronomical amount of research has gone into trying to find out. Geneticists, developmental biologists, behavioral and cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary biologists all seek explanations. No one has put all the pieces together yet, but over the last few years, some major new clues have emerged.

First, some key facts. Crucially, left-handers aren’t mirror-image people. My heart is on the left where it belongs, and my liver is on the right. Whatever causes left-handedness isn’t related to situs inversus, a much rarer condition where a person’s internal organs mirror the usual arrangement.

My brain might be more or less normal, too. Or maybe not. I probably process language in the left hemisphere of my brain the way almost all right-handers do, but there’s a 20% to 30% chance that I process language on the right or that I split the task between the sides. That’s one puzzle about left-handedness: As a group we have more diverse patterns of brain hemisphere specialization.

Left-handedness does not seem to be purely genetic. Two left-handed parents have a left-handed child only 25% to 30% of the time. If one identical twin is left-handed, there’s only a 20% to 30% chance the other is too. This suggests a genetic component alongside some developmental randomness.

Also, the rightward bias of human handedness is unique. Some other mammals can be right-footed or left-pawed, but there’s no statistical imbalance toward left or right across the species, except for our extreme 10-90 split.

Is there a theory of left-handedness that fits all these facts?

Scientists (and I) long assumed that handedness must originate in the brain. After all, my left hand is more dexterous than my right because of the more richly interconnected neurons that map to it, on the right side of my motor cortex. It’s a reasonable guess that the causal arrow leads from brain to hand. In fact, remarkably, it seems to be just the opposite. Our hands sculpt asymmetry in our brains.

Ultrasound studies indicate that a fetus’s dominant hand is decided before its brain even connects to its limbs. We start flailing one arm around much more than the other starting about 10 weeks post-conception, as a fishlike fetus the size of a kidney bean. The movements are entirely reflexive, yet the arm that flails more predicts future handedness with a high level of accuracy.

A 2017 study in eLife reported evidence that this asymmetry originates in the spinal cord. The authors analyzed tissue from fetuses between 8 and 12 weeks post-conception (the window when arm-movement asymmetries become detectable) and found extreme differences in gene expression, or the building of new proteins based on genetic instructions, between the left and right sides of the spinal cord. This asymmetric expression could rig up motor circuitry, such as an abundance of neurons with long, signal-carrying fibers, that leads to more involuntary movement on one side than the other. Only after this does the brain get involved, as sensory feedback reaches the developing motor cortex, strengthening the neural representation of that limb.

That could explain how handedness happens. However, it doesn’t account for why the right side wins nine times out of 10, or why there is the occasional veer to left.

Researchers in the 1970s talked about a mythical left-handedness gene, but none exists. The genetic connection is more diffuse. Recent large-scale studies have identified variants of about 40 genes that each slightly elevate the chances of left-handedness. The more of these gene variants a person has, the more likely they are to be a southpaw.

The big surprise is that most are tubulin genes, which form some of the structural components of cells. “I don’t think I had this [gene family] on my list 10 years ago, to be honest,” said Sebastian Ocklenburg, a behavioral psychologist who co-authored both the 2017 eLife paper and a 2025 review paper in Trends in Genetics on the tubulin findings. Some of these same genes are also linked to neurological disorders including schizophrenia, dyslexia, and autism. People with these conditions are more likely than the general population to be left-handed or mixed-handed.

So what might be going on?

Tubulin genes encode proteins that form “microtubules,” long filaments that act both as the skeletons of cells and as highway networks within them. It’s possible that some process involving microtubules unfolds in the neural progenitor cells that give rise to neurons of the spinal cord in a way that functionally “leans right.”

We know that proteins attach to the surfaces of microtubules and move along them to transport molecular cargo from place to place inside cells, and thus that the structure of microtubules helps determine where many molecules accumulate within cells. So perhaps a certain signaling molecule preferentially accumulates more on one side of a neural progenitor cell than the other. When the cell divides, one daughter cell might then inherit slightly more of the signaling molecule than the other. Over many rounds of cell division, the imbalance could create a discrepancy between the left and right sides of the developing spinal cord. Feedback loops would amplify the difference, strengthening gene expression on one side of the spinal cord and suppressing it on the other. Two different modes of neural development result in an asymmetry — structurally favoring the right most of the time.

The gene variants associated with left-handedness might cause proteins to lock onto the microtubules in a slightly different way, so that more of the relevant signaling molecules accumulate on the opposite side of a neural progenitor cell. Or perhaps the initial rightward bias is so weak (and further weakened by the gene variants) that sometimes chance fluctuations give the left side the upper hand.

This fits the observation that handedness is somewhat heritable, heavily biased to the right, and also quite random. The details remain mysterious, but this provides at least a plausible origin story for handedness. And yet this is only one aspect of the causal explanation I’m looking for. Why would evolution build in a bias?

A coin flip during fetal development lands on one side 90% of the time. This suggests that right-handedness is advantageous for some reason, but if so — and here I feel a slight sense of defensiveness kicking in — why are the left-leaning tubulin gene variants still around? Chris Venditti, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, isn’t a lefty, but he points out that the proportion of left-handers has been consistent across time and continents. “Usually in evolution when that happens there’s a reason for it,” he told me.

In an April 2026 study in PLOS Biology, Venditti and co-authors Thomas Püschel and Rachel Hurwitz of the University of Oxford looked at any and all data on the handedness preferences of primates, such as which hand a baboon uses to reach into a tube to retrieve food. They found that many individual primates have hand preferences, and that these preferences are stronger in species with bigger brains. But across species, left- and right-favoring individuals usually balance out. Only humans exhibit an extreme population-wide bias.

