Roastidio.us User Picks KjQKkQVg

NixOS is making me less afraid

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 17:06:04 +0000

On the go? Listen to an ai-narrated version of this article.

Something funny happened a little while ago: I read about FreshRSS, and it sounded nice, so I installed it on a server and started using it. That would not have happened a year ago, but then again, a year ago I didn’t have any NixOS servers.

For the past few years, my rss feeds have lived locally on my phone only. There was a good idea behind that1¹ I can mostly take time to read when I’m away from my computer anyway., but it never quite worked in practice. For one, many things are easier to read on a larger screen. But it was also brittle to trust a phone app to manage the read/unread status of thousands of articles across a hundred feeds.2² In particular, when I switched to a different phone I could migrate all feeds to it, but the read/unread status was lost along the way. What I really wanted was a server-side feed aggregator. This is software that runs on a server, manages rss feeds, and then I can read the rss feeds either through a web interface, or through client applications. I’ve wanted that for a while, but I’ve never taken the step, because it would be yet another side project to maintain the deployment of.

But now, with some NixOS experience, adding a working FreshRSS configuration (including backups) took 9 lines of Nix code3³ Plus a dozen more lines for the nginx reverse proxy configuration. It got a little complicated because I wanted to proxy_pass from a specific location block which required rewriting cookie paths. But that’s a me problem, not a NixOS problem.. That installation has just hands-off worked for the past few months. If or when that server breaks, I can spin up a new one running the exact same configuration, probably in something like 15 minutes. When we can do something like that, there is literally no reason to not just try the new software.

Contrast this against how FreshRSS is installed outside of NixOS. Then we’d

download and extract an archive to the right location;
configure permissions according to instructions;
install nginx and php-fpm with necessary extra dependencies to the server;
configure php-fpm pools and make nginx pass requests through to php-fpm;
set up Let’s Encrypt certificates;
set up backups; and
hopefully remember how to do all the above if something breaks and we need to reinstall FreshRSS on a new or upgraded server later.

Of course, the FreshRSS project provides a container image which would shorten the process a little bit. It purports to set up Apache with mod_php and configure them the right way. Then we’d only need to configure backups, create a systemd service that runs the container, and manage nginx as a tls terminating reverse proxy in front of that, because the container image reasonably does not come with tls support. This is still stuff to remember, and there’s also no guarantee the same thing works six months down the line when reinstalling, unless we wrote down which exact container image we downloaded.4⁴ It does not help to build the container image from source, because two builds from the same Dockerfile separated by time can result in rather different container images.

I have mentioned before how much I dislike maintaining side projects. That includes my own code, but also self-hosted services developed by someone else. I’m okay with a few minutes of maintenance here and there, but having to schedule hours of uninterrupted work to upgrade something, or spending any amount of time at all on emergency maintenance, really kills my desire to work with computers.

You’d think someone of my disposition would be deep into configuration management, container orchestration, or both, but no. I have made honest attempts with CFEngine, Ansible, podman, and k3s but none of them improved my installation/configuration/deployment experience significantly over (a) carefully writing things down, and sometimes (b) turning those careful notes into a shell script performing a sequence of ssh commands.5⁵ Yes, this is essentially reinventing Ansible – but less brittle. It won’t break the next time someone glances sideways at pip. The drawback of the shell script is that it often ends up relying on assumptions that become invalid with time, or when it is used in a different environment. A NixOS configuration reads a lot like the careful instructions to myself, except they’re executable and they produce the same result every time.

Rendering untrusted HTML email, safely | The Making of Close

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 17:06:04 +0000

One of the earliest core features we built in Close was our email sync feature, which allows Close to automatically pull in email communication between your sales team and your sales contacts and display them for your team to see. We present a unified timeline of all communication (emails, calls, SMS, etc.) with a sales lead in one place for your team.

This feature required that we build a way to display email in our web app – safely, without security concerns that typically come with naively rendering untrusted HTML (Stored XSS Attacks).

We launched our ability to display synced HTML email in 2014, however the technical side of it is still very relevant and (I think) interesting since our approach is not one that I've seen widely used.

In the end, we found a way to, exclusively on the client-side (in web browsers), render untrusted HTML email safely inside our single-page application (written originally with Backbone.js, now mostly React). Here we'll discuss a few approaches we had to consider and how we solved this problem.

For example, we can display an IMAP-synced email thread like this:

HTML vs Plaintext?

While many emails do come with a plaintext variant, we had to immediately dismiss the idea of only displaying plaintext email, as convenient as that would have been from a security perspective. Many emails don't have a reasonable plaintext alternative, and users simply expect to be able to view HTML formatted email as they were designed.

Some emails only have a plaintext variant. In those cases we can render the plaintext content pretty simply in our web app: effectively just convert new lines into <br> tags and convert URLs into links.

But most of the interesting engineering/security concerns are around rendering untrusted HTML content (in this case, email content) safely, which is where the remainder of this blog post will focus.

Main goals and concerns

Our main goals were the following:

Display HTML email, not just plaintext
Display "full" HTML email. We care about much more than just a few simple tags like <b> and <i>, but rather want to support displaying sophisticated email styles (including custom style tags) that you often see in well-designed HTML email newsletters, calendar invitations, etc.
We want to render emails within our web application, without any conflicts of our CSS leaking in or the email CSS leaking out.
In addition to CSS styles, we also want to display images, expect links to work, etc.
Most important: Do not let any JavaScript run. Otherwise we run the risk of an attacker taking over our user's Close account by stealing cookies, or a number of other Very Bad™️ things.

Finding a solution…

Saying No to HTML Sanitization

While there may be some rock-solid libraries out there that can take untrusted HTML content and make it completely safe for rendering in HTML, there were a lot of potential downsides to this idea.

First off, in 2014, we didn't immediately trust any of them. HTML sanitization libraries often rely on parsing HTML with regex, which is a notoriously bad idea. We absolutely didn't want to be trying to maintain a library like this ourselves, or have to worry about some unhandled edge case that could lead to a major security vulnerability.

Additionally, unlike other use cases (e.g. rendering a blog comment which may contain just some basic markup for bolding text), we felt like we needed to render complex (heavily styled) HTML emails properly, just like you'd see in Gmail or other modern email clients, so we couldn't default to a tiny whitelist of tags or supported attributes.

Finally, HTML sanitization on its own wouldn't be enough, because we want to render the email within an existing web app, and we don't want its styles affecting the styles of the rest of the web app. There's a well-known solution to this – iframes – that we could have used to help here.

Once we explored iframes, however, we realized they could do everything we needed already on their own…

What can iframes do for us?

Most web developers know that an <iframe> can render a web page in a fairly isolated fashion. Certainly they can solve the issue of our web app styles incorrectly affecting an email's styles (or vice versa).

But we still have that pesky issue of JavaScript.

Uncommon but helpful iframe attributes

There are a number of lesser known iframe attributes that can be very helpful. Let's take a look at a few.

`srcdoc`

Most commonly iframes point to a src webpage URL – either on the same origin or different origin. But since Close is a Single Page Application and our frontend would already be fetching data about the email from our REST API (and could include the email body itself), we discovered that this attribute allowed us to inject HTML content into an iframe (with all the typical iframe benefits) without needing that content to be served by a separate page.

So rather than having to do something like:

<iframe src="/email/body/?email_id=EMAIL_ID_HERE">

... which would have required us to setup an additional endpoint, we could simply display the HTML we already had:

<iframe srcdoc="UNTRUSTED_HTML_HERE">

Neither approach is particularly more or less secure than the other. Both make you still think about "what about script execution" and consider the "same origin" vs. "different origin" options (e.g. we might have needed a separate domain and then have to pass some kind of token for authentication). We chose srcdoc because it worked and was easiest for our setup.

For the value that we inject into the srcdoc, we actually wrap the HTML email in a little HTML, with two main goals:

Give email bodies some sane default styles, and make them fit into the look-and-feel of our web app by default.
Put target="_blank" on all links by default (via a <base> tag), since we never want a user clicking an email link to load a new webpage in the iframe, and this is also a convenient way for us to apply this behavior to all links without having to traverse the email's HTML.
Apply a Content-Security-Policy <meta> tag instructing the iframe document to avoid executing any JavaScript whatsoever. (If we used a hosted page with src instead of srcdoc, this would be done with an HTTP Header instead).

<html>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy" content="script-src 'none'" />
    <base target="_blank" />
    <style>
      body {
        margin: 0;
        font:
          13px -apple-system,
          system-ui,
          'Segoe UI',
          Roboto,
          Oxygen-Sans,
          Ubuntu,
          Cantarell,
          'Helvetica Neue',
          sans-serif,
          'Apple Color Emoji',
          'Segoe UI Emoji',
          'Segoe UI Symbol',
          sans-serif;
        overflow-y: hidden;
      }
      html:not(.x),
      body:not(.x) {
        height: auto !important;
      }
      p:first-child {
        margin-top: 0;
      }
      p:last-child {
        margin-bottom: 0;
      }
      a[href] {
        color: #3781b8;
        text-decoration: none;
      }
      a[href]:hover {
        text-decoration: underline;
      }
      blockquote[type='cite'] {
        margin: 0 0 0 0.8ex;
        border-left: 1px #ccc solid;
        padding-left: 1ex;
      }
      img {
        max-width: 100%;
      }
      ul,
      ol {
        padding: 0;
        margin: 0 0 10px 25px;
      }
      ul {
        list-style-type: disc;
      }
    </style>
  </head>
  <body>
    ${bodyHtml}
  </body>
</html>

`sandbox`

This attribute is the heart of our security model. By adding this attribute, it adds a whole bunch of restrictions to the iframe document, including preventing any JavaScript from running! Learn more about what's blocked here and here. The sandbox attribute allows you to opt back in specific behaviors that are blocked by default. We only allow:

allow-popups – We add target="_blank" to all of them.
allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox - So that external webpages opened via a link actually function properly.
allow-same-origin – We need this for our web app to detect the height of iframe's content. This would be dangerous (and defeat the purpose of sandbox) if we also allowed scripts to run by also including allow-scripts, however it's harmless on its own.

`csp`

We add a Content Security Policy to the iframe with a value of script-src 'none' as an additional mechanism to avoid any JavaScript from running in the iframe. This is mostly duplicative with sandbox but provides an extra layer of protection in browsers that support it.

As you can see, we have some overlap in coverage here (e.g. 3 separate features to avoid JavaScript running). We have learned of particular browser bugs where there were temporary limitations in any one of these indvidiual approaches. A reminder that security in layers is often best.

Bringing it together...

Handling unsupported browsers

As soon as we made the decision to rely on <iframe sandbox> as our primary safety mechanism, we also had to consider users with browsers who didn't have this safety mechanism, so that we didn't put their accounts at risk. Feature detection to the rescue:

// Don't show HTML at all if they are using a browser that doesn't support <iframe sandbox>
// since our security model relies on it to prevent XSS.
// (And the basic functionality relies on <iframe srcdoc>)
const iframe = document.createElement('iframe');
const isHtmlEmailSupported = 'sandbox' in iframe && 'srcdoc' in iframe;

Based on this, we can make sure we only display the plaintext email variant (if one exists) or else render a message like "Your browser does not support displaying email content."

Known limitations

One can envision additional enhancements where we would want to parse and modify the email HTML before rendering it. One example would be if we wanted to try to rewrite and proxy all image URLs (similar to Gmail) to protect our users' privacy.

Similarly, we do have a problem where browsers will show a Mixed Content warning (since our site is https://) after you display an email that includes an <img> with an http:// src. Those warnings are still fairly unobtrusive, however, but ultimately we should proxy them to be served over https.

So while we may one day layer in additional HTML parsing measures (either client-side or server-side), and could decide to switch from an <iframe srcdoc> to <iframe src>, the other security features mentioned here would still likely play an important part of safely rendering HTML email.

Lots of other details to get right

There were a lot of other details to get right. Each of them could deserve their own blog post, but here is a summary:

We have to convert "inline" images (images that are embedded within the email itself, not referencing an external URL) to be displayable by the web browser.
We have to deal with understanding quoting parts. We wrote quotequail for this. (Mailgun later open sourced a similar library called talon). You can see in the screenshot at the top of this post a little "..." button where the quoted part of the email is collapsed by default, but expandable.
We want to avoid the "extra scrollbar" issue you typically experience with iframes, so we carefully (this is surprisingly tricky) detect the height of the iframe email contents and then set the iframe to that height, giving it a seamless look on the page.
We need to consider how composing email works too. We needed a WYSIWYG editor for HTML Email that also prevents any XSS. We currently use Froala Editor for this, after having tested many editors for security.

Thoughts?

Can you find any flaws in our email rendering security model? Our product and approach has been audited by third party security firms, however we always appreciate any reports of security vulnerabilities at security@close.com.

Feel free to hit me up at @philfreo with any comments or questions!

– Phil Freo

Do web components have a future if nobody is writing them? | Read the Tea Leaves

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 04:50:11 +0000

With my previous post on “using the platform”, I was surprised that the comments on Hacker News and Lobsters tended to veer toward web components. This surprised me because I didn’t mention web components at all in the post.

I was less surprised when I did some research and found that the entire “use the platform” mantra was first popularized by Polymer, which was Google’s early attempt at a web-components-based JavaScript framework. In 2018 they even called it “our motto”! So this explains why a lot of people seem to have it burned into their brains that “use the platform” means “use web components.”

Now, one of the reasons I didn’t mention web components in the post is that, in my opinion, they’re actually not a great example of “use the platform” (regardless of the motto’s origins). I instead leaned on examples of HTML and CSS features that tend to be more performant, more accessible, and require far fewer lines of code than the equivalent in JavaScript. This is largely thanks to the advances that the browser vendors and standards bodies (e.g. the CSS Working Group and Open UI project) have made in the past few years.

Modern Web Guidance

Web components popped into my head again, though, after a comment on Mastodon pointed me to Google’s Modern Web Guidance. I wasn’t aware of this tool before writing the post, but essentially it’s a set of skills that you can give to an agent to nudge them in the direction of using more modern browser features. Essentially, it’s “use the platform” for agents (or at least the Chrome team’s vision of it).

As I was watching the demo, though, I was struck by how hard it is to see where web components fit into the picture. In the presentation, Phil Walton shows how you can use Modern Web Guidance to create a web app that feels more like a native app in terms of following your finger smoothly as you touch the screen, thanks to features like CSS scroll snap points and scroll-driven animations.

But nowhere in the demo are we really seeing the code – this is pure vibe-coding. And as I watched, I struggled to think of any place where, if I were building Modern Web Guidance myself, I would put instructions to tell the agent, “Hey, you should use custom elements, shadow DOM, or other web component primitives here because it’s going to make the end user experience better.” And that’s because there’s nothing that web components can really do to make the end user experience better. (Arguably you could say that shadow DOM improves CSS performance, but I’ve benchmarked this to death, and you can effectively get the same boost with compile-time CSS scoping, which many frameworks and tools like Svelte, Vue, and Tailwind are already doing.)

So I took a look at the actual code for Modern Web Guidance, and my hunch was confirmed: web components feel like an afterthought. For the first six months of the project’s lifetime, there was almost no mention of web components. This only changed 3 weeks ago when a single commit landed, which mostly provides guidelines for those already using web components, around the topics of accessibility, pre-rendering, styling, etc. But nowhere does the Modern Web Guidance strongly recommend the agent to use web components – in fact, there’s a whole section titled “Decide whether you even need a custom element” which sounds downright discouraging at times. As written, if you throw the Modern Web Guidance at an agent building a brand-new product, it seems unlikely to me that it would choose to use web components.

To be fair, there is one exception: a line for Chrome extension authors recommends using shadow DOM for complex UI injected into a page. This seems perfectly sensible to me, although it’s a fairly narrow use case. Another line suggests using web components for “design systems, embeddable widgets, and self-contained UI,” but this is also fairly narrow, and reads to me as a faint nod within the larger context of “decide whether you even need a custom element.”

Web components at a crossroads

So where do web components fit into this new AI coding world? I’m not going to rehash all my points about web components’ strengths and weaknesses; I’ve already done that at considerable length. Instead I want to talk about what’s new if people are no longer writing the code (or increasingly, even reading it).

This section was painful for me to write, because I spent years working on a web-components-based framework (LWC), participating in the Web Components Community Group and Accessibility Object Model group, and defending web components on my blog, in podcasts, etc. And yet I have to acknowledge that their core value proposition have been severely weakened by agentic coding.

In short, web components were designed for a world where people typed HTML by hand, code was scarce, and thus reuse was an economic necessity. None of those things are true anymore, or at least they’re much less true and becoming less so by the day. So the elevator pitch of “build for a common standard and your components will be easier to pick up and reuse” becomes less compelling as more and more people are vibing UIs from scratch on top of a largely invisible platform substrate.

This doesn’t just devastate the value proposition of web components: it also impacts the JavaScript frameworks that inspired them. Increasingly I read about teams rewriting their entire frontend from one framework to another, based largely on the vibes of “it’s probably better for agents.” Regardless of the merits of these rewrites (which I think ought to be more evidence-based along the lines of “it uses fewer tokens” or “it’s a faster end-user experience”), we’re likely to see more of them in the future. And if people start seeing the framework layer as disposable, it seems unlikely to me that they would assign much value to the layer one step below that.

As I argued in a 2023 post, component libraries were already moving from a “batteries-included” model to a more “DIY” mindset. The apotheosis of this is shadcdn, which might seem like a machine for spitting out reams of boilerplate, but in a sense, that’s the point. Rather than make your touchpoint with a component system an inflexible API that resists your attempts to style or tweak it, you import the individual bits and pieces and then rearrange them at your will. This shift was already underway before AI coding, and now with LLMs “reams of boilerplate” are an advantage rather than a detriment. And none of this plays to the strengths of shadow DOM, reflected attributes, or other web component mainstays.

Salvaging web components

There are two (slightly weak) cases I can try to make for web components in this new world of AI coding.

The first is so-called micro-frontends, or the idea of separating a large UI into multiple sections that can be built by different teams without clobbering each other. Web components were explicitly designed for this scenario: avoiding “friendly fire” (in Brian Kardell’s memorable phrasing). In a world of agents, this kind of sandboxing is actually a well-known technique, because typically you want to isolate agents into strict boundaries to avoid them rampaging on top of each other. In other words, web components could theoretically allow you to have multiple swarms of agents working on separate parts of the UI without their CSS, events, or globals clashing with one another.

The obvious counterpoint is that the web already has a great sandboxing primitive, which is iframes. Iframes offer even firmer boundaries than web components: not only are components isolated from each other, but they also live in separate JavaScript realms with postMessage as the only communication channel. There are several tradeoffs that I don’t want to get into here (synchronous vs asynchronous communication, memory usage, the porousness of closed vs open shadow DOM), but I do think web components have a chance in this fight. (Arguably, the Modern Web Guidance’s “design systems and self-contained UI” are also examples of micro-frontend-like scenarios where web components can shine.)

The second argument is that reuse still matters even when rewrites are just a prompt away. For example, I still believe that my <emoji-picker> element is a good poster child for an effective web component: there is no reason to rebuild this thing in React, Vue, Svelte, and a dozen other frameworks, even though you could trivially do so with an LLM these days. It’s a standalone, client-only component, and most of its complexity lives in managing the emoji data, IndexedDB, etc., with little need for touchpoints with a framework to manage its rendering or lifecycle. So packaging it as a web component and allowing folks to wrap it in their framework layer of choice (or none at all) is still a sensible distribution model.

Arguing against web components as a lingua franca for reuse sounds (to me) like an argument that all code sharing or even open source in general is a waste of time in the agentic era. My colleague André Staltz has shown that this is clearly false: if anything, AI coding is increasing the amount of shared code, not decreasing it. Even if you can rebuild something with agents, that doesn’t mean that it’s worth spending the tokens to do so. (Although I do still wonder about smaller projects.)

The stronger counterargument is that agents already have a perfectly good component reuse layer, which is React. I don’t believe this, though, because I don’t think that React is the last JavaScript framework the world will ever need. Performance benchmarks like the js-framework-benchmark and isomorphic SSR benchmark still stubbornly argue against React adoption: as it turns out, the virtual DOM is still pure overhead. React could certainly reinvent itself for the agentic era, but I imagine this could lead to compatibility problems that would argue more strongly for web component adoption, if for no other reason than to get off the update treadmill.

Still, I think the strongest argument of all is that neither web components nor React nor any other framework really matter, except maybe as a footnote in someone’s AGENTS.md or an aside in an agent’s thinking process. Recently I vibe-coded a small app for my wife, and the agent mentioned that it was wavering between Preact and Svelte before finally settling on Preact. To be honest, I didn’t care at all because the app worked and solved the problem at hand.

Conclusion

I still have a soft spot for web components, and when push comes to shove I’ll happily defend them against any detractors.

There’s even a web component on this very site! The theme picker above is an “HTML web component” (or “light DOM component”), which I find quite nice as an alternative to the old-school “HTML with jQuery sprinkles” approach. Defining setup logic in connectedCallback just feels cleaner to me than awkward querySelector acrobatics. That said, I’ll admit that I had to explicitly tell my agent to use a web component (otherwise I’m certain it would have just shrugged and reached for querySelector).

Despite my sentimentality for web components, though, I think that the web component advocates working on standards, frameworks, or browsers will have to work twice as hard to argue for their relevance in an AI coding future. I no longer have a dog in this fight, but I looked at the status of some longstanding problems with web components and was disappointed to see that server-side rendering, stylesheet sharing, and accessibility still appear to be unsolved. These kinds of flaws – which mind you, directly impact the end-user experience and are thus unchanged with AI coding – will have to be fixed if web components want to have a fighting chance.

If web components don’t survive, or they wither away to forgotten infrastructure on a minority of websites, then what will they have accomplished? Well, I do think that one unambiguous victory for web components has been in “explaining the platform.” This was one of the original goals of web components: taking a native HTML element like <video controls> or <details>/<summary> and explaining how web developers could build it themselves from platform primitives. And in fact if you look at the browser DevTools, you’ll even see “user-agent shadow DOM” hiding inside these elements.

The user agent shadow root for <video controls> in Chromium DevTools.

