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4 stars
Notes on Afghanistan | Matt Lakeman
115-minute read
The reading time above is not a typo; you probably won’t be able to read this in one sitting. But it’s incredibly worthwhile; one of the best things I’ve read in a long time.
In Fall 2025, I spent three weeks in Afghanistan travelling through Kabul, Bamiyan, Ghazni, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-i-Sharif. The following is a recounting of the interesting parts of my travels and readings on the country.
3 stars
Why Does A.I. Write Like … That? | New York Times
12-minute read
In the quiet hum of our digital era, a new literary voice is sounding. You can find this signature style everywhere — from the pages of best-selling novels to the columns of local newspapers, and even the copy on takeout menus. And yet the author is not a human being, but a ghost — a whisper woven from the algorithm, a construct of code. A.I.-generated writing, once the distant echo of science-fiction daydreams, is now all around us — neatly packaged, fleetingly appreciated and endlessly recycled. It’s not just a flood — it’s a groundswell. Yet there’s something unsettling about this voice. Every sentence sings, yes, but honestly? It sings a little flat. It doesn’t open up the tapestry of human experience — it reads like it was written by a shut-in with Wi-Fi and a thesaurus. Not sensory, not real, just … there. And as A.I. writing becomes more ubiquitous, it only underscores the question — what does it mean for creativity, authenticity or simply being human when so many people prefer to delve into the bizarre prose of the machine?
If you’re anything like me, you did not enjoy reading that paragraph. Everything about it puts me on alert: Something is wrong here; this text is not what it says it is. It’s one of them. Entirely ordinary words, like “tapestry,” which has been innocently describing a kind of vertical carpet for more than 500 years, make me suddenly tense.
Original link | Archive.is link
Is the Dictionary Done For? | New Yorker
11-minute read
There was good money in the word business. Then came the internet and, with it, ready-to-hand answers to all questions lexical. If you are writing on a computer, it’s almost impossible to misspell a word anymore. It’s hard even to misplace a comma, although students do manage it. And, if you run across an unfamiliar word, you can type it into your browser and get a list of websites with information about it, often way more than you want or need. Like the rest of the analog world, legacy dictionaries have had to adapt or perish. Stefan Fatsis’s “Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary” (Atlantic Monthly Press) is a good-natured and sympathetic account of what seems to be a losing struggle.
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The flash point was the inclusion in Web. III of “ain’t.” (The president of Merriam-Webster had ruled out “fuck,” over the objections of the dictionary’s editor-in-chief, Philip B. Gove.) The “ain’t” taboo is a little odd; the word is just a contraction of “is not,” “are not,” or “am not.” But, in 1961, the use of “ain’t” in the United States was a very clear marker of social class, like saying “I seen him at the mall.” The “ain’t” controversy laid bare the stakes in lexicography: language use as an indicator of status.
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Looking at online dictionaries, you can see plenty of selection going on, but it’s hard to grasp the principles that are guiding it. Take “groyper,” a name for followers of Nick Fuentes, the white-nationalist Svengali. (“Svengali” is in the O.E.D. and Merriam-Webster, but not in Cambridge.) “Groyper” has popped up a lot recently, because Fuentes was in the news. But the word is reportedly eight years old—and it has still not made it into the online O.E.D., Merriam-Webster, or Cambridge dictionaries.
Original link | Archive.is link
2 stars
25 thoughts on Venezuelan regime change | Flyover Takes
4-minute read
On January 2nd, I was walking around London with a friend and explaining the new Trump Monroe Doctrine. “We’re probably going to do regime change in Venezuela, and who knows what else,” I said. “It’ll likely go better than Iraq and Afghanistan, but who knows.”
At 11am the next morning, I saw the news about the US military operation and capture of Maduro. As the resident Latin America expert among my friends, a few people reached out for my takes.
