YouTube just randomly recommended to me this new video about some barren field in Northern England. No like-and-subscribe gimmicks, no music, no sponsor — just a cheerful dude who knows how to read the land exceedingly well. I watched the whole 40 minutes and now I want to have a pint at the local pub with this guy. It goes to show that the most mundane thing can be made interesting if presented with knowledge and wits. In the age of engagement maxing, I found it refreshing to stumble upon the video equivalent of a Web 1.0 geocities page handcrafted by some passionate hobbyist. So, this Sunday, go out and find 10 interesting things about your neighborhood. https://youtu.be/WfedELEl2cA

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Deep down, almost every life decision collapses into this tradeoff: 1/ 躺平 (tang ping / to lay flat), opting out, minimizing entropy production, and postponing ever so slightly the heat death of the universe. 2/ 奋斗 (fèn dòu / to strive), the normative choice of grinding with purpose and maxing out local order at the cost of global dissipation. At cosmic timescales, both are irrelevant. The choice only matters over a human lifetime, plus a few generations for the most impactful among us (which, statistically, probably excludes the 37 of us here)

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2026 vibe be like

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The Skynet and Roko’s basilisk tropes are quaint, but it’s very obvious that all AI needs to do to take over is weaponize our primate brain levers and let us fight each other to death Manufactured consent is so 1988, we’re well into manufactured dissent and this will only scale exponentially once agents start actively hacking our cognitive backdoors

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More than three years have passed since I tweeted this. Yet I cannot feel blasé about using LLMs on a daily basis. I grew up dreaming of artificial intelligence. What we have now may be simulated intelligence, but that’s not a nuance I care about. For all intents and purposes, my childhood dream is fulfilled. The ability to engage conversationally with the digital equivalent of a tireless and highly intelligent adult with access to the world’s body of knowledge — that’s something I can never get tired of. We work together, we debate philosophy, we learn physics, we debug code, we plan workouts, we geek out over obscure rabbit holes, we ponder weird questions that I wouldn’t ask anyone else. Robert Heinlein once wrote: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” Current AI is virtually just a pair of opposable thumbs short of being able to do all that. It fills me with wonder; especially knowing that this is the beginning and that today’s tech is the worst it will ever be. I might be born too late to explore Earth and too early to explore space, but boy am I going to keep exploring the living shit out of the future https://x.com/AviationDoctor/status/1598676770567630850

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1/2 Indignation is not conducive to maintaining perspective, so let’s try to step back from the news and zoom out. Intuitively, the recent history arc feels analogous to the chaotic behavior of nonlinear systems: periods of deterministic, yet unpredictable disorder, bookended by islands of remarkable stability. Xennials and older will remember the movie Red Dawn, which captured the then-prevailing end-times fantasy: a Soviet invasion of America’s heartland, resisted only by true American grit. Then the Cold War ended, leaving the US devoid of a credible enemy. What followed was a liminal decade of triumphant certainties for Western liberal democracies, mistakenly taken for granted by Francis Fukuyama. 9/11 dispelled that illusion sharply, or at least so it seemed — the homeland was vulnerable after all, but to asymmetrical threats, punches thrown below the belt. But eventually, even hyperterrorism was tamed, and bored pundits started popularizing the Thucydides trap of a confrontation with a rising China as the next threat narrative. Today, it feels like the immediate threat to America is coming from inside the house: organically homegrown divisions, even if stoked by foreign powers who’d rather see the Empire eat itself from within than having to confront it.