So from a standards and internal-consistency perspective, web components have been a clear win. They provide a degree of coherence between userland and the platform that, without them, might have felt ad-hoc or inconsistent from browser to browser.

This has also created a symbiotic relationship between standards and userland, where web component concepts have flowed back into standards and influenced the design of new platform features. You can see this most clearly in the Open UI project, where terms like “parts” and “slots” are frequently invoked (both of which come from web components), and which has landed several new features in browsers such as customizable <select>, popovers, and invoker commands, with more likely on the way.

So whatever happens to web components in the future, and regardless of whether web developers ignore them, forget them, celebrate their demise, or write them off entirely, nothing can take this victory away from them. They are woven into the texture of the web platform in a way that can never be undone. For me, this makes me happy even if I never write another web component again.

You can comment on the fediverse or Lobsters.

Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman | Computing | The Guardian

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 05:30:57 +0000

The concept of using web-based programs like Google's Gmail is "worse than stupidity", according to a leading advocate of free software.

Cloud computing – where IT power is delivered over the internet as you need it, rather than drawn from a desktop computer – has gained currency in recent years. Large internet and technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Amazon are pushing forward their plans to deliver information and software over the net.

But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

"It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign," he told The Guardian.

"Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true."

The 55-year-old New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party.

His comments echo those made last week by Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who criticised the rash of cloud computing announcements as "fashion-driven" and "complete gibberish".

"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do," he said. "The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"

The growing number of people storing information on internet-accessible servers rather than on their own machines, has become a core part of the rise of Web 2.0 applications. Millions of people now upload personal data such as emails, photographs and, increasingly, their work, to sites owned by companies such as Google.

Computer manufacturer Dell recently even tried to trademark the term "cloud computing", although its application was refused.

But there has been growing concern that mainstream adoption of cloud computing could present a mixture of privacy and ownership issues, with users potentially being locked out of their own files.

Stallman, who is a staunch privacy advocate, advised users to stay local and stick with their own computers.

"One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control," he said. "It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."

Nothing is Boring in America - by Henry Oliver

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 05:30:46 +0000

I want to see America. I want to see all of America. Every small-town interstate, every roadside diner, every eccentric museum, every monumental lake, mountain range, river, every charming creek, every rock formation that sticks out like a snake’s head, even every boring conurbation that has abandoned all aesthetic hope. I want to hear the accents of the Mid-South and the Midwest, the twangs and the drawls and the gurgles. I want to see the monuments, the statues, the suburbs, and the dizzyingly long highways. I want to stop in for coffee and see a local political meeting. I want to go to the places where people still have sunken toothless mouths and where there are wooden buildings collapsing across the road from vast soulless new-builds. I want to know how they live miles from anywhere and right there in the heart of things.

That is why I drove a thousand miles from home, wiggling from Arlington to Richmond to Damascus to Chattanooga to Franklin to Shiloh. Now we are winding back, through Nashville to Louisville to Dayton and to Ohiopyle. We have been in the mountains and over the mountains, in the heart of old Confederate country, in the fields where the course of the Civil War changed, in the diners where locals are surprised to see anyone from out of town.

A lot of what you see on a big road trip is what you went to see. One wishes, naturally, for Americans in their big trucks to be aggressive on the road, no matter how irritating it might be at the time. One wishes to see podgy middle-aged men lined up on stools eating eggs and biscuits. (Indeed, one fits right in.) What else is a road trip for if not to see up close and for real all the hundreds of details of this great civilization of the USA that we take for granted out of books and movies and television programs?

But a lot is what you never knew was out there. In five days I have fallen in love with Tennessee. There is history everywhere. Not just in the battlefields and Civil War sites, and the superb state museum, but in the collapsing buildings, the old-school diners, the well-preserved towns, the eccentric and wonderful little museums. And the natural beauty is just awesome. There is an elephant sanctuary in this state—three thousand acres dedicated to rehabilitating elephants. It is closed to the public but it has a visitor center in a town of only four thousand people. There is a mighty river, mist that drifts and piles in great clumps, the Chattanooga Choo Choo, long flat landscapes, deep valleys, National Parks of extraordinary beauty and poignancy. Yes, in Nashville the dogs wear bandanas and the art museum is full of modern rubbish (though it is housed in a very splendid art deco building, the old Post Office). But on every road off the interstate you will see history in real time, one place in decline while another is thriving, the old ways of life still clinging on. The Catfish Hotel in Shiloh, the little towns that are not on the road atlas but which do have large graveyards next to their church. It is a world unto itself.

For one night, we crossed into Mississippi, and saw Corinth, a small place, with no redeeming architectural features, but where the Sheriffs let our children sit in the car and use the siren. They handed out stickers too. One of them had just married the waitress in the restaurant we stopped at. In the morning we went to Abe’s Grill, which looks like a shack on the outside and only has space to sit on counter stools, or a small table outside. It is family run, fifty-three years old, and opens at 3 a.m. every day for the nurses and factory workers hereabouts. The walls are covered in fading photographs, many including the old owner who died a month ago. His wife and son and daughter-in-law still run the place, never missing a beat, flipping eggs while they chat to customers. “What meat for you? Sir? British! Bacon or country ham?” They are fast and friendly and as soon as you are gone they are well-acquainted with the next customer. The biscuits are advertised as the Mid-South’s favourite and I am surprised they have not gone national. I would drive miles to have them again, dipped in their chocolate gravy. (All the son would tell me about the recipe is that it takes a lot of love. These are family recipes.) The roof beams are covered in licence plates, one from every state, which people bring in and donate. The menu is so old it advertises eggs ’n’ biscuit for less than $3. Dickens would have produced a timeless page of description about this place where a coffee pot is always filling, the bills are held in the owner’s head without notes, and someone is always arriving, hoping breakfast has not yet run out. If you want a cheeseburger at 3 a.m.—and a cheeseburger that is famous in local parts—Abe’s is the place to go. We have met a lot of lovely and big-hearted people down here, but Abe’s packed more of them into a few square feet than anywhere else.

That was only one hour of our journey. We saw the third largest collection in the USA of mounted animals (shot in Africa) in a small town—the very same town that houses the elephant sanctuary. We saw a tractor graveyard, endless lorries carrying logs, the remarkable and almost unbearable spectacle of Buc-ee’s—a service station that is larger than some malls, they could screen movies there—, several remarkable National Parks (truly, a wonderful wonderful service), birds of prey on telephone wires, a drive-in movie theatre, an Amish horse-drawn buggy, lorries that truly look like Transformers, and mist sitting on lakes and hanging upon trees that could make you believe a dinosaur might any moment walk right out of it and heave along the road.

And who knows what else is coming? Drive the suburbs and see the great variety of houses, the bizarre Halloween decorations, the endless businesses; drive the highways and see the blaring and sublime advertisements that line all the roads—NOW HIRING, WE BUY GOLD, CHEAPEST CIGARETTES FOR MILES, SHE WANTS THE DECK, WORLD’S LARGEST FIREWORK SUPERMARKET, WE SELL FLAMETHROWERS—go to the supermarkets and see the great variety of life, go to the Piggly Wiggly, which was the first self-service market, and is now a living museum, with the old beige shelves, brands from the 1960s, and the typography your grandmother would have known. Nothing is boring in America.

Go—go—and see it all.

i am so afraid of starting small... – a small corner of the internet where i can think out loud and try to make sense of things

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:09:56 +0000

a small corner of the internet where i can think out loud and try to make sense of things

i am so afraid of starting small...

14 Oct, 2026

in hindsight, a lot of the losses i've had in life in the past year is from trying to make huge leaps. about a year and a half ago, i got a windfall large enough to change my life. and i did – i did change my life but in ways i didn't think through. resigned from the highest paying job i've ever had only to never find a new one that matched the environment and the compensation. bought my dream car only to let it go six months later.

i aimed and leapt so fucking high when i should have been climbing the ladder one step at a time. i don't know. i guess i thought i could skip some rungs and end up in the same place i wanna be faster. only i didn't. i jumped so high only to fall flat on my face. where exactly did that get me? farther than where i even started.

few months before that windfall, my brother died. for a while, i was stuck feeling like i was running out of time. that life can end in an instant. and i guess some part of me was afraid i'd die one day without getting to where i wanna be. i think for the most part, i tried to make big changes in my life with that in mind.

but if i really take the time to introspect, i guess i was ashamed of starting small. i wanted my progress to be quick and dramatic enough to feel like i am getting somewhere. why? i don't even know. maybe cus i feel like if the change is too small, it won't be big or loud enough for anyone to notice. but then i ask myself – whose attention am i trying to get exactly? why does progress not feel like one when it's not visible to others? am i doing the things i'm doing for myself or for somebody else? who am i trying to impress?

why am i living my life as if someone is watching when in reality, everybody is too busy minding their own lives? i act as if people are interested in what's going on with my life that i forget everyone's carrying enough baggage of their own to care about someone else's.

so again, why am i so afraid to start small? why do i feel like if the steps are too small, i won't get to where i wanna be?

Rivian CEO: Robotics Is Progressing Much Faster Than You Think

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 19:13:49 +0000

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe is behind the wheel of a fully-loaded R1 SUV, plodding through traffic on a dreary Wednesday New York City afternoon, when he tells me people are underestimating the progress in robotics today.

“The rate of progress in robotics is going to be far higher than the world knows,” he says. “Far, far, far, far faster.”

Scaringe, the 43-year-old CEO of the $18 billion electric car company, founded Mind Robotics, a new robotics company, in 2025, raising $1 billion with a plan to take advantage of the field’s latest advances. The company is building industrial robots that are not quite humanoids, but have two arms, two hands, fingers that splay wider than human digits, and fingernails that can be used to manipulate thin items that require a light touch.

Scaringe and I met at Rivian’s showroom on 14th street in New York City this week. And after some schedule jenga, he offered me a ride my podcast studio across town so we could have the maximum amount of time to talk. Expecting a cursory update on a car company, I left with at least some belief that the so-called ‘ChatGPT moment for robotics’ might arrive sooner than anticipated.

The key development, Scaringe tells me, is that robots are now starting to learn broad, generalizable skills, unlike their predecessors that moved with prescribed motions, and that is unlocking an array of new possibilities. The transformer model at the heart of LLM technology is also being used to enable these advances as well. “This is a transformer-based model,” Scaringe says. “We’re using transformers to take really complex, diverse sets of data, convert that into models with weights, use those models with weights to drive action.”

Instead of telling a robot the exact movements it needs to make to clean a surface, for example, Scaringe says you’re starting to be able to just tell it to clean a surface and its internal model will be able to use generalized motion skills to figure it out. Look at a phone, and it will use its fingers to pick it up. Look at a credit card, and it will use fingernails.

Scaringe, who can’t escape being measured up to Elon Musk as a head of an electric car company, is now competing with Musk in robotics as well. Scaringe’s robots are, in a sense, the anti-Optimus. As opposed to Musk’s general purpose humanoids, Scaringe’s bots are factory-centric and meant to be sold to manufacturers. This is because Scaringe belives the economics are better his way.

“You need to have a business that’s willing to pay for the robot,” he says. “Would you be willing to pay a robot $10,000 a year to fold your laundry? Maybe, but that’s a small selection. But would you be willing to have a robot that you paid $50,000 a year to work three shifts in a manufacturing plant? Absolutely.”

Indeed, Mind Robotics has a deal with Rivian where it trains and runs its latest technology. Within Rivian’s plants, workers wear cameras to feed data about their movements to the robots’ AI models, and they have cameras watching their movements, feeding the data to the models as well. In a sense, it’s modern-day Taylorism, a practice where factory managers watched workers in the industrial age, identified all unnecessary movement, and asked workers to move in regimented motions. This time though, it will be the robots doing the efficient work.

Scaringe believes that a wide spectrum of industrial work will be automateable, including an entire factory. “Take a Rivian plant, we have 6,000 robots today, we have 7,000 people,” Scaringe says. “All those jobs that people are doing are things that more advanced robotics could do.”

But what of the workers?

“I think robotics is going to be like multi-decade transition,” Scaringe says, explaining that the complexity of industrial work will necessitate longer-time-horizon rollouts vs. immediate adoption.

Still, he’s under no illusion that the future of human labor will look anything like it does today. “Now it’s pretty rare that you meet a farmer,” he says. “But if this was 125 years ago, that would have been normal. I think the same is going to play out in not just manufacturing, but lots of different segments where the things we’ve done historically are going to start to shift.”

How $31 Trillion In Datacenters Get Built By 2050 — With Dallas Dolen (sponsor)

Dallas Dolen is the TMT leader at PwC. Dolen joins Big Technology to discuss PwC’s projection that global AI infrastructure investment could reach $31 trillion through 2050. Tune in to hear why he believes surging compute demand can outrun efficiency gains, and how the world could generate enough power to support the buildout. We also cover international competition for data centers, growing political opposition, AI’s consumer opportunity, and whether today’s models are already powerful enough to transform business. Hit play for a wide-ranging look at what it will actually take to build the infrastructure behind the AI boom.

Watch Here

This Week On Big Technology Podcast: The Bumpy Road To AGI — With Kevin Roose

Kevin Roose is the author of The AGI Chronicles,. Roose joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss whether an AI industry rife with personal rivalries, infighting, and mistrust can be trusted to develop technology more powerful than humans. Tune in to hear why Roose emerged from years of reporting inside OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind more concerned about AI safety, why he believes the industry should slow down, and what happens if AI systems begin improving themselves. We also cover Sam Altman’s leadership style, Dario Amodei’s motivations, Sergey Brin’s return to Google, Microsoft’s AI missteps, and the behind-the-scenes drama of OpenAI’s boardroom coup. Hit play for an inside look at the personalities, power struggles, and technological breakthroughs shaping the race to superintelligence.

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

Thanks again for reading. Please share Big Technology if you like it!

And hit that Like Button or a robot might do it for you

My book Always Day One digs into the tech giants’ inner workings, focusing on automation and culture. I’d be thrilled if you’d give it a read. You can find it here.

Join Big Technology’s Private Discord Server!

Where we’ll talk about this story, the latest in AI, the week’s podcast, and plenty more. You can sign up via the link below:

书评：My Brilliant Friend

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:27:53 +0000

本书作者叫 Elena Ferrante, 这是笔名，作者很低调，谁也不知道她真名是什么。有趣的是书的第一人称叙述者也叫 Elena，这让书读起来有自传的味道。原著是意大利语，我读的是英文版。中文版名字似乎叫《我的天才女友》，不喜欢读书的朋友也可以看 HBO 拍的同名电视剧。这本书讲的是在二战刚结束不久的那不勒斯，两个女孩的成长故事。

那不勒斯话

那不勒斯自希腊时代就是一个重要城市，Naples 名字的起源是 Nea-polis，也就是希腊语“新城”的意思。放眼全意大利，那不勒斯的历史文化也是属于最久远的那一拨。但出于种种原因，整个意大利南部包含那不勒斯，从中世纪开始在经济上就远远落后于意大利北方，所以，意大利是个地域歧视非常严重的国家。那不勒斯话和基于佛罗伦萨话的意大利普通话有相当区别，在书中描述的1950年代，所有那不勒斯人生活中都说那不勒斯话，但从小学就开始，教育就全是基于意大利普通话的。

在家里说方言，在学校说普通话，这对我们中国人并不陌生。但是，由于意大利显著的南北经济差别，那不勒斯方言有着很强的负面属性。我读的是英文翻译，无法体现出两种语言在不同场景下的使用情况，只好不厌其烦地说，这句话是用意大利语说的，这句话是用方言说的。总体来说，那不勒斯话代表粗俗，下流，没文化，意大利语代表受教育，有文化，讲礼貌。而且，语言教育占到他们教育体系相当重要的一个方面：小学学意大利语，初中学拉丁语，到高中还要学古希腊语。对于不研究古籍的普通意大利人来说，拉丁语和古希腊语完全没用，但它们是文化人的象征，不懂一点拉丁语和古希腊语，你就永远是被看低一等的那不勒斯土老冒。

大城市，小地方

My Brilliant Friend

那不勒斯是意大利第三大城市，书里描写了繁华的闹市，无尽的海滩，还有在全城都抬头可见的巍峨壮观的维苏威火山。但是，本书主人公的活动范围，交往的朋友基本离不开方圆几百米的一个小小社区。一个小学，一座教堂，两三条街，几座居民楼。这么小的地方还有相当的阶级分化：首富住在看得见的不远处，次富甚至住在主人公自己楼上。有钱人也不说搬离这个穷社区，到富人区去住，好像在穷邻居面前显摆有钱是对他们很有意义的一件事。本书让我有种观察一个城中村的感受。

一般而言，大城市的好处是眼界开阔，机会多。小地方的好处是生活安逸，有人情味。可惜，这样的一个城中村两边都不占。外面的精彩世界让人不安于闭塞穷困的生活，但上升通道很少，近乎没有。少数的几个上升通道又有强烈的副作用，所以有的人想走走不掉，有的人走掉了又不得已回来，有的人在两个世界之间徘徊，无法取舍。

此时此刻，我终于懂了“穷人”是什么意思，比多年前老师问我的时候清楚的多。“穷人”是我们。

暴力阴影下的兄妹关系

在这里所有的男人都打老婆，所有的父母都打孩子，女孩被欺负了，她的哥哥必须冲出去跟人打个头破血流。在暴力阴影下，女孩子能得到的保护来源基本只有哥哥。这里每家都有四五个孩子，但书里描述姐妹关系，兄弟关系，姐弟关系的篇幅基本不存在，兄妹关系是压倒性的主流。书中一起玩的几个年轻人是三四个同龄的妹妹，还有她们各自的哥哥，比她们大5，6岁，形成了一个“共享兄妹”的关系。

仔细推想一下，这种共享兄妹团体很有效：女孩需要保护，男孩需要接触可成为自己女朋友的女孩，而且几个男孩一起上，打架不容易吃亏。双方都是各取所需。但是，我总觉得这种友谊实用性太强，时效性太短，不怎么可爱。当时间到了，实用性消失后，婚姻就是亲兄妹感情的坟场，异姓兄妹之间也不会有好的结果：

我和这些男孩一起长大，我本觉得他们的举止是正常的，他们满口的脏话也是我的口语。但是，我过去六年走的路他们一无所知，我在别处学到的东西跟他们时一起完全用不上，我还必须时刻克制自己，缩小自己，我必须藏起我的另一面，除非我想让他们感到自卑。我究竟在干嘛？是的，这一车人都是我的好朋友，有一个还是我的男朋友，我们现在一起去参加我最好的朋友的婚礼。但这个婚礼本身就证明我这个好朋友，全世界我唯一觉得不可或缺的人，要跟我分道扬镳了，不再属于我们。她不在了，我和这里其他人的联系，正如这辆飞驰的汽车，就快走到终点了。

续集：The Story of a New Name

本套书一共四本，这是第二本。上本写了她们的青少年时代，这本到20多岁为止。第一本里埋藏的所有矛盾在这本里全面爆发，又加了很多感情戏。如果不剧透，又要概括一下的话，我的总结是穷人家特别出色的女孩找不到对象。这是个有点俗套的主题，但确实有道理。一个出色的女孩择偶的选择面是大了，但每个选择都是错的：

可以找个门当户对，知根知底，疼自己的人。但是，你家里人一定觉得你亏了，对方也觉得配不上你，从而暗自自卑。那你自己呢？你会不会有一天也会觉得亏了呢？

也可以找个有钱人家的孩子。但是，不管你怎么想，他怎么想，“交易”这两个字就写在你的脑门上。你和你的朋友的关系会异化，你的家人和他的家人的关系会异化，然后你会觉得他变了，或者更糟，是你当年太年轻不谙世事，知人知面不知心。

还可以找个文化人，精神伴侣。但是，出身市井的你和作为知识分子的他三观天生不搭：你受得了他的清高，自恋，不食人间烟火吗？何况他恐怕不会专情。

作者没办法，我更没有。相信过程吧。书还有两本，要写一辈子的。我暂时不想读下去了。

我们还是孩子的时候我就爱上了你。我没跟你说，因为你这么漂亮这么聪明，而我又矮又丑又穷。你得回你丈夫那里去，我不知道你为什么要走我也不想知道；我只知道你不能待在这里，你不应该活在这个猪圈里。我带你回你家，你自己上去，我在楼下等，要是他打你的话，我就冲上来杀了他。但是他不会的，他只会因你回来而高兴。我们再订个约定：要是最终你还是跟他过不下去，是我把你带回去的，我负责再带你走。好吗？

Passkeys Are Not a Trap

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 22:44:22 +0000

A post called Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them. has been doing the rounds over the last few days, making it pretty high on Hacker News, and I've had it sent to me many times with an 'is this true?' kind of vibe. It's written for "non-technical citizens of the web", and the headline advice is to stop using passkeys and go back to TOTP codes and passwords.

The Argument

The post makes what appears to be one central claim: Passkeys support something called attestation, which lets a website ask for cryptographic proof of what made the passkey.

The author calls this a "hidden dial" and argues that sites will slowly turn it up, until you're only allowed to log in with approved software on an approved operating system, with no modifications, no LineageOS and no sharing your Netflix password. Throw in uBlock Origin, the FIDO Alliance membership list and the UK's image-scanning proposals, and the conclusion is that passkeys are "not designed to prioritize your interests". <that-escalated-quickly.gif>

It's a compelling story. It just doesn't match how any of this actually works...

Your Passkeys Don't Attest

The passkeys most people use are synced passkeys, stored in iCloud Keychain, Google Password Manager, 1Password, Bitwarden or whatever other software of your choosing. These passkeys don't give websites an attestation statement at all, and though a site can ask, what comes back is none. I know this because I wrote an opensource passkeys library and made it available to everyone.

If a consumer website decided tomorrow that it would only accept attested passkeys, it would lock out almost all of its own users, instantly. What website is going to do that? Besides, the guidance for consumer sites has been to not even request attestation for years now.

Attestation Isn't What You Think It Is

The post describes attestation as proving "that an approved passkey manager, operating system, and firmware are in use" which is simply not true.