The Doom Spenders | Macleans
13-minute read
Welcome to the YOLO economy: live now, pay later. The generation of young people raised on the hyper-consumerism of the social media age are entering adulthood at a time of extreme economic and existential instability. Without so much as a fully formed frontal cortex at their disposal, they are navigating a foundational disconnect: the impossible costs of education and housing are landing them in the hole while a punishing job market and wage stagnation are conspiring to keep them there. They feel screwed in the long term by the economy, the news cycle, the climate-change doomsday clock. So, in the short term, they’re saying screw it: they’re getting the $80 manicure, the limited-edition Labubu. They’re hopping on a plane to see the Eras Tour in Argentina, because even with airfare and hotels, it’s still cheaper than buying tickets in Toronto.
It’s not logical—it’s dissociative. “A classic trauma response,” according to financial therapist Aseel El-Baba, who told me that Gen Z has a severed relationship with the future. “We’re asking them to make decisions that will benefit them down the road, and they’re saying, ‘What road? The road that’s been pulled out from under us?’” In these desperate times, spending on small (and not so small) luxuries is a balm. But it’s also a time bomb, ticking away in the windowless, cockroach-infested basement apartment of the Canadian economy ($2,500 per month, not including utilities). Nobody YOLOs their way to a TFSA or an RRSP contribution.
Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know | Astral Codex Ten
11-minute read
The term “vibecession” most strictly refers to a period 2023 - 2024 when economic indicators were up, but consumer sentiment (“vibes”) was down. But on a broader level, the whole past decade has been a vibecession.
Young people complain they’ve been permanently locked out of opportunity. They will never become homeowners, never be able to support a family, only keep treading water at precarious gig jobs forever. They got a 5.9 GPA and couldn’t get into college; they applied to 2,051 companies in the past week without so much as a politely-phrased rejection. Sometime in the 1990s, the Boomers ripped up the social contract where hard work leads to a pleasant middle-class life, replacing it with a hellworld where you will own nothing and numb the pain with algorithmic slop. The only live political question is whether to blame immigrants, blame billionaires, or just trade crypto in the hopes that some memecoin buys you a ticket out of the permanent underclass.
Meanwhile, economists say things have never been better.
AI and the Human Condition | Stratechery
8-minute read
I get the logic of Patel and Trammell’s argument, but I — perhaps, once again, over-optimistically — am skeptical about this being a problem, particularly one that needs to be addressed right here right now before the AI takeoff occurs, especially given the acute need for more capital investment at this moment in time.
First, the world Patel and Trammell envisions sounds like it would be pretty incredible for everyone. If AI can do everything, then it follows that everyone can have everything, from food and clothing to every service you can imagine (remember, the AI is so good that there are zero jobs for humans, which implies that all of the jobs can be done by robots for everyone). Does it matter if you don’t personally own the robots if every material desire is already met?
Second, on the flipside, this world also sounds implausible.
The Risk of Bed-Sharing is Probably Smaller Than You Think, and the Benefits Are Larger | Motherhood Until Yesterday
8-minute read
This baby has a 1 in 46,000 chance of dying of SIDS while sleeping in a crib in its parent’s room. It has a 1 in 16,400 chance of dying of SIDS while sleeping in its parent’s bed.
The latter risk is undeniably higher, but still very low. I absolutely hate it when articles (like this somewhat obnoxious LA Times piece) say things like “Infants who sleep with adults are two to ten times more likely to die,” without mentioning what the baseline risk level is, which is 1/16,400! It’s also worth noting that this calculation does not take breastfeeding or the safety of the sleep environment into account at all, which would further lower risks of bed-sharing, meaning its potentially even lower. Even without factoring that in, this is the kind of risk that most of us are willing to take, and that we all undertake on a daily basis, just by living our lives.
How Did TVs Get So Cheap? | Construction Physics
6-minute read
One of the standout items is TVs, which have fallen in price more than any other major category on the chart. TVs have gotten so cheap that they’re vastly cheaper than 25 years ago even before adjusting for inflation. In 2001, Best Buy was selling a 50 inch big screen TV on Black Friday for $1100. Today a TV that size will set you back less than $200.
