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4 stars
Notes from a Burmese Prison | A comic by Danny Fenster & Amy Kurzweil | The Verge
11-minute read
If you want to get a letter out of a Burmese prison, do not give it to the guards.
Perhaps this is obvious, but when they told me I could write two a month — one to my embassy and one to Juliana — I was naive enough to try.
“All night,” I wrote to Juliana.
“A fluorescent flood light illuminates the clouds of mosquitoes feasting on me, which makes it hard to sleep, and when the mosquitoes retreat, the ants crawl in — in pulsing veins along the cell wall and floor, over every inch of skin all day.”
I filled every centimeter of the official letter form they gave me.
“But it’s all fine. I’ve already gotten used to it by now. I just want to see you.”
Three days later…
“Write bigger. And don’t say there are ants here.”
So I tried again.
“Ju- I love and miss you so much. I am doing well physically and feeling more or less healthy — but mentally things are obviously rough…”
“No.”
And again.
“Sorry.”
[...]
Juliana’s package was my first indication that anyone knew where I was. It had taken several days to pass inspection. I’d heard there were books too, but the prison translator had to first certify that they contained no political content. Journal entry: “Just reflecting on how brilliant my wife is. She near telepathically included just about every essential item I’d been wanting. And she included a (new?) air-tight tupperware container, to keep the bugs out. Most of this she must have intuited. I also imagine her asking coworkers etc.
3 stars
Why Europe doesn’t have a Tesla | Works in Progress
12-minute read
In recent decades, Europe has fallen behind the United States. In 2000, incomes in the original six members of the European Union were just 10 percent behind Americans. Today, they are 20 percent lower. One factor behind this has been the lack of innovation in European business. To a striking extent, Europe lacks tech giants like Google, Meta and Amazon. But even in industries in which it has traditionally excelled, like carmaking, Europe has failed to keep up. Tesla is now worth more than the next nine largest carmakers in the world put together. Six American cities are now served by robotaxis made by Waymo. Understanding why Europe doesn’t have Google is important. Understanding why it doesn’t have a Tesla is existential.
[...]
What really sets Europe apart from states like California is different. Relative to income, it costs large companies four times more to lay off Germans and French than American workers, a difference arising entirely from different regulatory approaches. As a result, it virtually never happens: Americans are ten times more likely to be fired than Germans in any given year. In this respect, the European economy differs greatly from the American one. By American standards, a European business has to be exceptionally confident that it will want an employee for a long time before hiring them.
This may sound like a great virtue of European life, and in a way it is. But it has costs. If it is expensive to fire people, then companies may pay them less in order to balance out employment costs, or they may not employ people at all. To understand the innovation gap, however, there is a third effect that is even more important. If it is expensive to lay people off, employers avoid creating jobs that they might subsequently discontinue. Innovation involves experimentation and risk, so jobs in innovative areas of the economy are more likely to be discontinued than jobs elsewhere. High severance costs create a fundamental incentive for European businesses to avoid innovative areas and concentrate on safe, unchanging ones. In the long run, this is a recipe for decline.
Child’s Play | Harper’s Magazine
24-minute read
The first sign that something in San Francisco had gone very badly wrong was the signs. In New York, all the advertising on the streets and on the subway assumes that you, the person reading, are an ambiently depressed twenty-eight-year-old office worker whose main interests are listening to podcasts, ordering delivery, and voting for the Democrats. I thought I found that annoying, but in San Francisco they don’t bother advertising normal things at all. The city is temperate and brightly colored, with plenty of pleasant trees, but on every corner it speaks to you in an aggressively alien nonsense. Here the world automatically assumes that instead of wanting food or drinks or a new phone or car, what you want is some kind of arcane B2B service for your startup. You are not a passive consumer. You are making something.