When it is present, WebAuthn attestation tells the site the make and model of the authenticator, identified by its AAGUID, with a certificate chain from the vendor to back it up. It says nothing about your OS, your browser, your extensions, whether your phone is rooted or jailbroken, your firmware version, or even what colour it is.

The YubiKey Recommendation

This is the part that surprised me the most. For people who want stronger security, the post recommends a hardware security key like a YubiKey, because it "avoids OS-wide attestation".

YubiKeys are the authenticators that do attestation. Every one of them ships with a Yubico-issued attestation certificate, and enterprise attestation exists specifically so organisations can require approved hardware keys. I'd still recommend a YubiKey to anyone who wants one, they're excellent and I use them, but if attestation is the thing you're worried about, the post's own recommendation pushes you towards attestation rather than away from it!

TOTP Is a Step Backwards

The post holds up TOTP as "already" a great solution. TOTP is better than a password alone, absolutely, but it has one big weakness: you can type the code into the wrong website, just ask my good friend Troy Hunt. Phishing kits like Evilginx sit in the middle, relay your password and code to the real site in real time, and walk away with your session. This isn't theoretical, it's how a huge number of account takeovers happen today and we have the evidence to prove it.

This is the problem that passkeys solve. A passkey is bound to the domain it was created for, so your browser simply won't use your example.com passkey on examp1e.com. There's no code to read out and nothing for the user to get wrong. The author even concedes this in the addendum, saying that passkeys are domain-bound and resist man-in-the-middle attacks, but still tells readers to avoid them. Swapping a phishing-resistant credential for a phishable one is a really bad trade...

What You Should Do

Keep using passkeys! Wherever a site offers one, take it, and store it in a password/passkey manager you trust. If you want to be able to move your credentials around, pick a provider that supports that. If you're worried about attestation creeping into consumer logins, then that's worth pushing back on, loudly (if it ever happens). But it hasn't happened, the biggest providers don't support it, and avoiding passkeys today while you wait for it won't protect you from anything, it just leaves you open to phishing.

Sources

I have some experience in this area:

I created WhyNoPasskeys.com to track the availability of passkeys on the Web.

I built and deployed passkeys support on my own SaaS company.

We built our own passkeys library and had it security reviewed.

I wrote about Security considerations when using Passkeys on your website.

I wrote Passkeys 101: An Introduction to Passkeys and How They Work.

I made our passkeys library opensource for everyone to use.

I've done extensive security testing of passkeys implementations.

I've openly acknowledged the limitations of not using attestation on passkeys.

I think most of all that it's important to say I use passkeys everywhere I can because they're currently the best thing we have available to protect our accounts. And they're not a trap.

On Vulgar Materialism

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 23:03:23 +0000

The most stubborn facts are those of the spirit, not those of the physical world.

— Jean Gottmann, Geography and International Relations

In 1914, before the First World War, there was this belief: “a European war would be economically disastrous, the moneyed classes won’t let it happen”. Europe went to war anyways, and the war was in fact an economic disaster as everyone knew it would be. Why were those people wrong? Because the rich were not in control: the Tsar and the Kaiser and the Emperor were in control.

I thought of this in 2022, in the lead up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, whenever I would read someone argue: “Russia invading Ukraine would be economic suicide, the oligarchs won’t let Putin do it, they want to keep their yachts and villas”. Then Putin did it anyways, and the oligarchs had their assets in the West seized. Because the oligarchs are mis-named. They have no political power whatever and live and die by Putin, who appoints them to run stuff, and they get to live well, as long as they are loyal. They are the recipients of political patronage, not the source of it. When the wars start anyways, the same cynical people change their tune, suddenly it’s the armaments industry that’s behind it all, the war was profitable after all.

The default lens through which modern people look at the world is vulgar materialism: a stylized, populist version of historical materialism where everything is explained by money, states are weak, democracy is a fiction, corporations and the rich run the world, ideology and religion and nationalism and language have no explanatory power and are merely covers for secret, underlying material motives.

Once you notice it, you see it everywhere: you’ll hear people say that the Rwandan genocide was a scam to sell machetes or the war in Gaza is about oil or ISIS beheadings are caused by a lack of economic opportunity. People on the right justify skepticism of medicine by invoking Big Pharma, and climate skepticism on climate scientists seeking grant money. Glyphosate is probably the most studied molecule in history at this point, but no amount of studies will convince people it’s safe, because corporations are evil.

In fiction—if you think this is a valid way to sense the cultural consensus—the trope of the evil corporation has been done to death and beyond. Just this week I finished a novel and watched a movie where the central bad guys are private corporations with quasi-state powers. Seemingly no-one notices that never, not once in all of human history, has there been anything like “corporate state” of science fiction. No, not the VoC or the EIC, which were “companies” in the sense of bodies corporate, the old medieval sense of the word: power was delegated to them, and they ruled on behalf of the states that chartered them. Not Venice either: you couldn’t buy your way into the Golden Book until the republic was well into the decline. The EIC once controlled 25% of world GDP, yet, when Parliament decided it had delegated too much power, they simply neutered it. And you think Jeff Bezos has power?

Now, why is vulgar materialism false?

First, as a way to explain events, the problem with asking “cui bono?”, is that whatever happens—literally in any circumstance—someone will benefit. If nothing bad happens, the peacetime economy benefits. If something bad happens, then, because the means of relief are obtained through the market, the companies that provide those means benefit. Thus war benefits arms manufacturers, plagues benefit pharmaceutical companies, earthquakes benefit glaziers. And it’s not wrong to benefit from relieving a harm. The COVID vaccines saved millions of lives: why shouldn’t pharmaceutical companies benefit? It is wrong to benefit from perpetuating a harm, but companies have limited ability to do that, more on which below.

So the question “who benefits?” always has an answer, which often proves nothing. And if there is no obvious causal chain from the beneficiary to the event, then that just proves the shadowiness and corruption of the whole thing.

Second, we can ask: in the real world, does money give you influence over the state? To some extent, yes. Some lobbying efforts succeed. America is one of the few countries in the world where it’s legal to advertise prescription drugs to the public, for example. But corporations don’t have veto power over the state. If e.g. Pfizer spends billions on a clinical trial, and some guy at the FDA says no, and wipes that investment, who wins? The FDA wins. Pfizer can’t do shit.

There’s also an invisible graveyard problem, where the success of lobbying is very salient, because it’s often shockingly offensive. But there are many contrary cases that are less salient because, well, if you ban something, it doesn’t happen. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not approve a single nuclear reactor from its creation in 1975 until Vogtle 3+4. What has Westinghouse done about that? Nothing successful, apparently. It’s not like they’re getting paid to not build reactors.

Big Tech has a lot of smart people and a lot of money. Do tech billionaires run California like a private fiefdom? Reader, they don’t even run San Francisco. The best they can do is maybe help a slightly more moderate Democrat get elected as mayor.

Maybe it helps to try the first-person. Say you are a billionaire, and you want to make some kind of political change. In a democratic society that means paying people to:

Perform the intellectual labour of getting policies in the hands of the people who can enact them.
Advocate for those policies.

That is, you start or fund a think tank that writes policy proposals, or a media organization that advocates your views. But for every person who will do this effectively and faithfully, there are a hundred who will happily take your money and waste it, either out of incompetence or value misalignment. Sifting the effective organizers, wonks, lobbyists, advocates etc. from the chaff can’t be delegated, because then you have an infinite regression: at the very least you need to spend a lot of time and money and opportunity cost to hire one person to delegate the task of staffing an effective organization. A hands-off billionaire will just throw their fortune away. Many do this, and in fact it’s the default form of philanthropy.

In a non-democratic society, you can try to buy political power through bribes, intimidation etc. But the people in power can just expropriate your assets. So you need the power first to protect the wealth.

Finally: government is violence and coercion. Sovereignty over some volume of space is the ability to tax, arrest, imprison etc. the people there and to get away with it, and, ideally but not necessarily, to have that violence recognized as legitimate. Now: can Google carry out a drone strike? Can Amazon field an air force, appoint a judge, levy taxes? Of course not. If a corporation or a billionaire tried to acquire one one-trillionth of the state’s capacity for legitimized violence the state would vaporize them.

Bitcoin Is Gold, Stablecoins Are Silver - by Tomas Pueyo

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 17:25:43 +0000

Several premium or paywalled articles over the last few days:

Have you seen this? There are more transfers in stablecoins than payments in Visa or Mastercard.

Although this sort of graph is becoming widespread, don’t be fooled: These are payments with credit cards compared to transfers for stablecoins, which include many more types of money movement, including buying and selling investments. More on this later. This doesn’t take away from the fact that stablecoin transfers are becoming massive.

Stablecoins, cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a stable value, typically by being pegged to a traditional currency, are worth over $300B.

Source

Mostly through Tether and USDC:

Source: Allium, via a16z

Stablecoin transfers are growing much faster than crypto trading:

Note the different axes. Source.

Stablecoins are quickly becoming the 2^nd big crypto use case after Bitcoin. Why? How big is it going to get? What’s the difference between them and Bitcoin? What’s the future of cryptocurrencies? Since the best way to predict the future is to understand the past, let’s do that with currencies to learn how we got here.

Shells, Copper, Bronze, Gold, Silver, Paper

You can understand why Bitcoin has been successful when you consider the history of currencies, as we did in How Silver Made Chinese Empires and How Ancient Metals Started Civilization. Good currencies need to be:

Scarce: eg, the market can be flooded by shells
Stable: Its value can’t be changing all the time
Divisible: for big or small transactions
Durable: eg, shells or bad quality paper can break
Portable: eg, copper was so cheap that you needed to carry a lot of it to make any payment
Fungible: eg, two shells are unlike each other
Acceptable: other people must recognize it as a valid currency

Some things work better than others as currency:

These factors explain why Bitcoin is so valuable now, worth $1.7 trillion dollars, nearly as much as silver.

Indeed, Bitcoin is:

Available: You can easily get Bitcoin wherever you are
Scarce: There will only ever be 21 million BTC
Divisible: One BTC can be divided into one hundred million pieces (0.00000001 BTC, about 0.08 cents today)
Durable: It’s going to be there as long as we see value in it, as BTC is the result of computation
Portable: You can send it anywhere with a few clicks at very little cost
Fungible: One BTC is exactly the same as another
Acceptable: Everybody that is close to crypto knows BTC and accepts it as payment. This is the core reason why BTC is one of the biggest cryptocurrencies and why it will remain so for a long time: As the first one, and one that’s well built, everyone recognizes it as the most important, and that makes it so.

I skipped one of the properties of a good currency. Did you notice which one?

Stability.

The price of BTC is volatile.

This makes it like gold, for the same reasons.

The Dullness of Gold

This is the value of gold over time:

The price was reasonably stable between 1600 and 1800; we’ll see why in a moment. Source.

Notice this is a logarithmic graph, so gold price swings are even wilder than this. Why?

Gold is very scarce, so in moments of scarcity, people hoarded it. They squirreled it away in chests, jewelry, furniture… Which is a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more people think it’s scarce, the more they hoard it, and the scarcer it becomes.

Scarcity and stability are connected: the scarcer a currency is, the less stable it will be.

Bitcoin has the exact same problem, for the exact same reason. It has the ultimate scarcity (only 21M BTC will ever be minted), so when people think its value is high, they will hoard it, pushing its price up, and when they think its value is shrinking, they will dump it. This is why BTC prices swing so much.1

This has catastrophic consequences for an economy whose currency is gold: When the economy expands, people need more gold, so it becomes more scarce, so its price increases, people start hoarding it, and the lack of currency makes the economy cool off. In other words, a lot of the economy’s productivity increases simply translate into higher gold prices.

Uncharted Territories is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Shiny Silver

This is what made silver so valuable. In the 1400s, after the Black Death in Europe, the economy boomed. By the 1450s, this2 had led to a dramatic shortage of silver, which spurred technology improvements in Central Europe, which helped them discover new silver mines. A few decades later, the Spanish discovered the American ones, flooding the world with silver.3

Since silver is more abundant than gold, it’s less scarce, which made it more stable as a currency.

The patio process for extracting silver from ore, in Spanish America

And stability is key for a currency, because that conserves the value of the signal of prices. We all know how bad inflation is for the economy. Deflation is, too: If a currency gains in value over time, people will reduce their consumption, dragging the economy into a recession.4

The global economy boomed, from Spain to Europe and even China. That’s why silver coins became legal tender around the world:

Mexican silver dollar. Notice the Chinese chop marks. They were added each time a merchant confirmed the validity of the coin. Converting silver into coins made it fungible (two coins are the same). Source.

Hence stablecoins. Get it?

The Stability of Stablecoins

Stablecoins, like most cryptocurrencies, inherit the same benefits as a Bitcoin: availability, divisibility, durability… The main difference is the scarcity vs stability tradeoff.

Since scarcity is what makes Bitcoin like gold—too valuable, which makes its value unstable—then the next generation of successful cryptocurrencies was always going to be the one to solve this problem: Eliminate scarcity, and instead target stability.

That’s how a stablecoin works. A company like Tether tells you: “Give me one dollar, I’ll give you a digital dollar (which I’ll call USDT for United States Dollar – Tether). You can move it around as you please, and when you want, I’ll give you that dollar back.”

Each time a customer asks for one USDT, Tether just mints it, so the stability of the currency is completely tethered to its underlying currency (in this case, USD). How does Tether guarantee that one USDT is always worth one USD? Because5 it uses your dollar to buy a US Treasury security, and it makes money out of the yield on that security (or “treasury”) while you keep that USDT unredeemed. About 3/4 of Tether’s dollars are in US treasuries or equivalent assets.6

This is why the company is one of the most profitable: With interest rates around 4%, its over $200B in assets generate $10B in profits in 2025. With just 200 employees, that’s around $50M of profit per employee—10x more than NVIDIA!

A global adoption of USD stablecoins might have some pretty serious macroeconomic consequences.

A Radical Impact on the Global Economy

With people worldwide buying USD, the entire world economy might dollarize. With this ubiquity, more businesses might put their prices on USD stablecoins and accept them as currency, thereby furthering the cycle.

Lower US Inflation

This would be valuable for the US because it can keep printing dollars while inflation stays low, since it’s distributed over many more dollars around the world.

This is so useful that the US is embracing USD stablecoins, and approved the GENIUS Act as a result. Imagine: The US can print treasuries at will, and the rest of the world gobbles them up! More debt without the consequences of higher required interest rates.

Europe and China see this coming, and they’ll try to fight it with their own stablecoins. The competition will be good for customers—except when it prevents citizens from buying the competing stablecoins.

Weaker Financial Weapons

But of course, the more transactions run on stablecoins, the less they run on the US-led SWIFT system, undermining its influence on global transactions. The US would have fewer financial weapons against its enemies, but a more powerful monetary policy.

All this is not a trivial side-effect. Eliminating the power of a central node is arguably the core purpose of cryptocurrencies.

Undermine Local Currency Policy

Along the same lines, most countries wouldn’t be able to influence the economy as much through monetary policy, since many more of their citizens’ and firms’ assets would be in another currency.

Fewer Financial Crises

From here, via Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution, heavily edited:

Firms and financial institutions in developing countries borrow heavily in USD while their revenues and assets are in local currency. When the US increases its interest rates, the dollar appreciates, the economy slows down, and asset prices shrink. These firms suddenly find themselves squeezed by rising dollar debts and falling asset values. This shock forces cutbacks and retrenchment. This is one of the key channels through which US monetary policy spills over globally.
But if households and firms begin holding dollar assets via stablecoins, now both sides of their balance sheet will be in dollars. A stronger dollar no longer only increases liabilities; it also raises the value of their dollar assets, helping to offset the shock. In effect, stablecoins can act as a decentralized balance sheet stabilizer, muting one of the very mechanisms that drives global financial volatility.

So these are some of the global consequences that stablecoins could have in the global economy, but first we need to get there, and that depends on individuals adopting stablecoins - and from what we can see, there’s demand. Why are so many people interested in that? Why not simply use US dollars?

The Advantages of Stablecoins over USD

We talked about the big needs of currencies in history before, but that doesn’t mean we’re done. There are still many pain points with payments today that new payment and currency systems can solve.

1. Access USD Where It’s Hard To

If you’re in Venezuela, Turkey, Iran, or Syria right now, you’re losing 15–80% of your currency value every year you hold it. If your money is in the bank, you’re watching it evaporate. It would be better to hold USD, which lose their value much more slowly.

But as a foreigner, you can’t easily access USD. You can’t get a US bank account, your local banks might not offer the service, or your government might simply ban it. Buying USD bills on the streets is at a deep discount, you need a place to store them, and people might steal them from you.

But if you can log into your crypto account and with a few clicks buy a USDT with your own currency,7 you will not lose your life savings just because you happen to live in an inflation country. You’ll have access to this money anywhere in the world.

2. Fast International Payments

“Oh I’m sorry, it’s 5:01pm on a Friday. You’ll have to wait 88h for us to process your payment—Monday is a bank holiday.”

And then on top of that, you need 1–5 business days to get your money! Are we in the Middle Ages or what? Are we carrying silver ingots by horse-pulled cart? We’re not, but traditional payment systems like SWIFT can still take day transfer your money.

3. Working Capital

During that time, the money is neither in the sender’s account nor in the receiver’s, so both need to cover that money during that time. This working capital can add up to a lot, and some companies need huge, expensive loans in the interim. An immediate settlement—which stablecoins can do—bypasses that problem.

4. Cheap Fees & Commissions

Traditional payments are expensive, too. An international wire transfer frequently costs $20–$30, and remittances cost on average over 6% of the amount! If you send home $1,000, the intermediary can shave $100 off your meager income.

Those are just fees. What about exchange commissions? Not great to lose 1-3% of the money in every transaction you make. That’s some medieval financier kind of stuff.

5. Convenient International Payouts

Imagine a company that has thousands of employees in dozens of countries around the world. How do you manage all the currencies, national banking systems, bank accounts…?

6. Programmability

A dollar is dumb. It just sits there waiting for you to do things with it. Cryptocurrencies are not.

Imagine a homeowner paying a plumber €500 to replace a water heater. The homeowner sends the money into a digital escrow. The contract releases €250 when the plumber arrives,8

then releases the rest when the homeowner confirms the heater works. If they disagree, the money stays locked until a named mediator decides what happens.

Cryptocurrencies can support smart contracts that settle and move money automatically. For example, they can release funds when certain conditions are met—subject to software, oracle, and governance risks. Trading, collateral, lending, prediction markets, decentralized exchanges, tokenization… These are all examples of things we can do with intelligent money that are hard to do with dumb money.

Takeaways

As you can see, while Bitcoin is a way to store value like gold was (and is), stablecoins are optimized specifically as currencies for payments, the way silver was in the past. All these new stablecoin-related currencies and payment processors are focusing on solving the pain points of our current ones: high costs, slow settlement, accessibility, inconvenience, and stupidity.

This also tells you how we should think about the future of stablecoins in particular, and cryptocurrencies in general: What pain points do we still suffer from existing currencies and payment systems?

That’s what we’re going to look at in the next article.

Gold had another disadvantage as a currency that BTC doesn’t share: When it was a currency, it was so scarce that it was extremely valuable. This made it great for big purchases (think chests of gold paid between governments in the movies), but bad for small ones. We can say it was not divisible enough.

And some other reasons, like the exhaustion of older silver mines and the loss of silver over time.

You can see the result of that in the price of gold in the 1500s. Once silver was everywhere, the value of gold as a currency plummeted, so its value went down accordingly.

Also, of course, if a silver coin has the exact same value for centuries, you can easily notice when the price of bread goes up, and then plant more wheat, store more grain, or shift your consumption to another staple. If the price of one smith’s knife goes up faster than others’, you know to change your provider.

At some point there was a question on whether Tether was indeed doing this. Theoretically, it could take your dollar and do whatever it wants with it. It would not be the first time this happened in crypto.

The remainder includes gold, secured loans, bitcoin, shares, corporate bonds and other investments. I find that nuts TBH.

USDT and USDC are banned in countries like Syria or Iran, but people there can use VPNs and other ways to get money out of their country and into such instruments.

It can be verified by a tamper-proof geolocation timestamp that proves the plumber was there when he said he’d be there.

Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them. - by The Hack

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 01:14:01 +0000

Seems like every website wants us to stop using passwords. There is a replacement we are being asked to use instead called passkeys. This should be a tad concerning if passwords are familiar to you and you don’t fully understand these nebulous passkeys.

Websites say that passkeys are more secure or more convenient or something similarly beneficial. While it is true that passkeys can be far more secure than passwords, and may indeed be more convenient, that’s not the whole story. Passkeys are not designed to prioritize your interests. Like the Trojan Horse, passkeys are legitimately elegant on the surface, but there is something troubling inside.

What’s important to know is that unlike with any other kind of login credential, you do not have ultimate control over your passkeys. With passwords, you can choose where to write them down; with authenticator apps, you can decide for yourself which ones to use (they’re pretty interchangeable); and with physical security keys you can hand them to your colleague if you really trust them. But with passkeys come a hidden dial that lets the websites you use them on gradually remove your ability to do as you please with them.

I will explain how that is possible further down, but let’s first take a look at who wants you to be using passkeys.

Passkeys are the invention of the FIDO Alliance,1 which is a consortium of a number of different competing interests – Big Tech, little tech, national governments, intelligence agencies, banks, various public institutions, and even a handful of nonprofits like Mozilla – who are all able to agree that passkeys are a good and righteous cause.

The members of the FIDO Alliance all have their own interests. Big Tech wants to bring little inconveniences into our life so they can sell us more ads. Intelligence agencies want to track everyone in the world. Banks want to be free of indemnity. Little tech wants cheap solutions to reduce liability. Mozilla wants to avoid having to die on any particular hill.2 I make no particular claim that any of these are bad motivations. But it is notable that no consumer advocacy groups are members of the FIDO Alliance. (This stands in contrast to, for example, the World Wide Web Consortium, the organization that decides the standards used on the web. Alongside the usual corporate members it has not only public interest groups but also universities and Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web in 1989. Honestly, if Gandalf himself were to join the W3C he would not be out of place.) Regarding the FIDO Alliance, nobody is there to make a strong case for the user’s own interests.