By analyzing evolutionary relationships among species, the authors concluded that our strong preference to use one hand over the other (before any species-wide rightward bias emerged) began roughly 7 million years ago, around the time our ancestors became bipedal and developed big brains. We had to stand upright before we could start deploying our hands asymmetrically, and it was more efficient for our growing brains to distribute key functions to different sides, only devoting resources for fine motor skills to one hand (while remaining plastic enough to wire up the other hand if necessary). But then, the authors estimate, sometime after the emergence of the genus Homo, 2.8 million years ago, evolution coded a preference for right over left.

Of the various speculative theories for the emergence of this extreme preference, one that seems plausible to me points to our unprecedented capacity for violence.

In 1996, psychologists proposed the “fighting” hypothesis, which posits that left-handers persist at low levels in the population because, so long as they are relatively rare, they have an advantage in hand-to-hand combat; their opponents are likely to be unfamiliar with left-handed attacks. It’s not a bad theory; indeed, the element of surprise probably accounts for lefties’ success in sports. But that doesn’t explain why right-handedness prevailed in the first place.

Then, in 2023, psychologists advanced the “modified fighting” hypothesis, which says righties have a more basic advantage dictated by the position of the heart on the left side of the body. Since they wield weapons in their right hands, their most effective and potentially fatal blows can be delivered to the left side of their opponents, where the heart is. At the same time, right-handed attackers lead with their right — protecting the more vulnerable side. In 2026, the scientists behind the modified fighting hypothesis supported their case with a review of the literature on sharp-force injury. They found that people are stabbed significantly more often on their left sides, and these attacks are more often fatal.

This would, the hypothesis goes, offer a general survival benefit to the gene variants that favor right-handedness, while still allowing just some left-handers to benefit from their surprise combat advantage, “particularly in fights that do not involve sharp weapons,” the authors noted.

According to Venditti, this aligns well with his finding that right-handedness is unique to the genus Homo. “Humans are pretty violent creatures,” he said. “In most animals, fighting is not to kill your opponent. That’s not what anyone involved in the fight wants.”

On the other hand, it’s unclear whether subtle combat dynamics could fully explain the consistency and persistence of the 10-90 left-right split.

I can’t help wondering if the stigma of the kind I experienced in Ghana and my grandmother faced as a child played any role. Perhaps a small surplus of right-handers emerged early in hominin evolution because of the modified fighting hypothesis, and this fueled cultural norms that reinforced the genetic disparity over many thousands of years. Some scholars I spoke to dismissed the stigma as a recent phenomenon — a “flash in the pan” on evolutionary timescales, in Venditti’s estimation. But to me, the widespread linguistic association of “right” and “left” with good and bad suggests that the stigma may be older and more profound. Ocklenburg further pointed out that the socially mandated division of labor between hands still observed in Ghana and many other places today — right for eating, left for hygiene — would have offered a major survival benefit in helping people avoid spreading germs and contaminating food. “It’s seen as discrimination, but it’s actually a genius way to keep people from poisoning themselves and dying,” he said, noting that the taboo has surely saved countless lives.

There may never be a certain, or simple, answer to the question of why I am left-handed. Or why humanity is so right-handed. Or why left-handed people are overrepresented in some fields and slightly more likely to have certain health conditions. But as I’ve followed the clues through developmental biology, genetics, evolution, and culture, I now see that our peculiar handedness is inextricable from our humanity.

The will to power will return

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 02:50:42 +0000

In the 1980s, France started 43 nuclear reactors across 14 sites. On average, each reactor took just seven years to build. Forty years later, all but one of these reactors are still running, and they continue to produce nearly half of France's electricity.

Can you imagine France doing something like this today? Or any other country in the West for that matter? The past is a foreign country. But why is this? Why did the West lose the will to power?

A popular meme would explain it as the inescapable good-times-hard-times circle: Hard times (WWII) create good men, good men create good times (Les Trente Glorieuses), good times create weak men (The End of History), weak men create hard times (now).

The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe offers a theory for this wheel of time by tracing the last five centuries to the same four recurring phases: High, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis.

It was the good men of France's hard times who planned the country's incredible nuclear build out. This hero generation, as Strauss and Howe calls them, planted the trees of power that would provide shade for several generations to come. It seems inconceivable to expect similar bold plans and action from the current cohort of the European political establishment.

But The Fourth Turning argues this was ever thus. The decline that always sets in once we enter the unraveling phase of the century (or saeculum, as the book calls it) inevitably leads to a crisis. We're on the cusp/in one of those right now. So pessism is perhaps a rational response.

And yet, the night is darkest before the dawn, and the current Crisis is likely to lead to another High, if the past five centuries and Strauss and Howe's theory are any guide. If so, we should expect the next hero generation to reject this managed decline of our present turning, and once again taking up the mantle of ambition.

The circle of the saeculum is both a prophecy and a roadmap. We're not supposed to live like this forever: weak, ineffectual. This too shall pass. And when it does, once the Crisis becomes another High, we'll marvel at the time wasted, but with the pity due a pathetic period of the past, not from within an eternal prison of decline.

We just have to make it out of the current Crisis alive. The last one brought us a total war. Would be nice if we could get back to the High without something quite as devastating, but don't bet on it.