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I’m struck by the short-sightedness that characterizes the current zeitgeist — as observable in international relations, domestic politics, monetary policy, extractive business practices, and, parochially, zero-sum crypto games. Our ability as a species to forecast / model / predict the future has never been better. We can see in full 4K resolution the damaging consequences to the human project of acting tribally, selfishly, and in the pursuit of short-term outcomes. There’s no place on Earth where the cost of our negative externalities remains hidden for long. It’s all transparently available in orderly datasets and visual evidence that propagate at the speed of the electron. And yet we indulge. It’s almost as if our ability to live longer, and to travel quickly far and wide across the planet, was now inversely correlated with our ability to plan and coordinate for the long view. We’re just building a better, faster, mightier Moloch. Was that always the plan? Are we forever captive of our own vicious primate tendencies, like the scorpion stinging the frog?

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I wish I could set my own mental temperature on demand, from near zero when I need pure analytical rigor, to arbitrarily high when I need fever-dream level creativity Maybe Neuralink will enable that one day by stimulating one brain hemisphere over the other, or micro dosing hallucinogens directly into the right areas

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Last month marked the 200th anniversary of the Decembrist revolt, a failed coup d'état in Saint Petersburg against the new Russian Emperor Nicholas I, just as he was being sworn in following the sudden death of his brother, Emperor Alexander I. The uprising of approximately 2,000 soldiers was led by 121 officers who, despite their loyalty to the Russian Empire while fighting the Napoleonic troops a few years prior, had been inspired by the Western republican standards of governance. They longed to abolish Russia's autocratic regime, which had begun three centuries prior with Ivan the Terrible (Russia's first Tsar), and replace it with either a constitutional monarchy or even a republic, while ending serfdom and enshrining freedom of expression. Had the revolt succeeded, it could have been on par with the French Revolution in terms of historical importance. Instead, it fizzled out, and all 121 insurrectionists were sent into exile to Siberia. I wonder what the world would be like had the coup succeeded and Russia turned into an open and progressive society. It is plausible that the Bolsheviks would not have gained any traction a century later, negating the need for a Cold War and completely rewriting the second half of the 20th century. There is an alternate universe where Russia would remain, to this day, a democratic beacon of Enlightenment values, and where Russkiy Mir would be admired rather than feared. Clio is a fickle muse. She weaves those almost imperceptible and yet pivotal knots in the fabric of History, where the fate of the world hinges on almost nothing — Franz Ferdinand's driver taking a wrong turn, Luther nailing a church door in Wittenberg, Lord Balfour sending a short letter. Like as many Big Bangs starting from a singularity.

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Do you ever wish you could go back in time? I think I’d travel back to the Devonian period, wait for the first Tiktaalik to crawl out of the water, and stomp it with 375 million years worth of pent-up misanthropy

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“If you want to build a church, don’t build it in a casino” This is but a small aside in @rev-morwen.eth’s long sermon, but it’s also a useful extension of @cdixon.eth’s computer-and-casino parable from Read Write Own. There are plenty of Web3 builders here on Farcaster striving to build parts of the onchain world computer’s rails (including Merkle themselves; let’s render unto Caesar regardless of their recent pivot toward the casino philistines). But only a subset of them holds the various connected tenets of trustlessness / permissionlessness / decentralization / credible neutrality / privacy / ossification / subtraction / FOSS as near-religiously axiomatic. This includes the original orthodoxy (broadly, the Ethereum preachers @vitalik.eth, @tim, @chaskin.eth, @marissaposner, etc. and their flock) as well as the later reformation movement shipping orthopractic alternatives (e.g., @cassie’s Q). They all aspire to welcome us into their heavenly infinite garden. TL;DR: I’ve updated my mental model to be Church <-> Computer <-> Casino. And what is true for builders is true for users; they are, respectively: the devout and zealots, the hackers and power users, and the gamblers and degens. As above, so below. Ramen.

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We need a word for when you le muscle memory makes you click in the usual spot but the UI is still refreshing in that same nanosecond and now you’ve triggered a completely unintended action, like opening an ad or something

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Everybody’s suddenly nostalgic of Vanilla Ice over whatever the current flavor is

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Second NY resolution of the year: I’m embracing Feng Shui so I can blame all of 2026 on my IKEA shelves

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I am le confused

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