The reason presented to the public for why everyone needs to use passkeys now is that passwords are insecure. On this point I agree. Consider that the servers behind the billion-dollar American IT company SolarWinds were famously found to be using solarwinds123. Hawaii’s Emergency Management Agency (the same one that sent out that false missile alert) accidentally revealed a password due to a sticky note on someone’s desk in the background of a photograph. If your security relies on a password, you will always be anxious that somebody, somewhere, has somehow figured out what it is and already has access to your bank account.

On the other hand: what passwords have going for them is that they’re very intuitive, everyone knows how they work, people have been using them since time immemorial, and you can choose where you store them and who you share them with. Keep this in mind.

(Also keep this in mind: Netflix does not want you to share your passwords.)

But there already exist superior security mechanisms to passwords, to which the FIDO Alliance seems to be giving the cold shoulder: first there was Two-Factor Authentication (in particular: receiving a text message or email with a one-time code), and later came the more robust system of Time-Based One-Time Passwords (TOTP) – in common parlance, “authenticator apps.”

What’s neat about TOTP is that it doesn’t rely on text messages or email or even the internet at all. Your authenticator software simply generates a random-looking number every 30 seconds based on the current time (and a random starting number called a “seed” or a “key” that is unique to you), and this is all that a website needs to verify you’re you. The term authenticator app is misleading, not in the least because websites tend to heavily imply you need to download a specific app, such as Google Authenticator. In reality, there is an open standard for TOTP (called RFC 6238); that is to say, the formula used to generate these random-looking numbers is public knowledge, so you don’t need to use any one specific piece of software. In almost all cases you don’t need to use Google Authenticator just because the website suggests it. You don’t even need to use a smartphone; you can use your laptop or even a Game Boy3 from the 90s for this purpose. You can use any software and hardware you like, so long as it can tell time decently and can handle a few lines of code. You can even write the software yourself in Python if you want, or if you feel like burning a moticum of jet fuel you can get an LLM to write it for you.

Compared to using just passwords, TOTP is a great solution already. If you accidentally leak your TOTP in a photograph of your desk, you’re only at risk for a couple of minutes until the code expires. TOTP is certainly less intuitive than passwords, but at least like passwords you can still choose how you want to store them. You can choose where you want them to live and what software you want to use to generate the codes. And you can’t easily shoot yourself in the foot with an easy-to-guess TOTP code like you can with a password123; as they are nothing more than random-looking numbers, all TOTP codes are equally hard to guess. Oh, what’s more, you can send a code to your friend to let them log into your Netflix account temporarily while you’re away on business. You can even share your TOTP seed itself if you really want to so that your friends can generate your TOTP codes themselves and then they can let their friends log into your Netflix account. You might get some strange looks if you write all your TOTP seeds down on a piece of paper like you do with your passwords, but at the end of the day this data is yours to handle how you like. Aren’t open standards wonderful?

(Netflix does not want you to share your TOTP keys either.)

So what makes passkeys so different? Well, they look very similar to TOTP on the surface. Both have an open standard (RFC 6238 for TOTP, WebAuthn for passkeys), so surely passkeys must have all these same nice properties as TOTP, right? At first glance it would seem so. Indeed, just now I generated a passkey using free and open source software, and then I emailed it to a friend, and now we can both access the same website using that passkey. At no point did I have to ask anyone for permission, not the website, not the FIDO Alliance; not even my friend, who kindly let me monopolize her time without objection. What’s more, I don’t have to type any numbers by hand to use a passkey; I don’t have to remember any magic words; passkeys just work. Judging from that alone, a passkey is indeed convenient. And it sure seems like I can do whatever I want with my passkeys.

(But Netflix does not want you to share your passkeys.)

So where’s the catch?

The catch is that there is something else that is also called a “passkey” and it’s nothing like the nice kind that I just described.

In fact there are many different things called “passkeys” and the FIDO Alliance has intentionally named all of them the same thing. I believe this was done in order to deliberately confuse users and encourage them not to look too closely at the fine text. Indeed, in the technical documentation, the WebAuthn standard that defines passkeys barely uses the term passkey at all. Instead there are discoverable credentials and undiscoverable credentials; there are hardware-backed credentials, and software-backed credentials; there are attested and unattested credentials, and more and more.

There are so many optional components to what a passkey can be that the specs read less like a standard and more like a parts catalogue. So, let’s go over exactly what other things are in the catalogue alongside the nice and perhaps-almost-intuitive kind of passkey I described earlier. I will present them all in the best light I can manage so that you can understand why some people genuinely recommend passkeys as a good security solution, but by the end of the list I hope you will be able to see the problem I see.

Copyable vs Non-Copyable passkeys

Both kinds exist.

When you generate a passkey, it can be made to be non-copyable. The reason you might want this as a user is to be sure that so long as you have possession of your passkey – so long as your iPhone is in your pocket, say – nobody else can access your account. On the other hand, passkeys can be made to be copyable instead, and you might want this ability in order to share one key between your devices.

If you make a passkey, make sure you know which of these two kinds you’re making! If you think your passkey is one of these and it’s actually the other, you will end up having a bad time someday – either when you realize you can’t rescue your only passkey off your dying laptop, or when somebody else turns out to have a copy of your passkey and you didn’t know that was possible.

Transferable vs Non-Transferable passkeys

Both kinds exist.

Surprisingly, even if a Passkey is non-copyable, it can still be transferable. This may violate your intuition about how data is supposed to work. Although it’s how physical objects have always worked, we don’t often encounter situations in the digital world where sending something to your friend causes it to disappear from your own device.

You might want your passkey to be non-transferable in order to be completely sure that physical possession of one specific device is absolutely required to access your account. On the other hand, you might want your non-copyable passkey to be transferable in order for it to be able to move with you when you replace your smartphone for next year’s model. (Or maybe you just want to be able to play some kind of avant-garde digital relay race among your friends as an artistic statement.)

Hardware-Backed vs Software-Backed passkeys

Both kinds exist.

Even if you’re not digitally savvy, you probably know what files and folders are, at least if you have a desktop computer. Admittedly, smartphones are designed to muddy the waters regarding where exactly that file you downloaded is and if folders are even a copacetic concept. (Yes, smartphones do use files and folders. They just don’t typically come with a file browser like your desktop does.)

So all these passkeys we’ve talked about so far are just files right? Well… not really. That is, they can be. Or they might not be. As with all these other qualities a passkey can optionally have, passkeys can optionally not be files at all. Indeed, since files are copyable and transferable and all sorts of other intuitive things, if passkeys had to be files, it would not be clear how anyone could make a non-copyable passkey.

Enter hardware-backed passkeys. These make use of a secure chip that comes with all modern devices which can store data that cannot be exfiltrated (meaning the data cannot leave the safety of the secure chip). There are different kinds of chips with different names: your laptop has a Trusted Platform Module and an iPhone has a “Secure Enclave” and so on. You will not find this area of your device in your file browser anywhere.4 It is a separate component entirely. Because of their cryptographic use case (and perhaps their mystique), people have taken to calling these chips “cryptoprocessors.”

The consensus seems to be that cryptoprocessors are indeed very secure. You might wonder if someone with the know-how couldn’t just surgically open the chip with the right tools and extract the data off that way. That’s theoretically possible; however, such chips employ all kinds of chemical and electronic tamper-detection measures and will self-destruct if you try to do this.5 So unless you have the resources of a nation-state at your disposal, you can basically take as a given that (hypothetical manufacturer backdoors notwithstanding) nobody can remove the secret data from your cryptoprocessor; not Netflix, not your operating system, not even you.

You might prefer to use a software-backed key because you understand how files work and you already have a solution that works for you for storing your private data. You might want to use a hardware-backed key to get the extra security afforded by a nigh-impenetrable cryptoprocessor.

User-Present vs Non-User-Present passkeys

Both kinds exist.6

Some passkeys require somebody to press a button or click a prompt to confirm authentication. Others can be used without anyone in the loop at all.

You might want the former kind because you yourself are a human. You might want the latter kind in case you want to authorize a piece of software to act on your behalf.

User-Verified vs Non-User-Verified passkeys

Both kinds exist.

Okay so maybe a user was present, but how do we know the right user was present? Passkeys can optionally require biometrics (e.g. fingerprint sensors or retina scanners) or the use of PINs or passwords of their own in order to be extra sure that only one specific intended human being can use them.

You might want a user-verified passkey in order to be safe even in the situation a thief pilfers your device. You might want a non-user-verified passkey because you expect to lend your tablet to another family member so they can read your ebooks on Amazon and listen to music on your Spotify account and watch your movies on Disney+.

Attested vs Non-Attested passkeys

This is where things take a left turn.

I’ve presented all these properties so far as being up to you to decide. That may indeed be how it is on most websites – for now, at least. After all, what cause does Twitter have to tell me exactly which security measures out of the smorgasbord available I should opt into for my passkeys? But you should know that the FIDO Alliance has defined this standard such that your passkey software is required to tell the service you’re accessing which of these features are enabled. They’re called authenticator data flags in the WebAuthn standard.7

This means Twitter (formally X) can say to you, “sorry, we only accept the User-Present User-Verified Non-Copyable Hardware-Backed varieties of passkey here. But hey! You can still choose between Transferable and Non-Transferable passkeys!” Actually, I’m being optimistic – I suspect they are unlikely to phrase it in such clear terms. They will likely just say “unfortunately your passkey isn’t secure enough; download our app.”

But it’s an open standard, isn’t it? And maybe you have a friend experienced in writing Python code. Can’t you just make your own passkey software which just does the nice file-based kind of passkeys with none of those extra security features, and then have it tell the website anyway that it’s a User-Present User-Verified Non-Copyable Hardware-Backed passkey? Can’t you just lie?

Oh yes absolutely you can. Your passkey software can lie about whatever passkey features you like. Unless we’re talking about an Attested User-Present User-Verified Non-Copyable Hardware-Backed passkey. In which case, no. That can’t be faked.

Attested passkeys8 are the last but most important type of passkeys you need to know about. These types of keys use what’s known as remote attestation to cryptographically verify – using the aforementioned tamper-proof cryptoprocessor that lives in all your modern devices – that you are using one of the several approved passkey managers, and not using a custom one that you vibecoded yourself and which can lie.

This is the feature that means you no longer get to make the calls about your passkeys. Fortunately, attested passkeys are not yet required on most websites. But the FIDO Alliance standard makes attestation a part of the passkey ecosystem, whether you want it or not. And even if the website doesn’t require attestation now, simply by using passkeys you indicate to the website that your setup supports the FIDO Alliance’s passkey standard and that you as a user are capable of using passkeys.9 This means that once Twitter (formally X) is satisfied that the overwhelming majority of its users would be unaffected, they can flip the switch – perhaps not all at once, perhaps just for ten thousand users at a time so as not to cause a fuss – and start rejecting non-attested passkeys.

Critically, remote attestation requires the co-operation of your cryptoprocessor, your passkey manager software, your device’s operating system, and your device’s firmware to all pass the remote attestation check. After all, your phone’s operating system has total access to all the 0s and 1s in every app that’s ever run, so it’s not enough for Twitter (formally X) to trust your passkey manager if it can’t even trust your phone’s underlying operating system. If any single one of those things were to fail – say, because your phone stopped receiving security updates so you installed a custom operating system like LineageOS to keep yourself safe without having to buy a new device – then Twitter (formally X) will be able to notice and prevent you from logging in.

I’d like to be clear that there are legitimate uses of remote attestation. By using a website that requires attested passkeys you can be sure you stay safe from accidentally installing a scammer’s fake passkey application that steals your data – the website will reject such a passkey. You might want an attested Passkey even if the website doesn’t require it, since you can use attestation to verify that your software has not been tampered with by a hacker while you weren’t looking. (Of course, attestation may be overkill for this; even if your device were hacked, the hardware-backing feature described above makes it impossible for the passkey to be exfiltrated from your device. Though admittedly that guarantee is less reassuring once you realize that even if the key stays firmly on your device a hacker could still use it if they have control of your phone otherwise. At the very least you can always power off the device to temporarily deny hackers access to your Non-Attested Hardware-Backed Non-Copyable Non-Transferable passkeys.)10

As for reasons to not want attestation: you might want to be able to use software that Twitter (formally X) doesn’t specifically approve of, such as Linux. Or a phone with a refurbished operating system. (Or if you’re nefarious you might want to be able to lie to Netflix and tell them that of course you and your three friends are absolutely all the same person using the same device.)

(But with attestation, Netflix can finally prevent you from sharing your passkeys.)

It’s not just about Netflix or Twitter (X)

There is ample reason for you to be hesitant before you set up a passkey. If you’ve used only websites that require one certain kind of passkey then you might not notice when a website has you set up a different kind of passkey. Don’t forget that unlike passwords and SMS codes and TOTP, passkeys are designed to function in the background without you ever seeing the details. They’ll offer you at most a “confirm” prompt. (That’s the convenience aspect.) My expectation is that the industry will start off with very few constraints on your passkeys, and gradually add more and more, not all at the same time, but staggered on different sites, and then in a few years people will forget that they were ever offered a choice in which security measures they want to enable on their passkeys (if they even knew there were different kinds of passkeys at all).

So far, almost nobody has even heard of remote attestation. The vast majority of people use one of the four major operating systems (Windows, Android, macOS, and iOS) and not alternative operating systems like Linux, LineageOS, postmarketOS, or GrapheneOS. The overwhelming majority of people don’t replace the operating system on their phone when it stops receiving updates; instead they just buy a new phone. So almost nobody will ever encounter a situation where their device fails a remote attestation check.

Are attested passkeys so bad, though? After all, we really aren’t meant be sharing Netflix accounts to begin with.

Take another look at the list of members in the FIDO Alliance, and put on your tinfoil hat. Why do intelligence agencies care if I am sharing my Netflix account? Heck, why does Microsoft care if I am sharing my Netflix account?

For intelligence agencies, and for corporations like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon – giving you convenience and security is likely not their primary goal. I think they have an entirely ulterior motive. They can use passkeys to prevent you from running unapproved software.

Remote attestation can allow them to verify that your device is not capable of, say, sending and receiving encrypted messages, or running a competitor’s app, or using social media without verifying your ID. They don’t want you to be able to turn off the mandatory built-in AI image scanner on your phone that scans everything your phone sees for nudity. (Yes, I’m serious.)

But I rather like deciding for myself what software I approve of and what software I don’t. Something I value about my web browser is that I can install extensions to modify aspects of websites that bother me. I can say no to auto-playing videos on news websites; I can decide which advertisements are too intrusive for me to let through; I can filter out irrelevant search results and disable AI summaries; I can block the “recommended video” feature on YouTube which always seems to promote outrage and division (or as Big Tech calls it, “engagement”). And if a website ends up monopolizing my time anyway, I have an extension that locks them down after a certain duration. These extensions give me control over how the internet affects me, even if Big Tech would much rather make those decisions for me. But Google owns Google Chrome, which is the world’s most popular web browser, and they can remove support for these useful extensions (as they did earlier this year with uBlock Origin11); and with remote attestation they can prevent me from using any other browser that doesn’t follow suit.

Remember those authenticator data flags I mentioned? There used to be only 4 of them. Earlier revisions of the FIDO Alliance’s security standard (called “WebAuthn Level 1” and “WebAuthn Level 2”) had fewer catalog options to choose from. I’m sweeping some details12 under the rug here for brevity, but since you are given four distinct binary choices, you could call that 16 different kinds of passkey. In 2022 the FIDO Alliance added some more (“WebAuthn Level 3”), so that websites could know whether or not your credentials are copyable, or if backups of your credentials might exist somewhere. There are still two flags left “reserved for future use.” What might our passkeys require of us in the future?

I’m not one to argue about slippery slopes, so I won’t claim that the campaigns to protect children online today will tomorrow turn into laws designed to make it easy to identify political dissidents. But I will say that the widespread adoption of the passkey technology being advertised to you as convenient and secure is capable of permitting such laws to be easily enforced.

So if you care about your privacy and the privacy of others, if you believe people should be free to choose what software runs on their devices, that people should be allowed to learn how to write their own software and run it on their own devices, and that friends should be able to privately talk politics online without government interference, then I would ask you to reject these dozens of different security mechanisms which are all confusingly branded as the same “passkeys.” Wait for Big Tech to propose something just as convenient and secure but more clearly defined and with fewer strings attached. In the meantime if you want better security than a password, your Game Boy can provide you with TOTP.13

Thanks for reading Non-Functional! Subscribe for free to receive more updates about digital sovereignty, privacy, and market capture on the world wide web.

No relation to the Canadian mobile network of the same name.

I jest, but Mozilla has a reputation for putting up a fight and then eventually surrendering on issues like these. For instance, they eventually implemented Google’s proprietary Widevine DRM system into the otherwise open-source Firefox browser, as rejecting it might have resulted in users being unable to watch Netflix.

Yes, someone really made TOTP for Game Boy. I cannot in good conscience actually recommend using this, but it will make you popular at parties. (At my parties in any case.)

In practice a hardware-backed key may have a file component too, but it will be encoded in such a way that it’s cryptographically useless without the cryptoprocessor it is made for.

Devices for consumers will generally just scramble themselves electronically as their anti-tamper mechanism, but more imaginative booby-traps are rumoured to exist. XEROX once made a chip that could shatter into tiny shards as a defence measure.

Okay so this one’s a bit of a stretch. In practice I don’t know of any websites that accept passkeys when the user isn’t listed as present. I tried a non-user-present passkey on this demo site (which is meant to be as permissive as possible) and even it rejected me. (Dang.) So I expect most passkey managers don’t even make it possible to use passkeys like this. Nonetheless, the FIDO Alliance’s standard is explicitly defined in such a way that it’s possible for a passkey to indicate that the user is not present. Perhaps this is intended just to support potential future use cases?

The authenticator data flags don’t all line up exactly with the features I presented above, but it’s close enough for the purposes of this blog post. For example, authenticator data flag UP is User-Present, authenticator data flag UV is User-Verified, and authenticator data flag BE is Copyability (“Backup-Eligible”).

(Also, while some of these flags are fixed over the life of the passkey (like BE), for others the passkey manager is allowed to tell the same website different things at different times (like UV) – but the website or your passkey manager can still effectively enforce that a certain passkey is always User-Verified.)

Authenticator data flag AT exists and… is actually for a completely unrelated thing also called “attestation.” (I incorrectly said that remote attestation is indicated by data flag AT in the first version of this footnote. Actually it’s in another section of data entirely. Yes I agree that this was an ironic mistake to make in the article where I caution against getting confused about multiple security concepts sharing the same name.)

Technical details: In an early version of this article I incorrectly implied that there was a direct way for platforms to check what users would be affected in advance of requiring remote attestation. To my knowledge, the WebAuthn standard does not provide any straightforward method allow websites to query whether a particular user’s passkey situation supports remote attestation, at least not without directly asking the user to create a remotely-attested passkey. But in practice, one’s operating system and browser are readily visible to websites, and because the vast majority of users will be on one of a few common setups, the site can make a very good guess about what portion of its users would be excluded by a remote attestation requirement.

One use case is particularly intriguing to me. In principle, remote attestation can also be run in reverse, to verify that the server you connect to is not doing anything you don’t want it to be doing (such as stealing your credit card number, or keeping backups of the posts you delete). Sadly, to my knowledge, no major platform has ever implemented “reverse” remote attestation this way.

uBlock Origin (which remains available on Firefox) is no small fish either. This widely-loved extension boasted about 40 million users before its untimely fall from the Chrome Web Store’s graces, making it one of the most popular extensions available there. Fortunately its successor, uBlock Origin Lite, while somewhat less capable than the original, has already managed to recover about half those users. Though I must wonder why those users didn’t simply switch to another browser at that point, given it’s quite straightforward to do so. (Or perhaps half of them did?)

As I understand it, “User-Verified” requires “User Present” to be set, so that would imply 12 distinct flavours. But in practice, security measures outside of the specific flags mentioned (such as requiring biometrics specifically, or non-transferability) are queryable and enforceable via remote attestation, so that actually means there are arbitrarily many passkey restrictions possible already with WebAuthn.

Addendum: I feel I have made a compelling case for passkeys in this article. And I haven’t even pointed out one of their best security features: they are (in most use cases) domain-bound, meaning they are resistant to what are called Man-In-The-Middle attacks. Passkeys have so many incredible properties that I really want to use and recommend them; it’s very unfortunate that the FIDO Alliance has ruined a good thing by slipping in remote attestation and by making no attempt to ensure the difference between these various kinds of passkeys remains evident to the user.

Fortunately, if you want the level of high security passkeys can give you without the strings attached, there is actually an even more secure solution: security keys, such as a YubiKey. These are basically just physical passkeys that you can carry around with you and use alongside your other devices. They are also part of the FIDO Alliance’s WebAuthn standard, but because they are entirely self-contained their remote attestation requirements don’t have to spill out and lock down your whole operating system.

'AI' is Not a Tool

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 07:24:12 +0000

(I keep delivering this as a quip, here's a bit more)

First order of business - is 'tool' going to have an interesting, distinguishing and thus illuminative meaning or be a mere platitudinous stand-in for "anything useful"?

We'll save tool as "anyone/thing that can be exploited" for the AI titans, for whom VCs, politicians, wannabe-titan-CEOs, software devs, rural towns etc are all 'tools'. The pockets on the front of my shirts are useful (I need to keep my reading glasses handy), but they are not tools. Similarly, fast food drive-thru windows are useful, but are not tools (more later).

Some definitions of 'tool':

a device or implement, especially one held in the hand, used to carry out a particular function
an instrument (such as a hammer or saw) used or worked by hand : an instrument used by a handicraftsperson or laborer in their work

What I like best - A tool is something you wield.

wield - to use (as a tool or instrument) especially with full command or power : handle, manipulate, control

Especially useful in that are:

Tools are implements with which you do something, they do not do things for you. Tool use builds, rewards, and often requires, expertise and skill. The continuous application of technique and energy, and sensory feedback, are essential to the buildup of expertise (from experiri - "try").

Good tools have many properties LLMs lack - they are predictable, reliable, deterministic, of bounded function, hopefully simple etc.