丫丫因为“天性善良”得了一张奖状 – Yanwei's Blogs

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 23:24:00 +0000

2016年10月8日，丫丫六岁（快满七岁）。

丫丫带回家一张美国“三好学生”证书，获奖原因是“天性善良”。老外很重视孩子独立于学习、体育之外的品格培养。证书是班主任和校长联合签发的，每个月，每个班，有一人获奖。获奖其他原因包括: 责任感、尊重、激情、值得信赖、诚实、乐观、忠诚。

丫丫三岁

丫丫六岁

我觉得丫丫（二女儿）是有些与生俱来的贵族气质的，她可能是在另一个时空（天堂）发现我对妮妮特别尽心，才主动要求投胎到我家做女儿的。【注：凡人，比如妮妮，是没有特别投胎权的。】所以，在我心里，妮妮是亲生的，丫丫是高贵的，一个我必须客客气气照顾好的小公主。

拿到证书，我的第一反应是觉得好笑，还有因为“天性善良”获奖的。第二反应是回想我小时候，三好学生都是学习好。

评论区

刘玥：我特别喜欢二丫头 [grin]. 丫丫的眼睛里有一个纯净清透的世界看了让人感觉平静心无杂念[愉快]
我回：这是她收到的最高的褒奖[害羞]

刘敬文：从小就对老二偏心啊[撇嘴]
我回：妮妮是老大，就像直接从我心里长出来的一样。丫丫刚出生的头一年里，我一直护着妮妮，那时两岁半的妮妮要面对妹妹到来所带来的冲击，还有上幼儿园的冲击。老婆说我偏心，我反驳说，“我一点都不偏心，因为我的心里全是妮妮。“ 后来，丫丫完全凭借自己的个人魅力，把我和老婆都征服了。

汤芳：两个不同时期的丫丫都透着一股与众不同的气质
我回：我觉得你的评价总能穿透尘世的云雾。
汤芳：你的评价倒让我钻到云雾里去了[呲牙]
我回：我在思考一个问题：是不是天下脱俗的美女都是从一个地方来的，你们彼此都认识。一眼就看出来身上那股共同的气质。你认识丫丫，丫丫也认识你？我是你的同学，是丫丫的爸爸，但我却是肉眼凡胎，纵和你们有万千关系，却永远参不透你们的来历。
王鹏远：会聊天 [thumb up]
我回王鹏远：我真这么想
汤芳：聊斋范儿了 [晕]

刘莹：做父亲的是不应该这么偏心的[偷笑]

Religion as Software Business - by Tomas Pueyo

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:23:07 +0000

What will be v6?

The contest for Uncharted Territories posters is ongoing. Go here to view the current entries and vote for your favorites so far. So far, my take is that there are many interesting concepts, in part thanks to AI, but that AI adds lots of meaningless details that don’t easily produce a great end product. The contest will remain open for a couple of weeks. Go here to submit your own entry!

I spent 15 years designing software products and businesses: reducing friction in onboarding, creating viral loops, building new features to increase retention, designing for improved network effects…

The more I did it, the more transparent the tactics that religions have used to grow became to me. It’s like the veil of complexity falls and the true structure of the world appears. Patterns that seemed incomprehensible suddenly make sense.

Yes, religion is like software: both produce ideas and rules instead of physical products, they have goals they translate into repeatable instructions focused on shaping human psychology and behavior, they have version control (anti-heresy) and forks (new sects), they optimize the onboarding, retention, viral loops, network effects…

With this lens, you start understanding why Christianity is the most widespread religion on Earth and why Islam spread so fast, having replaced smaller local religions like Facebook replaced Hi5 and SmallWorld. Why there are few Jews but the religion has survived 3,000 years, why each of these religions holds the beliefs it does, why their borders have barely changed in over 1,000 years, how they have evolved from one form to the other… You can understand why they emerged in the order they did, and why they were successful or failed. And it gives us a sense of what will happen with current religions in the future, and what new religions might arise.

And new versions come over time that improve on the previous ones, to make them work better and grow faster. In the previous articles, I showed how this is the case for Christianity and for Islam. The best way to illustrate this is through their evolution, from the v0 of animism and polytheism, following the software updates v1, v2, v3, v4, and v5.

v0: The Origin of Religious Belief

Finding Patterns

Which hominid was most successful: Those who saw patterns and drew quick conclusions to explain their causes, or those who didn’t? Obviously, the ones that reasoned through causality: Those who heard rustling in the bushes and thought “Lion!” would live longer than hominids who heard rustling in the bushes and thought “eh, who knows.” The hominids who saw their brother get struck by lightning and thought “The gods don’t want us on that hill, especially during thunderstorms” would live longer than hominids who thought “I wonder if that happens every time.”

Hominids who were constantly seeing cause-and-effect patterns were probably wrong most of the time, but if you’re superstitious and avoid repeating any behavior that preceded something bad, then you’re going to pass your genes on, and a thousand generations down the road your descendants are going to have brains that are great at imagining patterns, even those that aren’t really there.

Social Rites

When too many humans gather and they don’t have rules to code their conduct, tension arises. This makes collaboration hard, which keeps them poor. The groups that were prone to ease these tensions through some sort of activity would be able to collaborate more, and prevail. We call these activities rites. From this article by Rob Henderson:

San Bushmen (modern hunter-gatherers) will occasionally engage in a dance to dispel what they call “star sickness.” This mysterious force encompasses jealousy, anger, interpersonal conflicts, and a failure to exchange gifts. Such pressures give rise to hostilities and damage cohesion in the group.

One of the most disturbing social elements is young males, especially those deprived of social, economic, and mating opportunities. Disputes between them can easily spiral into reciprocal violence, especially when large numbers of allies can be recruited. Rites tailored to them are especially important. Dunbar studied them in early societies, and found religious rituals, feasting, singing, and dancing that have been shown to enhance social cohesion. Other social innovations (e.g., men’s clubs, socially recognized leaders) and regulated relationship arrangements (marriage, kinship, dowries) are all geared to lowering young male violence.