This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: today, soc 2 is done before your ai girlfriend breaks up with you. it’s done in delve. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers. I don’t know if he needed SOC 2 done any more than I did. A few blocks away, I saw a billboard that read: no one cares about your product. make them. unify: transform growth into a science. A man paced in front of the advertisement, chanting to himself. “This . . . is . . . necessary! This . . . is . . . necessary!” On each “necessary” he swung his arms up in exaltation. He was, I noticed, holding an alarmingly large baby-pink pocketknife. Passersby in sight of the billboard that read wearable tech shareable insights did not seem piqued by the prospect of having their metrics constantly analyzed. I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to prompt it. then push it. After spending slightly too long in the city, I found that the various forms of nonsense all started to bleed into one another. The motionless people drooling on the sidewalk, the Waymos whooshing around with no one inside. A kind of pervasive mindlessness. Had I seen a billboard or a madman preaching about “a CRM so smart, it updates itself”? Was it a person in rags muttering about how all his movements were being controlled by shadowy powers working out of a data center somewhere, or was it a car?
Original link | Archive.is link
My journey to the microwave alternate timeline | Telescopic Turnip
8-minute read
Inventors constantly come up with exciting new inventions, each of them with the potential to change everything forever. But only a fraction of these ever establish themselves as a persistent part of civilization, and the rest vanish from collective consciousness. Before shutting down forever, though, the alternate branches of the tech tree leave some faint traces behind: over-optimistic sci-fi stories, outdated educational cartoons, and, sometimes, some obscure accessories that briefly made it to mass production before being quietly discontinued.
[...]
I recently spent a few months in one of these abandoned timelines: the one where the microwave oven replaced the stove.
First, I had to get myself a copy of the world’s saddest book.
[...]
Marie T. Smith’s Microwave Cooking for One is an old forgotten book of microwave recipes from the 1980s. In the mid-2010s, it garnered the momentary attention of the Internet as “the world’s saddest cookbook”:
To the modern eye, it seems obvious that microwave cooking can only be about reheating ready-made frozen food. It’s about staring blankly at the buzzing white box, waiting for the four dreadful beeps that give you permission to eat. It’s about consuming lukewarm processed slop on a rickety formica table, with only the crackling of a flickering neon light piercing through the silence.
Lords of the Ring | Harper’s Magazine
16-minute read
Hoshoryu had become sumo’s seventy-fourth yokozuna in January, but his promotion was not without an element of controversy. Some of the council members reportedly felt that he was not yet ready, that he had too often lost bouts to lesser fighters. Their objections were overruled, but these doubts were a problem not only for the pedants and purists, but for those invested in the bitter, long-standing rivalry between Japanese-born rikishi and Mongolian wrestlers like Hoshoryu. Since 1992, when the first of Hoshoryu’s countrymen began competing, there have been more than seventy Mongolian rikishi, many of whom have dominated sumo’s upper echelons. This was most gloriously personified by the yokozuna Hakuho, who became a grand champion in 2007, at just twenty-two years old, and went on to shatter records that had been held by Japanese-born yokozuna for centuries. Hakuho retired in 2021, but the relegation of Japanese rikishi to second-class status remains a statistical fact: of the eight yokozuna to have earned the title in the past quarter century, six have come from Mongolia.
Original link | Archive.is link
The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting | Hackernoon
16-minute read
If you stand quietly in the nave of the former Christian Science church on Funston Avenue in San Francisco’s Richmond District, you can hear the sound of the internet breathing. It is not the chaotic screech of a dial-up modem or the ping of a notification, but a steady, industrial hum—a low-frequency thrum generated by hundreds of spinning hard drives and the high-velocity fans that cool them. This is the headquarters of the Internet Archive, a non-profit library that has taken on the Sisyphean task of recording the entire digital history of human civilization. Here, amidst the repurposed neoclassical columns and wooden pews of a building constructed to worship a different kind of permanence, lies the physical manifestation of the “virtual” world. We tend to think of the internet as an ethereal cloud, a place without geography or mass. But in this building, the internet has weight. It has heat. It requires electricity, maintenance, and a constant battle against the second law of thermodynamics. As of late 2025, this machine—collectively known as the Wayback Machine—has archived over one trillion web pages. It holds 99 petabytes of unique data, a number that expands to over 212 petabytes when accounting for backups and redundancy.
[...]
The Internet Archive’s mission is “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” This mission is morally compelling but legally perilous.
Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible | WIRED
11-minute read
Sharks are innocent. Or at least they’re not eating the internet. As a family of cartilaginous fish, sharks are collectively not guilty of most, if not all, charges of biting, chomping, chewing, or otherwise attacking the underwater network of fiber-optic cables. The people who build and maintain the nearly 600 subsea cables that carry almost all of our intercontinental traffic—supporting just about every swipe, tap, Zoom, and doomscroll anywhere on the planet—have a love-hate relationship with this myth, which has persisted for decades. They might even hate that I’m starting this piece with it.
If a cable is suspended over the seabed, a shark might gum it as it explores. Sometimes they’ll lunge for a cable that’s being pulled out of the water. But for a shark to actually bite a cable, you’d have to wrap it in fish, much as you’d hide a pill in a hunk of cheese for the dog. Rats can be a threat on land, because their incisors never stop growing, so they like to file them down on semisoft cables. But nobody ever asks about rats, maybe because, as a friend of mine pointed out, “sharks make you cool, but rats sound like you have a problem.”
[...]
TAT-8 would witness the fall of the Berlin Wall, the birth of the World Wide Web, the end of the Soviet Union, the dotcom boom, the end of Tory rule in the UK and the beginning of the Bush years in the US, the September 11 attacks, the dotcom crash, and the dawn of social media (it was Friendster). Rather than being the last cable ever needed, as had originally been believed, it was full to capacity within 18 months, by which point there were other cables, like PTAT-1 across the Atlantic and TPC-3 in the Pacific. By 2001, the TAT series was up to number 14. After developing a fault that was too expensive to be worth fixing, TAT-8 was taken out of service in 2002.
Original link | Archive.is link
2 stars
This Texas Teenager Is One of the World’s Most Feared Fighters. Don’t Expect Her to Talk About It. | Texas Monthly
7-minute read
On a drizzly November morning, inside Kingsway Jiu-Jitsu—a strip mall gym wedged between an indoor driving range and a medical testing lab in North Austin—John Danaher sat on a mat near a vinyl logo advertising The Joe Rogan Experience. The podcaster grinned from the wall as Danaher gazed ahead, his bald head pitched forward and his bare feet folded beneath him. Before him, nineteen acolytes grappled in silence, each striving to master what practitioners call the gentle art. He looked pleased.
In a corner of the room, an eighteen-year-old girl with a high ponytail and bright blue nail polish was busy dominating a series of male training partners, some at least twenty pounds heavier than her. By the end of the hour-and-a-half-long session, Helena Crevar’s cheeks were flushed, her hair wispy. But she did not look tired. As Danaher looked on, she latched onto an adversary’s leg and twisted it into a lock. “Ow!” he blurted, and they broke apart. As anyone who’s sparred with Helena knows, wait too long to tap and you might get hurt.
[...]
Her coach from that time, Ruben Delgadillo, remembers Helena as a shy yet precocious girl who liked to bake cookies, collect porcelain dolls, and research jujitsu obsessively, texting him links to moves she wanted to try. Her focus and precision seemed almost preternatural. “She was like an android,” he says. “If you told her to move three inches to the left, she’d move exactly three inches to the left.”
Original link | Archive.is link
Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It | New York Times [gift article]
16-minute read
In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird.
Original link | Archive.is link
Last Rights | Astral Codex Ten
9-minute read
Everyone hates Congress. That poll showing that cockroaches are more popular than Congress is now thirteen years old, and things haven’t improved in those thirteen years. Congressional approval dipped below 20% during the Great Recession and hasn’t recovered since.
A republic where a supermajority of citizens neither like nor trust their representatives is not the most stable of foundations, so it should not be shocking that the legislative branch is being subsumed by the executive.
What’s the solution? Many have been proposed, some with very snazzy websites.
[...]
These proposals, no matter which direction they’re coming from, have two things in common. The first is that they largely agree on the problem: members of Congress are disconnected from their constituents. Thanks to a combination of huge gerrymandered districts, national partisan polarization, and the influence of large donors, a representative has little incentive to care about the experience of individual people in their district.