What you learn while wielding a tool is something about the world, the task, the physics, logic etc of what you are trying to do or the situation you are trying to overcome. And often, something about yourself.

As a lifelong tool builder and user, I know what tools are. LLMs are not tools.

Control, sensory feedback, intention, intimacy, continuous direction, expertise etc are all missing from LLM use. LLMs are not wielded. LLMs are automation.

automation - (of a device or process) working by itself with little or no direct human control.

A drive-thru is not a tool for cooking, it is automation for avoiding cooking. LLMs are not tools with which you write code - they are automation with which you avoid writing code, to which you abdicate writing code.

You don't direct the action of an LLM - you make requests and it acts on its own, without your energy or continuous direction. This request/automation cycle is not wielding, it's not control, it's not continuous, it's without feedback.

What you are doing while using automation, instead of learning real-world truths, is attempting to divine the details du jour of some automaton. And striving to game them - e.g. ordering a custom burger (no onions) in order to get a freshly made one. Or filling voodoo.md with just the right incantations. You are only a software update from everything you've 'learned' being rendered obsolete by the latest algorithm. (A soggy cold burger from which the onions have been removed) You have traded working with the world to working for a capricious robot.

It is a mistake to be haphazard about "tools" being equivalent to utility, e.g. saying - "the LLM didn't write my paper, I just used it as a tool to read and summarize some research papers". But you didn't wield it to read those papers (as you might a Kindle). It read the papers, not you.

What do you miss by abdicating doing the reading? Pretty much everything. First and foremost, you miss learning how to write from those who can. You miss learning how to formulate an argument. You miss noticing things. You miss loading your background mind with fodder for novel ideas. You miss building trust in some authors and suspicion of others. You miss all the jokes. You miss all of the edges. You miss learning how to think.

Tools don't get "misaligned", they don't "go rogue", they don't "escape containment", "conspire" etc.

LLMs are not tools. I know many people use the phrase "just tools" simply to indicate "they are what you make of them". Except that's not true. Automation has intrinsic properties and differences from tools that you ignore at your peril.

Rich

Lobbying | the singularity is nearer

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:16:17 +0000

the singularity is nearer

Lobbying

Oct 10, 2026

Have you tried to explain lobbying to a non American unfamiliar with the concept?

You see, the corporations and rich people write checks to the politicians. No no, not to them directly, sorry, to their reelection campaigns. Then the politicians listen to what the people who paid them have to say and pass laws based on that.

No but like, the money isn’t for the laws, it’s for like, TV ads and fancy haircuts and private jets and stuff. It’s not a bribe. It’s for their Super PAC. All above board. It’s like, they do what the people with the money want, they get the money, and they continue to have a successful career in politics.

No no, it’s not bribery. Bribery is super illegal in America. It’s like, the politicians need help knowing what laws to pass. So rich people come and help them. And they also give them money. How much money? Oh, that depends how helpful they are.

And if they were really helpful, they can leave the politics and get a nice consulting job with the people who lobbied them after. Then the money goes right in their pocket. No no no that can’t be a bribe you see, that happens after the laws were passed, a bribe would have to be before.

You just don’t get it cause you aren’t American, lobbying is definitely not bribery.

No Man Is an Island

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 22:35:56 +0000

In this post, I argue that individual intellectual activity can only be sustained in an intellectual community of other humans. AI dissolves these communities, which in turn makes private intellectual activity rarer.

The Case of Software

Some years ago, when it became clear that AI would solve software engineering, my thinking was:

In my professional life, I’m happy to move one level up to become a manager of AI agents. I’m literate, I’m a good technical writer, I can describe what I want and let AI agents write the code.
In my own time, I can keep doing the things I care about because I enjoy them intrinsically. This is the “intellectual” side of software engineering: reading technical blog posts and papers, learning new programming languages, designing new programming languages, writing technical essays, writing code for my tiny open source projects.

The second point has not quite worked out. What actually happened? First, the discourse of software engineering became worse. As I wrote earlier:

Claude Code was released a little over a year ago. In that short time, software engineering has been completely transformed. Materially, it might be positive: higher productivity, though at the cost of a messier codebase. Socially, it has been a disaster.

The discourse around software engineering has gotten dumber. It’s like everyone in the industry lost 30 IQ points. People used to talk about compilers, type systems, logic. Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive. There’s only so many times I can hear about “agentic harnesses” before I lose my mind.

Then there’s the loss of human capital formation: there is nothing to learn. Prompting is not a skill, at least, it’s a much shallower skill than software engineering. The instrumental dimension of the work has improved in that people can get more output per unit of effort, but the dimension of work that’s about building up human capital has collapsed. And maybe this is rational. Why learn to code at all? The computers can do that for us. And so the rigorous, systematic thinking you need to practice in order to be a good programmer: all gone. The machines can be rational for us. We can just vibe.

Second, contributing to the commons of software engineering is increasingly pointless. Before AI, you could publish open-source code, write blog posts to share ideas or inspire other people, write expository texts like tutorials, forum posts, textbooks etc. to teach people. After AI, what’s the point?

You write a blog post: who’s going to read it? The next training run will ingest it, marginally improving AI capabilities. Maybe the post was a workaround to some obscure technical problem, so the next time someone encounters that problem, they will ask Claude, who will solve it without crediting you. Maybe you had some insight about how to structure large codebases: who cares? The humans aren’t making those decisions anymore.
You design a revolutionary new programming language: who cares? Maybe Claude cares, for what that’s worth. But humans don’t write or even read the code anymore. The programming language is an implementation detail the humans no longer have to care about.
You write a library, and publish it on GitHub: who cares? The AIs might discover it, and use it, but the operator won’t know you exist or did anything.

It’s not just “you can’t get GitHub stars or traffic to your blog”; rather, there is no sense of a common human project you can contribute to. There’s your own private garden of code, which you can grow infinitely in all directions with the help of AI, but you never have to leave the garden and go to the bazaar to trade with people. Under these conditions, it’s hard to care or do anything.

But does it actually matter? Does it matter if we stop writing blog posts about obscure JavaScript features, and designing new programming languages? Maybe writing code was always drudgery, and now we can move on to higher things, like math—oh, wait.

The Intellectual Life

From observing what happened to software engineering, and what’s currently happening to mathematics, I think we can derive some general insights about intellectual practices in general.

We tend to think of intellectual activity as private and solitary: the philosopher sitting in his armchair, deriving the world ab initio. But intellectual activity has two inputs that can’t be acquired in isolation: a shared body of work to build upon, and motivation. The shared body of work is communal, unless you want to recapitulate the entire tech tree. Motivation we can break down into two components:

Intrinsic motivation: we learn for the sake of learning, we create art from a compulsion we can’t understand, etc.
Extrinsic motivation: David Chapman defines “nobility” as manifesting glory for the service of others, and using our abilities in service of others. We want our work to be useful to others, we want others to benefit from our work, we want to contribute to a shared human project. Fame and the esteem and good will of your peers are the proxies by which we measure our contribution.

We tend to think of intrinsic motivation as the purest kind: endogenous, self-created, unmotivated by material or social gain. But it’s an emotion, and, like all emotions, it’s transient and short-lived. And this is rational: otherwise, we’d all be stuck in life-long unproductive obsessions. So, we need something to fill the gaps between moments of divine inspiration. Extrinsic motivation serves this function.

Private intellectual activity that is sustained, complex, and long-term requires an external intellectual community to provide material and motivation, like fuel and oxidizer. That private activity, in turn, sustains the community: by publishing papers, textbooks, code, etc., you add to the shared body of work for others to build on top of; by citing someone’s paper or contributing to their repository, you give them the recognition and honor that confirms they are doing useful work, which in turn motivates them to keep contributing.

Without community, you don’t get isolated individuals each working on their own things: you get nothing. The inputs to intellectual activity dry up: no one is adding to the shared body of work, and there are no peers to benefit from your own intellectual activity. Without this extrinsic motivation, you get less intellectual activity because, again, intrinsic motivation is fleeting.

After AI

After AI, intellectual contributions become unnecessary or redundant. In the case of software: the AIs write all the code, so what’s the point of writing either code or prose? The audience for those things is now severely diminished. Humans don’t write code anymore, so they won’t read blog posts about how to write code, or tutorials, or try new libraries or programming languages. In the case of mathematics: the AIs can prove theorems, write papers, explain papers, tutor students, and in the near future, they might write entire textbooks better than humans. So what’s the point of writing a paper, or a textbook? It’s superfluous.

If intellectual activity is unnecessary—if there’s no consequence to designing a new programming language or publishing a paper, or if there’s simply no community to contribute to—then it won’t happen. There’s no point.

Now apply this to every other domain of intellectual activity, and you see what the future looks like. There may be individuals building new libraries and programming languages, but no shared culture of software engineering; there may be individual students and practitioners of mathematics, but no living community of mathematicians.

Why We Underrate Intellectual Community

I’ve spoken to people who think AI will have a positive effect on the life of the mind, and their thinking is that right now too many people are doing intellectual activity for instrumental reasons: citations, clout, etc. In this view, the collapse of intellectual communities is good, because it sifts the intrinsically-motivated übermenschen from the clout-chasing masses.

I think this view fits with contemporary society: we view intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as high and low status, respectively. A “developed” person is supposed to have a private, inexhaustible reserve of motivation which is causally disconnected from external reward.

But this is not a realistic view of human beings. Humans are social animals who can only flourish in the society of other humans. We care, and we should care, about contributing to the world. And if technology makes our contributions superfluous, then what is left?

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Luke Drago and Andy Matuschak for feedback and conversations.

Ken Arneson : The Value of Not Getting to the Point

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 22:03:06 +0000

I read somewhere recently, I forget where, that the purpose of people getting together for a conversation over a beer or coffee or lunch or dinner is that it the food and drink spare us from the burden of needing to have something to say throughout the whole conversation.

This was a revelation to me. All this time, I assumed that the primary purpose of lunch was lunch. All this time, I figured that I was just lousy at conversation because being an introvert made conversation awkward and laborious for me. For everyone else, conversation seems comparatively effortless. But it seems from this data that conversation must be harder for everyone else than I had assumed.

My oldest daughter is a freshman in college. She recently texted me and said she wanted to talk. I asked, what about? She got annoyed at me for asking.

I was clueless as to why. I guess the Dunning-Kruger effect applies to all of us, there’s always some area of life where we’re so incompetent we don’t even know we’re incompetent. This area, apparently, was one of mine.

She asked if we could just talk about something stupid. So I called her, and we talked about Donald Trump and the presidential race and stuff like that for a good long while. I didn’t ask about what was really bothering her.

Eventually, the conversation turned, and we finally got to talking about the thing she wanted to talk about. But that probably at least half an hour into the conversation. We segued slowly and organically from the stupid stuff into the real issue.

And this, too, was a bit of a revelation to me, that someone would not want to get straight to the point, that someone would need a nice long conversational warmup before they’d feel comfortable enough to be ready to talk about something more uncomfortable. I’m very much a get-to-the-point kind of person. I tend to say what I mean, or nothing at all.

Language is imprecise. Our feelings don’t always have direct translations into speech. It’s hard to explain what we feel, to say exactly what we mean. We have wants and desires and emotions, and we often try to rationalize those feelings. Those rationalizations are often logically incoherent. But it’s hard to see the incoherence of our own rationalizations because our points of view are so limited. And often (if we’re not falling prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect) we intuit that our rationalizations may be incoherent. So we’re cautious in what we say. We know that there can be social penalties for saying the wrong thing in the wrong way to the wrong person.

All this adds up to making the act of talking about something sensitive daunting. There is a vulnerability in speaking. That’s why our culture has all these rituals and conventions around conversation, like idle chit-chat and coffee and such: to build enough trust in the environment where we can feel comfortable enough to overcome the vulnerability inherent in speech.

I never fully understood this before. I feel like everyone else understands it, though, because they act as if they do. But if they do, it must be an intuitive understanding, a grokking, not an explicit fact that people state out loud. Otherwise, I probably would have heard someone say it explicitly sometime before in the almost 50 years I’ve been in this earth.

Having now finally come to this understanding, it occurs to me that perhaps this is the great flaw with Twitter, why everyone I know on Twitter seems to eventually run into a wall with it. The 140-character format pushes you to get straight to the point. There is no room for the idle chit-chat and sips of coffee and other conversational rituals that let us dance around the sensitive issues. Without these rituals that are built into real-life human-to-human conversation, the problems with speech that those cultural rituals are designed to prevent come flooding in.

There is so much hair pulling and teeth grinding about what people should and should not say online, and how they should or should not say it. And maybe all that hair pulling and teeth grinding arise because our online conversational cultures, and the technological platforms they reside on, have not had the time to evolve into something that works, the way that our real-life conversational culture has.

There are many, many more people who are clueless about how to behave in online conversations than there are people who are clueless about how to behave in offline ones. How I came to be the flipside of that, I don’t know.

And it also occurs to me that there is a value in stating explicitly the things that are mostly just intuited about human nature and human culture. I want to explore these sorts of things. There is a risk, though, a vulnerability, in stating these things. The people who intuitively grasp these things will feel as though I am insulting their intelligence by stating something so obvious it shouldn’t need saying. But it isn’t meant as an insult to their intelligence, it’s meant as an insult to mine. I need to say these things because I’m the one who doesn’t understand these things. I need them explained to myself.

Which is all a roundabout way of stating something that maybe could fit into a tweet: I plan to start saying things that aren’t obvious to me but may be obvious to others. Sorry if you fall into the latter category and I waste your time. Such is the risk of saying anything, ever. And sorry for the roundaboutness in getting to this point. I seemed to need it, for some strange reason.

"Robot" Is A Social Construct: Why Your Dishwasher Is Not A Robot - Robot Girl Gang

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 17:47:13 +0000

The most effective way to nerd snipe a roboticist is to present them with a controversial definition of a “robot”. When I served on an industrial safety standards development committee, we once spent a memorable two full days trying to define “robot” sufficiently broadly so as to ensure the standard would apply to all reasonably forseeable uses of industrial robotic arms in industrial automation, but sufficiently narrowly so as to ensure we did not accidentally force newly developed types of industrial robots into a standard that would wrongly constrain them. This was, I say with all honesty, was an immensely enjoyable two days. I love this kind of thing. I will be pedantic all day long.

So of course, my esteemed colleague Tina decided to lob a grenade at me by asserting that a dishwasher is a robot.

There are two ways I could womansplain to her just how wrong she is. One is to meet her at her level by debating the technical definition. My primary technical issue with her explanation is that I do not agree with how she describes the “manipulation” capabilities of a dishwasher. The spray arms and soap release mechanisms are just that, mechanisms – they do not handle objects, and manipulation is about handling objects. Dishwashers are absolutely automated systems, and increasingly smart ones (though I side-eye the manufacturer that makes my dishwasher calling it “fully autonomous” because it cracks it open on completion to let everything cool). But they’re not robots. They fall short of the technical definition Tina used.

But the alternative I prefer is to inform Tina that she is wrong because robots are not actually defined by their technology, so arguing that way is meaningless. The word, and how we choose to apply it, is entirely a social construct.

“Robot” as a term is an invention of science fiction – and specifically, of Karel Čapek in his 1920 play Rossum’s Universal Robots. Robots continued to be explored through science fiction for decades before the first thing called a robot became a product you could buy. Automated machines not called robots existed well before the word was coined, and continue to exist today. And that’s because “robot” is not actually a descriptor of technical functionality; it is used to describe an automated machine we feel some kind of way about.

It’s specifically because the word and the concept were invented and developed through science fiction that this is the case. Science fiction spends a lot of time using the idea of aliens, robots, and artificial intelligence as a lens through which to view ourselves as humans.¹ It’s why Spock and Data and The Doctor and Seven of Nine are all such compelling characters in Star Trek – they exist as narrative constructs through which to ask the question “what does it mean to be human?”²

So that’s why we choose to apply the term “robot” to some automated machines and not others. We use the term for technologies which feel new, a little scary, and make our squishy biological brains feel a little bit weird about what this technology might mean for us. We might be worried about what this technology having some particular capability means about our jobs, or our relationships with other people, or our areas of expertise or talent. Technology that looks like the human form or appears to imitate aspects of human consciousness might make us question a religious belief we may hold about how life is created. Our interactions with something that looks and sounds human might make us think uncomfortable thoughts about how we (individually or as a society) treat other human beings. Or we might realize that public discourse about how great it would be to have something that looks like a human, sounds like a human, and has all the capability of a human, but without any rights or bathroom breaks or pay in exchange for its labor feels pretty gross, actually, if you’ve thought literally at all about how our history of slavery has had an impact on so many aspects of modern America.

We see this in the way what we call a “robot” has changed and evolved over time, and the way that change is so tightly correlated with the novelty of the technology and the degree to which we feel we understand the potential societal implications of it. Outside of sci fi, “robot” used to just mean robotic arms used in assembly lines. When I attended the RoboBusiness conference circa 2007, I remember the conference information specifically stating it was NOT for industrial robotic arms because they didn’t consider those robots anymore. Meanwhile, Roombas were state of the art and everyone was excited about wheeled mobile robots. A decade later, industrial robotic arms were allowed back in because power- and force-limited cobots and advanced vision systems attached to robot arms opened up novel new applications and capabilities that people had only just started to contemplate being automatable. These days, many folks are happy to laugh off the Roomba and robotic lawn mowers as “basically a toy” and humanoid robots are (unfairly) scaring the crap out of everyone about their job prospects (or safety in the face of someone’s robot army). All of these things meet the ISO definition of robot that Tina used, but as a culture, we’ve moved on to calling something new a “robot” and starting to demote the other stuff because we’re not impressed with (read: scared of) it anymore.

In short, a machine is a robot when it makes us sit with uncomfortable truths about ourselves.

And my dishwasher does not force me to examine my own existential purpose.

QED. Not a robot.

And monsters as well. What do you think Frankenstein was about? ↩︎
Sometimes very explicitly, as in the most excellent Next Generation episode, The Measure of a Man ↩︎

Author

Mikell

Mikell is a giant robotics nerd who likes to make that everyone’s problem. She enjoys holding strong opinions, being right about things, and arguing passionately about low-stakes topics after a couple of bourbons. Outside of robots, she cooks, hyperfixates on dorky television and movies, and raises two kids who couldn’t care less about robots.

My Husband Is a Good Man – Diary Asma

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 17:47:01 +0000

My Husband Is a Good Man

09 Oct, 2026

Read in BM

I really want to share with the people closest to me just how amazing he is and how lucky I am to have him.

But I can't tell anyone. I can't tell my sister because her husband is a total freeloader (biawak hidup). She basically lives like a single mother of five children plus one—her husband. If I tell her, I don't want her to feel the painful contrast between our lives.

I can’t tell my mother either. She always says that I’m lazy, that I can’t survive without a husband, and that my kids will eventually love their father more than me. I'm not lazy (though I'm not super hardworking either), and my kids love me. She rarely has anything nice to say. It feels like to her, a woman has to suffer first just to be considered a true woman.

I also can't share how good my husband is on social media because I'm terrified of the evil eye (ain).

And because of that...

Everywhere you look, there is so much content and gossip about bad husbands—husbands who cheat, who are flirty, who are freeloaders, abusers, or beat their wives. It's always the bad stuff.

But I want to challenge that.

I want to tell the world that good husbands do exist, and one of them is mine. In fact, there are so many good husbands out there, but we, the wives, just can't talk about it. If we do, people get annoyed, they criticize us, or they get hurt. People don't care about stories of good husbands; they only want the drama of the bad ones.

I want to give hope to all the single women out there that there are good men who will treat you like a queen. I used to daydream about being treated like royalty, but looking at myself, I never thought it would actually happen. Yet, that dream became my reality.

I want to tell you: don't lose hope. Don't assume that there are no good men left. Don't settle for a guy just because you're afraid you won't find anyone better. Good men exist!

You are precious and highly valuable. There is a man out there who will treat you right. Never settle for a bare minimum guy. Just don't.

#myhusbandisagoodman

Laptop Stickers: Yay Or Nay? | Brain Baking

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 08:06:40 +0000

Here’s an interesting dilemma for you: do you place stickers onto the back of your laptop? Are you a laptop sticker kind of person or afraid of anything glossy that might leave glue marks? I used to belong to the latter group, but after more than six years of typing on this M1 Air, I was ready to give in.

The reason for this is simple. Sebastián sent me a couple of Emacs-related stickers, knowing I couldn’t resist. It’s all his fault. Look at what he did!

A not so pristine golden coloured MacBook Air shining in the sun, desecrated by four stickers.

(And yes, I am well aware of the irony of pasting a Free Software Foundation sticker on a MacBook that runs on a proprietary OS. I promise my next hardware choice will be more ethically sound.)

Of course I can’t stop there: what to do with all that open space in-between the stickers? I could have placed them all at one side to make it even more painfully obvious that the beautiful symmetry is completely gone now. As for the question of where to stick them: I already think far too much and was too happy with the stickers to give this much thought. They’re on there. The Apple logo is still visible: a Brain Baking logo sticker covering that up might be the logical next step to take.

Every time I receive stickers at conventions, I hesitate: do I stick these onto the laptop? Wait, what do they represent? Do I really want to proudly display the Octat GitHub mascot to promote GitHub as “the only way to do Git”? Nope. Do I really want to paste a Java mug or Gopher on there, identifying myself with these programming languages that aren’t bad but don’t get my engine running? How about a colourful JetBrains IntelliJ one that can serve as a free ad? Nope, nope, nope. It was easy to be in the (tech) sticker hater group.

And then I finally found something that was fun to mess around with. So yes, I am now a happy Lisp and Emacs advocate at work. The stickers already provoked many Emacs versus Vim discussions that end once you show them that Emacs can be a window manager running your other apps, or that EVIL mode exists. Still, 99% of the die-hard coder colleagues—which are less than 10%, the others of course rely on VS Code—are Vim users. That’s great!

But one wasn’t and told me he yesterday closed his Emacs window for the first time in weeks. We both had to move classes but I’ve made a mental note to meet up and exchange Lispy configs. Thank you Seb & Seb’s stickers.