Ceremony

Ceremony is an important part of these social rites. From the book Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, as explained by Henderson:

In a video, a man performed the ordinary action of picking up a glass, cleaning it with a cloth, pouring the drink, and inspecting it before setting it on a table.
In another video, the event was ritualized: after picking up the glass, he waved the cloth at it without touching it, raised the container high up before pouring it into the glass, and bowed to the glass before setting it on the table.
When the researchers asked participants whether the two glasses were the same in terms of their physical qualities, the participants generally said yes. But when asked which one was more special, a significant difference emerged: they favored the ritual drink. When asked which beverage they would prefer to have, participants were three times more likely to pick the “special” drink. And when participants were told that the gestures were part of a traditional ceremony practiced in Fiji, Gabon, or Ecuador, participants were even more likely to select the ritual drink.

So it looks like we’re naturally geared towards religious belief. What did it translate into?

v0 to v1: From Animism to Polytheism

When your daily experience is of nature, plants, animals that hide in bushes or under cover of darkness, their skeletal remains after death and consumption… The natural thing is to assume they share a similar experience to yours: Spirits inhabit every animal, like they inhabit every person. This is why most early societies were animist.

And since your daily experience is that of humans and animals, you bestow upon them the abilities of humans and animals, just more powerful. Gods eat, sleep, lust, lie, and get fooled like humans do. They feel love, sadness, anger. They’re also pretty amoral and selfish: They don’t care much about what happens in the big picture, just about what happens to them and their supporters.

Then came agriculture and suddenly humans start controlling their environment. A clear hierarchy starts emerging: humans above plants and animals. It makes sense that now not all animals and things are spirits, and humans emerge as having a special relationship with gods.

Gods become more and more human-like.

As agriculture becomes more widespread, life and death don’t depend on the animals and plants around you, but rather on weather, pests and wars. So it makes sense that each of these big factors of survival develop their own gods.1

Humans think gods trade favors with them: If you give them the right gift or the right sacrifice, they will be happy with you and will help you with whatever power they have. The relationship with them is like with a patron: You sacrifice something when you need something—rain, victory, a child. If you anger them, they’ll side against you.

Rituals are attempts to get these fabulously powerful but mysterious entities on your side, and they’re designed through trial and error: You gave a part of your harvest to the farming goddess, and the next year the harvest was great? Surely, that made her happy. We must continue. But we don’t know exactly what part of the rite worked, so we should try to copy it very precisely to make sure it works again. The clan that knows a specific rite controls a god and gets social advantages. The more rites and gods you control, the more power your clan has.

You prayed to your god before a battle, but you lost? Surely, your god is weak, and the god of the conqueror is stronger, so you might as well pray to him instead. That means they have specialties and territory over which they have jurisdiction, just like humans and animals. This means gods are local to specific regions. They can only perceive what they see or hear, which is why in the Iliad Hera seduces Zeus so that he doesn’t watch the battlefield, or why Diomedes wounds Aphrodite with a spear.2 There can be many gods, no exclusivity. There’s no ritual to convert or to be a member, no commitment, because there’s not really a full concept of a cohesive religion, just a bunch of gods that exist.

The further a society removed itself from nature, the more human its gods became.

Notice how these features make these religions weak:

Since gods are local—with their homes in specific cities or regions—they can’t spread much.
That ties them to the local state. When the state crumbles, the religion goes with it: Surely, the god must not have been very powerful if his protected state failed.
Everybody has a different version of the gods, and few of their features get recorded, because nobody knows them definitively: Everyone is just trying to figure out what they want through trial and error. So they evolve across time and space, they merge with other deities, they lapse…

If you like The Avengers, you understand these gods’ appeal.

The modern polytheism stack: (mostly) human-looking figures that spend a lot of time in the sky, with supernatural powers, very human desires and flaws, and a penchant for good and evil, moral judgment and epic fights. I’d like the god Ironman to help me build startups. The only difference is that we know the Avengers are fake and they can’t give you anything, whereas people used to think gods could help them.

Within these belief systems, some features of future religions start peeking through.

In Ancient Egypt, there’s an afterlife. People’s hearts are weighed at death, the wicked are annihilated, and the good survive. If you think about it, that’s pretty natural: Evolution has given us a fear of death, so coming up with an afterlife is the most reassuring belief. Tying it to proper behavior is pretty intuitive too, as that’s what happens in human interactions: Be nice to people, and they reward you. In the case of Egypt, good meant avoiding violence, exploiting the weak, theft, cheating, cruelty, lying, sacrilege, and public disruption. We can see an ethnic system emerge.

But this proto-feature is only accessible to elites, is only summarily defined,3 and isn’t tied to spreading the religion.

Zoroaster came to change this.

v2: Zoroastrianism

The religion of Ancient Iran started moving towards monotheism between 2000 and 1000 years BC. Then, between ~1200 and 600 BC appears Zoroastrianism, spurred by the religious reformer Zoroaster4. Zoroastrianism displays some interesting religious innovations.5 The most important is the crystallization of good and evil for everybody. There is still a judgment after death, but now it applies to everybody, not just the elites or those who could afford it. People do good things because they’re good, and vice versa. You should do more good things to be good, and fewer bad things. When you die, your specific soul is judged.6 This enables moral enforcement for every individual among the population. This judgment gets linked to an afterlife, and a proto-heaven and hell appear, which is very convenient because they’re a super cheap way to enforce behavior.