The second thing that all these proposed solutions have in common is that none of them will ever be implemented. They all involve acts of Congress - and members of Congress have no incentive to vote to change broken systems that currently benefit them. Why would you want to stop gerrymandering when it’s the reason you don’t have to run a real campaign to stay in office? Why would you vote to give yourself more work? Why would you vote to make it harder for people to give you money? If we want to fix Congress, we need a solution that doesn’t involve Congress.
Luckily for us, such a solution exists: if we get 27 states to ratify the Congressional Apportionment Amendment, then we can make some real progress towards fixing Congress without Congressional buy-in. This solution is not a new idea. It comes up every few years and gets little traction. My hope in writing this piece is that it gets more traction now.
The Man Who Stole Infinity | Quanta Magazine
15-minute read
In an 1874 paper, Georg Cantor proved that there are different sizes of infinity and changed math forever. A trove of newly unearthed letters shows that it was also an act of plagiarism.
Are we in the foothills of World War 3? | Noahpinion
7-minute read
This example illustrates that although World War 2 officially began when Germany invaded Poland, conflicts that either foreshadowed the final conflagration or eventually merged with it began years earlier, in the mid-1930s. WW2 had foothills.
[...]
It’s possible that the world will avoid a world war in the first half of the 21st century. But if one does occur, I think future historians will see it as having had foothills as well. In the Syrian Civil War, the U.S. and Russia began to test their new hardware against each other, and their troops even clashed once. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the big shift, as it inaugurated a new era of great-power territorial conquest, began to harden global alliance systems, and pushed Europe to remilitarize.
Now we have the Iran War. The U.S. and Israel started the war, attacking Iran and decapitating much of its leadership. The Iranians, somewhat oddly, responded by launching missile and drone attacks on practically every Arab nation in the Middle East, causing some of them to threaten to join the war on America and Israel’s side.
Orcas haven’t changed, but our view of the killer whale has | Aeon
12-minute read
‘Orcas are psychos,’ quipped a close friend recently. He wasn’t joking, nor was he ill-informed. In fact, he is probably the world’s leading historian of whales and people. He had just watched a BBC Earth clip, narrated by David Attenborough, in which three killer whales separate a male humpback calf from his mother in the waters of Western Australia. The video’s closing footage, with two of the orcas escorting the naive youngster to his imminent death, resembles nothing so much as a kidnapping:
Many people might regard my friend’s comment as anachronistic. Following the first live display at marine parks in the mid-1960s, the frightening reputation of orcas vanished almost overnight. For decades after, when most people thought of the species, they pictured commercialised versions such as Shamu or the eponymous orca of Free Willy (1993) – virtual sea pandas. That warm and fuzzy image survived Blackfish (2013), whose viewers generally accepted the documentary’s thesis that orca attacks on trainers were due to the evils of captivity.
Recent encounters in the wild have only cemented this view. Researchers have observed orcas apparently offering gifts to human swimmers, as well as sophisticated group behaviours such as food sharing. Even the recent trend of killer whales disabling and sinking yachts near Gibraltar seems to have elicited sentiments of environmental guilt and socioeconomic catharsis rather than fear – at least from people not on the boats. Orcas have decided to ‘eat the rich’ and ‘take back the ocean’, declared the Twitterverse. The top marine predators were taking revenge for the harm humans had done them.
1 star
A Plain Anabaptist story: the Hutterites. | Ulmer
5-minute read
Five hundred years after Jakob Hutter was executed in Innsbruck, the community that bears his name is very much alive. The Hutterite story is above all a story of near-extinction and recovery. A movement that counted 20,000–30,000 members in its Moravian golden age was reduced by the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, and decades of flight through Slovakia and Transylvania to a remnant of sixty-seven people. That it survived at all is largely an accident of geography — the tolerance of the Russian steppe — and of a remarkable encounter in 1755 in Alwinz, where a handful of expelled Lutheran refugees stumbled into a dying Hutterite community and brought it back to life. Today’s 58,000 Hutterites are, in a very real sense, the descendants of that meeting.
I read the microwave link just now on a plane and laughed so hard people became concerned.