Many of my students like stickers on their laptops. Most just stick on there whatever they can get their hands on. I’ve seen a lot of Gophers but nowhere in our curriculum we explore Go and after approaching them, I learn that they don’t even know how to write a line of Go code. A Gopher is cool, that’s what matters! I do think that you should at least know what you’re implicitly preaching.

Which is why I’m not limiting myself by sticking only tech-related stuff on there. The question then becomes: what else? Something retro game-related, obviously. But still: what? A classic Castlevania logo? I’d rather go for a custom-printed sticker with some obscure sprite work, from for instance Wario Land 3 or Gobliins 2. If someone is able to recognise all these, I’ll finally have found my missing soulmate.

Maybe a pixelated version of bread or a fountain pen? Or am I giving away too much information that way? Also, since the laptop turns seven in January, I should keep copies as the stickers are not transferable.

Another approach would be to cover the entire back, making use of every square millimetre. A few colleague design lecturers carry laptops like this. I don’t think I’m cool enough for that.

Terence caught a nasty laptop sticker paralysis while trying to perfectly place his, so a bit of thoughtful preparation might be in order. I love Abigail’s Kirby sticker on her Thinkpad. She even scanned her laptop with a photocopier and converted the entire thing into a clickable polygon-based SVG. Much cooler than my lazy cellphone snapshot. I’m also jealous of her Cory Wong pizza slice sticker! I do wonder what she’ll do when her laptop breaks down or it’s time for a replacement. Nia’s laptop stickers (a November 2022 snapshot) also contains some cool ones, as does Manton Reece’s, such as bookstore stickers. Here’s a discussion on the Framework forum containing more inspiration.

It is clear that I still have some work to do. The four stickers are only the beginning. Laptop Stickers: Yay Or Nay? Yay. But then: how many? Overlapping or not? Planned placement or not? Tech-related only or not? See, even the most banal decisions in life come with Deep Thoughts!

To be continued with a photo when it’s done.

braindump stickers

Why were Victorian elites so effective? - Works in Progress Magazine

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 18:06:25 +0000

Books about successful people often make success sound rather unappealing. Education should be intense and rigorous, focused on driving up IQ and on the ‘STEM’ quaternity of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Once adulthood is reached, life follows an austere pattern, with a 5am start, cold baths, daily visits to the gym, little or no alcohol, a Huel-rich diet, and Stakhanovite working hours. This last point generates particular excitement, and descriptions of powerful people dwell with eager fascination on how many hours they devote to their labors.

The elites of Victorian Britain operated differently. Their schools and universities were not terribly academic and had very little STEM. As adults, they got up late, drank a lot, and spent a remarkable share of their waking hours partying. They loved feasting, sports, holidays, dancing, and dressing up. Contrary to their stodgy reputation, they were probably a lot of fun.

Despite this, the elites of nineteenth-century Britain were, by their own lights, extremely successful. For much of the century, Britain was the richest country on Earth. Its companies dominated global commerce, industry and finance. Its huge navy reigned over the world’s oceans, and its tiny army won a long sequence of wars while keeping watch over an enormous empire. Britain progressed gradually toward democracy with none of the revolutions and civil wars that wracked continental Europe. There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true. But on their own terms, the British ruling class enjoyed a victorious century.

Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically. We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test. But I want to explore the possibility that a relentless focus on soft skills, team building, and intra-elite networking actually worked rather well. Huel, STEM, and cold baths have their merits. But the example of the Victorians should make us hesitate before concluding that there is only one way to rule the world.

School

Caricaturing a little, we can distinguish two groups in modern educational debates: traditionalists and progressives. Traditionalists think that education should prioritize acquiring knowledge, that it should focus on ‘hard’ subjects like science, mathematics, and foreign languages, and that it should take place in a highly structured environment, where students’ time and behavior are tightly regulated. Progressives think that education should prioritize acquiring skills, that it should embrace ‘soft’ subjects beyond the supposed academic core, and that students should be given wide freedom in which to develop personally and socially.

One might assume that Victorian education was at the extreme traditionalist end of the spectrum, and modern educational progressives would indeed be horrified by the rote learning and corporal punishment of Victorian schooling. But in respect of all the controversies listed above, elite Victorian schools lean curiously toward the ‘progressive’ side of the spectrum.

Most socially elite Victorian boys began formal education at the age of seven or eight, spending about five years in a ‘preparatory school’ before passing on to a ‘public school’ (which, to the enduring confusion of international observers, is a kind of elite private school). There was a hierarchy of public schools, with the nine ‘Clarendon schools’ at the top, and just one, Eton College, clearly at the apex. About 30 percent of nineteenth-century cabinet ministers and 40 percent of prime ministers were Old Etonians.

Most students at both preparatory and public schools were boarders, meaning that elite Victorians were generally sent away from home by the age of eight and spent their childhoods more with peers than with family. In this respect they were distinctive even in their own time: elite families in continental Europe and the United States were far more likely to keep their children at home and educate them at small local private schools. It is plausible that this contributed to the lack of subnational loyalties in the British elite, in contrast to the distinct elites of, for example, the Southern United States, Catalonia in Spain, or Hungary in the Austrian Empire.

The public schools were of course single-sex, generating a somewhat febrile atmosphere in which intense quasi-romantic (or sometimes actually romantic) relationships between boys were common. Perhaps the powerful ties of nostalgia and loyalty that students felt for their former schoolmates were linked to this. The writer Jan Morris said that ‘the whole of English upper-class life…was shot through with bisexual instinct’ and that ‘the public school system…meant that male relationships were full of emotional nuance and undertone’. Demonstrative affection remained normal in adult life, and it was completely standard for pairs of Victorian men to walk arm-in-arm in public.

Academic life was dominated by Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek. The exact share varied, but the classical languages took up generally at least half of teaching hours, and sometimes as much as 80 percent, especially earlier in the century. Trailing in third and fourth places were mathematics and modern languages. There was resistance to the teaching of science, not because Victorians were hostile to science in principle, but because they thought it irrelevant to the kind of moral and cultural formation that a school for gentlemen was supposed to provide. Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School and the leading educationalist of Victorian Britain, remarked that ‘rather than have physical science the principal thing in my son’s mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the Earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament’. (By contrast, girls were not usually taught classics, meaning that, rather surprisingly, affluent Victorian girls generally followed a more modern curriculum than their brothers.)

Victorian adults had little occasion to use their classical languages, so they tended to forget them. ‘I have gladly forgotten all my Latin, and don’t ever want to remember it again’, wrote the war poet Charles Sorley, one year after leaving school; at least he did better than Winston Churchill, who remarked that ‘In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet’. The most that can be said for Victorians’ classical education is perhaps that, like schooling in any difficult subject, it trained students in self-discipline, memorization, and applying rules.

The Victorians themselves occasionally hinted that they regarded the official curriculum of school as something of a MacGuffin. In the hugely influential 1857 novel Tom Brown’s School Days, Tom’s benevolent father muses, ‘I don’t care a straw for Greek particles… What is [Tom] sent to school for? … If he’ll only turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian, that’s all I want’. In a similar spirit, Thomas Arnold wrote that ‘what we must look for here is, first, religious and moral principles; second, gentlemanly conduct; thirdly, intellectual ability’.

Under such circumstances, it is perhaps unsurprising that the share of time spent in the classroom was relatively modest. At Rugby School, weeks were divided into three ‘full days’, three ‘half days’, and Sunday. On a full day, students spent about five hours in the classroom, compared with maybe two hours on a half day. Other schools varied, but nearly all left many hours unfilled. In general, classroom hours were certainly not longer, and probably rather shorter, than those in normal schools today. They also tended to be shorter than those of contemporary elite schools in France, Germany, or Italy, where the curriculum was normally more academically rigorous.

The most prestigious Victorian school was Eton, but the most influential was Rugby, where many of the characteristic features of the Victorian public school were developed under the headmastership of Thomas Arnold. The version of football played at Rugby became known as ‘Rugby football’ and then just ‘rugby’. Here it may be seen in a primitive state, before the rules reached their canonical form.

Image

Pictorial Press via Alamy.

The focus on character formation led to increasing interest in how students spent their time outside the classroom. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, they were still mostly left to their own devices: their preferred pastime seems to have been roaming the local countryside and generally making a nuisance of themselves. During the Victorian period, school authorities introduced programs of organized sports, chiefly cricket in summer and various forms of ‘football’ (including what became rugby) in winter. Many schools ultimately had four, five, or even six afternoons of sports per week: a student would certainly spend ten hours a week on the sports field, and might well spend twenty.

The Victorians thought extremely highly of sports, believing that they instilled team spirit and endurance, fostered mutual loyalty, channeled energy and competitiveness, and taught men how to win and lose graciously. An extreme but not entirely unrepresentative example was Hely Hutchinson Almond, headmaster of Loretto School, who described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second – physique, third – intelligence, fourth – manners, fifth – information’. The cult of team sports was generally not shared in continental Europe, and European visitors were often bewildered by how seriously the English took schoolboy ballgames. But it spread across the Anglophone world, and it is still embodied in the traditions of American high school and intercollegiate sports today.

Another distinctive feature of the public schools, relative both to modern education and to other nineteenth-century school systems, was student self-government. The Victorians thought that close supervision by schoolmasters would inculcate servile habits in boys, compromising what one headmaster called ‘the great glory of an English public school – its free development of character, its social expansiveness, in short its liberty’. As a result, a system of prefects was developed in which, in theory, the more benevolent and mature boys were given extensive pastoral and disciplinary responsibilities over the others. The prefects would receive an apprenticeship in leadership, while the student body as a whole would come to see authority as something emanating from their peers rather than imposed upon them by an alien entity.

It is not hard to imagine how a self-governing oligarchy of teenage boys might go wrong. Victorian educationalists were themselves concerned about the potential for abuse, and various checks and balances were developed, like jury systems and rights of appeal before punishment. It is hard to say how often the prefect system operated unjustly, reliant as we are on the impressionistic evidence of personal memoirs, but it is beyond doubt that it was sometimes brutal. It is important to understand, however, that it was intended not simply as a system of domination, but almost as one of ‘elite liberalism’, whereby students would not only be subjects of authority, but also to some extent its legislators and executors.

University

From school, most elite Victorian men went on to Oxford or Cambridge (‘Oxbridge’). Oxbridge was not necessarily a big step up academically. Virtually everyone who applied was accepted. Once you were in, you could pursue one of two tracks: either an ‘honors’ degree, which involved at least some serious study, or a ‘pass’ or ‘ordinary’ degree, which involved sitting only some very easy exams in classics and religion. In the early Victorian period, most Oxbridge students were ‘pass men’; this changed gradually as the century drew on, but there were still plenty of pass men around as late as 1914. The pass degree was particularly popular among aristocratic students, who tended to prioritize rowing, feasting, and social polish over disciplined study.

Oxford in the early twentieth century. Victorian Oxford was about a mile across, and the colleges were all within a short walk of each other. As at many times in their lives, the Victorian elite chose to congregate geographically.

Image

David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford University Libraries.

Many honors students took their studies more seriously. But even they were not very practical in orientation. Oxbridge tutors believed overwhelmingly that the purpose of an undergraduate degree was neither training for work nor even preparation for academic research, but rather a general moral and intellectual formation that would fit students for any professional role they might later pursue. ‘No man will be a first-rate physician or engineer who is not something more than either, who has not some taste for art, some feeling for literature, or some other interest external to his profession’, said Benjamin Jowett, the influential master of Balliol College. Jowett aimed to convey this ‘something more’ to his undergraduates, leaving them to acquire specific technical knowledge later.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, such theories led the universities to exclude almost everything except classics and (at Cambridge) mathematics from the curriculum. Natural and applied sciences were viewed with suspicion on the basis that they were, in the words of the famous Oxford professor Edward Bouverie Pusey, ‘confined to the reception of information on matters of fact’ and do not involve ‘continued reasoning’. Between 1855 and 1860, just 8.1 percent of honors degrees were awarded to science students; in 1910–1914, it was still only 13.7 percent.

Nearly all students lived together in colleges. This contrasted with the situation in continental Europe, where students generally rented rooms off campus. Victorian pedagogues believed that colleges provided religious, cultural, and social formation, and that they prevented English students from acquiring the bad morals and habits of their continental peers. A typical day began with chapel; honors students and the less indolent pass men would then spend the morning reading and preparing assignments. Students normally ordered lunch to their rooms: rich students could have elaborate feasts brought up from the college kitchens, like Sebastian Flyte’s lunch in Brideshead Revisited. In the early afternoon it was customary to go out for rural walks or sports, especially rowing and cricket.

The Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, at a meal with friends in Magdalen College, Oxford. Students could order lavish meals to their rooms from college kitchens, with the cost added to their termly bill. Notice the cheap and mismatched furniture – this was still student accommodation, however grand its residents.

Image

Magdalen College Archives.

Around 4pm, students returned to college. Once or twice a week this was the time for ‘tutorials’, one-to-one or small-group discussions with tutors, often over tea or sherry. The tutorial system contrasted sharply with the more didactic and lecture-based teaching that prevailed in other university systems, and was seen as a way of inculcating independent thought. If a student had no tutorials, he would probably spend the early evening reading, socializing, or at one of the university’s various cultural, discussion, or debating societies, notably the Oxford and Cambridge Unions. The day concluded with a formal dinner in the college hall, often followed by conversation over dessert, digestifs and tobacco in college rooms.

Although the tutorial system was seen with pride, the quality of tutoring was decidedly uneven. Until the 1870s, most fellowships were open only to Anglican priests. Fellowships were comfortable positions, but much less comfortable than well-paid positions in the Church of England, especially since fellows were generally not allowed to marry. The typical Oxbridge don of the mid-nineteenth century was thus in his early or mid-twenties and regarded his fellowship as a holding post, which he would leave as soon as a desirable parish became available. Many of these young men would have been very bright, but few were serious researchers or experienced teachers. Fellowships were opened up to laymen in the later decades of the century, but Oxford and Cambridge did not become world-leading research institutions until they were transformed by German scholars fleeing Nazism in the 1930s.

The dominance of Oxbridge in British culture was unusual: these institutions educated a much larger share of the elite than was the case for any two institutions in any other country, with the possible exception of the top grandes écoles in France. Nonetheless, some elite and quasi-elite Victorian groups followed alternative educational pathways. For example, for much of the nineteenth century the colonial civil service in India was educated at a training college called Haileybury. These programs were not, however, necessarily more rigorous than the usual Oxbridge track. I cannot improve upon David Gilmour’s description of a day in the life at Haileybury, distilled from the memoirs of the civil servant John Beames:

At eight in the morning, the students rushed to chapel, many of them wearing only a nightshirt under a gown or overcoat. Afterwards they returned to their rooms for breakfast, which often turned into parties with ‘tankards of beer or claret’. Breakfast was followed by smoking a pipe and dealing with tailors and other tradesmen who had arrived from Hertford. At ten o’clock the bell rang for lectures, which lasted two hours on some days, three on others. The studious minority known as the ‘steadies’ took notes; the others yawned, drew sketches of their teachers and fooled about. After a lunch of bread, cheese and beer, they were free to do what they liked. The oarsmen went to the river, the cricketers went to their cricket pitch, the ‘steadies’ went for a ‘solemn constitutional’ along the lanes, and the ‘fast men’ either slipped off by train to London or else clattered off in dog-carts to play billiards at Hertford or Ware. Dinner took place in Hall at six followed by evening chapel at eight. Then the ‘steadies’ retired to their rooms and read far into the night, most of the others sat about drinking and singing, and at about two in the morning the ‘fast men’ returned very drunk from Broxbourne Station after catching the last train from Shoreditch.

Beames’s account was particularly colorful, but nobody seems to have had a good word to say about Haileybury as a teaching institution. Everyone, however, including Beames, agreed that it engendered much esprit de corps among its graduates. The future prime minister Lord Salisbury commented on the ‘close friendships formed there, which softened the rivalries of after life and secured devoted instead of perfunctory co-operation’. Perhaps something similar might be said for much of the elite Victorian education system.

Adulthood

One virtue that upper-class Victorian education signally failed to inculcate was early rising. Although Victorian schoolboys and university students got up fairly early for chapel, the day of an upper-class Victorian adult started late. The great prime minister of the early nineteenth century, Pitt the Younger, breakfasted at 9am. The great prime minister of the Victorian period, William Gladstone, hosted a social breakfast starting at 10.30am (claret was served), continuing till about noon. His rival Benjamin Disraeli attended breakfasts hosted by Lord Houghton, which started at 10am, but which Disraeli would join at about 11.30am. Elite Victorians generally had flexible working hours and were free to work from home unless they had meetings elsewhere. Many spent the whole morning at home, reading the newspaper, answering letters, and preparing for later meetings. The Edwardian prime minister Arthur Balfour generally did all this literally in bed, rarely emerging from his bedroom before lunchtime. As we shall see, mornings must often have been even later from February to July, when many leading Victorians would have spent much of the night partying.

At some point in the late morning, the Victorian would finally make his way to the office. By the end of the century, some wealthy people lived in suburbs and commuted by railway, especially in industrial cities like Birmingham and Manchester. In general, however, Britain’s elites were slow to suburbanize, and in 1914 most still lived in centrally located row houses and walked to work. Every day a great herd of frock-coated men emerged from Belgravia and Mayfair and poured through Covent Garden to their offices in Parliament, Whitehall, the Inns of Court, and the City.

The Strand in London around 1895. The Strand is one of the main roads between the residential West End and the commercial City, so it is thronged with top-hatted men commuting by foot or by horse bus.

Image

Alamy.

The exact timetable for the middle of the day varied by period and profession. In the early Victorian period, the upper classes often went without a serious lunch but dined early at 5 or 6pm. This changed drastically in the third quarter of the century, perhaps because of improved artificial lighting, so that by the 1870s many Victorians had a substantial lunch with wine, usually with professional peers at a club, sustaining them until dinner at about 8.30pm. Politics was a part-time job for most members of Parliament (MPs) and peers, so Parliament typically did not start sitting until 4.30 or 5pm; the majority of part-time politicians could wind up a gentlemanly day at the office in time for this, while the minority of full-time politicians could spend the day on party management, or (if they were ministers) at government business in their ministries.

Victorians loved dressing up, and both men’s and women’s clothes were much more elaborate than they are today.

Image

Wikimedia Commons (adapted).

Provided Parliament did not interfere, however, an elite Victorian would stroll home to dress for dinner. Upper-class Victorians of both sexes paid great attention to their clothes. For an informal dinner at home, a man would change into evening dress, usually including a starched collar, cuff and shirt front, patent leather shoes, and gold shirt studs and cufflinks.

Dinners were rich and elaborate. The number of courses naturally varied, but it was invariably more than a modern dinner at an equivalent grade of formality. A typical dinner began with soup and sherry, then proceeded to fish with hock (Rhineland whites), passing on through a sequence of meat courses with champagne or red wines, and finishing with various desserts and savories served with port and madeira. The Victorians loved drinking and drank a lot by modern standards. Men drank more than women, but women drank a good deal too: one conduct guide noted that ‘young ladies seldom drink more than three glasses of wine at dinner but married ladies, professional ladies, and those accustomed to society, and habits of affluence, will habitually take five or even six, whether in their own homes or at the tables of their friends’.

For about five months a year, between February and July, the elite of Victorian Britain congregated in London for what was called ‘the Season’, essentially a sequence of parties and social events. They usually owned or rented houses in Mayfair and Belgravia, two small neighborhoods that face each other across Hyde Park, meaning that the bulk of the ruling class would live literally within walking distance of one another. Parallel institutions existed in most Western countries at the time – the social seasons in Paris, Vienna, St Petersburg and New York were famous – but the London Season had a particularly dominant role in the national life because it coincided with the Parliamentary session, making it a forum for political networking as well as elite matchmaking and court rituals.

London’s residential neighborhoods in 1889, graded by social class. The wealthy neighborhoods are in yellow, clustered around the royal parks in inner west London. There was an internal hierarchy even among these, with Belgravia and Mayfair at the top of the hierarchy. Most of Britain’s elites lived in London for at least part of the year, during which time they would have been within half an hour’s walk of each other.

Image

David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford University Libraries.

During the Season, the upper-class evening continued long beyond dinner. Balls were the flagship evening entertainment. They started late, at nine or ten, and guests would filter in gradually, with the dance floor really full from about 11pm. Around midnight a meal called ‘supper’ appeared, comprising soups, salads, cold meats, shellfish, fruit, and ice cream. The beverage most associated with balls was ‘negus’, a hot drink made of port, spices, sugar and oranges or lemons. Lemonade, tea and coffee were on hand throughout the evening, and champagne, hock, port and sherry were served at supper. In addition, an 1867 guide for aspiring ball hosts observed, ‘Bottled pale ale and stout are quite permissible – in fact, they have become indispensable’.

After supper, dancing recommenced; a good ball peaked after 1am. Guests gradually returned home in the small hours, and the most determined might continue until dawn. It was good form to slip out quietly, and there was no requirement even to say goodbye to the hostess. ‘The great thing is to avoid making your departure felt as a suggestion for breaking up the party, as you have no right to hint by your movements that you consider the entertainment has been kept up long enough’, an etiquette guide notes.

Balls naturally had special significance for people in the marriage market. Arranged marriage in the strict sense had largely died out by the nineteenth century, but upper-class young people and their parents still hoped they would make advantageous matches, and balls furnished opportunities to do so. It would be quite wrong, however, to think that balls were simply mass dating events. Courtiers, bankers, judges, and cabinet ministers would have shared the dance floor with debutantes. In fact, with some exceptions like club lunches, the social events of the Victorian elite were notable for their lack of segregation by age or sex. A Society ball discharged the functions of both a teenage house party and a business networking convention: in fact, it was both a teenage house party and a business networking convention.

The Victorians loved dressing up: fancy dress balls were a popular variant on the normal format.

Image

iStock.

Unmarried young people (and their unfortunate parents) might go to three or four balls per week, while other Society members would go to one or two. But the other nights were scarcely less busy. Opera, theatre and concerts were important, especially opening or gala nights. The bread and butter of the Season was soirées, card parties, conversazione, receptions and less formal dances, as well as midnight ‘supper parties’, all mostly hosted in private homes. These elements were modular. An MP might miss dinner for a late sitting of Parliament, but still drop into a soirée at 10.30pm, turn up to a supper party at 11.45pm, and then arrive at a ball at 1am. From February to July, the Victorian upper class led a remarkably nocturnal existence, with bedtimes in the small hours and the mornings something of a write-off.