PRIEST ZOROASTER: Something very very very bad will happen to people if they don’t behave properly!
PRIEST DARIUS, whispering to ZOROASTER: But how can we know somebody did something wrong? How do we identify them? Punish them?
ZOROASTER: We go get them.
DARIUS: With what power?
ZOROASTER: Soldiers!
DARIUS: What if the soldiers don’t want to do it? Or are too expensive? Or at war? Or are the perpetrators? Or there are too many bad people? Or we can’t witness the deeds?
ZOROASTER: Good points. Hmmm…. OK OK, hear me out: What if we say the judge is God, not us, and he sees much more than us?
DARIUS: Okay, but how will people know we’re telling the truth? They’ll do a bad deed, wait for retribution, it won’t come, so they’ll carry on.
ZOROASTER: OK hold on… What if it happens after death?

DARIUS: What do you mean?
ZOROASTER: That way, they can’t say it’s false. They have no proof! They’ll be punished after death!
DARIUS: Genius! But we need to make sure the stick and the carrot are huge, otherwise people won’t care.
ZOROASTER: What if the punishment is really bad and it’s like forever? And vice versa: If you’re cool, you get a cool afterlife forever?
DARIUS: Yeah, totally, that would do it!

By introducing the concept of being good to each other, we suddenly get a religion that can enforce moral, collaborative, positive behavior across an entire region. People work more together instead of killing each other, wealth can accumulate, and society thrives.

Farvahar, the famous Zoroastrian symbol

Another innovation is that religion becomes dualistic: Only two main gods, for Good and Evil. All other deities become secondary. That’s just one step removed from monotheism: Obviously, everybody should follow the good one.

These innovations were certainly not designed with intention as I described in the conversation above, they likely came about through evolution. But as we know from the debate between intelligent design vs evolution, you don’t really need intelligent design for something significant to appear. With enough time, evolution can make it happen. The mechanism would be something like:

Lots of different prophets and priests are always coming up with new software ideas.
They debate ideas and combine them.7
The cleverest, most charismatic, or luckiest ones come up with a (software) combination that is more productive than any other version. This one spreads.
Entrepreneurial and efficient priests (which might or might not be the same as the theoreticians) take these ideas and help them spread faster and farther.8

In any case, Zoroastrianism was so successful that it became the state religion of the Persian Empires until the 600s AD, when Arabs conquered the Sassanid Empire and introduced Islam. Zoroastrianism persisted for centuries, but eventually dwindled. Yet today, there are still over 100,000 Zoroastrians in Iran. That’s the power of installing valuable new software.

But why did it appear then and there? Karl Jaspers and Peter Turchin speculated that they were the result of technological development. Here’s my interpretation.

Several innovations happened between 4000 BC and 1000 BC, including the domestication of horses, their mutation to be able to carry humans on their back, the invention of the wheel, and the discovery of iron smelting. These inventions made farming much easier and scalable. And war. Horseback riding enabled horse-mounted roaming. Curiously, as soon as the secret of iron smelting became widespread, most eastern Mediterranean civilizations collapsed, probably enabled by bandits who now had easy access to weapons.

All of this suggests that, through these thousands of years:

Empires became viable, because agriculture improved and now farmers could generate calorie surpluses, while technologies of violence allowed these farmers to conquer others.
At the same time, roaming bandits became viable too. The unconquered people would rather raid the farmers with their horses and iron weapons than do the farming themselves.
The bigger the empires, the harder to maintain their cohesion, and they would fall apart.

Prophets would witness these problems and propose solutions that had to be moral because the problem was of social coordination.

As nomad military superiority forced agrarian states to scale up to resist pressure from the steppes, one cultural mechanism for holding together ethnically diverse people in new mega-empires was the presence of unifying, ‘meta-ethnic’ (supranational) ideologies, such as Zoroastrianism in the Achaemenid empire, Buddhism in the Maurya empire, and Confucianism in the Han empire. Turco-Mongolian nomads (perhaps going as far back as the Xiongnu) had their own integrative meta-ethnic religion, Tengrism, although it is not usually viewed as a world religion.—Peter Turchin

Alas, although Zoroastrianism is productive software, that doesn’t make it everlasting: It doesn’t really focus on acquiring believers or retaining them. The next iteration would improve one of these aspects.

v3: Judaism

Good Tools Are Invisible - gingerBill

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 10:46:14 +0000

Good Tools Are Invisible

2026-07-10

TL;DR: A good tool is and ought to be invisible—striving to make such tools is the goal of a toolmaker.

One habit I see a lot, and have to push back on, is taking a tool’s shortcomings and reselling them as a “puzzle game” which is “fun” to solve.

I don’t want my tools to be “fun”. I want my tools to be invisible.

Text Editor Wars

Let’s take vim as an example This is just an example, and applies to other editors too.. I constantly see some people praise it not for what actually makes it good, but by taking the things it’s bad at and turning them into a puzzle to have “fun” solving.

I’ve had people tell me how “fun” it was to build a macro to handle some one-off text-refactoring problem. But when I looked at what they were doing and how long it took, my honest reaction was: I could have done that in Sublime in a minute with multiple cursors, or just written a quick script.

To be clear, I’m not saying text editors don’t matter to your workflow. I’m questioning the near-religious devotion people have to a tool because it gives them a “hacker vibe”—which is basically the whole appeal for newcomers to vim or emacs.

That’s what I mean by “invisible tools”. When you’re proficient with your editor of choice—whatever it is—it disappears into the background. But the moment it cannot handle something easily, it stops being invisible. What baffles me is that so many people treat that friction—the effort of working around a tool’s limitations—as the “fun” part, and then advertise it as evidence that the tool is great.

I know plenty of things wrong with my own editor of choice: Sublime. I don’t dress those flaws up as fun little puzzles to solve. I just get annoyed that it lacks the tools I actually need, forcing me to write a plugin or reach for a separate program to write to transform text the way I want.