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It was somewhat more difficult than I expected to suss out how TV manufacturing has gotten more efficient over time, possibly because the industry is highly secretive. Nonetheless, I was able to piece together what some of the major drivers of TV cost reduction over the last several decades have been. In short, every major efficiency improving mechanism that I identify in my book is on display when it comes to TV manufacturing.
Warren Buffett emails Microsoft exec | Internal Tech Emails
9-minute read
While many people would see our business as complicated or hard to understand, I am absolutely convinced an astute investor can learn our business in only 3 to 4 hours (and probably less than two hours if BillG explained it!).
In some respects I see the business characteristics of Coca Cola or See’s Candy as being very similar to Microsoft. I think you would love the simplicity of the operating system business.
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Your analysis of Microsoft, why i should invesdt in it, and why I dont could not be more on the money. In effect the company has a royalty on a communication stream that can do nothing but grow.It’s as if you were getting paid for every gallon of water starting in a small stream but with added amounts received as tributaries turned the stream into an Amazon. The toughest question is how hard to push prices and I wrote a note to Bill on that after our December meeting last year. Bell should have anticipated Bill and let someone else put in the phone infrastructure while he collected by the minute and distance (and even importance of the call if he could have figured a wait to monitor it) in perpetuity.
Europe is under siege | Noahpinion
10-minute read
The Deluge shows that power and independence are not permanent. If you are surrounded by hostile powers, and if you don’t have the ability to guard yourself against those powers, no amount of historical greatness can save you from being subjugated. This is an important lesson for Europeans to remember right now, as they find their region under siege from Russia, China, and the United States all at once.
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The American right — i.e., the people now in charge of the country — do not care intrinsically about democracy, or about allyship, or about NATO, or about the European project. They care about “Western Civilization”. Unless Europe expels Muslim immigrants en masse and starts talking about its Christian heritage, the Republican Party is unlikely to lift a hand to help Europe with any of its problems. Democrats will want to help Europe, but they will only be in power intermittently, and helping Europe will not be high on their priority list.
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The most important thing Europeans need is to panic. Europe is facing its own Deluge — a sudden pincer movement by hostile great powers that threatens to reduce it to a collection of small vassal states. This is a true crisis, and it will not be solved by social media rhetoric, or by brave declarations by EU leaders. It cannot be regulated away by eurocrats in Brussels. It will require bold policies that change Europe’s economic, political, and social models.
The Good News Is That One Side Has Definitively Won The Missing Heritability Debate | Astral Codex Ten
5-minute read
…the bad news is that they can’t agree which one.
How Federal Law Made Us All Disabled | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter
7-minute read
The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier. The change has occurred disproportionately at the most prestigious and expensive institutions. At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent. Not all of those students receive accommodations, but researchers told me that most do. The schools that enroll the most academically successful students, in other words, also have the largest share of students with a disability that could prevent them from succeeding academically.
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By the mid-2000s, the damage that the ADA could do had been at least somewhat contained by the Supreme Court, despite PGA Tour. Unfortunately, Congress did not like the decisions in Sutton and Toyota, and overrode them in The Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008. In determining who is disabled, the law now says institutions cannot consider mitigating measures that one might take. So this counts not only people who are in wheelchairs, but also alcoholics, sufferers of just about any recognized mental condition, and yes, those who need glasses. Congress even struck from the record the finding of 43 million Americans being disabled in 1990, on the grounds that it was too limiting.
Where does a liberal go from here? | Noahpinion
8-minute read
Imagine being a French liberal in the year 1815. You spent your youth dreaming of an end to tyranny and the stultification of the estate society, reading the works of Voltaire and Rousseau and Montesquieu and Diderot, talking of liberty with your friends in cafes. Yours was not among the names that history would remember from that era, but you once attended a salon in a rich woman’s house in Paris. You were not part of the mob that stormed the Bastille in 1789, but you felt your heart leap when you heard the news, because you knew that now everything would change. When you read the terms of the Constitution of 1791, you saw the fulfillment of your youthful daydreams become the solid fabric of a new reality.