By one definition, then, elite Victorians did remarkably little work: they could easily spend just four or five hours a day actually in the office. But by another definition, they were working all the time. Lunches, balls, and dinners were certainly fun, but they were not just fun. In the words of the historian Leonore Davidoff, these social occasions provided ‘access to a vast information network: information about jobs, investment possibilities, secret political decisions’. Many Victorians were intensely ambitious and drove themselves hard: sleep deprivation, exhaustion and burnout were familiar companions. The distinctive feature of elite Victorian lifestyles was not laziness, but an extreme weighting toward what we might call team building and professional networking, and the near-total fusion of personal and professional life.

Method in their madness?

The sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies famously distinguished Gemeinschaft – community, held together by ties of sentiment and tradition – from Gesellschaft – society, held together by explicit laws and contracts. As societies grow more complex, he thought, Gesellschaft tends to replace Gemeinschaft. But the Victorian elite was a little Gemeinschaft at the apex of an enormous Gesellschaft, an intimate community bound together by ties of common culture, shared memory, intense status competition, loyalty, and love. Its members strove for one another’s envy, esteem and gratitude, and to achieve this they would go far beyond what was contractually obligated or financially advantageous. It is not altogether fanciful to think of the Victorian elite as functioning like a big premodern village, though its members were geographically dispersed across the kingdom and its vast empire.

All the practices I have described in this article helped to maintain this emotional village. The ruling class were educated together from an early age, in schools and universities designed to inculcate shared values, a common identity, and ties of mutual loyalty. As adults they congregated every year in an area of central London that actually was village-sized, where they spent every night in one another’s company. Young members of the Victorian elite tended to meet their future spouses during these glittering evenings, so that the elite came to form, to some extent, a literal family.

Maintaining this community required a lot of time and effort, which obviously had opportunity costs. All else being equal, rich and powerful Victorians must have been less productive for spending four hours a day in the office rather than twelve. But the creation of a single ruling Gemeinschaft may have had compensatory advantages.

One of these was unity. In some ways, rich Victorians were quite diverse. They came from every part of the British Isles. They included landed aristocrats and urban bourgeois, with the latter steadily superseding the former over the course of the century. Most landowners were Anglicans, but many of the new rich were Nonconformists (non-Anglican Protestants), and some were Jews or Catholics. With the conspicuous exception of the Irish Catholics, all these people were successfully folded into a single British elite, rather than forming hostile counter-elites working to overthrow the social order.

This obviously had advantages for Britain. The elites of the American South had a very different identity to those of the North, and ultimately led the country into civil war. Spain, Italy and France suffered from incessant conflicts between urban bourgeois and rural nobility. Germany was riven with strife along geographical, religious, and class lines. Some of these tensions existed in Britain, but except in Ireland, the elite finessed them peacefully. A Nonconformist Manchester businessman probably supported the Liberal Party rather than the Conservatives, but the idea of violently seceding from Britain to form a Methodist Republic of the North would never have occurred to him.

Maybe the Victorian elites also had advantages relative to elites today. One strength of all Gemeinschaften is that they can reward their members with prestige rather than money, which is useful in contexts where adequate financial rewards are for some reason impossible.

This might be an important advantage sometimes. For political reasons, most modern societies pay politicians and civil servants vastly less than they pay people with a similar level of responsibility in the private sector. As a result, they struggle to persuade their most talented people to enter and remain in public life. The Victorians did not have this problem. Until the 1880s, most local government roles in Britain were conducted on a completely unpaid basis by local landowners. They also administered the rudimentary welfare system, sat as magistrates in the lower courts, and staffed the boards of most schools and hospitals. A landowner who ignored these responsibilities would suffer no material consequences, but he would be diminished and resented in the eyes of his peers, and for most, that was inducement enough.

Something similar applied to Parliament. Nineteenth-century MPs were unpaid and covered most of their own election expenses. In the 1880 General Election, the average Parliamentary candidate bore about £150,000 of expenses in an urban constituency and £450,000 in a rural one (in today’s money). MPs had to take this massive financial hit repeatedly, every time there was an election. They also had to bear all of their costs upon assuming office, including staff, travel, and accommodation in both Westminster and their constituency. And yet there was no difficulty filling Parliament: many of the richest and most powerful people in England competed fiercely to enter, simply because being an MP was intensely prestigious in their social milieu.

Maybe this identification with the social system affected how politicians behaved in office, too. In The English Constitution the political writer Walter Bagehot noted that parliamentary democracy creates powerful incentives for opposition parties to damage the country by corrosively undermining the government when it makes difficult but necessary decisions. But in practice, he thought, English politicians did not do this as much as one might expect:

In abstract theory these defects in our present practice would seem exceedingly great, but in practice they are not so. English statesmen and English parties have really a great patriotism; they can rarely be persuaded even by their passions or their interest to do anything contrary to the real interest of England, or anything which would lower England in the eyes of foreign nations. And they would seriously hurt themselves if they did.

It is hard to know how seriously to take claims like this. But it is certainly true that the MPs of both parties overwhelmingly belonged to the community described in this essay, sharing friends, relatives, memories, and values. Perhaps the elite village could punish them for defecting from norms in ways that are impossible today, making political life less prone to divisiveness, demagoguery, and brinkmanship.

Would modern societies work better if their local and national government were conducted by a tight-knit community of extremely rich and successful people? Maybe not: the downsides are obvious. But the problems would be interestingly different from those that they have in reality. Imagine a San Francisco whose Board of Supervisors featured Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, each feeling this responsibility to be the greatest glory of his career, each hoping that he might one day attain the greater glory that is the House of Representatives. It might not be paradise. Maybe it would be a disaster. But it would certainly be interesting.

We are going to kill “unalive” - Anil Dash

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 07:47:36 +0000

I talk to a lot of old people, those who were born in the 20th century, and if I ask them what the word “unalive” means, they usually have no idea what I’m talking about, except for some of them who have kids or who study Internet culture.

This will, of course, probably seem very weird to most people who were born in or grew up in the 21st century. Just to recap for the olds: “unalive” is the word you use to represent concepts like dying, or death, or killing or being killed, on digital platforms where saying those words accurately will cause the algorithm to punish or censor you. Or, maybe, where the perception is that using those words will result in being censored by the algorithm, and no one is actually willing to find out what happens if you use the forbidden words.

This sort of attack on people’s expression started on platforms like TikTok, where nearly all content is distributed through an algorithmic feed, but has since become ubiquitous in nearly all digital media that we see. In fact, these tics are now so prevalent that it’s routine to hear people using this kind of language in everyday life, even though there’s not yet an algorithm to appease in the physical world. I’ve heard people say, out loud, “he unalived himself”, in reference to someone dying by suicide.

And all of this has become even more visible in recent days as online conversation has turned to discussion of the horrific lack of accountability around the tragic rape case at Cornell University. Across the Internet, people are routinely referring to the central crime in the case as r*pe or “grape” or even using the 🍇 emoji, without a second thought for what it means that the very word can’t be said online anymore. Or, at least, the assumption is that it can’t be said.

To be clear, I am very much in favor of people using content warnings or sensitivity markers for content, and fine with people using abbreviations like “SA” for references to disturbing or triggering topics like sexual assault; we should provide people with as much context and control as possible when choosing what information they want to consume and when. I also know that sometimes, people use lesser terms for stressful subjects like death or assault to create a bit of ironic distance from painful or upsetting topics.

But most of the different variations of wording and emojis are coming from trying to appease the platforms, and there’s a heavy cost for those who are worried about being mindful: If someone is using a tool to filter out content, it will no longer be effective because everyone is using misspellings and euphemisms and imagery to get around the algorithm.

The spread of censored and mangled syntax is happening because people believe, or have experienced, that platforms will silence them for accurately describing the world in plain language. This shit is terrible, and it has to stop.

You Were Not Born With These Constraints

One of the things that’s most concerning to me is that an entire generation has grown up not realizing how extreme it is that their very language is being chosen for them by platforms run by people who hate that generation’s ability to express itself, and who hate the things it has to say. From their youngest days, this generation grew up watching people make stupid faces at them for YouTube thumbnails and never had a chance to reflect on the fact that those creators didn’t want to be humiliating themselves by making those expressions — the demands of the algorithms of Big Tech forced them to do that.

The rituals of feeding the algorithm are so built into people’s everyday habits that they’re invisible to people who weren’t alive before today’s platforms took over. Every parent of my cohort remembers the first time they heard their toddler finish doing something cute in their living room, and then turn around and say, “please like and subscribe!” afterwards. It’s a ghastly, sickening feeling to confront the fact that our little kids were being brainwashed into thinking that every adorable thing they did should be followed by a prompt to provide data to Google.

Over on Instagram, where people originally signed up thinking they were going to see someone’s vacation pictures, or shots of their cousin’s kids, you’re now stuck watching people beg for everyone to reply with cultish phrases in the comments, which will then earn them an obviously AI-generated response in return, all in service of “showing activity” to the algorithm, like it’s an angry god that needs a sacrifice. They’re just not sure exactly what the angry god wants.

Your free speech was taken away from you, and the people who did it are the same ones who spent years pretending to care about “free expression”. They contrived examples of lack of free speech on college campuses while squashing protests, and cried crocodile tears about “cancel culture” while getting people fired for political criticism. Now they have no problem with billionaires deciding exactly what words everyone is allowed to say. Larry Ellison is not content with his family owning all of the movies and TV shows — his family has to control what words people are allowed to speak on TikTok, too. Elon Musk isn’t content to merely generate and distribute child sexual abuse material for profit — he wants to silence the messages of the few decent people who are foolish enough to remain on Twitter/X, too. (That’s why I wrote you a guide on how to get your organization off of that cursed platform.)

Now that an entire generation has grown up using these Orwellian euphemisms, and all of the Big AI products are trained on the Internet that was created under this regime, do you think today’s AI tools even know that the real, uncensored world exists? If you can’t say “genocide” on any of the major platforms, yet those are the ones all of the Big AI tools used as their training data... well, then the AI tools sure aren’t very likely to know much about genocide, are they?

Fuck the Algorithm

Our creativity can be constrained by the language we use — our imaginations are limited by what we can think to say. If we’re trained to limit the words we speak just by habit, and those limits are put in place by people whose social, political, cultural and moral goals are the opposite of what we value, then our work is unalive before it is even born.

The answer to this is simple: say what you mean. This will take, to some degree, courage. It may even take, I hesitate to say, some sacrifice. When I suggest this course of action to people, they inevitably say, “But it will cost me audience!” or “But what if I lose followers!” or “What if they demonetize me!”

Okay, what if they do? What if they do.

Are you willing to push on this? To make a point about it? To move to platforms where you can actually say what you mean? Or to remember that you already have platforms where you can say what you mean? On an email newsletter or podcast you can say whatever the hell you want and nobody can stop you. On my blog right here, I can even curse in a headline and it won’t affect anything about how my site operates.

(And a reminder: Substack is not an email newsletter, and a Spotify show is not a podcast — they’ll be unaliving your distribution any day now.)

If you are a 20th century relic like me, it is incumbent upon you to remind the generation that grew up inside the algorithm that another world is possible, and that we know this because we lived it. We were able to style a MySpace page in any way that we wanted; the code for LiveJournal was entirely open source so there was no part of the algorithm that was unknowable. A blog like the one you’re reading right now could be made by anyone, and put up for pennies, and nobody could stop it from being read by millions of people. (And that last one? It’s still possible.)

If you are from this century, forget all that rambling bullshit about ancient history: all that matters is you getting what you deserve, because you’ve been fucked over by the same billionaires who’ve poisoned your planet and infested your world with slop. The best artists around you are invisible to you, and the most important statements by activists that you care about are being silenced. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a system working as designed. And the proof is as obvious as the fact that the angriest activists you know can’t even talk about systemic abuses or state violence without having to put it in algorithmically approved speech or censoring their captions like they’re going to be read by 5-year-olds.

It should make you furious. It is time to kill “unalive”.

The response is simple:

For every message you put out, start by saying what you mean. Don’t work backwards from what the algorithm wants or what a platform permits.
Build a presence on every platform you can, even the ones where you have fewer followers or where you’re harder to find.
Tell your audience that your speech being free matters more than corporate convenience. Keep saying it, and keep it positive: independence gets them better art, better information, and more connected communities.
Build alliances with other artists, activists and people who share your values, and let them know you’re going to start sharing your work uncensored.
Start releasing your work uncensored and see where the platforms push back. (You may be surprised: sometimes you were censoring yourself in anticipation of limits that weren’t even there.)
If a platform does try to limit your reach or expression, make a LOT OF NOISE about it. Tell the press, rally your alliance, and spread the word on your other platforms, using the moment to build audience and raise support there. Get others to amplify the parts of your work that don’t violate platform policy, so the controversy drives people to the rest.
Find the others pushing back on algorithmic control of expression, and raise and praise their work when they do the same.

If we keep accepting the words that are forced upon us by TikTok and Meta and Google and all the rest, while platforms like Twitter/X allow the most hateful and harmful content in the world to be distributed completely unfettered, we’ll only see authoritarianism rise, and the harms against the vulnerable accelerate. But what breaks my heart almost as much is that we’ll see so many brilliant artists and activists and thinkers whose genius will be muted or silenced by mindless, heartless algorithms that capriciously decide who gets to say exactly what words, in what ways.

I get angry every time I think about it. The tech tycoons get ever more brazen in what they’re willing to say publicly, boasting about how they’re going to cause the end of the world, or calling for ethnic cleansing, all while putting tighter and tighter reins on the speech and expression of ordinary people. It’s time for “unalive” to die.

Open Source as We Know It Is Dead

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 07:47:35 +0000

I made my GitHub account on June 17, 2011. About two minutes later, I opened my first issue: teleporting was broken in TShock, a Terraria server mod, and I wanted to know why. Not as early as some, but early enough to remember when getting a PR merged by a complete stranger felt like a small miracle. (I've been obsessed with game servers ever since - it's literally my job now.)

GitHub wasn't really the start, either. Before that, it was SVN checkouts that broke if you looked at them wrong, and tinkering with DarkRP on Garry's Mod servers, or writing SourcePawn plugins for old Counter-Strike: Source, or Zombie Master servers. GitHub just made it feel like everyone was finally in the same room.

Open source has been a part of my life for almost as long as I've been writing software. I'm self-taught, so it's not an exaggeration to say I wouldn't have a career without it. Most of what I know, I learned by reading someone else's code, or opening an issue that was probably a bit dumb, and having a maintainer patiently explain why.

This isn't easy to write and the title is a bit hyperbolic. But it's honestly how I've started to feel: open source, as I've known it, is dying. And I sadly think AI is what's killing it.

It was never just the code

When people talk about open source, they usually talk about code. Licenses, packages, download counts, stars. That was never the part that kept me coming back though.

It was the people. It was fixing a typo in a README and having someone say thanks. It was a stranger on the other side of the world finding a bug in my code and sending a fix before I'd even woken up. It was arguing (politely, mostly) in an issue thread about the right API, and ending up with something better than either of us would've built alone.

My first real GitHub PRs were in June 2014, three years to the day after I made that account. We were using PointDNS, and their little Node.js client crashed with SyntaxError: Unexpected end of input whenever you listed records on a big zone. It wasn't handling chunked responses, so I fixed it. Two hours later, feeling brave, I opened a second PR: a "global tidy up" that touched almost every line in the file. My description said, with all the confidence of someone who had never really maintained anything:

We're huge fans of your service, but this node.js module was rather counter-intuitive to use. Hopefully this pull request will help solve that issue for any future developers!

A maintainer merged both the next morning - no back and forth, no checklist, no bots. A stranger sent them 300 lines of unsolicited changes, and they took a chance on it. I can't fully explain what that did for me, except that it made me feel like I belonged.

A PR isn't just a diff - it's someone saying "I used your thing, I cared enough to make it better, and I'm trusting you with my work." Reviewing it is you saying "I see you, let's do this together." That exchange, repeated millions of times, is what built the Internet we all use every day.

Looking back at that second PR, I'm honestly a little embarrassed. An unsolicited rewrite from someone nobody had heard of, with a slightly cocky description? Miguel Grinberg, who maintains Flask-SocketIO, put it bluntly this year: "Today, an unsolicited PR is a red flag." If mine landed in a repo today, I'd assume an agent wrote it too, and I wouldn't blame anyone for closing it.

Andreas Kling said it best when Ladybird stopped accepting public PRs: "A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds." A real person wrote my PR, nervous, hoping it was good enough. The effort was the signal. That's what's gone.

It's not fun anymore

Something shifted over the last year or so, and it's been hard to put into words.

Open a PR on a popular repo today and observe what happens. Within seconds, a bot leaves an AI review summarizing your own change back to you. Another bot posts a preview deployment. Another posts a "walkthrough" with a sequence diagram nobody asked for. Sometimes a fourth shows up to respond to the third. By the time a human actually looks at it, the thread is a wall of generated text, and the real conversation (the human part) is buried somewhere in the middle.

That's the good case, where a human wrote the PR. The bad case is when nobody really did, like PRs that "fix" issues that don't exist, or PRs that rewrite half a file with confident, plausible, completely wrong code, or security reports that read like the real thing until you realize the vulnerability was hallucinated. And there are apparently accounts opening dozens of these a day across hundreds of repos, just farming green squares for a résumé.

I've started muting notifications from repos I used to love following since it's mostly just noise now, and that makes me sadder than I expected it to.

Even that first PointDNS PR, sitting quietly for over a decade, picked up a string of junk comments last November from an account I'd never seen. A #, a ###, a broken screenshot upload. I honestly don't know if it was a bot or a person. That's kind of the point.

I don't blame maintainers one bit

AI slop PRs are the worst kind of work. They look like contributions, so you feel obligated to read them. They take real time to review, and then more time to explain why they're wrong to someone (or something) that isn't listening. That's time not spent on the actual project, or with family, or sleeping.

And the doors are closing. Fast.

Not everywhere, and not all in the same way, but the direction of travel is hard to miss. curl ended its monetary bug bounty after the signal-to-noise ratio collapsed. Daniel Stenberg wrote that the share of real reports had fallen below 5%: “Not even one in twenty was real.”

tldraw started automatically closing external PRs. Ghostty tightened its AI policy, with Mitchell Hashimoto writing that low-effort AI contributions had increased the “bad” count “by 10x if not more.” Jazzband, home to dozens of Python projects, shut down entirely, blaming GitHub’s “slopocalypse” of generated PRs and issues.

OpenJDK banned LLM-generated contributions, naming reviewer burden as the first risk. Ladybird stopped accepting public pull requests. Godot now requires code to be human-authored and bans autonomous agents. COSMIC requires contributors to confirm that their PRs contain no LLM-generated code, comments, or descriptions. Codeberg members voted to ban mostly AI-generated projects from the platform.

Then on October 1, Sindre Sorhus disabled external pull requests across all of his repos:

Due to AI, I have disabled external pull requests on all my repos. Open source, as we have known it, was fun while it lasted. (It's been 15 years for me)

If you’ve written JavaScript in the last decade, you’ve almost certainly run his code.

The details vary, but the shape is the same: maintainers are no longer just deciding whether a contribution is good, they’re deciding whether they can afford to find out. I don’t think they’re wrong, and that's the really difficult part. Every maintainer closing the door is probably making the rational choice for their project, their time, and their sanity. But when enough people make that same rational choice, open source starts to become something else.

And then this week, Yusuke Wada disabled PRs from external contributors on Hono. That one hit hard. Hono is one of my favorite projects, and I've called it the gold standard for Workers development many times.

Sad news. We disabled PRs from external contributors on honojs/hono ... Hono has not stood here without PRs. I will never forget the PR @usualoma created for RegExpRouter. A damn fast HTTP router we have never seen! But PRs don't work in this era. Contribute in other ways. Thanks

That quote hurts because it contains the whole contradiction. Hono was shaped by an outsider’s PR, and that outsider is still contributing to it four years later. Now Hono has to close the door they walked through. I don’t read that as hypocrisy, I read it as grief.

Even the platforms are saying it out loud. In February, GitHub published "Welcome to the Eternal September of open source", which put it better than I can: "The cost to create has dropped but the cost to review has not." The next day, they shipped a setting to turn pull requests off entirely. Since then they've added caps on open PRs per user (AI agents count toward it), a way to restrict who can open issues, and a way to archive spammy PRs so nobody else can see them. The platform that made the pull request famous has spent the year building ways to turn it off.

Some projects aren't waiting around for GitHub to fix it. Zig moved to Codeberg last year, and more and more people are spinning up their own Forgejo or Gitea instances. I don't blame them either, since GitHub's reliability hasn't exactly been great lately. But every project that leaves takes its issues, its history, and its people somewhere new, with yet another account to make and another place to look. It fractures things even further, and makes the next stranger even less likely to wander in.

I'm part of this too

I use AI every single day, and that makes me feel slightly uncomfortable while writing this blog. I write code with it, review code with it, and I even had help organizing the rambling notes that became this post. It's an amazing tool and it's made me faster, and on good days, better at my job. I'm not here to tell anyone to stop using it.

But I think a lot of us (me included) have been treating the cost of it as zero. It isn't - the cost just moved. When generating a PR takes ten seconds and reviewing it properly takes thirty minutes, all you've done is shift the work from the person who wants something onto the person who has to say no - and the person saying no is almost always a volunteer who was already stretched thin.

AI made contributing cheap. It didn't make maintaining any cheaper - if anything, it made it a lot more expensive.

I don't know what the fix is

I wish I had a neat answer here, but I don't.

Banning AI PRs feels like the right call for a lot of projects, and I'll defend any maintainer who makes it - but it's also a blunt tool. It catches the person who used AI to help write one good test alongside the person who pointed an agent at a thousand repos. It relies on honesty, or on detection that doesn't really work, and it nudges us toward a world where repos are closed by default, where you need to be vouched for before you're allowed to help, and where the default answer to a stranger is no.