I’ve been using Sublime for 15 years now. It’s my editor of choice for a few reasons: its shortcuts are a superset of the graphical OS environment (which minimizes the mental context-switch when moving between applications), multiple cursors really are better than macros 99.999% of the time I think I’ve only “needed” a macro in Sublime twice in the past decade, and in both cases, setting up the macro took longer than if I just wrote a script to do the same thing. (since they give direct visual feedback), and it leaves me with the fewest “puzzles” to solve in my text-editing workflow. I’ve found something like vim to be better at basic editing but worse at bulk operations—and I don’t mean grep-like operations—which is why I’ve stuck with Sublime for so long. I never found vim motions to be that much more productive than my Sublime workflow either, and that wasn’t just down to lack of trying or familiarity To be honest, I have forgotten most of my “vim motions” knowledge over the years, because I don’t regularly exercise it, nor do I need to.. And since I virtually never write code in a terminal, my need for a terminal-oriented editor is effectively nonexistent.

If people find vim, emacs, or whatever genuinely good and productive, I’m not going to criticize them for using it. People are most comfortable with what they know. But for the people I am discussing, that same familiarity blinds them to their tools’ flaws, and leads them to celebrate those flaws, flaunting them as games.

Tools as an Identity

Part of why these debates turn religious is that a tool choice becomes a flag you plant—it says something about who you are. The “hacker vibe” isn’t a mere aesthetic; it’s tribal signaling, and that’s the real trap. Once your identity is invested in a tool, admitting its flaws starts to feel like admitting something about yourself. So people don’t just tolerate the flaws—they defend them, and eventually flaunt them. You cannot have an honest conversation about a tool with someone who’s decided the tool is part of their personality.

Feeling Productive versus being Productive

The text-editor-macro anecdote I mentioned is really about a gap between feeling productive versus being productive. There’s a sensation of cleverness that comes from solving a fiddly problem, and it’s easy to mistake that feeling for actual output. A tool that makes hard things feel heroic and clever feel like an achievement can register as “powerful” while quietly being slow. The honest test isn’t how engaged or clever you felt, it’s wall-clock time and how many mistakes you made getting there. A lot of the tools people evangelize would lose that test.

If productivity is actually the goal, actually question your own views on this, and try to see what makes you more productive. You will be surprised when you do.

Terminal UIs vs GUIs

Another example in this same vein is when people advocate for terminal apps over GUIs. If you’re stuck in a terminal all day, then I completely get the obvious advantage, but most programmers aren’t stuck in a terminal all day.

From those people who generally advocate for a TUI over a GUI, one of the criticisms of GUI apps tends to be: “I cannot navigate them with the keyboard alone”.

Okay? That doesn’t make GUI apps inherently bad. It just means the GUIs people build aren’t good enough to be keyboard-navigable. There’s nothing inherently impossible about making a GUI navigable with a keyboard, rather it’s just that most toolmakers never bother to implement, and usually because they don’t realize how much more productive keyboard navigation is than reaching for the mouse a lot of the time. If the argument was that a specific TUI app is better than the other alternatives which are GUI based, then that is a fair argument, but arguing that TUIs are inherently better than GUIs is very misinformed.

And this is the common mistake: people look at the current state of a category of tools and assume its current limitations are inherent/essential, when really no one has put in the work to make those tools better.

Linux’s (Lack of) Popularity as a Desktop

The year of the Linux I know I am going to get people saying “Linux is the Kernel, the OS is the [insert distro name]”. I’m sorry but that’s not how most people talk about Linux, and I don’t really care too much for your pendantry which aids nothing. Especially since to critique it, you clearly had to understand what was being said about it. desktop still isn’t upon us (in 2026), and part of the reason why it has taken so long to get to that point is fundamental: a lot of the people who use Linux love fiddling with configuration files to reshape their system—it’s their idea of “fun”, their puzzle game.

I went through that phase myself. But after a while, I just wanted things to work. Spending hours (if not days) configuring everything isn’t something I want to do any more. I want the defaults to be good and just work, and when I do need to tweak something minor, it should take seconds.

Maximal configurability shouldn’t be a tool’s goal, it should be an option for when it’s actually necessary. Designing an ergonomic tool is fundamentally about having good defaults, while still allowing escape hatches where they’re possible/needed.

The appeal of accidental Characteristics that an object has contingently and can change without altering the object’s essential identity. complexity is something a lot of programmers/techy-folk love, giving them a weird sense of security.

Having good defaults is fundamentally a toolmaker’s responsibility. We as toolmakers have a tendency to put the burden on the user: to configure it, to tweak it, to learn it. A lot of that burden is really a designer declining to make a decision. “Highly configurable” is often just an excuse for shipping no opinion at all and calling the resulting work your problem. Good defaults are a form of respect for the user’s time: the toolmaker does the thinking once so a thousand users don’t each have to. And part of designing a tool is to allow for some escape hatches tool; those escape hatches are there for the genuine minority who need something unusual; they should not be a substitute for getting the common case right.

Steep Learning Curve as a “Feature”?

Another defence I’ve seen is that the difficulty is the whole point, it filters out the uncommitted, and once you’re over the hump you’re rewarded for life. But a learning curve is a cost, not a virtue. It could hypothetically be absolutely a cost worth paying, but the payoff has to be genuine productivity, not the satisfaction of having paid it. Too often the reasoning is just sunk-cost dressed up as merit: “I spent months learning this, so it must be worth it, and you should copy in my footsteps too”. That’s the puzzle game again, only now the puzzle is the tool itself.