[...]
So that’s what you do if you’re a French liberal in 1815. You try again. Looking back at history, we see that the project of human freedom and dignity has had plenty of low points, but that so far it has always recovered. Even if you’re old, you pick yourself up and move onward. Even if you’ve made mistakes and supported one or two bad ideas for a while, you get back on track and learn from your errors. Even if you don’t know exactly where liberalism goes from here, you sit down and you think and you read and you talk to smart people until you figure out a new direction. You try again. And if that doesn’t work, you try again, and again, until you die, and someone else sees how much you tried, and learns from your mistakes, and then they try again.
Darwin the Witness | Aether Mug
14-minute read
It should be clear by now that Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle is much more than a log of scientific notes. Descriptions of nature and its mysteries abound—we’ll see them in the next episode—but his book is also a window into his own character, an adventure story, and a reminder of the glaring ethical blind spots that are possible even in well-meaning, brilliant people. There is one other major aspect of that narrative I haven’t done proper justice to yet: it’s a tantalizing snapshot of those thriving and tormented lands during an interesting period of their history.
1 star
How to actually feed America | Slow Boring
5-minute read
The Chicago team proposed something that, at the time, sounded like an odd choice for a charitable network: a market, complete with a custom-designed currency called “shares.” Every food bank would receive an allotment of shares based on how many people it served. Those shares could then be used to bid on truckloads of food in a daily national auction.
[...]
And the system changed donor behavior as well. Under the old queue system, donors could wait days for a food bank to accept or reject an item, leaving their warehouses clogged with product they were trying to move quickly. But once 200 food banks were simultaneously able to bid, donations moved immediately. The increased liquidity, as Prendergast put it, made donors more willing to give, and the supply of food moving through the network rose by 50 million pounds in the first year after the new system’s introduction.
Jellyfish Snooze Like We Do, And It Could Explain The Origins of Sleep | ScienceAlert
2-minute read
Specimens of upside-down jellyfish (Cassiopea andromeda) and starlet sea anemone (Nematostella vectensis) suffered an increase in neuronal DNA damage when deprived of sleep, something the researchers observed under both laboratory and natural conditions.
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When treated with melatonin, the animals slept more, and DNA damage was subsequently reduced. The researchers suspect that Cnidarians use a melatonin system like ours to synchronize their sleep cycles to daylight cycles.
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“These results suggest that DNA damage and cellular stress in simple nerve nets may have driven the evolution of sleep.
Are you a neoliberal? A neoconservative? | The Pursuit of Happiness
5-minute read
I see a lot of very smart pundits offering opinions on individual actions like the recent strikes on Nigeria, Iran and Venezuela. I see very few pundits offering coherent opinions on what sort of foreign policy regime makes sense for the US.
And no, “always push the right button” is not a sufficient answer.
Volcanic eruptions set off a chain of events that brought the Black Death to Europe | University of Cambridge
4-minute read
Their evidence suggests that a volcanic eruption – or cluster of eruptions – around 1345 caused annual temperatures to drop for consecutive years due to the haze from volcanic ash and gases, which in turn caused crops to fail across the Mediterranean region. To avoid riots or starvation, Italian city-states used their connections to trade with grain producers around the Black Sea.
This climate-driven change in long-distance trade routes helped avoid famine, but in addition to life-saving food, the ships were carrying the deadly bacterium that ultimately caused the Black Death, enabling the first and deadliest wave of the second plague pandemic to gain a foothold in Europe.
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The researchers were able to approximate this eruption through information contained in tree rings from the Spanish Pyrenees, where consecutive ‘Blue Rings’ point to unusually cold and wet summers in 1345, 1346 and 1347 across much of southern Europe. While a single cold year is not uncommon, consecutive cold summers are highly unusual. Documentary evidence from the same period notes unusual cloudiness and dark lunar eclipses, which also suggest volcanic activity.