Perhaps that's just where we're heading - smaller, trusted circles, with source available, but contributions by invitation. Maybe that's even fine, and I'm being nostalgic for a version of the Internet that was never going to last.

But the early 2010s version of me, nervously sending a stranger 300 lines of "tidy up", wouldn't get through that door. I think we lose something real when people like that can't get in anymore.

I don't know what the fix is. I just know I miss how it used to feel.

Changing How We Develop Ladybird - Ladybird

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:54:44 +0000

Today we’re changing how code enters the Ladybird project.

We will no longer accept public pull requests. From now on, code changes to the Ladybird codebase will only be introduced by project maintainers.

Ladybird is moving into a new phase. As we work toward our first alpha release, the project needs a tighter development process, a clearer security model, and a smaller set of people responsible for the code that enters the browser.

This is not a change we make lightly. Many valuable contributions have come from outside the maintainer group over the years, and we are grateful for them. Many of us also came up through open source by sending patches to projects we cared about.

For decades, code contributions have been how open source projects learned who to trust. People would show up, do the work, take responsibility for their changes, and stick around. Over time, trust emerged from the work itself.

AI tools have changed the economics of this very quickly. We use them ourselves every day, but a pull request no longer tells us as much as it used to about the person submitting it. A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds.

For a browser, this matters. A browser runs untrusted input from the entire internet on the user’s machine, and one well-disguised vulnerability is all an attacker needs. We have already seen patient, well-resourced campaigns in open source to earn maintainer trust and abuse it. What has changed is how much faster and cheaper it has become to produce work that looks like a serious contribution.

At the same time, every change that enters Ladybird becomes our responsibility. It has to fit the architecture, survive future refactoring, interact correctly with the rest of the browser, and be understood by the people maintaining it.

Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point. What matters is who is responsible for it once it enters the browser. Ladybird is becoming a browser for real users. The people introducing changes to it must be the people who decide those changes belong in the project, and who will answer for the consequences.

As part of this change, we will close all currently open public pull requests. We are grateful for the work people put into them, but keeping the existing queue open would keep that contribution path open in practice. There is no perfect time to make this change, so we are making it now. Going forward, pull requests will only be available to project maintainers.

There will not be a separate process for submitting patches by other means. We do not want to create a shadow contribution system through issues, comments, email, or forks. External code can of course exist under the terms of the license, but we will not treat forks or patch dumps as a review queue for upstream Ladybird.

Ladybird remains open source. The source code will continue to be publicly available under an open source license. Outside involvement still matters: clear bug reports, reductions, website testing, standards discussion, design discussion, security reports, and technical feedback all help move the project forward.

This is the right change for Ladybird now. We are preparing to ship a browser to real users, and our development process has to match that responsibility.

You're Leaving Compute on the Table · Nishant Joshi

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 06:46:02 +0000

There are six computers on my table right now.

All of them are awake. None of them are working. The hardest job any of them will do in the next hour is draw a spinner: waiting on a machine in Virginia to finish work whose every input is already sitting on this desk.

This desk is not unusual. Whoever your customers are, something like it is sitting in front of them. And for the most part, what’s on mine is more than capable of serving me.

Let’s look at what we have here:

Device	GPU (FP32)	Neural	Memory	Bandwidth
MacBook Pro 14” (M4 Pro, 20-core GPU)	8.6 TFLOPS	38 TOPS	24 GB	273 GB/s
Mac mini (M4, 10-core GPU)	~4.4 TFLOPS	38 TOPS	16 GB	120 GB/s
iPhone 15 (A16, aka the camera)	~1.8 TFLOPS	17 TOPS	6 GB	~51 GB/s
AirPods Pro 2 (H2 ×2, plus one in the case)	~GFLOPS/ear	-	-	-
Total	~15 TFLOPS	93 TOPS	46 GB	~440 GB/s

All of this sits on my table and draws roughly 100 watts under load, about as much as an incandescent lightbulb.

For perspective: the Apollo Guidance Computer ran at roughly 85,000 instructions per second, with 4 KB of RAM, and weighed almost 32 kilograms. Deep Blue reached about 11 GFLOPS. The ~15 TFLOPS on this table would have been the fastest supercomputer on Earth in 2001. Compute that once required a room, a government, or a world-champion chess match now sits in the general-purpose devices I use to watch cat videos.

The Waste

Almost nothing I do each day touches the ceiling of this hardware.

Yet every time I open X, I see another product launching online that could, or should, run locally. I’ve shipped these too.

It takes data and context already on my computer, sends them to a machine in Virginia, performs the work there, and sends the result back. The builder pays to create another execution environment; the customer already has one.

That duplication is the waste. Not every HTTP request. Not every server. Work whose data and context already live on the user’s machine, the machine sitting right in front of the person who wants the result.

Sun Microsystems spent two decades telling the industry that “the network is the computer.” The industry finally believed it, right as it stopped being true. The network is the phone book. The computer is the computer.

The internet gives people a permanent, addressable presence. It lets parties discover one another, communicate, and establish shared state.

Servers exist so parties can find each other and agree on what’s true. Everything else is waste.

Servers are excellent at coordination, authority, persistence, and work too large for the client. But computation should have to earn its trip across the network.

Software that runs locally is cheaper to build on and easier to trust. And it keeps working when the internet doesn’t.

Where This Breaks

“Zero marginal cost” is true for compute, not for engineering. Client-side software means a larger testing matrix, hostile machines, weak devices, and need for a robust update pipeline. The capacity is already paid for; making it dependable is not.

But that price was set a decade ago, when dependable meant a QA lab full of laptops and a hand-rolled updater. Wasm gave us one runtime everywhere; update pipelines are commodity; the testing matrix is exactly the kind of grunt work models now do. Most builders are working from a quote they never re-requested.

Some work belongs on a server. People want data synced across devices. Providers cannot trust clients to report billing honestly. Old and weak devices still exist. Long-running tasks should survive a closed laptop. Google Docs beat desktop Office on zero install, no data loss, and access from any device. And frontier models are unlikely to fit on your machine anytime soon.

Those are not edge cases. They are the boundary of the argument. The only question is which side of that boundary your product actually sits on. Checked, not assumed.

The Architecture Already Exists

But games never had the luxury of ignoring the client. Physics forced the architecture: a data center can stream frames, but latency is a law of physics, and you don’t get to repeal physics. So game developers put latency-sensitive physics, rendering, and interaction on the player’s machine, while servers arbitrate the shared world: who is where, who hit whom, and what counts as true.

The client computes. The server coordinates.

Nothing about that split is specific to games. Figma’s renderer was written in C++, compiled to WebAssembly, and runs in the browser. The server handles the shared document and collaboration. It does not draw every rectangle in us-east-1 and mail the pixels back.

And now there is Claude Code, Codex and Cursor. The model may live on a server, but the harness lives where the code, tools, credentials, and developer already are. The server streams intelligence; the client gives it hands.

That is the form factor people like because it does not pretend the computer in front of them is a dumb terminal.

AI has made the old mistake expensive enough to notice again. Builders now pay per second for cloud sandboxes that poorly imitate a laptop: cloning repositories, rebuilding environments, copying secrets, and reconstructing context that already exists on the user’s machine.

Sometimes that is the right trade. Background agents need persistence. Untrusted code needs isolation. Large jobs need hardware the customer does not own. But “put the harness in the cloud” should be a conclusion, not a default.

So the answer to “what should we do about it” is a default, not a product. When you design the next feature, sort the work into two piles: state that other parties must agree on, and everything else. The first pile earns a server. The second pile already has a computer: the one your customer is looking at.

Notice what the first pile keeps: identity, billing, the source of truth. Everything you actually charge for. Moving the compute doesn’t move the meter.

Take the last feature you shipped. Which pile did most of the work sit in, and which pile did you build it in?

Consumer hardware has become absurdly capable. The industry has treated that capability as somebody else’s problem.

The photo at the top of this essay hasn’t changed. Six computers, maybe 100 watts. Tomorrow they will spend most of the day displaying spinners, waiting on Virginia for work they could do themselves.

On Social Reality in China — LessWrong

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:41:49 +0000

[Epistemic status: intuitions and anecdotes.]

Recently, several posts and projects (Thoughts Memo, Babel Translation, Please Give Them a Chance) have taken important steps towards raising AI safety awareness and sharing rationalist philosophy in China. It’s great that we’re recognizing the importance of solving the messaging problem for China, and thus laying the groundwork for an international AI pause. Below I record my perspective on cultural differences which are relatively underdiscussed, which may become roadblocks to this communication program.

Background: I’m a “first-generation” Chinese-American who moved to the States at the age of four. The beliefs in this essay are primarily drawn from interactions with my parents and their generation of immigrants, and from consumption of Chinese media (dramas, webnovels, games, and manhua) which are not necessarily representative of the realities on the ground. I am likely over-indexed on the older generation and internet culture, and would appreciate corrections from folks who have direct lived experience. The picture I aim to paint is also complicated by a massive generational gap, and my understanding is that some of the below sentiments (e.g. the cynicism and nationalism) are partly inherited by the younger generation, and partly rejected through a variety of countercultures.

Briefly, I point to four axes along which China is strikingly different. These differences are not black-and-white, but I think if you take the liberal middle-class western bubble I live in and shift the mode ~1 standard deviation in these directions you would get a substantively more accurate model of China:

Chinese social media is like American junk food. Chinese people find American food disgusting: inauthentic slop inundated with additives and high fructose corn syrup. Westerners will find Chinese social media similarly disgusting: uncanny-valley filters are everywhere, and social media is omnipresent in every corner of life.
Primacy of social reality, and of shame and “face.” Shame is seen as something that just works in China, and is the dominant lever by which virtue is enforced.
Dark World thinking as described in Truth or Dare – a deep cynicism about human nature. People are by default out to get you. Emphasis on strength/competence and de-emphasis on kindness/virtue. Closely related to, but distinct from, scarcity mindset.
Chinese nationalism as collective insecurity. The narrative is that China experienced a “century of humiliation” being brought to its knees by western colonizers, the Opium War, and Japanese atrocities in WW2, and the world still sees Chinese as “East Asian weaklings.” Through this lens, the primary drive of Chinese people is to prove themselves equal or superior to westerners and usher in the Chinese century.

Chinese Social Media is like American Junk Food

One thing I was shocked by when visiting China is that my grandparents went down to the supermarket every afternoon to buy fresh veggies to cook dinner. Chinese people, at least the older generation, are extremely careful about what they ingest, and have extremely high standards about freshness and culinary discernment. The idea of Americans storing fruit, veggies, and preserved food from the grocery store for weeks in the fridge is repulsive to them.

I think the exact reverse of this dynamic exists for social reality. Chinese beauty filters are out of control. Similarly, here’s what much of pre-AI manhuas look like:

Left to right: 重生都市天尊; 都市仙王; 最强仙尊陈北玄; 武炼巅峰.

Westerners sometimes tell a story that China embraces AI because of some philosophical positivity towards technological progress. I don’t entirely discount this story, but my impression is that Chinese consumers already had a high tolerance for slop and AI content fit naturally into this ecosystem without ever triggering an uncanny-valley reflex. If anything, AI slop is of higher quality than some of the existing mass-produced content. According to this article, one new AI mini-drama (several hours in length) launches every 36 seconds on Douyin.

Another striking feature of Chinese media is the ever-presence of audience reactions and the surrounding cultural conversation. Here is what I see if I pull up the first episode of idol drama “Pursuit of Jade” with 弹幕 (bullet comments) on by default:

Here’s the first chapter of a randomly-selected popular novel on Qidian (the largest site for Chinese webnovels):

See for yourself: Qidian chapter.

Every sentence is annotated with reader comments – so interacting with the reactions of other netizens is now part of the reading experience. Often these comments are filled with memes and in-jokes (梗) which take years of internet immersion to understand. And thus reading a novel, something I classify as one of the most private experiences, is embedded into the cultural conversation.

There is a lot more I could say: writing is filled with “clickbait” attention-grabbers; astroturfing and doxxing are entrenched industries; and it is typical for important events in slop novels to be padded by pages of fictional “social media reactions” showcasing in-universe virality. The basic message is: how others react to something is as important as the thing itself.

The Primacy of Social Reality

Here is the first verse of a popular children’s song:

小嘛小儿郎
背着那书包上学堂
不怕太阳晒
也不怕那风雨狂
只怕先生骂我懒哪
没有学问啰无颜见爹娘
朗里格朗里呀朗格里格朗
没有学问啰无颜见爹娘
I'm a small student.
I carry my backpack to school
I’m not afraid of the sun.
I’m also not afraid of the wind or the rain.
I'm only afraid that my teacher would scold me for being lazy
I'd lose face before my parents without the knowledge of school
Lan lee eh lan lan lee eh lan lan lee eh lan
I'd lose face before my parents without the knowledge of school.

This basic message is inculcated throughout Chinese upbringing: push through and ignore physical discomfort, but attend to and be subject to social censure. It’s okay to be buffeted by the elements, but if your grades are bad, you’ll be too ashamed to face your parents.

China lives inside an intricate and cynical theory of social reality. I wish I had some good writeups of this to point to; something that comes close is 48 Laws of Power, which cries out “this writer is sourcing from Chinese philosophy” but goes too far in the nuance-less sociopath manifesto direction.

To give some examples, the phrase 社死, “social death,” which means being so embarrassed that one might as well be dead socially, has gained a lot of popularity. I think there is a genuine sense in which people (everywhere, but more so in China) are more viscerally afraid of humiliation than death. (Again, there exists a nuanced dialectic about this phrase, and it is now used mostly ironically to joke about minor embarrassment. Further, many fictional protagonists are written as bold iconoclasts who do what is right despite social censure. I think this example still points to a culture preoccupied with social grace.)

Another example, as depicted in media, is a complex of subtle and entrenched rules “潜规则” (lit. “unspoken rules” or “underwater rules”) about social/corporate power that serve to enforce dominance hierarchies. The most salient such rule is “sleep with your boss to get ahead,” but more broadly, it points to dynamics like bribery and nepotism. Depending on status dynamics, being late is either a faux pas or a power move. Similarly with refusing to get drunk at a work dinner.

The Dark World Frame

A lot of anti-social behavior I used to intuitively attribute to "Dark Triad" pathologies – narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy – I now attribute to a cluster of cynical/self-defensive beliefs that Duncan Sabien identifies in Truth or Dare as “The Dark World frame.”

Dark World thinking is typified by Peter Thiel’s recent viral quote: “If you’re evil, at least you’re not bad.” Dark World thinking is everywhere, but in my experience there’s a particularly brazen strain in China. Key tenets of the Dark World:

No good deed goes unpunished.

It is better to be strong than good.

It is better to be evil than weak.

It is better to be honest than kind.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

That which can be destroyed should be.

Kindness to others is cruelty to oneself.

A common trope in Chinese stories is what I call parenting-by-cauterization. A cruel master forces a young boy to kill his best friend: “He was your greatest weakness, kill him and you have one fewer.” Forming attachments is weakness. Breaking attachments makes you strong. (To be fair, this pattern is usually attributed to antagonists, and generally rejected as needlessly cruel by the overarching plot. My reading is that this is a real dialectic-in-progress to reject a pattern of generational trauma.)

Dark World thinking sees all virtue and kindness as pretense. Among many such tropes, a common derogatory trope is of women who act nice and innocent 白莲花 (white lotus) while being deceitful and manipulative on the inside. Chinese media creates trapped priors that people acting kind, altruistic, and pure are more likely to be evil. Similarly, the phrase 圣母 (Virgin Mary) is derogatory slang for someone who displays excessive (read: normal-to-westerners) levels of empathy. If all kindness is pretense and deceit, the only way to signal trustworthiness is cruelty. My father used to say, “Everyone will be nice to you, but only your family will be honest.”

One time I was having lunch with my wife and a Chinese friend, and the conversation meandered to why my wife entered college as a premed in her distant past life. Among the many reasons – money, respectability, parental approval – my wife brought up the motivation of “saving lives and helping people.” My friend laughed open-mouthed at that suggestion, taking it as an obvious joke. (Again, I don’t mean to say this person is representative of China. I suspect that their reaction is two-standard-deviations more Dark-World than the mode in China, and three-standard-deviations more Dark-World than the mode in the West.)

Zvi Mowshowitz once wrote a book review of The Three-Body Problem, where his thesis was “The real aliens are the Chinese people”:

Instead, the humans are written a lot stranger, to my American eyes, than the Trisolarians. Most characters are Chinese, but even those who are not continue to mostly think and act in this similarly alien style. I appreciated the opportunity to see the view of humanity from someone in a completely different culture. But it points out how ordinary the Trisolarians are that they are, at least, not obviously less like the humans I know, than are the humans in the book. How much of this is how the Chinese or some Chinese group view humans and think about the world, versus how the author does? I cannot say.
The viewpoint expressed is deeply, deeply conservative and cynical.
People, all but a handful of them, are absurdly fickle, petty, short-sighted, self-interested and self-defeating. They are obsessed with status and how they are relative to others, and on the margin wish others harm rather than well. If anyone tries to escape disaster or otherwise rise on their own, universally mankind's response is to band together to kill them.

The Three-Body Problem is a particularly extreme example of the Dark World frame, and it’s an outlier because science fiction is grim-dark by default. My guess is that half of the Dark-Worldness of The Three-Body Problem derives from the nature of science fiction, and half from Chinese culture. There’s a reason the second book is called The Dark Forest.

Chinese nationalism as collective insecurity

At some point I was watching American Ninja Warrior, and one season hosted national teams from various countries. When the interviewer came around to hear people’s stories, all the western teams were like “I’m doing this to set a good example for my wife and kids at home.” The Chinese team was like “I’m doing this to prove to the world that Chinese people can be great athletes.”

In 2025 we saw the launch of an absolutely peak FMV game “Road to Empress” about ~~instrumental convergence~~ a fictionalized account of China’s only official female ruler Wu Zetian. Ludwig went viral in China for streaming it on Twitch, to the extent that the creators flew him out to China to film a cameo in the sequel:

Ludwig’s cameo.

The top comment on the Bilibili playthrough, which Ludwig reacted to in this clip, went, “This game is really good-looking. It can let foreigners know that Asians are not all squinty-eyed as in the stereotype [grin] There are also many handsome men and beautiful women.” Ludwig’s response was “I'm laughing that their idea of America is that before playing this game, I thought all people in Asia were the stereotype with the squinty eyes.”

Even among strains of nationalism, Chinese nationalism seems to be particularly chip-on-your-shoulder. My impression is that this kind of insecurity is less in your face, but still present, in younger Chinese today. It is concerning how much Chinese AI models catching up in the AI race is entangled with this national insecurity.

—

The point of this post is to open for the reader my fairly narrow window into Chinese culture, and to draw attention to certain features I find alien as an American.

I suspect that if the rationalist project wants to take root in China, it has to solve problems like not being immediately branded as holier-than-thou “圣母”, and adjusting to the cutthroat attention economy of Chinese social media. HPMOR is an example of something (grimdark power-scaling quasi-isekai fantasy) that likely appeals to Chinese netizens; Peter Singer is not.

I like to say that if LessWrong is “on the spectrum” and “more autistic than normal,” where normal is set to the ambient western culture, then China lives past the right endpoint of the spectrum, at “even more allistic than normal.” My current hypothesis is that the locally optimal message to China is in the vein of “give us your autists who feel alienated by the monoculture,” but others may prefer a more conciliatory approach that directly appeals to the dominant culture.

Roastidio.us User Picks KjQKkQVg

NixOS is making me less afraid

Rendering untrusted HTML email, safely | The Making of Close

HTML vs Plaintext?

Main goals and concerns

Finding a solution…

Saying No to HTML Sanitization

What can iframes do for us?

Uncommon but helpful iframe attributes

srcdoc

sandbox

csp

Bringing it together...

Handling unsupported browsers

Known limitations

Lots of other details to get right

Thoughts?

Do web components have a future if nobody is writing them? | Read the Tea Leaves

Modern Web Guidance

Web components at a crossroads

Salvaging web components

Conclusion

Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman | Computing | The Guardian

Nothing is Boring in America - by Henry Oliver

i am so afraid of starting small... – a small corner of the internet where i can think out loud and try to make sense of things

i am so afraid of starting small...

Rivian CEO: Robotics Is Progressing Much Faster Than You Think

How $31 Trillion In Datacenters Get Built By 2050 — With Dallas Dolen (sponsor)

This Week On Big Technology Podcast: The Bumpy Road To AGI — With Kevin Roose

Join Big Technology’s Private Discord Server!

书评：My Brilliant Friend

那不勒斯话

大城市，小地方

暴力阴影下的兄妹关系

续集：The Story of a New Name

Passkeys Are Not a Trap

The Argument

Your Passkeys Don't Attest

Attestation Isn't What You Think It Is

The YubiKey Recommendation

TOTP Is a Step Backwards

What You Should Do

Sources

On Vulgar Materialism

Links

Bitcoin Is Gold, Stablecoins Are Silver - by Tomas Pueyo

Shells, Copper, Bronze, Gold, Silver, Paper

The Dullness of Gold

Shiny Silver

The Stability of Stablecoins

A Radical Impact on the Global Economy

Lower US Inflation

Weaker Financial Weapons

Undermine Local Currency Policy

Fewer Financial Crises

The Advantages of Stablecoins over USD

1. Access USD Where It’s Hard To

2. Fast International Payments

3. Working Capital

4. Cheap Fees & Commissions

5. Convenient International Payouts

6. Programmability

Takeaways

Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them. - by The Hack

Copyable vs Non-Copyable passkeys

Transferable vs Non-Transferable passkeys

Hardware-Backed vs Software-Backed passkeys

User-Present vs Non-User-Present passkeys

User-Verified vs Non-User-Verified passkeys

Attested vs Non-Attested passkeys

It’s not just about Netflix or Twitter (X)

'AI' is Not a Tool

Lobbying | the singularity is nearer

No Man Is an Island

The Case of Software

The Intellectual Life

After AI

Why We Underrate Intellectual Community

Acknowledgements

Ken Arneson : The Value of Not Getting to the Point

`srcdoc`

`sandbox`

`csp`