Conclusion

None of this is an argument against any particular tool. It’s an argument against a way of thinking. Use vim, use emacs, use Sublime, but use whatever disappears into the background and lets you get on with the work. That is the whole test, and it’s a personal one. What I’m pushing back on isn’t the choice, it’s the storytelling that grows up around the choice: the reframing of limitations as features, the effort of working around a flaw sold as the reward, the tool quietly promoted from the thing-you-use to the part-of-who-you-are.

The clearest sign a tool is serving you is that you stop noticing it—it becomes invisible. You don’t celebrate its flaws because you’re not turning them into a hobby, rather you just get mildly annoyed and route around them. You don’t defend it because nothing about your identity is riding on it. And you don’t mistake the feeling of cleverness for the fact of productivity, because you’ve bothered to check the difference.

So by all means, enjoy your tools, for the joy of programming itself. Just be honest about which parts are genuinely good and which parts you’ve talked yourself into loving. The best tool isn’t the one with the best story. It’s the one you forget you’re using.

A good tool is and ought to be invisible—striving to make such tools is the goal of a toolmaker.

Chatto is now Open Source!

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:54:25 +0000

Hot damn. This is the big one.

I’m happy to announce that Chatto, the group and team chat application that I’ve been working on for the past year or so, is now officially Open Source, and available for anyone to self-host.

The fastest way to give it a try is through Homebrew:

brew install chattocorp/tap/chatto
chatto init
chatto run

See Chatto’s Getting Started Guide for details. Or stick around to hear more!

Chat Just Got Real

Chatto aims to be the group chat application that you actually enjoy using. You’re probably familiar with the one that rhymes with “knack”, or the one that rhymes with “beams”, or the one that rhymes with “this gourd”.

Chatto is just like those. Except you’re going to love how compact and snappy it is. And that it’s Open Source. And you can just self-host it. For free, too! (A weird thing to write, but the OSS chat app space has become very weird in many ways!)

This is what it looks like:

If you want to see it in action, drop by the Chatto HQ Community!

It’s designed to be extremely easy to self-host on your own infrastructure. In its most basic shape, you just run the executable, and that’s it. It even serves its own frontend!

It’s very light on resources, and probably has the snappiest frontend that you’ve ever used in an app like this. It puts data protection and privacy first, with all personal and chat data fully encrypted at rest with per-user keys that get shredded when a user decides to delete their account.

Each Chatto server powers a single community, with no federation of data between servers, nor any third-party tracking or analytics. If you want to hang out in multiple servers at once, the client will simply connect to all of them directly. If you want to host multiple communities, just spin up multiple Chatto processes. Easy!

Chatto comes with full support for voice and video calls, with screen-sharing, built in. Calls are fully end-to-end encrypted and will scale to as many participants as your infrastructure can handle.

And you can use it today, for free, by self-hosting it on your own server. Binaries are available for Linux (x86_64 and ARM64), macOS, and Windows; head over to the Chatto Self-Hosting Documentation site to get started.

Chatto Cloud

If you prefer someone else to take care of the hosting, I’m also happy to announce that Chatto Cloud will soon enter public beta. Chatto Cloud’s offering is very simple: it provides paid hosting for Chatto servers — and that’s it. No premium subscriptions, no ads, no icky bits. Just hosting.

And it’s really good hosting! Chatto Cloud is launching with fully European and European-owned infrastructure, with more regions slated for launch in early 2027. Every Chatto server on Chatto Cloud benefits from automatic scaling, nightly backups of all data, and zero-downtime version upgrades.

There’s no lock-in; servers hosted through Chatto Cloud are 100% compatible with self-hosted ones, and you can pack up your data and move into or out of Chatto Cloud at any time.

If you want to get notified about the start of the beta, please see the end of this post for a low-volume newsletter you can subscribe to.

What’s Next for Chatto

Chatto is now at version 0.4. I consider it stable enough for production use, but there are a few important features still missing — head over to the Chatto Roadmap if you want an overview.

The focus for Chatto 0.5 will be on additional safety features (content reporting and moderation) as well as polishing the client, particularly its multi-server functionality. I have some fun stuff planned for this that I can’t wait to put into people’s hands.

I expect Chatto to hit 1.0.0 in about 6-12 months. Until then, there may still be breaking changes, even though I’ll be trying to keep them to a minimum. If you do decide to self-host, please be ready to update to new versions as they are released.

Get in Touch

It’s been an exciting journey so far and I’m looking forward to finding out what’s ahead. If you’re self-hosting Chatto, I’m super eager to hear from you about your experience — please don’t hesitate to head over to the Chatto HQ community and get in touch.

Also please feel free to drop by and say hello if you’re interested in Chatto for your company, Open Source project, or similar. I’d love to learn more about your requirements, and help you get set up.

Links

Chatto HQ Community - we have a #self-hosting support channel!
Chatto Self-Hosting Documentation
GitHub Repository
Chatto on Bluesky

If you want to be notified about new releases or the start of Chatto Cloud’s beta, you’re invited to subscribe to the Chatto announcements newsletter. It’s super low-volume (~1 email per month), and is only used for notifying you when exciting new stuff becomes available.

Automation Makes The World Cup Worse. But We Can’t Help Ourselves, Can We?

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 23:58:10 +0000

An epic World Cup has been marred by an overreliance on technology and automation.

In this year’s competition, FIFA has used cameras, sensors, AI systems, and other automated tools to make the game more precise. But these tools, and the accompanying video assistant referee, have taken the soul out of the game.

FIFA’s tech tools have tipped the scales over touches and technicalities that would never be caught by the human eye, and exposed what’s lost when we hand too much to the machines. They’ve also revealed that even when automation noticeably degrades our products, we seem to be unable or unwilling to free ourselves from its grasp.

In soccer, or football as it’s known globally, consequential calls typically rely on human judgment and all the nuance, subjectivity, and context that come with it. An offside call, for instance, relies on the referee’s ability to notice a player making their way behind the defense before a pass heads their way. Video review can aid with that process on borderline calls, using a mix of AI, cameras, sensors, and other tech to theoretically make calls more accurate, more consistent, and protect against alleged bias. But the problem is the sport isn’t designed for this kind of microscopic precision, and relying on it degrades the game.

The worst-case scenario occurred in a July 2 match in which Croatia lost to Portugal. After Croatia scored what looked like the tying goal in stoppage time (aka: at the buzzer), sensors in FIFA’s connected ball detected it apparently grazed the tip of a Croatian player’s hair, leading to another player to be declared offsides while setting up the play, and the goal was then taken back.

Croatia’s hair graze didn’t register to the naked eye, or even on a big screen, but the reading from the sensor was enough for the human referee to let it change the game. The replay showed it as a “heartbeat graphic” spiking at the same moment it passed the player’s head.

“Technically correct,” wrote Roger Pielke Jr. of The Honest Broker in response to the robot call. “Good for the game? I think not.”

The latest flashpoint came ahead of tonight’s U.S.-Belgium match, after President Donald Trump reportedly urged FIFA to review the automatic one-match suspension for U.S. striker Folarin Balogun. FIFA suspended the ban while leaving the VAR-reviewed red card on his record, drawing objections from Belgium and a rebuke from UEFA.

The episode is a high-profile example of how technology can muck up a match. The referee did not initially show Balogun a red card, but a VAR review that slowed down the play made it appear to be a different kind of blow worthy of a send-off offense. While it might seem like a technicality, the example shows the difference between human and tech judgment: Protocol says slow motion can be used to establish factual issues such as point of contact, but normal speed should generally be used to judge the intensity of a foul.

Beyond the World Cup, there have been plenty of other recent examples of AI’s limitations across other industries. Last month, reports noted Ford has re-hired more than 300 veteran “gray beard” quality inspectors to help train younger staff and reprogram the car maker’s AI tools after its systems failed to match quality checks. And in May, Starbucks reportedly scrapped an AI program for automating inventory counts almost a year after it was deployed across North America. The cited AI error feels almost hilariously human: miscounting and mislabels items such as similar milk types.

From assisting refs to replacing other roles, time will tell if new tech will become a universal problem or just an isolated series of own-goals. But for now, it seems like we can’t help ourselves either way.

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Some of the other tech in this year’s World Cup:

Here’s a brief look at some of the other tech FIFA is using this World Cup in partnership with various companies:

VAR is powered by tech provided by Hawk-Eye, which FIFA has been partnering with for years. While it was also used during the 2022 tournament, this year includes updates for computer vision systems which are using more cameras and that capture more skeletal points for each player than before.
Like in the last World Cup, matches again use a connected ball featuring a 500Hz motion sensor chip that detects every ball movement and helps referees make decisions in real time. Developed by Adidas, the ball also captures game highlights such as Messi’s hat trick against Algeria.
Lenovo’s partnership with FIFA is powering other tech including referee body cams, AI-stabilized footage and 3D avatars of 1,200+ players to give fans first-person views of games. Other data collected using Lenovo’s tech helps inform coaches, e-commerce systems and venue operations.
Hyundai and Boston Dynamics are working with FIFA to provide “Spot” robot dogs that patrol stadiums in Dallas and New Jersey for added security. The companies also just announced today that they’re bringing the Atlas humanoid robot to the Round of 16 to use in halftime activations. It was also used on Sunday to deliver the match ball during the Norway-Brazil match.
There are also reports of FIFA reportedly using biometric and surveillance tech, including anti-drone systems, to improve stadium security.
Google’s also working with Argentina’s national team, with Gemini being used to help analyze team plays, performance and stats. (That’s something other tech companies like IBM and Microsoft have been doing for years with other sports.)

The Intelligence Report

Google faced criticism for a new Independence Day commercial that imagines what it’d be like if the founding fathers had used AI to write the Declaration of Independence.
Anthropic redeployed its new Fable model to Claude after the U.S. government forced its suspension shortly after it debuted last month. It also announced a new AI workbench called “Claude Science.”
AWS said it’s investing $1 billion into a new AI unit focused on embedding engineers with customers. The move follows what other companies like OpenAI have also done recently, which resemble Palantir’s use of “forward-deployed engineers.”
OpenAI has reportedly proposed the U.S. Government on taking a 5% stake in the company, a pitch that reports say would involve other AI companies in the U.S. also giving the government a similar stake.
Nvidia said it’s partnering with AI cloud providers to expand compute access for startups, model builders, enterprises and researchers.
Meta is reportedly planning a new division called Meta Compute, which would allow it to create a cloud infrastructure business and sell compute to make money beyond advertising.

The latest on Big Technology Podcast: Who Wins The AI Superapp Battle?, Apple’s Consumer AI Victory, World Cup Automation Mistake

M.G. Siegler is the author of Spyglass.org. Siegler joins Big Technology to discuss the race to build the AI super app and which companies are best positioned to win. Tune in to hear why OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple are all converging on the same idea: an AI interface that can handle more and more of your computing life. We also cover Apple’s new Siri, whether consumer AI will be won by default on the iPhone, and what World Cup automation says about our growing reliance on machines. Hit play for a sharp, wide-ranging conversation about where AI products are headed next.

You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your podcast app of choice